To be good, do good. It's that simple

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems our faith should be way more than a walk down memory lane. We study, we celebrate what happened thousands of years ago for what it says about how we live today. I don’t think many would disagree.
So it was that during a Bible study in the early spring of 2004, less than a year after we first went into Iraq, we found ourselves debating what God would have us think about this war. Group members were already beginning to be polarized—just like the country. My co-leader, a Vietnam vet, said that his greatest fear was that we would “cease to believe that America is good.”
I knew what he meant but it seemed an antiquated concept to me, a remnant from an earlier time when people believed in constant absolutes and unquestioned obedience to authority. Wasn’t it obvious? America is good when it does good. For those who believed the Iraq mission a mistake, America was (and is) not doing good. We sympathize with our troops and pray for their safety, but we can’t say America is doing good in one instance because it did good in another. Actions have consequences. We were good when we wrote “all men are created equal” into the Declaration of Independence; not good when we made slavery legal in America. It’s really pretty simple.
Some Christians like to emphasize the concept of obedience to authority. I too believe in obedience—to the law as Jesus summarized it: Love God and God’s creation, and your neighbor as yourself. Those who love obedience to earthly authority can pull out a passage here and there—mostly misunderstood and misinterpreted. They themselves often have an interest in that authority structure, much like the religious leaders who challenged Jesus to explain by what authority he spoke. They couldn’t see it but the answer was obvious: God’s.

Prison Officials Enforcing Religious Orthodoxy

In my church we pride ourselves on tolerance—on being able to agree to disagree without fragmenting the “body of Christ.” We’ve had families leave because they felt our pastors were too liberal, only to return when they learned their new, more conservative church had no tolerance for the non-conforming 10 percent of their belief system. Better to be where you’re accepted, even when you disagree.
Enforced orthodoxy has been a problem in the Christian Church from the beginning. It’s why the so-called Gnostic gospels were banned and burned. And once the Romans quit putting Christians to death, we started in on each other. It’s also why the pilgrims first came to America and why government establishment of an official religion was banned in the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Justice Department have forgotten that history. The Bureau, which operates as part of the Justice Department, has recently established a list of up to 150 permitted books for each religion, while banning all others from our Federal Prisons. Bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told the New York Times the goal was eliminate books that advocate violence, tend to radicalize, or encourage discrimination. But prison chaplains were already screening donated books for these types of extremism. Because the Bureau provided no money to buy the books on their list, many prisons have had their religious libraries stripped bare.
Although the Bureau denies it has become an advocate among competing views of Christianity, Ms. Billingsley's statement seems to belie that claim: “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts,” she said.
The Bureau has refused to release the list to the public but parts of it have leaked out anyway. As an example of the apparent bias, the list contains nine books by C.S. Lewis, a darling of the religious right, and none by the highly respected Reinhold Niebuhr, a progressive but mainstream pastor and theologian.
If the Bureau’s thinking had been applied 2,000 years ago, the Pharisees would have been in, and Jesus would have been out.