have abjured the virtues of the saint. We have collectively turned
our backs on most versions of loving- kindness for all. And we do
not feel a very pressing need to forge a counterfeit culture of com-
passion. Surely there are the church drives and the benefi ts and
the charities and the collections and the vari ous forms of or ga-
nized pity— but many if not most of those are merely forms of
self- congratulation. “Pity would be no more,” says Blake, “if we did
not make somebody Poor.” We are rank with voy eur is tic kindness.
But the main event in American Chris tian ity over the past de-
cades has been a usurpation. More and more, the faith of American
Christians is not the faith in the compassionate and merciful Jesus,
but faith in God the Father. When fundamentalist believers talk now
about Christ, they are often talking about Yahweh. They have for-
gotten the fi gure who was mild and sometimes humorous and end-
lessly kind. They have little interest in Jesus the poor vagrant who
was not well disposed to any forms of worldly authority, who liked
to spend his time with publicans and whores, and who despised
money. The true Jesus was what Whitman said he was himself: pe-
rennially on the side of those that the others are down upon. Many
American Christians have forgotten this fi gure. They’ve recharac-
terized Jesus as a bitterly judgmental father in love with punishment
and retribution.
The complexities of Chris tian ity (and to be fair the complexities
of Jesus’ own teaching) make this possi ble. But trading Jesus for
Yahweh is not desirable, if what you care about is the welfare of the
world, and in par tic u lar the plight of the poor. The Jesus of many
American fundamentalist churches now has nothing more against
getting rich and power ful than Yahweh does. Chris tian ity always
hangs between being the religion of the poor and the religion of
Rome. It is now very much the religion of Rome, at least in Ame rica.
We seem to have come to an agreement that life is every man for
himself, and every woman too. We have created a war of each against
In the Culture of the Counterfeit 255