If you follow this blog, you know that our resident novelist has weighed in on this subject. Now, listen to another novelist with a similar message.

It’s disturbing reflection of evangelical America that diversely different political figures like Reverend Wright and Pat Robertson both take up huge chunks of media time under the same banner of Christianity.

Even a casual comparison between their political views and the recorded words of Jesus shows they certainly are not speaking on his behalf. Where the Reverend Wright calls upon God to damn America, Jesus did not request the same for the oppressive Roman overlords. Unlike Pat Roberston’s solution for Hugo Chavez, Jesus never advocated the assassination of leaders of foreign nations.

This problem begins with the unspoken assumption that American evangelicals must be of one political stripe to make a difference. Gather as many blacks under Reverend Wright as you can, or as many whites under Pat Robertson or the Moral Majority, and let the best army win. In this landscape, conservatives are Christians. Liberals are the anti-Christ.

The gospel accounts, however predominately show Jesus as a person who lived intentionally concerned with the common good of all people. As for politics, Jesus pointedly refused to lead his people against their overlords. Yet in rejecting the leadership mantle offered to him, Jesus showed a great understanding of politics. Especially when it comes to faith.

Living in a land where cross-shaped shadows of history’s most infamous torture instrument were a constant reminder of Roman rule, Jesus well knew that on the kingdom of earth, power is gained by the sword. He knew too, the pitfalls of grasping that sword, used so literally in his name during the Crusades, and metaphorically in recent presidential elections through the leverage of votes.

In contrast to the Christian right, Jesus, who knew God best, did not invoke his Father’s name to impose moral imperatives on the secular society around him — Greeks and Romans who lived far more hedonistically and with far less regard for human life than today’s ‘Hollywood’. Unlike Christian boycotters, Jesus did not expect a secular world to live by biblical standards. The irony is that the institution Jesus did criticize and hold to those standards was the religious establishment that eventually slaughtered him. Why? For asserting that it had failed God miserably in pursuit of politics and power.

Few who argue the divinity of Jesus will dispute that because of Jesus, western civilization was changed. Yet he transformed society by transforming individuals, not by transforming legislation. He offered hope and inner peace, leaving his followers a simple directive to feed the hungry and cloth the poor, asking them to give love and to accept suffering and sacrifice.

In this sense, yes, Jesus was a leader. By example. He rejected the power of the sword for the powerlessness and suffering and sacrifice of the cross. But Jesus and his teachings continue to transform individuals, while Rome is an ancient fallen empire, and the leaders of his day are dust, forgotten except as history lessons.

This is not to imply that Christians, as individuals, should remove themselves from the democratic process, in voting or running for office or even in leading groups with a common political cause. But marching beneath a Christian banner begins to set up an exclusionary group — ‘either you’re Christian and you’re on our side, or you oppose us, thus you can’t be a Christian’ — with results readily seen in the polarization of American politics. There are liberal Christians who want to help the poor and fight for justice.

The Christian banner hurts effectiveness too. Leaders of Christian coalitions who claim the moral high ground in the name of God are often viewed with the suspicion accorded to an invading crusader, and are correspondingly hampered by this suspicion, no matter how positive or well intentioned their efforts.

The greatest danger in the politicalization of faith awaits for the day it might have total success, a danger that America’s founding fathers foresaw by establishing the separation of church and state. Horrible and godless as a democracy might appear at times to the religious right in America, it is still far more inviting than the reign of the Christian Inquisition or the current theocracy in Iran.