Reversal of Fortune?

One of the strangest features of the contemporary political landscape is the marriage of convenience between religious conservatives and traditional elements of the Republican Party. If you had lived a hundred years ago, for instance, you would have experienced a similar theology from the fundamentalists but the politics would have been very different. The great populist of the latter part of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century, William Jennings Bryan, who most people remember as the fundamentalist prosecutor in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, had a long and successful political career during which he railed against the moneyed interests of his day and on behalf of the common working person.

According to the William Jennings Bryan Recognition Project,

Bryan is credited with early championing of the following: (1) graduated income tax (16th Amendment), (2) direct election of U.S. senators (17th Amendment), (3) women's suffrage (19th Amendment), (4) workmen's compensation, (5) minimum wage, (6) eight-hour workday, (7) Federal Trade Commission, (8) Federal Farm Loan Act, (9) government regulation of telephone/telegraph and food safety, (10) Department of Health, (11) Department of Labor, and (12) Department of Education.

Now from that list of liberal political accomplishments, one would imagine that Bryan was probably a godless atheist, right? In fact, he was anything but, which was why he was the prosecutor in charge of convicting Tennessee biology teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution against state law in the mid-1920’s. Bryan’s theology was hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell’s or Pat Robertson’s today. But his politics were very different.

The understanding of Jesus that Bryan brought to the public square was a Jesus who was concerned about fair wages, fair taxes, fair working conditions, and the good that the government could do for its citizens. Bryan was also a world-renowned champion of peace, using his position as Secretary of State in the Wilson administration as a platform for peacemaking , rather than saber rattling. But somewhere along the way, this message of concern for common people and for peace went by the boards amongst fundamentalists and was instead replaced by a Jesus who favored the powerful and who walked with potentates, and who thought that force was a legitimate means to achieve American public policy ends.

This is the Jesus of the contemporary Religious Right, who favors small government, low taxes, and who would be more likely to give you a lecture on self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, than he would be to heal you or feed you with the little boy’s five loaves and two fishes. In short, this Jesus sounds like he just finished a summer internship at the Cato Institute.

How did this Jesus come to be? How is it that fundamentalism left its roots and created the Jesus that had no critical word for Wall Street but who instead embraced market economics as the path to the kingdom of God?

[via Christian Alliance for Progress]