Happy (Religious) Holidays

For the faithful in my audience, this is an important week. Easter and Passover. Punditry comes out of the woodwork on news sites, but CNN's commentator Roland Martin has something extraordinarily insightful to say:

When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant only caring about two issues,­ abortion and homosexuality?

...

Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that's no big deal.

The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it's high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith. And those on the left who believe they have a "get out of sin free" card must not be allowed to justify their actions.

Martin does raise a fascinating point: how some modern American Christianity has been boiled down into those two issues, and it's frankly disturbing. Not because I happen to agree or disagree with either side, but because it largely ignores a 2000-year-old tradition based largely on principles of social justice. It's worth reading the rest of Martin's article, to hear about the African-American preacher who agreed to march in an anti-abortion rally, but couldn't get any white preachers to help him clean up a crack-infested neighborhood because "it was more his problem."

But there is a message of hope in what Martin shares, and it's one that I've become increasingly interested in: whatever else we may be, we are all still Americans and people, and owe it to ourselves to try to work together to find common ground, especially as more and more of us on each side realize things may be getting worse rather than better.

So this week:

For the Christians - Happy Easter.
For the Jewish folks - Happy Passover.
For my fellow agnostics - Enjoy a nice weekend.
For the atheists - faith in nothing is still faith.

For everyone else - be well.

Hat tip: Liz for the story.