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It sounds trite, so forgive me: some of my best friends are Christian.
I'm a Christian (Presbyterian), though I think one could call me a liberal, even lapsed, Christian, like lapsed Catholics or Jews.
I've a running discussion with a good, Korean-American professor friend of mine, (also a talented writer, and a Christian), about the scandal of such beliefs.
Some American and Korean Christians aren't the best representatives of their faith. Far too often, they're of the fundamentalist bent: they believe in Adam and Eve, magical apples, talking snakes, talking donkeys, virgin births, Armageddon, or that the earth is just 6,000 years old.
But this column isn't a theological treatise or exegesis.
Democratic republics offer varying degrees of religious freedom, and I have no problem with that. If you want to believe in blood covering the moon during the Apocalypse, or Lucifer coming back to reign on earth, cool. As literature, and indeed, wisdom, the Bible can be quite a good read (although Milton does a better rendition of the Christian creation myth in his "Paradise Lost").
The problem comes when religious people push to inculcate public debate, and then shape public policy, with their theological assertions. They want to enshrine religious tenants as law. You see this in many Republican-controlled states.
The number of anti-abortion policies enacted since the 2010 Republican sweep of many state legislatures has multiplied ten-fold, because God says human life (as in sentient human life) begins at conception.
Some states, like Louisiana, have gone so far as to allow public or publically-funded schools to teach the Christian story of creation in science class as fact; breathtaking.
On the federal level, bipartisan legislation passed in the U.S. Senate to end workplace discrimination against sexual minorities (called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA) will not pass the Republican House, because conservatives believe people have the right to discriminate against homosexuals if their religion tells them to do so.
The U.S. Supreme Court will rule this year on several religious-freedom cases, the most prominent being the Hobby Lobby case (where a corporation wants to legally object to paying for healthcare coverage for certain female contraceptives for religious reasons).
Imagine the precedent such a ruling would set for American democracy if the High Court decides in favor of Hobby Lobby. Corporations could argue religious objections to serving Jews, blacks, Muslims, or other healthcare procedures as a constitutional right.
Employing theological claims to excuse or encourage all manner of cruelty, malice, and injustice isn't new:
Europe used the Bible to support ant-Semitism for centuries, making a social environment conducive to the Holocaust an inevitable result.
The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas, and the wholesale theft of their land, was called God's will.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was sanctioned by Catholics and Protestants alike as biblically sound, since dark-skinned people were from the tribe of Ham, and destined to be servants and slaves as their just curse.
(I should also note here that other Christians, Abolitionists, fought against slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s found its home in Christian churches).
Large swaths of Muslim-majority countries relegate women to chattel status, subservient to men and boys, (basically patriarchy and rank misogyny magnified to the nth degree) under Sharia Law.
For several years, the Democratic Party (the opposition party to President Park's Saenuri Party), has tried to pass a comprehensive anti-discrimination bill, including protection for racial and ethnic minorities, women, religious minorities, and sexual minorities.
The largest Christian organization in Korea vehemently opposes the legislation because it protects ''the gays."Same sex relations are forbidden by the Bible, and homosexuals are clearly not human, or not human enough to rise to the level of protection.
President Park's controversial nominee for prime minister, Moon Chang-keuk, pontificated at his church that both Japan's brutal colonization of Korea, and the Korean War, were God's will for Korea, because Korea was a lazy, godless, agrarian society. He recently withdrew his nomination due to these views.
There were and are people who argue the same thing about Native Americans and blacks. Slavery, rape, lynching, torture, and generational theft of liberty, labor, land, and remuneration are good for the soul, apparently. Praise Jesus.
Moon, had he been confirmed, would have been the second highest-ranking elected official in Korea, a powerful and consequential post.
Even without religion, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, classism, and other social ills would be alive and well in our societies.
Yet, the weight of religion (in this case, Christianity), its vast, unsubstantiated claims on our soul; its promise of everlasting life; its call to faith without empirical evidence, makes those who use Christ to enshrine bigotry into law (and stymie social progress towards a more just world in the process) powerful foes indeed.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory and is currently an English professor outside of Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
