Remember the Sermon on the Mount?

By Barbara Ehrenreich

As it approaches the estimable age of 2000, the Judeo-Christian ethic seems to be going all soft and senile. A noisily Christian portion of the Virginia electorate is prepared to send a former felon to the Senate on the grounds that he never cheated on his wife. In Haiti, born-again ex-President Jimmy Carter invited torture master Raoul Cedras to teach Sunday school, apparently because his wife is slender and his shirts are well pressed. Everywhere, private virtue -- or the successful simulation of it -- seems to count more than public morality, and material wealth more than anything else. In the new, mellowed-out version of the old-time ethic, you can lie, steal and trample on the poor -- so long as you keep those zippers zipped.

True enough, the Bible has a great deal to say on the subject of zippers or their A.D. 1 equivalent. Thou shalt not lust after your neighbor's wife or livestock. Thou shalt not spill the seed that was intended for your brother's widow. Thou shalt not divorce and, better yet, not even marry in the first place but wander around single and celibate, spreading the word.

That is stern stuff, and an abiding challenge to the wayward flesh. But it's the easy part. The hard part is the social side of the Judeo-Christian ethic, meaning not how you treat the spouse and kids but how you conduct yourself in the world beyond the bedroom and the den. We don't hear about it so much since the word Christian began its oxymoronic partnership with the smug word right, but Scripture demands unstinting charity, if not all out dedication to the poor.

Recall Jesus' encounter with the wealthy young fellow who claimed exemplary zeal in the zipper department. He had followed the Ten Commandments to the letter, so was he entitled to eternal life? No, was the unambiguous answer; the next step was to "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor." Jesus then offered his famous observation on camels and needles and how futile it is for rich folks to try to wriggle their way into heaven.

All right, maybe camels were smaller then and needles a lot more wide eyed. But the message is reiterated in passage after passage, and not only in the politically suspect New Testament, where socialists have always found solace. Ezekiel explains that the Sodomites' sin was that they had "pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness" but did not "strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" -- quite apart from any "abomination" (16: 49-50). Amos addresses the rich people of Bashan, who "oppress the poor, which crush the needy," thundering that "the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fish-hooks" (4: 1-2) (which puts even "necklacing " in a new perspective).

So, to echo some of our self-righteously Christian spokesmen, how far we have strayed from the narrow path prescribed by the prophets! A sizable portion of the electorate, probably no less Judeo-Christian than anyone else, stands ready to let the richer candidate buy its votes, on the theory that the rich cannot be bought themselves. In the case of Michael Huffington in California or Ross Perot in '92, piles of earthly treasure are proffered, with a straight face, as proof of one's ability to lead. But who can fault our lucre-crazed political culture when even the televangelists promise financial well-being, i.e., "prosperous ease," as the reward for supposedly Christian virtue?

The poor themselves, in a stunning inversion of Scripture, have taken the place of the demons and Pharisees. Well-fed intellectuals trip over one another in their eagerness to castigate the down-and-out as muggers, sluts, and even -- in the case of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their new book, The Bell Curve -- retards. No political candidate dare step up to a lectern without promising to execute, imprison and snatch alms from the hands of the "underclass."

In the midst of this profound moral confusion, the Haiti crisis came like a test from on high. Here were good and evil laid out in black and white, or rather, black and creamy mulatto: the pastel luxury of Petionville vs. the dark, bottomless misery of the shantytowns. And in Jean-Bertrand Aristide, here was as Christ-like a figure as ever headed a state: devout, dedicated to the poor, and celibate on top of all that. Yet from Clinton's flip-flops to Carter's flirtation with Cedras, we dithered shamefully. Even after the troops had arrived, it was unclear at times whether they were there to protect the rich and their "attaches" from the poor, or the poor from their well-heeled tormentors.

Now of course Scripture is open to interpretation; ethics do change with the times. Most Judeo-Christians don't prohibit shellfish anymore or appease the deity with slaughtered rams. But there's something suspect about a brand of Judeo-Christianity that can get all het up about the spilling of seed while gliding right past the Sermon on the Mount. We seem to have chosen the easy path, the one that comforts the already comfortable and harangues the already hard pressed. We're the post-Judeo-Christian generation, and the Christian Right is turning out to be nothing more than Christian Lite.