Heaven Can't Wait

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In short, I believe Jesus was a radical, and the time has come to start saying so.

AFTER THE 2004 ELECTION, pollsters asked voters in the Bush-friendly "red states" what most influenced their decision to re-elect the incumbent. A slim majority said that their candidate's "moral values" were a deciding factor. Liberal pundits professed shock and immediately started speaking out on the need to put faith back in progressive politics.

A number of religious scholars and political strategists, from Rabbi Michael Lerner to former president Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, have long been imploring the American left to re-engage with organized religion. Three months before the election, Bill Moyers wrote in Tikkun magazine that "our times cry for a new politics of justice" and that to truly challenge this country's complacency, believers in the American experiment must "get Jesus back."

On the front lines, Democratic politicians and their handlers are misinterpreting the need for soul searching as a tactical matter. Instead of engaging in a thoughtful discourse about ways to empower environmentally conscious, peace-loving people of all faiths, strategists are scheming to sound less secular, appear more moral. In other words, they're working on ways to spin millions of conservative Christians into believing that, deep down, their candidates are really just regular, God-fearing folk.

Besides being dishonest, this is a tactical mistake on a par with the party's insistence on nominating uninspiring moderates to out-Republican the Republicans on wedge issues. It also betrays a basic misunderstanding of the fault lines that define this country's religious landscape.

In the main (and here I confess to a gross generalization), Americans who consider themselves Christian tend to think about the New Testament's central character in one of two distinct ways. For many, what matters most is that Jesus was a divine spirit who died for their sins. To accept him as your savior is to be saved, and the pursuit of that salvation is paramount. For a smaller percentage of believers, Jesus is a peasant revolutionary who lived by example and died for it. To model your behavior after his is to bring earth closer to heaven.

You can find a contemporary example of the juxtaposition at the local video store. In Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and based on a novel by Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, Jesus is imperfect, routinely tempted by sin and crippled by bouts of indecision. The point was not for viewers to leave the film revering the protagonist but rather empathizing with his titanic, timeless struggle. After the film was released, conservative evangelicals lined up outside theaters to protest. It bombed at the box office.

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