Ruth, one of my sisters, has just sent me an email with the full text of an article by Bill McKibben, American environmentalist.
The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
“Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves. That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans (most American Christians) are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.”
McKibben is concerned that there are several competing creeds for American Christians. One of those is the belief that figuring out the schedule for the End Times. He points to www.raptureready.com, Tom DeLay’s apocalyptic policies, and the writings of Tim LaHaye. More concerning to McKibben is the soft-focus, comfortable suburban faith being promoted by mega churches serving the needs of individual consumers rather than communities.
McKibben reflects on Rick Warren’s ‘you-focused’ Purpose Driven Life as still having the potential to help people connect faith in Jesus with radical mission and ‘other-focused’ lifestyle.
Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape. He lives with his family in the Adirondack Mountains, New York State, and is a Sunday School teacher in the local Methodist church.
He’s also the author of the book “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age” if my memory serves me correctly. One of several conservative biopolitical books often mentioned in the same breath as Francis Fukuyama’s “Our Posthuman Future”.