Where's our focus?

As anyone who's every casually followed American politics (in my opinion, the only way to follow them and stay sane) knows, the evangelical right always keeps itself within an arms length of major proceedings, such as election campaigns.  From what I can tell, the recent Democratic nomination was no exception, with conservatives slamming Barack Obama from all sides on religious issues ranging from speculation that he's a Muslim (because that would be a real outrage, wouldn't it?) to some ill-advised comments made not by him, but by his pastor.  John McCain has also recently come under fire for his comparatively "progressive" (gasp!) views on things such as the environment and abortion.  Of course, from a purely secular, civil point of view, the Christian right, as a citizen's lobby, has every right to express it's political views (just as the arms lobby does - note that just because I recognize their right to speak, doesn't mean I agree with the amount of influence they're allowed to yield in governance).  Even if, from the outside, the American electorate appears to consist largely of incompetent morons, democracy gives them the right - in the words of Henry Mencken - to "get (what they want) good and hard".  

The Christian right's democratic allowance to express its views, therefore, is not what I'm concerned about.  I'm not even going to delve into the issues that guys like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell brought up - if you want a summary of the perennial pro-life - pro-choice joust, tune your TV to run-of-the-mill 60 Minutes or Larry King Live programming.  What I'm increasingly skeptical about isn't the issues that the Christian right is concerned about, but rather the one's it isn't eager to address.  From a biblical perspective, the priorities of leaders such as Dr. James Dobson are often way off base from where an influential Christian leader's efforts should be concentrated.  Simply put, why is there so much Focus on the Family?  Don't get me wrong - as an institution, the concept of family is addressed on numerous occasions within the Bible, notably in the Paul's letters.  However, the family unit has somehow become the central focus of the most visible representatives of Christianity in North America (maybe even the world), with issues such as poverty and social injustice somehow deemed the domain of liberals and the occasional evangelical counterculturalist (i.e. the Ron Siders and Jimmy Carters).  Furthermore, dialogue has been further concentrated by limiting the breadth of topics deemed relevant to ensuring the maintenance of "family values" to issues such as homosexuality and abortion, consequently rejecting important issues such as the impact of individualism and materialism on our children.

With these concerns in mind, I decided to lug out my trusty Strong's concordance (the utilization of which is as much of an arm exercise as one of the brain), and do a topical index search for homosexuality.  Perhaps surprisingly to some, Nave (editor of the topical index) only identifies 12 instances where the issue of homosexuality is addressed in the entire Bible; moreover, a few of them are contained within the same general passage (e.g. Leviticus 18:22, 20:13).  Although I may be wrong, I don't believe Christ ever specifically addressed the subject (also suggested by the absence of a Gospel reference in Nave's account), although he clearly touched on related issues such as sexual morality and healthy relationships.  

This is in stark contrast to the amount of emphasis the Scriptures place on topics such as poverty and social injustice.  With another glance at Nave, I find that the list of references under the heading "poor" is exhaustive, taking up close to an entire column in what must be pt. 6 font.  Although the results for "injustice" were more modest, there were still more than twice as many references as there were to homosexuality.  Purely out of curiosity, I also did a search on "family".  Despite there being a bit more than half a column of references, the first specific that I noticed was the editor's disclaimer that "the concept of the family in the Bible differs from the modern instutution", presumably as a forewarning to the fact that many of the passages had little relevance to ideas of "healthy family" that Westerners seem to occupy themselves with.  Granted, not all of the references under "poor" dealt specifically with material poverty; the abstract idea of "spiritual poverty" is also touched upon.  However, close examination of the listings reveals that the vast majority of the passages deal with material poverty.

Obviously, this doesn't even come close to being a complex hermeneutical examination of these subjects.  However, the involvement of Christians in politics - and social issues in general - has, at least in my mind, become more of a forefront issue amidst all of the US election hype, so I figured it would be good to provide some food for thought.  And not just for people in the US: to identify the disproportional preoccupation with issues such as homosexuality as being a problem contained within the American evangelical community would be unwise, given the weightiness of these issues in Canadian electoral politics and social activism.  I'm not sure how much these issues come up in other democratic contexts around the world, but I'm sure that in many cases the attention paid to them is significant.  Overall, I'm certain that if followers of Christ are going to be the "salt and light" that Jesus says we're to be in Matthew 5, we're going to have to stop ridiculously confining our attention to a few issues, and be at the forefront of the battle against much broader causes of evil and injustice in the world today.

Wow, that was far from being the longest blog post I've ever written, but I feel like I just ran a marathon.  I'm going to go drink a big glass of milk, or orange juice, or whatever I can find in my parents largely grocery-deficient kitchen (guess that's what happens when there cease to be puberal youths raiding the cupboards 24 hours a day).  My current state of unemployment, coupled with the fact that I'm starting to grow bored with Tiger Woods PGA 2008, means that I should be blogging more consistently over the next couple of weeks.  So keep an eye out!  Have a great weekend!

Cheers

Tom