MEADOR: Prayers for rain wrong-headed

A word about religion and politics: It's a controversial place to begin the year, but a recent advertisement has provided proof that it's unfortunately necessary for us to once again visit these two tiresome topics.

In a recent ad by Focus on the Family, web commentator Stuart Shepherd asked if it'd be wrong to pray for rain on a certain night, "say, the night a certain presumptive presidential nominee is to give a certain acceptance speech."

If you know anything about the Colorado Springs-based organization, you know he's not talking about John McCain.

Shepherd went on to ask if it'd be wrong to pray for torrential, "cameras-can't-see-the-stage rain," while Senator Barack Obama gives his acceptance speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He then attempts to justify his bizarre and juvenile prayer by saying that he's still pro-life and believes in marriage being between one man and one woman.

The ad continues in this way as Shepherd repeatedly describes the sort of rain he'd like to see - "I'm talking umbrella-ain't-going-to-help-you rain. Not flood people out of their houses rain. Just good old swamp the intersections rain" - and why he wants to see it. After two and a half minutes of this, the ad mercifully comes to an end.

Unfortunately, the faulty narrative that creates these ads has run for far longer than two and half minutes. It's been told in evangelical churches for about 30 years now and will likely be heard in hundreds of churches this coming Sunday.

It goes something like this: America was once a good, God-fearing nation that looked remarkably like an episode of "Leave it to Beaver" or the opening scenes of "Pleasantville." But then in the 1960s, with the sexual revolution, the free speech movement and Woodstock, that began to change.

The comfortable and easily-discerned morality of the 1950s was rejected by the younger generation, and they replaced the older generation's values of personal peace and affluence with personal freedom and authenticity. The result was a newfound acceptance of homosexuality and, in the early 1970s, the passing of Roe v. Wade, which led to legalized abortion.

Put simply, this story tells us that in the culture wars between the believers and the non-believers, the non-believers won. But "Leave it to Beaver" wasn't reality.

It then goes on to use a simplistic, flat reading of carefully-selected biblical texts (taken out of context) to argue that it's now the responsibility of Christians to "take back America for God." This is done by advancing aggressive anti-gay marriage legislation and electing leaders who will work to overturn Roe v. Wade.

This is the narrative that defines organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the thankfully-defunct Moral Majority and other similarly-minded groups. Essentially, it's the narrative that has created the culture wars.

And this would all be a very appropriate narrative for Christians to live by if it weren't for the fact that the Bible condemns the whole thing.

The Bible, from beginning to end, does indeed speak quite often of the idea of God bringing all of creation under his authority. Language of renewal, restoration and redemption is inescapable from Genesis to Revelation. However, the biblical idea is not that God uses political victory to advance his revolutionary vision for the world.

Rather, it is that the church ought to be salt and light in the world. The idea is that the church, like salt, is a preservative. It keeps things fresh, it protects them from becoming moldy, rotten and tasteless.

You can describe it as providing a light in a dark place when all other lights go out.

The idea is Christians ought to lovingly and with humility engage with the people around them, pro-actively working for the betterment of all members of the society (and all members includes both the unborn and their mothers).

Simply put, the relationship ought to be mutually beneficial, not adversarial. There ought to be overlap and mutual influence between Christians and non-Christians as we seek to create just, virtuous societies.

To reduce God to faction-driven politicking, as organizations like Focus on the Family routinely do, is to present a God whose vision for the world is stale and dead because it is limited by the effectiveness of political action and its benefits are limited to a select group. If the Christian faith isn't good news for everybody, it isn't good news for anybody.

Tragically, many evangelicals fail to communicate this idea. Rather than protecting what is good from becoming rotten through charitable and sacrificial acts of love, evangelicals (and I include myself) often are the cause of the rottenness due to our own arrogance and inability to interact with people who do not share our beliefs.

So, perhaps rather than asking God to demonstrate his judgment on Obama by sending rain at convention today in Denver, we instead ought to be asking God to spare us from the "cameras-can't-see-the-stage" rain that we ought to be receiving.

After all, it's easy to point out the speck in your neighbor's eye, but, like the Bible says, it's much healthier to remove the log from your own.

Jake Meador is a junior English and history major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.