Failures of Christianity

[pat]

I made the following comment in someone else's journal earlier this week, and I wanted to keep track of it...

Part of the problem is that when Christian institutions, or individual Christians, fail at Christianity (by which I mean not actually following the precepts of Christ), their failures are writ large in history: crusades, pogroms, the Bush II administration. The good that Christianity does tends to be writ small, between people. (Although there are exceptions: the Underground Railroad (and the abolitionist movement in America in general) was often run by Christian organizations. The death squads in El Salvador went after religious figures because they dared stand up for the people.)


Christ does not call his followers to seek power or wealth, but instead humility and servanthood, which usually fail to make headlines or history texts.

Comments

[pdx42.livejournal.com]

That's a very good observation, and an appreciated one.

[necturus.livejournal.com]

Yet the slaveholders as well as the abolitionists thought they were "following the precepts of Christ". And I suspect so do Bush and his supporters.

It is unfortunate that two people can read the same book of scripture and come away with different, even diametrically opposed notions of how things are meant to be. It is as though scripture is more a mirror of the heart and mind of the reader than a window into the heart and mind of God.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Sorry to take so long responding to you. Yes, the issue of how Scripture is used and misused (however you want to define those terms) is a big one. And I am sure that Bush and Company would not see their actions as "failures of Christianity."

The context of the original comment was a discussion in which the poster argued that Christianity should be done away with since it had done such evil in the world. I think it is impossible to weight good v. evil in this debate, precisely because the evil tends to be big and the good small in scale.

I think one of my favorite sayings comes into play here: "An idea is not responsible for the people who hold it." I read a great many wonderful ideas in the Gospels, and the fact that others use the same texts as bludgeons (erroneously, in my view) does not change that.