Sins are like grapes. They come in bunches.
Take, fer instance, the Wild Goose Festival, at which a bunch of left-of-center evangelicals have congregated in order to harangue the faithful. Actually, when I use the term “faithful” here, what I actually mean is that they gathered to harangue the faithless. Jim Wallis, Frank Schaeffer, et al. are forging a new Holy Ghost alliance between fruit queens and welfare queens, between lesbians and agnostics, between Jesus Victims and regular old Victims.
For many reasons, America is profoundly a two-party nation. This is part of our unwritten constitution, but is related to the written one. Because we have a “winner-takes-all” approach (in the Electoral College, for example), and because our legislative chambers do not run on the parliamentary model, this has made two-party politics a practical necessity, and has made the rise of third parties extremely difficult. Not only so, but this necessity of legislative mechanics has, at least a couple centuries ago, entered into our national psyche. We think in two-party terms now even when there is no practical necessity for it.
This means that our political and cultural debates tend to be binary. This can be (and often is) a nuisance. From where I sit, this means that if I express the view that we ought not to spend money our great, great grandchildren haven’t earned yet (a sentiment full of seething hatred, I know), then this means that I suddenly find myself in an alliance with other folks who also think that while we might not be able to turn Afghan opium farmers into Jeffersonian democrats, it is certainly worth a try. But then they also agree with me that babies ought not to be condemned to death for the crime of having been conceived in America, and they agree with me that New York State doesn’t know what a marriage is. So to be pro-life and fiscally sane in America is to be lumped in with foreign policy adventure hawks. Like I said, a nusiance. Within this binary set-up, it it still okay for me to dissent (as I frequently do), but this sort of thing comes with the territory.
But for those left-leaning Christians who think that Jesus wants us to run up our great, great grandchildren’s credit cards, this is not just a nuisance. It results in fatal moral compromise. There was a time when we could say that people who thought that way about economics were just math-challenged. But when they give voice to that sentiment now, they may soon find themselves at a Silly Goose Festival, standing next to some Jesus Victim with his flame on. And if they don’t applaud this new wave evangelical debauch, then they will soon be run out of the joint as promulgators of hate.
Everything is coming to a point. The days when you could rest behind the bromides of soft socialism are over. As Dimble says in That Hideous Strength, “Have you ever noticed that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point? . . . If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family — anything you like — at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder” (p. 283).
God is not mocked. The harvest doesn’t necessarily look like the planting, but there is always a direct relationship between the two. And those who used to kid themselves at the planting will find this harder and harder to do the further on we go. To change the image, evangelical fuzzy thinkers have signed up for hard times. And the hard times will extend from hell to breakfast.