The theology that politicians adopt matters to all of us

To understand what's happening in American politics and our various culture war battles, it's really important not to miss the theology advocated and lived out by the people who are leaders in both areas (and they overlap).

What, for instance, does it mean that when it comes to the issue of abortion, President Joe Biden, a Catholic, veers away from the position of the church?

What does Donald Trump mean when he says God saved him from being assassinated recently and that if Christians elect him this time they'll never have to vote again?

And how does the interpretation of biblical prophecy affect the political positions of people who identify as politically or religiously conservative? And on and on.

Keri L. Ladner's helpful new book, End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to QAnon, is a pretty good place to start if you want a sense of how politics and religion have danced (and sparred) together for the last 50-plus years. As Ladner focuses deeply on the many ways that the malleable theology (premillennial dispensationalism) of the late Jerry Falwell (pictured below) influenced American politics, she also raises questions about today's political news in a way that yields this lesson: Understanding the theology behind various political movements is essential to understanding those movements at all.

As Ladner explains, Falwell thought he had a talent for interpreting and (especially) reinterpreting current events in light of what he believed to be biblical prophecy. From his start as a pastor who "lacked formal theological training, having attended an unaccredited Bible college and deciding against going to seminary," Falwell, Ladner writes, essentially made up a way of interpreting biblical prophecy by relying on the invention of dispensationalism by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a former priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland.

It was Darby who created -- not quite from whole cloth, but close -- the idea of the "Rapture," when, he taught, true Christians would be lifted into the air to meet Jesus and go to heaven. And, in turn, it was Barbara R. Rossing, professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, who so thoroughly debunked the idea of the Rapture in her 2005 book, The Rapture Exposed.

In that book, she concludes this: "(I)f the doctrine of the Rapture is so central to Christians' future, why did God bury the treasure for 1,800 years? Why do we have to piece it together only to find it now? As I have argued, the answer is that the Rapture and the dispensationalist chronology is a fabrication."

The standard way of thinking about premillennial dispensationalism today is that it divides world history into seven eras, or dispensations. As the Christian History Institute page to which I linked you above says, the eras are: "Innocency (before the Fall), Conscience (Fall to the Flood), Human Government, Promise (Abraham to Moses), Law (Moses to Christ), Grace (the church age) and Kingdom (the millennium)."

And Falwell was always looking for the start of what he said would be seven years of "Tribulation" that would happen after true Christians were "raptured" from Earth to heaven. When those seven miserable years ended, according to this thinking, Christ would come to Earth to rule in peace for 1,000 years. (The word "premillennial" means that the Tribulation will happen before the 1,000-year reign of Christ.) Falwell -- and some other dispensationalists after him -- suggest that if America can become a truly Christian nation with all the values pushed by conservative Christian leaders, America may be spared some of the worst of the Tribulation.

Which is why he pushed to elect politicians who would implement his ideas. And why he said over and over that the job of Christians now is not to repair the broken world but, rather, to work to save individual souls so they will be spared the horrors of the Tribulation and can be among the raptured.

It's all in how you read the book of Revelation in the New Testament. As you can see, some of these theological systems may make at least some internal sense or have some internal consistency. But when they are used to interpret current events, thousands of years after the prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures were written, they can lead down some pretty strange streets, the Rapture being one of them -- and those strange interpretations can lead to political positions and even government policies that may make sense to the interpreters who are (mis)using the Bible but that may have almost nothing to do with reality.

And that's where we all need to be careful.

Ladner wraps up her book this way: "One question I have found myself asking repeatedly is whether Falwell and his dispensationalism matter anymore, if the movement has moved so far beyond him that his thought has become irrelevant. I do not believe that it has. His hyper-nationalist, anti-U.N., anti-one-world-government paranoia; his embrace of unregulated capitalism and insistence on dismantling all social-aid programs; his fear of Christian martyrdom and of non-Christians having a place in America's public sphere; his hatred of the queer community; his rejection of civil rights for African Americans with the smokescreen of the anti-abortion movement; his unwavering belief in the imminent fulfillment of prophecy even when global events change direction; these things and more all have shaped the belief that America is indeed one nation under God's wrath. And that belief persists to this day."

In a word, theology matters. And it especially matters when politicians use some variety of it that sharply divides us because it dehumanizes some of us.

That's why it helps to know how politicians' religious beliefs might affect the kind of public policies they will advocate and try to make mandatory for all of us. If they are likely to result in a more deeply divided citizenry, voters would do well to say no to that. But to say no, they need to know the theology behind what the politicians are advocating.

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GOV. TIM WALZ, A 'MINNESOTA LUTHERAN'

Speaking of politicians and their religious beliefs, this Religion News Service story describes the religious connections of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who yesterday became Vice President Kamala Harris' choice for running mate for this year's presidential election. He's described as a "Minnesota Lutheran," meaning a member of a church that is part of the Mainline Protestant denomination known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The RNS story also points out that Walz has been active in interfaith relations, especially with Muslims, who make up an important group of voters in his state. But it will be worth paying attention to what Walz has to say about how his faith might affect his policy choices, so let's pay attention -- to him and the other candidates, too. (By the way, the ELCA is the largest of more than 40 Lutheran denominations in North America.)

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THE BOOK CORNER

In one sense, Judaism is the root from which Christianity sprang without itself disappearing in the process. The third Abrahamic faith, Islam, owes much of its theology to both of those faith traditions, beginning with Judaism.

That's just one important reason to learn about Judaism. Another important reason us to try to understand the Middle East and the role modern Israel plays there.

I can recommend two books to help you grasp the core of Judaism -- one just published and one that's regularly been on and off, then on and off my bookshelf since it was published in 2004. The older one is Accessible Judaism: A Concise Guide, by Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, who was my co-author when we wrote the book They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.

The new book is The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism, by Rabbi Irving Greenberg. This is a compelling description of the central points of Jewish theology and is written in clear, accessible language that people who know almost nothing about Judaism can track and that uses fresh insights to keep Jewish readers turning the pages.

Early in the book, Greenberg, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, makes clear why even non-Jews might be interested in this book: "Modern civilization has achieved tremendous improvements in material well-being for billions of people. This accomplishment, however, has become detached from the classic Jewish values of partnership, respect for Creation, acceptance of limits and accountability to a Higher Power. This disjunction has generated new crises: climate change, species destruction and the misuse of power to inflict oppression, racism and even genocide."

And here's a brief example of the insightful thinking you'll find here. Greenberg writes: "From asexual reproduction, life has moved to sexual selection; from chemical and instinct-governed behavior, life has matured to include emotional reactions and the capacity to love. The Torah describes this process in its language. Humans, like all life, are planted in the ground of the Divine. Just as plants rooted in alkaline soil evolve to become more alkaline and more absorptive of the nutrients in the ground, life itself absorbs the distinctive God energy and evolves to become more and more like its ground, the Divine."

A bonus: At the end of the book is an easy-to-read chart describing what Greenberg calls "the three great eras of Jewish history." If you are Jewish or if you know any Jews -- or are just curious about them -- this book can be a valuable resource.

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P.S.: I've written this special column for The Kansas City Star today about the U.S. defense secretary's outrageous cancellation of the recently announced plea bargain in which three of the 9/11 terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay Prison would plead guilty to the murder of nearly 3,000 people in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. For members of many 9/11 families like mine, this was another painful gut punch.