Liberal Christians: where are you?

(Well, there is slacktivist)

 

Barbara O'Brien writes in this post that secularists should not be so quick to lump all religion together with the ridiculous, barefoot literalsim preached by fundamentalists:

Westerners often cling to an infantile religion focused on a Big Daddy God and the face of Jesus mysteriously appearing on pancakes and cheese sandwiches. And since that's what much of religion in America looks like, it's easy to assume that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.

But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn't have to be that way.

Amen, sister. Indeed, my own religion is an attempt to prove that religion "doesn't have to be that way." And I admit that I am often guilty of charicaturing "believers" in this way. O'Brien goes on to argue that biblical literalism is not some ancient tradition handed down unbroken from the distant past (though even if it was I think it would still just be as laughable), but rather a recent historical development. She quotes Karen Armstrong:

... faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …

… I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

I'm glad to hear this point raised by those sympathetic to Christianity. But I must say, you sophisticated Christians with your metaphorical interpretations and worldviews compatible with modern, pluralistic secular democracy and limited government are LOSING THE NOISE WAR BADLY to your more fundamentalist counterparts. Where are you? Where are the mainstream Christians speaking out that Dobson and Falwell are full of crap? If you just leave fighting the fundies to us atheists, we will lose. We are outnumbered, and not particularly trusted.

 

Thomas Friedman constantly bemoans the fact that moderate Muslims with non-violent ideologies are getting drowned out and intimidated by the violent fanatics (one example here). Well, I'm going to start bemoaning the fact that moderate Christians are being out-played by their own fanatical wing. Wake up folks, we need you to help us. You're not doing much better than your Islamic Moderate counterparts.