The Life of Bryan...

The years around 1900 were fascinating ones for European Christianity. The confluence of science, technology, Christian saturation, missions and world exploration had led to an amazing thoery.

It was taken pretty much as gospel that European (and hence American) Christians had done such a good job of living Christianity that the world was just about ready to turn a corner. Poverty would be a thing of the past. Disease was just about over. The earth was bending to the will of man.

Why, Christian society had done it... We had brought about the millenium... Lions were about ready to lay down with lambs. All it would take was a little more work. A little more effort... Christian effort.

A magazine was launched at this time which is still around today. It was called, "Christian Century." After all, would not the 20th century truly be the Christian Century?

All this was before WWI... that war to end all wars which ironically was the precipitating cause of almost every war we've fought since then, particularly our trauma today in the Middle East.

This was the Christianity that William Jennings Bryan embraced. It seemed thoroughly Biblical. He even warred against Darwinism and modernism in Biblical interpretation.

But a careful reading of his Christian writings show that his was a pretty secular Christianity. Jesus was commended for His example more than His Salvation. Standing at the crossroads of a dominant Evangelical Christianity and a dominant secular Christianity, Bryan spoke as an Evangelical but his message was secular.

One only needs to look at the results of that time. The vibrant Christian movements of the Salvation Army, the YMCA and other similar organizations were what characterized the age.

And yet, within 20 years, the centrality of Jesus was eliminated in favor of social work. The Gospel was about helping people, not realizing the helplessness outside of Christ.

When Bryan is viewed in this light, that particular Christian politic is more evident. That we now have such a hard split between adherance to real faith and adnerance to helping others becomes more obvious. It's a factor of what happened in those days.

Somerset Maugham puts words in his hero's mouth in Of Human Bondage. The hero speaks of how the time at the turn of the century broke society free of their religious and spiritual roots. Yet there was no ethic to replace the Christian ethic, so they held on to it.

And bit by bit, that ethic has grown and hardened into a religion of its own... but bereft of the correction and centrality of Jesus and HIS own ethic. Picking and choosing, our society today chooses tolerance and inclusion (certainly a message of Christ) without the balance of justice and right living.

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Christian Politics...

Is this the future of Jesus' Church??

www.jesuscampthemovie.com

Why William Jennings Bryan?

You will not crucify humanity on a cross of gold!

And the crowd in the Kansas City convention hall went absolutely beserk.

It's hard to believe that monetary policy was the monstrous issue of the 1896 presidential race.

Maybe it was a different time. Maybe people studied politics more, knew economics better. Maybe, for all the cries of "country bumpkin" the East Coast elite dished out, maybe those bumpkins knew more than all but a few economists do today.

And they probably did.

Because it affected them so profoundly.

The vast middle of the US, the breadbasket, was small farmers at the turn of the century. Farmers are surprisingly like any other small business man... they desperately need capital. They invented, after all, the term "seed money".

The banking elite wanted only gold as the backer of currency. Gold provided more stability, it was thought. Big business very much loved that currency was limited to gold reserves on hand.

But for small farmers, the limited supply of gold meant a limited supply of money, and most of that in the hands of the bankers and big business.

Limited money supply meant limited money available for loans every spring to put seed in the ground. Expensive money.

As the US pushed a single-metal currency, farmers' access to capital was starved off.

It was this issue that drove young Congressman William Jennings Bryan. He was from a farm state, born in another farm state.

Very quickly he made his name as an orator. It had always been his goal, as he had seen what God had given him in talent, to use the spoken word to effect change for the good of the common man.

He arrived in Chicago a relatively inexperienced Congressman. His Democratic party wasn't that different from the Republican. They were backed by old money and didn't listen to the cries of the little man.

It was the time of the Populist party. When Communism seemed better than Capitalism.

And Bryan was the immense underdog arriving at the 1896 Democratic convention. The Populist party and several others were threatening to tear the Western/Southern 2/3s of the Democratic party and render the Democrats even more marginalized than they currently were.

Bryan had the ability to fill a 15,000 seat auditorium with his voice alone... and he had words that mattered and words that held together. He was an ORATOR.

His passion for the people brought the house down. The "Cross of Gold" speech is still the standard for American political oratory.

Politics and religion met in Bryan... And he left Kansas City the upstart surpise, the nominee of his party.

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... And What About Morality?

Rev. Ted Haggard's troubles shine a bright spotlight on the disucssion of Christians in politics. Haggard's story would be huge without the gay marriage debate. With it, it just underlines that Christianity is just a powerplay for moral hammering.

Evangelical Christians look little different than the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. Loud, strident ... and hypocritical.

Should believers back down from moral politics, or politics as a whole? Is taking moral stands something that hurts rather than hinders the cause of Christ and the communication of the Gospel?

We end up looking like rigid nasty spiteful buffoons.

Yet a fall like this is nothing new. Mankind is inherently sinful and we will often turn away from Jesus' power and love. Our culture sees it most with sex, but we quietly do it with money and with many other areas.

Perhaps in this search for a real Christian political expression this needs to be kept in mind, that what people should see first is Jesus. And I don't think that's where we're headed right now.

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In Times of War...

I was planning on a logical progression of these thoughts, but ran across something as I read this morning that was too good not to post now...

My current read is a history by Victor Davis Hanson. I highly recommend his Ripples of Battle. Hanson is a classicist whose books continually answer the question, "Why should I care?". Why should I care about history and what went before?

A Christian High School teacher of mine was known for her phrase: "Man's Heart Never Changes". That could be the subtitle of this post, and perhaps the first tenent of a Christian political understanding.

My current read is about the Peloponnesian War. That famous conflict between the Greeks that we studied in school. And it's full of application. The title of this Hanson book is A War Like No Others.

From this morning's chapter about political turmoil at home while the troops were out fighting... turmoil both in Athens and in Sparta:

When the war appeared to be stalemated and the eventual victor uncertain, internal revolution was less likely. Yet after a particular setback...one side or the other grew emboldened that change at home might reflect the course of the larger war. If proof were needed that many people lack an ideology but instead prefer to look first to their own self-interests, no better examples exist than the first Peloponnesian War... the ebb and flow of Greek opinion that followed each particular Sparan or Athenian reverse. War ... when combined with political tension, turned what would have otherwise been heated, but mostly restrained, civil disputes into unchecked bloodletting. ... Thucydides (the War's notable historian) thought civil unrest and coups were central to his story of the war itself and that soon after hostilities broke out the "entire Hellenic world, so to speak, was so convulsed."

Oligarchs usually sought to parade their cause under the misleading rubric of wishing for "a temperate aristocracy". Democrats countered by professing loyalty to the idea of "equality under the law". Once the struggle began, the former were rarely temperate and the latter seldom lawful.

We are not shedding blood over our current war. But we did during the Viet Nam era. Any biography of a Nixon insider shows how much the mental instability of that administration was tinged by the horror of violent overthrow of our very government. Of machine gun emplacements wrapped by mounds of sandbags in the basement corridors of the White House and Congress.

I hadn't thought about it, but there truly is blood in the streets at home when there is war abroad. Generally the war is longer in duration than the tidal wave of patriotism upon the start of conflict. As the war drags, the political opponents begin to use the war as leverage.

What does that mean for the disciple of Christ who engages in politics?

Our position on issues must be carefully separated out from the current sweep of emotion. Who and what we are as redeemed men and women is easily pulled or pushed along by either side of the war's aftermath at home. But we serve a King not of this world.

This, then, might be my first pillar... Our politics must move heavenward just as all areas of our lives do, as we are weaned from the flesh and more and more recognize our new creation in Christ.

Of course, what that means then must be answered.

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Political musings

I'm hijacking my own blog for a time. It's silly season, mid-term elections. I've always been fascinated--held captive really--by politics. So for a time this will be a political commentary blog.

I'm in the midst of reading a second political book in a row... Just recently finished a book I recommend to any interested in political history.

That book was A Godly Hero. It's a biography of William Jennings Bryan. He was a 3-time Democratic presidential candidate. An Illinois boy who found fame and fortune by his mellifluous voice and passionate stands.

The history is fascinating because it covers a time when what we now take to be leftist politics was highly Christian in nature. It covers a time when Western populism was nearly socialist, when Communism was considered a viable option. When Christianity and the causes of the left marched in lockstep.

Those days are past, but I want to use this space to seek out what is a Christian political manifesto.

I'm not happy that the Evangelical church has made a tight alliance with the GOP. I'm not comfortable that the social causes of Jesus are now owned by the rabid secularists.

I'm not happy that I squirm when the word Christian and Democrat are linked.

So ... hold on... here we go.

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Thoughts on politics

I've been studying my reactions to the Mark Foley scandal. I'm not comfortable with my own thinking...

First of all, I'm disgusted with both parties. And I'm disgusted with the media coverage. There is no doubt in my mind that this is an engineered scandal... that the Democratic party held onto this information and timed it's release to squash any GOP headway at the midterms.

I've looked at the blog that "broke" this data (I think it's www.stopsexualpredators.com or something like that... I don't have it in front of me). It's pretty clear that it's a site manufactured to LOOK like a grass-roots anti-abuse site... but if you look at it critically it seems scripted. It leads to only one true "blockbuster" and that's this one... It's shrewd.

So their pontificating about the GOP not dealing with this information earlier rings hollow if you look at this deeply. They had the info and held it too, for exactly the same reason... to protect electoral advantage.

Now my own dis-ease... I find myself almost letting Foley off the hook because of the use of this as a political football. I find myself guilty of the same things...

It's tough in politics... because it's so easy to believe that the cause is worth more than the people.

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