Despite this being the Advent season when the candles of
love, joy, and peace have been lighted on our Advent wreaths (for those who
have such things), we realize have been taught to think, not just with a
sincere heart in a single direction, e.g. loving all, whether they are friendly
or hostile towards us, but in divided-heart polarities, such as, “You are
either for us or against us,” or “You are either Republican or Democrat” or
“You are either our ally or our enemy,” or “You either go to my church or are
against the ways of God.” Some people think more easily in these black-white
polarities than others, some fight against them harder than others, but the public
dialogue in our anxious society tends to be colored by these stark
“either-or’s.” There is no need to dig deeper, to check sources, to look for
nuances. There is no need to discover what unifies us since we prefer to focus
on what divides.

Thus, as in the ancient world (as noted in a recent presentation
in at Society of Biblical Literature depending on the works of Philip A.
Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and
Congregation and Dynamics
of Identity in the World of the Early Christians), we tend to use emotive
labels to demonize (and sometimes valorize) others. In that world, those in
rival associations (collegia) were
often referred to as “immoral” and/or “impious” using this rhetoric of demonization
without any real concern about the accuracy of the charges. Indeed, the
language was understood in the culture to mean “I think that those other guys
are wrong” or perhaps “bad.” While this becomes an issue in the understanding
of Jude or 2 Peter 2 in particular in that some of their critique of those they
oppose may be standardized and stylized, not intended to be taken literally, it
is clear that the early Christians (who in Roman terms were an association) were
demonized by such rhetoric as “cannibals,” “haters of humanity,” “impious,” etc.
This led to social ostracism (seen, for example, in 1 Peter) and worse (mostly
in the post-New Testament decades and centuries).

I was still thinking about this paper and the tendency for
our society to do likewise when I came upon the
charge that Pope Francis is a Marxist.I link to what, I believe, is the
original statement of Rush Limbaugh (there may have been others of his leanings
who made the charge before him), although I note that the charge spread in
certain circles on Facebook and that is where I first read it. To his credit,
Limbaugh allows that the Pope may have been “mistranslated” (which is unlikely,
given that a second edition of the English version of the Apostolic Exhortation
merely added notes and clarifications), but he labels what he thinks he
understands the Pope to have said with the demonizing term “Marxist” (the
alternative demonizing term in his circles being “socialist,” with “Marxist”
being a bit more inflammatory). News organizations and blogs went wild on this
one, as you will find if you google “Pope Francis Marxist.” Some of them
attacked the Holy Father, while others defended him, while still others
preferred to use another label for him, such as “Peronist.”
Time Magazine then named him “Person
of the Year,” which was in turn labeled either “leftist” or a remaking
of the Pope into the person they wished that he were. Then there were those
who thought that they could excuse the Pope by arguing that he was speaking
unauthoritatively, which in itself showed a lack of knowledge of Catholic
teaching. The point is that there was a lot of negative labeling going on.
Surely even Rush Limbaugh is not so ignorant as to think that the one who sits
in the Chair of St. Peter is an atheist, or a believer in an impersonal
Hegelian dialectic of class warfare, or one who subscribes to any of a number
of other beliefs characteristic of Marxism (assuming that Limbaugh has done his
reading in The Communist Manifesto
and Das Kapital). No, what he was
saying in his usual breathless manner is that he did not like what Pope Francis
said about the oppression of the poor, for it clearly marked the Pope as not
one of Limbaugh’s group. Thus he chose the demonizing label “Marxist” to
express his displeasure. Others used different labels for the same purpose or
valorizing labels to express their positive feelings.

What gets lost in all of this is the source of the ruckus,
which is the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii
Gaudium. The problem is that that document says a lot more than the bits
and pieces that are picked out by people like Rush Limbaugh or even many of the
Pope’s defenders. The further problem is that that the Apostolic Exhortation
itself, important as it is as the Pope’s first major document, fits into the
context of Catholic social teaching, which one can find summarized in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Read that document and you will find that it is not original, but in fact is
based on the documents of Vatican II and on the various Church Fathers. And, of
course, all of this is rooted in the teaching of Jesus and the various prophets
of the Old Testament. Is Paul a Marxist because he suggests that the Christian
principle is that there should be an economic equality? (2 Cor 8) Is Jesus a
Marxist because he blesses the poor and never the rich? In fact he is the one
(other than James) who says “woe” to the rich. (Luke 6) What about Amos, who
excoriates the rich of his day for economic oppression of the poor? And
certainly Moses is a Marxist because he legislates the redistribution of land
(the main means of production in ancient Israel) every 50^th year. And
we have yet to do a systematic study of the biblical literature.

I say to my students, “Check your sources.” I tell them,
“Look up the works in the footnotes and read them.” I warn them to get beyond
the slogans and labels of “liberal” or “conservative” or “evangelical” or
whatever and to discover the substance of the argument. In this day of
uncounted online “news” sources (not to mention on air news sources), many of
which are propaganda for various positions and/or sensationalism, some of which
being not just junk but worse than junk, this admonition is even more important
than it has been in the past. When we check the sources, we discover that the
Holy Father is just being a Christian, or at least a Catholic Christian,
following the major themes of Catholic social teaching that in turn is based on
the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. But of course, such checking takes time,
and a quick read leading to a quick headline is so much more successful and
even necessary under the pressure of 24/7 news coverage. Furthermore,
demonizing is also more profitable – scan the headlines on the pseudo-news
magazines at the checkout counter of your local supermarket: how many of them
are positive and how many of them demonize this or that person?

The fact is that either-or terminology is often
not the best terminology. There are people who are neither Republicans or
Democrats, who are neither Socialists or Capitalists, who are neither left nor
right, who are neither a nor b (you substitute for the letters on the polarity
of your choice). And some of these people are Christians, who just might not
fit into the polarities of the day, just as Jesus did not fit into the polarities
of his day (e.g. he was neither pro-Roman nor pro-Jewish resistance to Rome).
It might be that if we get beyond our emotive demonizing of others we will
discover that they are marching to the beat of a different drummer, and just
perhaps that drummer will turn out to be the one the sound of whose approach
the Old Testament prophets heard and who slipped into our world with hardly a
drum roll (unless the angelic chorus had a percussion section) on that
Christmas Day (whether it was in December or March or some other time of year)
some 2016 to 2018 years ago. Check your sources – it is all in the Book, if you
take the time to read carefully and observe the nuances of human communication
rather than jumping quickly to labeling.