Subversive religion

What's subversive about religion? Well, not much these days, it would seem. All over the globe, religions are formed into power blocs - evangelical Christians and Jews in the US, radical Muslims in the Middle East and South-East Asia, Roman Catholics in part of Europe and South America, and, to a lesser extent, Hindus and Sikhs in India and the subcontinent. It's perhaps easier to see other people's religious beliefs as subverting our own, or our "way of life." This is the essence of the justification of the "war on terror," and you've heard it from the lips of Blair and Bush ad nauseam over the last six years.

It fell to a man called Jim Wallis, from an organisation called Sojourners in the US, to point out that it was most unlikely that the founder of the religion of the evangelical right in the US, a certain wandering Nazarene, would most probably not place war in Iraq and tax cuts for the rich at the top if his list of priorities while building the kingdom of heaven on earth. If you remove all the references in the Bible to poverty and injustice, as Wallis points out, you're left with quite a thin book.

This approach makes for an interesting set of questions, in the same mold as the harmless but woolly "What Would Jesus Do?" variety. How would Jesus negotiate in the WTO or GATT talks, and whose side would he be likely to take? The rich and powerful or the poor and dispossessed? What would he make of set-aside policies in the EU, where farmers are paid not to grow food on their land? And how about missile shields and the doctrine of pre-emptive war?

A prominent Brazilian Catholic bishop, Helder Camara, once remarked that when he fed the poor he was called a saint, but when he asked why they had no food, he was called a communist. I think the founder of his faith might see it this way too.