The First Liberal: A Secular Look at Jesus' Socio-Political Ideas and How They Became the Basis of Modern Liberalism

Copyright © 2008 by Dennis Martin Altman

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Bibliography

About the Author

END NOTES

For Margarita Danguole

The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion—Tom Paine

Acknowledgments

The author extends heartfelt thanks to Wendell Abern,

Betty Heller, Mandy Heller, Sam Kirshenbaum, and Tom Leppert

for generously sharing their knowledge,

experience, and wisdom.

Personal thanks

also, to the first

readers of this manuscript, who

contributed helpful comments, questions,

and corrections from their diverse perspectives.

These stalwarts are most warmly noted as Bill, Cathy, Craig,

Edward, Gabe, Gary, Gordon, Jamshed, Jeff, Karyl, Molly, Norman, Peter,

and Richard.

Preface

I begin with an apology to those who think this should be a religious work. My purpose is to discuss the political ramifications of the words and deeds of Jesus and to show how they formed the basis for modern Liberalism. For that reason, I discuss Jesus as an historical figure and do not refer to him with capitalized pronouns or other indications of faith.

Two thousand years of pass-ons

Unfortunately, Jesus did not write anything down. The question of accuracy haunts any writer who dares to quote from the days before electronics and makes it necessary to approximate the phrasing used by a subject by drawing conclusions from witnesses and their best recollections. This problem is particularly vexing for biblical scholars because of the countless generations of hearsay in which accuracy was certainly compromised. Those errors were further corroded by handwritten histories by well-wishing but often semiliterate scribes. If that weren’t enough, as the accounts progressed over two thousand years, they certainly took some hits from their journeys through Aramaic, to Coptic, to Hebrew, to Greek, and to Latin before coming to English and other modern languages. Every child knows the game of repeating a phrase and passing it on to the end of the line. The final version may be disarmingly distorted.

Shakespeare and Bacon

Then there is the thorny question of authenticating the source of any quote. At times, some literary scholars simply sidestep complications by applying what is loosely called the Shakespeare-Bacon factor. This avoids any distractions over concerns that the works of Shakespeare may have been written by Francis Bacon (or anyone else). These litterateurs simply say that the writer of the work will be called Shakespeare, and they leave it at that. Their treasure is the work itself. Since this is not a religious document, we are free to apply the same rule. The person to whom the essential words and actions discussed herein are attributed is Jesus Christ. I have not identified them with the usual chapter and verse notations because these quotes are all well known.

It should also be noted that there is no need to approach this subject with reverence. Religious factors involved in historical matters do not change the value of the social principles involved. Peace, love, and forgiveness are valid social values that can stand very well with or without spiritual support. Thus, they may be embraced by people who answer to non-Christian or even to no religious callings.

Detachment from reverence is necessary for the clearest view of these ideals, just as it is vital for a telescope to be positioned away from the glow of atmosphere to afford an accurate view of the night skies.

Some secular ethicists maintain that the rigid rules of many religious disciplines may actually detract from the quality of their implementation. When a prohibition is flatly stated—for example, Thou shalt not kill—its value is essentially limited. Simply forbidding what is worst does not have the effect of guiding followers to achieving their best in this regard, such as preserving or enhancing life. For this reason, many ethicists feel that a positive mindset can produce a higher level of behavior than a code of negatively stated prohibitions.

Jesus’ teachings are an excellent example of that principle. He taught in a positive manner. His habitual use of carrots instead of clubs stands in contrast to the thou shalt not tonality of much of the Old Testament.

Jesus’ teachings are based on expressions of love, forgiveness, and generosity. In modern times, there is a collective term for the individuals who practice these principles and who extend them freely.

Religious or not, these people are called Liberals.

Introduction

In 1994 I left my home turf, the media centers that are New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., to join the faculty of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. This book is written because of what I found there.

On the surface, Kentucky is a state that should hold no surprises—it’s in America’s Bible Belt (BB), its economy is largely agricultural, and many of its people speak with soft Southern accents. By all outward signs, Kentucky should be a land of clean-living, peace-loving, and charitable people; and to some extent, it is. The quality of life one finds in Lexington and Louisville, the other big university town, is culturally rich, ethnically diverse, and unpressured. But those cities are eyes in a storm of contradictions.

The state’s population ranges from concentrations of the most highly educated (in the two big towns) to the less lettered enclaves of Appalachia. Overall, Kentucky ranks a poor forty-seventh among the states in percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees, and it’s rated thirty-fifth in the proprietary smartest state index created by author Morgan Quitno.¹ The state is poor as well. In terms of per capita income, Kentucky ranks forty-fifth among the fifty states.² Tragically, the area’s rankings rise only in listings of negative factors. It’s eighth in diabetes, fourth in cancer deaths, and seventh in deaths from heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions.³ These lamentable numbers have been tabbed as the Kentucky Uglies by observers, and they provide the backdrop to the most severe of the commonwealth’s contradictions.

While Kentuckians are statistically underpaid, unhealthy, and underedu-cated, they tend to vote as if they were rich, robust, and well prepared for any professions they might care to pursue.

This is generally true of the rest of the Bible Belt as well. (The BB consists mainly of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina, most of Texas, and Kentucky.) The Belt states all rank unfavorably among the fifty states in terms of income, health, and education. However, they continually vote to keep things just the way they are. Illogical as it may seem, the BB regularly elects politicians who short-change them in terms of their greatest needs. What’s wrong with this picture?

Are they politically naive? Do they hold a distorted view of how government works? Are they unaware of the achievements of Liberal programs like Roosevelt’s New Deal, which improved health, education, and prospects for employment for poor, rural Americans? Or have they been blindsided by their preoccupation with other issues that obscure their view of their own world?

That may be the case. Republican politicians have learned the secret of convincing the poor, rural people of the Southern states to vote against their own best interests and keep conservative candidates in power. They court poor Southerners because they’re easy. They vote emotionally. They respond to candidates who aggrandize the military, wave the flag, and belittle those who rely on welfare payments.

Some Republicans don’t have to pander to them. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never had to get down and appeal to rural Southerners because they could count on the votes of educated people in Northern states. I found that to be the case when I worked for President Gerald Ford in 1976. We knew we wouldn’t run well in the South because we were up against a favorite Southern son, Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, so we didn’t try.

But militant and Fundamentalist Republicans don’t run well in Northern, industrial states, so they must win the rural South. There simply aren’t enough economic conservatives in the country to carry a national election. And, the BB comes through for them every time.

I spent the better part of the last twelve years exploring this strange phenomenon. Since I’m not a social researcher, I had to chase information by conversation, observation, and a homemade version of exit polling on election days. Although no simple explanation emerged, I did find several complicated ones, and they seemed to stem from confusion about racial and religious ideas.

Religion is the keel of the South’s identity. In other areas of the country, when people meet, first questions usually deal with where one lives and what he or she does for a living. In the BB, it’s what church one belongs to.

A universe without gravity

BBers are steady churchgoers. The church and fellow congregants comprise their social atmosphere. Their membership and participation in church activities are their credentials, and they wear them proudly. They love the belonging-ness of it. Church membership is a validation of status, and they declare it in every possible way. They use religious expressions in their conversations, and they advertise their commitment via song, jewelry, holiday celebrations, tattoos, and bumper stickers. If Christianity had a secret handshake, they’d use it all the time. But while the church is their universe, they don’t feel the pull of its gravity. BBers do not live as Jesus advised. In fact, at the bottom line, the people of the Bible Belt live in absolute denial of everything Jesus ever said.

They lead the nation in both divorce and murder,⁴ two offenses on which Jesus was particularly outspoken. They rack up the worst numbers in the country in teenage pregnancies, STD/HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality. They mouth all of the right words at all the right times but ignore their meaning. One might say that the people of the Bible Belt treat Jesus more as a hood ornament than a prophet.

The virus that ate the Message

Reading Jesus’ Beatitudes, one can almost touch the enormous worth, scope, and beauty of his ideas; but somewhere between the time of the Sermon on the Mount and modern Bible Belt America, the message was bent out of shape. So, instead of a gentle, harmonious society in the Southern states, we have a sector that’s awash in domestic violence, racial hatred, a recurring poverty cycle, and premature death.

There’s no benefit in lamenting this chain of misfortune. The situation simply demands change. And, no matter how dire, there is nothing in the human experience that’s incapable of change. One logical course of action, if it were possible, would be to simply reboot the whole program. That would require leaders in these communities to reintroduce Jesus’ ideas cast in another light, with less emphasis on heavenly rewards for self and more on empathy and forgiveness for others. No realist expects that day to come in our lifetimes, but it’s the only path that could lead to the ideals of racial harmony and service to others. Only then might the BB trade its penchant for militancy, intolerance, and the pursuit of perdition for a calmer, kinder lifestyle.

And only in that improbable event could one expect the absurdity of poor people voting for rich people’s candidates to wind down. Nonetheless, there is always the fervent hope that a grassroots reformer will emerge from the hills and begin to light a trail. No society is terminally mired in darkness. If these people can be shown that their fears have been played and parlayed by modern political carpetbaggers, they might begin to look for a way out. That possibility is unlikely. But, grand hopes die hard, and the possibility of raising social awareness is the stuff of life to Progressive Christians and humanists. And since every journey begins with a single step, such is the purpose of this book.

Foreword

I was slightly reluctant to write the foreword for this book when Dennis Altman first invited me to do so. After all, he was not one of the biblical scholars I was used to working with on a day-to-day basis. He may not have read some of the often dense but cutting-edge New Testament scholars like John Dominic Crossing, or Robert M. Price, or the theological work of Lloyd Geering or Karen Armstrong. And worst of all, he might not know the jargon.

Certainly there would be some scholars who might question whether or not Jesus was the first Liberal. Jesus was clearly influenced by the prophets, like Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos, who predated Jesus by several centuries. It occurred to me, however, that few people are concerned today about what Amos or Hosea might have to say about our social and political discussion. On the other hand, there are millions of people who seem to think that their Jesus should be guiding our social system. Public policy is impacted every day by politicians who claim that they are operating on behalf of Jesus.

As I began to read the chapters of The First Liberal, I realized that sometimes it is good for thinking people to get out of their own specialty and bring a fresh perspective to what is in this case an old subject. It is good to take a break from the scholarly nuances, minutia, and jargon that sometimes camouflage unclear thinking and just say what you are thinking, so everyone can understand, whether they agree with you are not. Professor Altman has done just that, and his writing makes for interesting and challenging reading. His secular look at Jesus is not unique, but he brings a unique perspective and writing style to the table.

Jesus would never have considered himself a political figure, but from the very beginning, as a result of both his teaching as well as his actions, he managed to get tangled up in the politics of Rome. But Christianity did not become a true political force until it was adopted by the Roman Emperor Constantine as the unofficial state religion.

Most Christians today are not aware that a great deal of what they believe about Jesus and Christianity was decided by a vote (actually several votes) by the bishops in the fourth century. The huge struggle was between two groups with opposing views of Jesus and the future shape of Christianity. On one side were the bishops who were adherents to the philosophy of Arius. They believed that Jesus was fully human, although angelic, and that through his willingness to totally and completely align his will with God’s will, he proved worthy to be adopted by God as a son. Furthermore, they believed that Jesus had provided all humanity a path that could be replicated by anyone willing to follow him. As a result, each and every individual had, and still has, the opportunity to be adopted as a child of God and experience the Kingdom of God.

On the other hand, there were the bishops primarily from the west, led by Bishop Athanasius. Athanasius insisted that if you did not believe that Jesus was born as the only begotten son of God and was divine, his sacrifice on the altar of humanity would not have been worthy of the cosmic redemption for the sins of the world. This group argued that the proof of this divinity was in Jesus’ Immaculate Conception, the miracles, and of course, the physical resurrection. For Athanasius and his adherents, if one did not believe in these things, one could not be a true Christian, although there were multitudes of Christians at the time who did not believe those things.

The vote had to be taken several times over a period of months, and in more than one location, before the Emperor Constantine would accept the results. It was only when the bishops all met in Nicaea and voted one more time that Christianity, as most traditionalists understand it, was born officially. It was only then that Jesus became God. Athanasius and his partners hammered out the Nicene Creed, which became the measuring rod for true Christianity from that point on for the vast majority of Christians. And the Roman Empire and the Roman Church began a strange but powerful marriage. After nearly three hundred and fifty years, Christianity went from being a counterculture movement to becoming a pillar of the culture.

What is important to note about these two different interpretations of Christianity seventeen centuries ago is that the two distinct groups placed the importance of their faith and their understanding of their religion on very different things. At the risk of oversimplification, the Arians were more concerned about behavior and actions than they were in beliefs. They were more interested in praxis than they were in creeds.

On the other hand, powerbrokers like Athanasius were almost obsessed with the correct beliefs and they had little interest, it appears, in compassionate, loving behavior. Historians tell us that, although he was a brilliant man, he was mean to a point of being cruel. After the vote and the inauguration of the new pope, Athanasius went on a campaign to put all of the Arian followers in jail as heretics, including Arius.

I tell this story because I believe that this historical event describes some of the root differences between most Progressive (Liberal) Christians and the Conservative Religious Right today. One is much more interested in behavior, especially in the way one treats others, and less interested in beliefs. They tend to focus more on the teachings than they do in the creeds. They tend to be far more open to change and more inclusive in their relationships.

Those on the Religious Right want a measurement that can be used to decide if one is in or out. They seem to be far less concerned about their actions and more on correct beliefs. They tend to want absolutes and are not comfortable with unknowns or questions. They tend to believe the most important commandment in the Gospels is the redacted one: Go and make disciples out of all nations.

Little has changed in the almost seventeen hundred years since the Nicene Creed and Arius’ arrest. Today there are still two very different perspectives on what Jesus was. And even more important, there are two distinct ways of looking at what he was teaching. The amazing thing for many of us who work and live in this arena is the realization that we are all getting our information from the same text. Yet, it is impossible to understand, without doing some kind of a psychological analysis, how different parties can come up with such different perspectives from those same pages.

But it seems clear to more and more people today that the folks who feel that Jesus came to earth to judge and decide which of us has the correct beliefs have had far too much say and have had power in the public forum for far too long. Although most studies indicate that the Religious Right are a minority in our country, it is been a very strong, tightly organized minority that has been able to affect elections, agenda, and policy. However, most of the political pundits today believe this organized voting block is unraveling, a point that Professor Altman has noted.

Another trend that Altman reports is the growth of the Christian Left, which can be measured in part by the numerous new organizations that have sprung up over the last decade. These groups are steadily