Is Christianity singularly responsible for injustice?

Tim Keller's book The Reason for God has a chapter that deals with one more complaint aimed at Christians -- the church is responsible for so much injustice. People question why so many non--Christians live better lives than Christians, why the institutional church supported war, injustice, and violence over the years, and why Christian churches have so many smug, self-righteous, dangerous fanatics. The author looks at all three of these criticisms.

Keller tackles first the problem of character flaws in Christians. He says every good act of wisdom, justice, and beauty is given by God to all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute. He does this to make the world a better place. So, non-Christians can live decent lives. Secondly, Christian theology teaches that even Christians are seriously flawed people. Our moral efforts are too feeble and false to ever deserve salvation. It's not surprising to find broken individuals in church.

Growth in character and changes in behavior occur gradually after a person becomes a Christian. We don't come to God after we clean up our lives. So, as a result, "the church will be filled with immature and broken people who still have a long way to go emotionally, morally, spiritually."

Keller then takes on the complaint that historically the church has supported violence. Critics note how Christian nations institutionalized imperialism, violence, and oppression. But, Keller notes, governments which rejected organized religion and belief in God (France in the 18th century, Communist countries in particular) each produced massive violence against its own people without the influence of religion. The author says violence in the 20th century was inspired as much by secularism as by moral absolutism. His conclusion is that there is some violent impulse that is so deep in our hearts that it expresses itself regardless of what the beliefs are in a particular society.

Keller's third point is in reaction to the complaint that Christians are self-righteous fanatics. But the Christian message is that we are accepted by God by sheer grace, not because of what we do but because of what Christ did for us. Keller says this is profoundly humbling. So, the people who are fanatics and smug "are not so because they are too committed to the gospel but because they're not committed to it enough." He thinks the solution is not to tone down and moderate Christianity, but to understand more fully what it means to be a Christian. Jesus himself criticized religious people, notably the Pharisees. He ripped into their legalism, self-righteousness, bigotry, and love of wealth and power. Self-righteous religion is always marked by insensitivity to issues of social justice because these people feel superior to others. Instead, true faith is marked by profound concern for the underprivileged. The Bible, according to Keller, "teaches us that our treatment of them equals our treatment of God."

Keller looks at one historical stain on Christian history -- the African slave trade. He notes that even though slavery existed around the world in every human culture over the years, it was the Christians who first came to the conclusion that it was wrong. When Europeans set up slavery in the New World, they did so in opposition to papal pleading. Keller brings this up because he says Christianity has a self-correcting apparatus--we get our list of virtues with which we can criticize sins of the church from within the Christian faith itself.

Another example of this is the civil rights movement in the United States. It was not a political or primarily a religious and spiritual movement -- the Christian faith of African-Americans empowered them to insist on justice despite strong opposition to their demands. Martin Luther King, Jr. often invoked God's moral law and Scripture to call white Christians to be more true to their own beliefs and to finally understand what the Bible really teaches.

I think Keller has it right. There's no doubt that the church has done terrible things, but look at the alternative. Many more lives were lost in the 20th century because of secularism, not Christianity. Today the smug, self-righteous people often occupy the highest positions in intellectual, atheistic circles; they think the human race is perfectible and that they have all the answers. Christians, on the other hand, know their own failings and cry out, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me."

Is America a threat to world peace as the left suggests?

Another of the big lies that Michael Medved attacks (The 10 Big Lies About America) is the charge that America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace. His point is that involvement in overseas conflicts is not new; it has characterized every stage of our emergence as a world power. These clashes have little connection to colonialism or empire building – instead, they were often done with unselfish intentions. Their long-term impact most often benefited the peoples involved as well as the world at large.

He starts with a look at foreign fights. As an example, United States fought against Islamic extremists more than 200 years ago. These battles took place in North Africa where ruthless pirates devastated U.S. shipping. Thomas Jefferson made war successfully on these pirates and their fanatical rulers. Medved says American was never truly an isolationist nation. Virtually all of our major wars began without enemy attack on American soil – the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. So, the current war in Iraq is not a new situation for America; as in other wars, we attacked a country that had not attacked us first.

Another feature of our American clashes shows that we generally avoided the temptations of conquest. In 1848 we defeated Mexico, but instead of annexing all or much of that nation, we agreed to assume that country’s national debt and to pay the government what was considered a large sum of money for a sparsely populated territory that eventually became the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. It’s true we fought one imperialist war against Spain in 1898, yet we did not attempt to incorporate Cuba as part of American territory. After World War I, we were the only one of the major victorious allied powers that sought no territorial or colonial enhancement at the Versailles conference. When we defeated Germany and Japan in World War II, we provided a security shield for our European allies.

Generally speaking, the states and peoples aligned with America in world affairs prospered economically and developed functioning democratic institutions. Think of our enemies in World War II (Germany, Italy, and Japan). In addition, South Korea has a vibrant economy and is certainly more robustly democratic than many nations in the area. Consider two nations which were once affiliated with the West but have become anti-American --Cuba and Iran. They have both suffered spectacularly. Or consider Hawaii compared to Fiji and Tahiti. They all have stunning beaches and breathtaking landscapes, but Hawaii is by far the most prosperous, functional, and dynamic society in all the Polynesian islands.

But critics often attack the United States for its international affairs during the Cold War. Medved says we must weigh the events in the context of the multigenerational, worldwide struggle against the aggressive force of worldwide communism. A rough estimate counts over 100 million victims of communist murder in the 20th century. Those who concentrate on our mistakes during this period don’t realize that the result was freedom for nearly 500 million human beings liberated from Soviet tyranny.

Medved ends the chapter by using a thought experiment. Imagine that the United States had never become a world power or even existed at all. Would the ideals of democracy and free markets be as important in the world today? Would murderous dictatorships have claimed more victims or fewer? Would nations be under the rule of Nazism, communism, or some other tyranny?
I don't see how anyone could answer these questions without realizing the force for good the United States has been over the years.

Roosevelt and Stalin: a lesson for us all

I just finished a book called Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship. What an eye-opener. Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought he knew how to handle Joseph Stalin as World War 2 ramped up. Unlike Winston Churchill, FDR decided he should be extremely accommodating to Stalin, thus showing the Russian tyrant he had nothing to fear from America and the West. The result of this approach was heartbreaking and puzzling.

As early as 1942, Roosevelt worked tirelessly, if not realistically, to help Stalin. He sent many young American sailors to their deaths on the dangerous Murmansk convoys to keep Stalin supplied even as Churchill said the Royal Navy was too stretched to provide decent escort service. FDR then agreed with Stalin to support a cross channel attack on France in 1942, way before the U.S. and England were ready. It would have been a bloodbath.

In 1942, the Brits, Americans, and Russians met at Teheran with more of FDR’s generosity on display. He agreed in principle to Russia’s dominance in the Baltic countries and eastern Europe, thus abandoning these countries to years of misery under communism.

As the war continued, Roosevelt gave away much more to the Russian dictator. He advocated giving one-third of the surrendered Italian navy to Stalin, despite the fact that the Russians didn’t fight in the Mediterranean while the British lost a huge number of ships there. He urged American military leaders to abandon the Italian peninsula and the entire Mediterranean strategy because Stalin didn’t like armies near where he planned to take over entire nations. A truly sad occasion was the Warsaw uprising in 1944 when the Polish resistance leaders led an uprising against the German occupiers because the Russians who were closing in on Warsaw asked them to do so. Instead of coming to their rescue, the Russians cynically stopped short of Warsaw to let the Germans destroy future opposition to Russian military and political dominance in the area. The British asked FDR to help supply the Poles with needed help, but he refused, afraid to anger Stalin. In addition, Roosevelt agreed to support the Russian-supported Polish government being put together, even though the true Polish government was in London in exile.

Toward the end of the war, FDR repeatedly gave way before the Russians. He held the American army back from Berlin, he agreed to huge land accessions if Russia would enter the war in the Pacific against Japan. He looked the other way as Lend-Lease supplies to Russia were diverted to other uses than defeating Hitler, he let Russians inspect American industrial plants without letting our people see Russian plants, he canned his ambassador to Moscow when he pointed out the evils he encountered there, he refused to look into many reports of Russian atrocities against Poles.

The book ends by asking a key question—why did FDR act this way? The answer the author gives has to do with FDR’s worldview. He, like his hero Woodrow Wilson, saw the world in utopian terms. It could be made better, people were basically good, something like the old League of Nations could be reconstituted and made to keep the peace. This idealism permeated the “progressives” of this time. They came to see ugly, totalitarian regimes like the U.S.S.R. as a bit rough around the edges but interested in the same upward drive for perfecting the human race. Their worldview blinded them to the reality of evil.

Does all this sound familiar? Look at the progressives today. They lash out at Israel, but have little to say to Iran. They tolerate North Korea, they excuse Hugo Chavez, they praise Fidel Castro, they hang out with thugs at the United Nations. I see the current administration in this light—the leaders think that if we are nice and accommodating, the world’s dictators will stop their nastiness. Then we can sit around the campfire and sing songs together. Really??