Joe Biden, Ascendant Liberal Christianity and Divisions Within Catholicism

The four years of the nightmare of the Trump/Pence regime witnessed an empowerment of the ugliest elements of Protestant Christianity in America.  Scamvangelists and hate group leaders had ready access to the White House and the Trump/Pence regime continually sought to give Christofascists special licenses to discriminant and ignore the non-discrimination laws that bound the rest of America. All of this was done under the name of a one-way street of "religious liberty" with a goal of maintaining evangelical support for Trump who embodied just about everything Christ ever condemned. Thankfully, Trump was defeated and Joe Biden is ushering an ascendant liberal form of Christianity that seeks to further Christ's gospel message rather than merely parse Old Testament snippets in order to condemn others with a viciousness that likely would have shocked the biblical Pharisees.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this change even as Biden has set off divisions within the Catholic Church that pit moderate and liberal Catholics against right wing extremists who seemingly want to be Southern Baptists as noted by a piece in the Washington Post.  One can only hope that the liberal factions of Christianity prevail.    First highlights from the Times piece:     

There are myriad changes with the incoming Biden administration. One of the most significant: a president who has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices.

Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.

And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality.

His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results.

Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian.

Yet the current influence of liberal Christianity in the Democratic Party goes beyond Mr. Biden. Senator Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, won election with a campaign rooted in Black liberation theology. The Sunday after his election, Mr. Warnock preached about John the Baptist, the “truth-telling troublemaker,” he said, who was beheaded by King Herod for his prophetic witness.

Representative Cori Bush, a pastor who led Kingdom Embassy International in St. Louis, has started her tenure in Congress advocating universal basic income. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez connects her Catholic faith with her push for reforming health care and environmental policy.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Biden rooted himself and the country in a Christian moral vision that makes room for a pluralistic society, unlike his predecessor who promised to make America a certain kind of Christian nation. . . . . For Mr. Biden, “it was a subtle and explicit effort to show a different vision of a way in which a Christian could imagine themselves as part of a diverse America, one that is defined by these common objects of love, rather than by hate and fear or exclusion,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s priorities reflect values that progressive faith leaders have pushed for, and that motivated many to speak out for him during the campaign, said Derrick Harkins, who led interfaith outreach for the Democratic National Committee this past cycle. There is a sense of moral synergy on the left, among not only progressive Christians but also humanists, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and the spectrum of faith traditions, he said.

The work now “has a chance of really having traction,” he said. “I’m very optimistic about what can unfold.” The grassroots progressive Christian movement is center stage in Mr. Biden’s Washington.

As noted above and in the Post piece, the far right of the Catholic Church - which includes many bishops -  clings to the Church's 12th century dogma on human sexuality and finds Biden's support for abortion, LGBT rights and acceptance, and the embrace of non-Christians anathema.  Ironically, Biden finds a powerful ally on his side on a number of issues: Pope Francis.  Here are highlights from the Post column:

In another time, the election of only the second Roman Catholic president in U.S. history, a loyal church-goer who publicly embraces his faith, would have brought satisfaction and even joy to the nation’s large Catholic minority.

Instead, President Biden’s rise has underscored deep divisions within the U.S. church: the emergence of an increasingly hard right within the U.S. hierarchy now being met by a more vocal progressive Catholicism represented by Pope Francis and the cardinals and bishops he has appointed.

The day of Biden’s inauguration brought a dramatic confrontation between the two forces.

Just hours after Biden had attended Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement that began by praising Biden’s “piety” and “his moving witness to how his faith has brought him solace in times of darkness and tragedy,” but then moved to an unprecedented first-day rebuke.

The statement infuriated the Francis wing of the church leadership, which had not been consulted. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago took to Twitter that afternoon to deplore the statement as “ill-considered” and the product of “internal institutional failures” since it “came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released.” Other Francis allies, including Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, issued statements distancing themselves from Gomez’s view.

And the Vatican itself was plainly unhappy. The Jesuit magazine America quoted a Vatican official calling the statement “most unfortunate,” and Francis set an upbeat tone. He said he was praying that Biden would be “guided by a concern for building a society marked by authentic justice and freedom” with a particular concern for “the poor, the vulnerable and those who have no voice.”

Biden embodies the Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, a period when the American Catholic imagination was shaped by the “two Johns,” in the writer Garry Wills’s evocative phrase, Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy.

But a more conservative leadership appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI coincided with a Reagan-era push by intellectuals and activists on the church’s right to ally with the White evangelical political movement in opposition to abortion and advances in LGBTQ rights. The effect was to play down the church’s social justice teachings and to create what Cathleen Kaveny, a Boston College theologian, called “an American fusion of Catholicism with certain conservative and nationalist forms of evangelical Protestantism.”

Now the tables have turned again with Francis. . . . And this is why Gomez’s admonishment was a blunder. Not only did he galvanize the pro-Francis forces in the church willing to work with Biden on many issues. He also sent a message to the Biden administration that its formal dealings with the Catholic hierarchy should go not simply through the bishops conference, the traditional route, but also through the American cardinals, three of whom were named by Francis.

Biden did not run for president to transform the politics of the Catholic Church. But the devout kid from Scranton, Pa., is already having that effect.