Worth a look: Column by Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan wrote a fascinating piece about the body of Christ in Newsweek: Christianity in Crisis. Give it a look.

Sullivan focuses on two historic figures - Thomas Jefferson and Francis of Assisi. We see first Jefferson cutting up a Bible to remove passages that he felt detracted from the message of Jesus. Next, we discover the intricacies of Jefferson’s beliefs and how it shaped the framing of the Constitution and other founding documents.

This paragraph summarizes the pivotal point about Jefferson:

When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by “church”: the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus’ death. If Jefferson’s greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy. “I am a real Christian,” Jefferson insisted against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. “That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

I am not sure what more needs to be said about the body. It should not serve the interests of powerful. Jefferson wanted Christians to free themselves from the trappings of power, politics, and privilege, being able to engage in society as a voice of conscience.

Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—Jefferson’s point is crucially important. Because it was Jesus’ point. What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be—rather than the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was—he actually emerges more powerfully and more purely.

Sullivan argues that the body of Christ is seriously ill as more and more people of conscience look elsewhere for spiritual fulfillment. Who can blame them for looking elsewhere when so many so-called Christians demand control over everyone's sexual behavior and reproduction? Never mind that many of these same Christians have conveniently forgotten their own indiscretions while rushing to stone those they accuse of sin.

All of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo: Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic self-denial—or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and toward “spirituality,” co-opting or adapting the practices of meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?

Sullivan is somewhat optimistic that the body of Christ can be revived from its present malaise. Cleansing the body of the lusts for wealth and power seems like a tall order in our society, but miracles do happen.