The Practicing Progressive

Wikipedia tells me that the biblical phrase “Not of this world” could refer to four possibilities including a Christian based apparel company, an album by the Christian band Petra, an Italian film and a song performed by the heavy metal band Danzig. What it doesn’t say is that the term could also describe the actions of two wildly disparate Christians this past week.

How else to understand the comments coming from former Evangelical pastor, Ted Haggard and current Catholic pope, Benedict XVI than to say that neither of the men are acting like they are part of this world.

In the first case, Haggard, the former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs and just as former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, spoke on the occasion of a HBO movie premiering this week about the beleaguered minister who was ousted from both positions when he was outed for being in other positions with a male prostitute. The movie purports to reveal Haggard’s continuing dilemma as he attempts to reconcile his Evangelical Christianity with his homosexual urges. Viewers of the film will recognize that his attempts are doomed to failure. The homophobia inherent in his divine theology crash head-on with the equally inherent desires in his very human nature. Curiously, Haggard has been on a whirlwind publicity campaign for the film. Appearing on various talk-shows in recent days, the disgraced pastor seemed oblivious to what appears obvious to most of the rest of the world. So ebullient has the ex-pastor appeared during this media blitz that his former church was forced into announcing a pay-off they were making to another of the pastor’s sexual partners who threatened to go public believing the new movie was too dismissive of his former lover’s extra-marital activities.

The fact that Haggard for years led the charge against equal civil rights for gay and lesbian folk should have been a tip off to the rest of us. Elmer Gantry always saved his most vitriolic sermons to rail against the very behaviors he most enjoyed. The disconnect between what we say and what we do is the very definition of hypocrisy.

Disconnect also describes Pope Benedict’s decision this week to un-excommunicate four bishops from a breakaway religious cult that produces liturgies and literature that are rife with anti-Semitic prejudice. Indeed, one of the bishops rescued from eternal damnation is an Englishman by the name of Richard Williamson who as recently as last week told a Swedish interviewer that no more than 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and that there was no evidence of millions of other Jews being murdered in gas chambers.

The outcry from not just the Jewish community but religious folk around the world was immediate and inflamed. Jewish leaders sputtered in fury as they described the Pope’s decision as “deplorable” and wondered aloud how any dialogue with the Vatican could continue. By week’s end, the Pope had taken a step backward trying to distance himself from the still reprieved Williamson’s hate-filled rhetoric but the Pope’s failure to understand the obvious response to his actions seems spectacularly naïve at best and dangerously close to being downright sinister.

Christianity has carried on its campaign against the Jews for over two thousand years. At times it has exploded in hideous pogroms bent on extinguishing an entire population. Most other times it has simply included in its teachings the dark descriptions of Jews found in Christian scripture. But any kind of tolerance of such insidious assumptions seems certainly antithetical to the teachings of the one from whom this flawed religion takes its name. The Pope’s decision to turn a blind eye to these past injustices by forgiving a bigot who still refuses to recant reveals a different but equally bizarre disconnect with the world as that of Mr. Haggard’s.

It is interesting to note that Wikipedia’s entry does not point to the rabbi from Nazareth as the original source of the phrase “Not of this world.” But after what two of his disciples have said and done this past week, I suspect Jesus is probably hiding.