Djelloul Marbrook

The glory of Christianity is its gospel of love, charity and compassion, so why do condemnatory histrionics from the pulpit about family values, abortion and homosexuality dominate news of Christendom while the pulpit’s deafening silence about a church-going society that allows insurance adjusters to make a mockery of its dearest tenets is met with complimentary silence in the media?

The media and the pulpit are complicit in this disconnect between the way we describe ourselves in polls and the way we license a culture of greed to shape our social policies. When the pulpit inveighs against gays but can’t bring itself to condemn corporate greed or the fact that almost fifty million Americans lack health insurance and the rest of us are tortured by insurance adjusters we ought to wonder whether that is Christian cloth those preachers are wearing.

We may not know what Jesus would say about homosexuality, the ordination of women and gays or abortion, but we know for a certainty what he said about the poor, the sick and the oppressed. So why all this mouthiness about issues that are less than central to the Christian message?

Do we really want to be in the position of saying that when it comes to love, charity and compassion we will let the insurance industry and the HMOs define our religion? It seems to me that is the trap in which we are caught. We seem unwilling to say that the New Testament is more important to us than globalization. Perhaps we need to revisit the story of the moneychangers in the temple.—DM