I believe this originally ran in Harper's (read excerpt here: http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html) but I found this longer excerpt on LexisNexis. If anyone has the full thing, that'd be greatly appreciated since it was an interesting read.


The Christian Paradox

The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
August 21, 2005 Sunday
By BILL McKIBBEN, Wire Services



ONLY 40 PERCENT of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels.

Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms.

Here is a statistic that does matter: Three-quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.

The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counterbiblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans - most American Christians - are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation - and, overwhelmingly, we do - it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox - more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese - illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish.

It is true that a smaller number of Americans - about 75 percent - claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration.

In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four-fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.

But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion - say, giving aid to the poorest people - as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?

In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide 15 cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to 21 cents.

It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose - childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool - we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin.

The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention.

And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were "food insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.

This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners).

Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest.

Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate-just over half-that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent.

Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline-like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?...

The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that its adherents boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.

But their theology is appealing for another reason, too: It coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.

But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people.

There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common - that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.

It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a "love your neighbor" theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion.

Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works - they're the ones that have nurtured me. But they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting Christians, like [Jim] Wallis' Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.

The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren's "The Purpose-Driven Life," illustrates the possibilities. It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted 65 uses of the word you). But it also makes a powerful case that we're made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for it is real. And there's no great need for Warren to state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon on the Mount.

Admittedly, this is hope against hope. More likely the money changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our "spiritual" life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus.

As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters - the TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups" - have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves - become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come.

When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.

Bill McKibben is scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and author of many books. This article is an excerpt of a larger article that appears in the August issue of Harper's Magazine.

"Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife"

uhuaeuhaeuhaeuheauhaeuhaeuhuheahuaeuhea

10 commandments? 4 gospel authors? Doesn't god know we memorize things best in groups of 3?? Pffft!

Biology = 1 / God = 0

Great article. I've always said that there are too many Christians who forget that the most important part of the Bible is "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

Thank you for posting that article.

I wonder how many people that were shooting at helicopters and looting stores in New Orleans went to church every week...

You've really never been in a poor community in the United States, have you? It's not hard to find gang members, drug dealers, and/or juvenile delinquents that report to church with their mother every Sunday.

interestingly enough, Jesus said his followers should do that, speaking of the individual. There is nothing in there about government helping the sick, weak, suffering......

Look at the money and effort etc donated in the past week. It dosen't seem all that paradoxical.

But, we're talking in generalizations anyhow. Very interesting article to say the least. You don't really have to go to church to follow the teachings of Christ, but aside from that there are a few really good churches out there.

It was actually a question, sort of in humor, posed by a black friend of mine from Miami, who grew up in a poor neighboorhood in St. Louis. It made me think for a little bit.

But no, I don't know what goes on in poor black churches, much less do I know about what goes on in churches in rich white communities. I don't know who goes to churches in my home town either.

And I gave an answer.

Q: How many looters/shooters go to chuch every week?
A: Many.

I guess then, as Lloydd says. They are not following the teachings of Jesus.

Exactly. Going to Church means nothing.

I guarantee you its something only found in the U.S., and that it only applies to the W.A.S.P. slowly becoming a minority here. When you take it in a larger perspective, its only a long line of Paradoxes that characterize its entire history for there are many, many, many ends and beginings that do not match in Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church is usually, probably close to 99.99%, the culprit behind the holes in that fill the religion because of its social, economic and downright political ambitions. It doesn't take much insight to its history to realize that this Empire took a folklore about a martyr for change amongst the Hebrew Israelites of ancient Palestine and purged it, reconstructed it and outright lied about it to create an unquestionable way of life for its constiuents. The ancient Hebrew creation story (the Torah, or the Old Testament) was in no way related to the story of Jesus of the Nazarenes (No its not a mispelling, Nazareth was founded in 60 C.E., thirty years after the "Cruxifixtion") until the Romans went back and impossibly linked the two together. If the foundation was hardly built upon anything at all, then how can you expect the rest of it to make any sense? Yet, it hangs on, like a gangrene infected limb. It seems the only way it could finally be put to rest is if it confronted an situation that unanimously proved that the Church's way is completely wrong, yet its confronted many of them and simply dismissed them as fake (i.e. Evolution). It wasn't until the late 1990's that the church finally accepted that the Earth rotated around the Sun in the Solar System, after hundreds of years of solid proof. The Roman Empire is still alive and well, it just now controls the most powerful aspect of its people, their minds. Where other Empires controlled your direct assests and your life with boarders and armies, they could never completely control your thoughts. By tapping into faith, everyone's weakest point, the Roman Empire could thrive forever by voluntary support from its own people, spreading across continents and ultimately directing the fate of humanity to this day. By directing your belief in the unknown, the Empire is still here today, a remarkable feat compared to the kingdoms that have come and gone throughout history in the blink of an eye.

I realize my years of research into this subject will undoubtly offend the masses, so I leave them with this simple question: Is it more common for nature to stray from its course or for a man to tell a lie?

Only found in the US? I lost you there. When looking at similar topics, you can find idiots believing much stranger things outside of the US. I could give examples, but do I really need to?


And talking about the Old and new testament, it is no stretch to realize they are not related, but to actually date them based on other bull shit you have read? To actually state it in a manner as if it was fact? I may defend Bush from time to time, but if I found an Anne Coulter book tomorrow I would never use it as a factual account of todays society.

The last third of what you said, i could debate. But can we not seperate science, religion and bull shit? There are points in time and space that I pretty much reject.

I admit the first sentence of my original post was properly explained, so I shall elaborate on what I should have said in that original sentence. The "trend" that I was referring to was to the originating article "The Christian Paradox." And just in case you haven't read it, it describes a current trend of ignorance and apathy held by many Christians in the United States, yet they're the first to proclaim that they're wholly Christian. What I was saying in that first sentence was it was only something you will find amongst White (Caucasian), usually Protestant, Americans in the middle to upper class range. I know it because I live in a very "conservative" area, and live in the town that proudly has "more cops than churches," (If you come to Burke County, you're gonna get busted) and we've got churches for every social, political, ethnic and economic group here. The biggest church in town, the First Baptist Church, is a babylonian-like white white building that seems to stand hundreds of feet in the air. It sits in the middle of peaceful West Union Street, in the middle of a friendly neighborhood with equally peaceful people walking their dogs or jogging in the afternoon. (For those of you who've never been by Morganton, or North Carolina for that matter, West Union Street is part of the larger Union Street that cuts completely across town respectively. West Union is the rich side of town, with its monumental houses that decorate the landscape like a McDonalds in Ethiopia. East Union Street, however is like going to the other side of the Berlin Wall, its where the projects and meth houses are, the kind of place you'll for sure get pulled or mugged in if you drive a fancy car.) The Baptist Church's Romanesque features would give you the impression that its massive size would equal a massive faith, however its completely untrue. The Church is only used on Sunday mornings for 45 minutes (they'll be damned if they miss out on their Blue Plate Specials) and Wednesday evenings for nearly an hour, the rest of the time its just populated for various Boy Scout meetings or any other local organization. The sermons they teach reveal they'll only teach parts of the bible that do not offend its SUV (more like Hummers now) and Jaguar driving masses and do not make you feel guilty for being so priviledged in life. On the Contrary, on the opposite end at East Union Street, there sit two AME churches, just a block away from the downtown businesses. Everyone knows that its no place for a church because there is no decent parking spaces, its dangerous to walk across the street and it gets utterly noisey across that entire section in the afternoons. However, these churches stay open for hours every Sunday and Wednesday, sometimes all afternoon. They're mostly lower class folks who wear their only expensive set of clothing on these designated days, but make sure that their faith in God is known. They may be dimunitive, impervished and on the wrong side of town, but they don't let it stop them, they go to heard the good word and make sure they know it every Sunday and Wednesday. So you see, what I was trying to express in my first sentence was that the Christian Paradox probably happens only in the United States (I mean, most of Europe is Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox while the rest are Protestants that belong to a major "counter-Catholic" church of similar hierarchies) and it only happens by Social, Economic and Political alignment. I hope that clears any confusion you might of had. I'm not even going to begin on the rest of what you posted, a person who links Science with Ann Coulter deserves psychiatric help.

P.S: I'm sure these "idiots believing much stranger things outside of the US" probably feel the same about you.