Salman Rushdie: A SECOND LOOK
We are celebrating the 2 000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, as Catholic cardinals and believers of all stripes continually remind us. Never mind that this will put Jesus in the odd position of having two birthdays in the space of a week (Christmas Day as well as the Millennial Instant), or that all serious scholars and even church leaders now agree that he wasn’t actually born on either of them.
Faux-millennium or not, it’s the only one we’re going to get. But will the faux-millennium turn out to be a dark sabbath of what one might call faux- Christianity? Appropriately enough, the year already offers us a number of striking examples of faux-Christian behaviour.
Here, for instance, is General Augusto Pinochet attending midnight mass, which brings up the interesting question of the role of his confessor. Many of us would be very eager indeed for a chance to hear the general’s confession. But one man presumably already has. The issue of penance is, therefore, worth a moment’s thought. Exactly how many mea culpas and Hail Marys was the general asked to say to atone for his crimes?
Hardline, but essentially counterfeit Christian “values” have been the driving force behind the rabidly partisan attack by United States Republicans on their sexually deplorable president.
To an observer whose admiration for American democracy was born at the time of the Watergate hearings, those grave, scrupulous, bipartisan deliberations over an earlier president’s genuinely high crimes, the tawdry Bill Clinton impeachment debate has been a depressing, disillusioning spectacle. Down into the dirt we tumble, in the name of the gentle Christ.
But one of the Christian soldiers, speaker-elect Bob Livingston, is already hoisted on his own sanctimonious petard. Now pornographer Larry Flynt’s exposs may skewer several more, and no less a moral authority than the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker has been sighted on CNN, attacking his own Christian cohorts for their un-Christian disinterest in forgiveness and healing. How low can you go?
There’s an older word for the American right’s fork-tongued Christianity: hypocrisy.
Washington has been for many months in the grip of a kind of hypocrite fundamentalism. If the Senate now brings the sorry saga to a close, it will be because sober considerations of state have finally gained the ascendancy over mad-dog godliness; because worldly-wise politicians have put the faux-Christians back in their kennels at last.
Clinton, who reportedly prayed with his spiritual advisers while the impeachment vote was being taken, is no slouch in the faux department himself. Of course, his present, astonishing popularity rating is in part a reaction to the Kenneth Starr troopers’ sheer vileness; but it is also due to the popularity in the US of his decision to bomb Iraq.
Did Clinton discuss that with his spiritual advisers, too? Did his equally devout British ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, agree that those essentially pointless strikes were the moral, Christian way to go?
I well know that faux-religion isn’t an exclusively Western vice. Believe me, I know something of the hypocritical fervor with which the militants of other faiths – Muslims, Hindus, Jews – invoke their god or gods to justify tyranny and injustice.
No amount of Western hypocrisy can come close to Saddam Hussein’s faux-Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Yet religious zealots have the nerve to accuse god-free secularists of lacking moral principles!
Well, sirs, for an ungodly person like myself, the overarching issue in the world today is not any of the stuff on the god squads’ agendas. It’s the so- called Debt, the multi-trillions of dollars that keep the poorest countries of the world in hock to, and under the thumb of, the richest.
Even in the most fiscally conservative circles, there is a growing consensus that The Debt must be wiped out, unless we want a third millennium marked by the resentment, violence, fanaticism and despotism that must be the inevitable effects of this global injustice.
Why not make cancellation of The Debt the human race’s millennium gift to itself? Now that could make 1999 a real milestone in human history. It’s an idea in which our interests and principles coincide, wherever we come from, rich north or poor south; whoever we are, friend or faux. It is a policy that would erase the memory of 1998’s shabby Monica Lewinskyings, and put Clinton’s presidency in the history books for a genuinely high moral reason. Cancel The Debt for the millennium! It’s even the Christian thing to do.