To the Christians in the House

I once had a manager who thought he was John Galt. Or at least a John Galt. Even though I adored him, I knew he wasn't. And when he went on to embezzle a substantial sum, it bore out my literary instinct.

I knew, though, who he was talking about because I had read Atlas Shrugged as a younger girl. So much younger, in fact, that my mother had taken the book away from me, saying, "You don't need to read that. You're selfish enough already." But I eventually read through to the end.

So when Ayn Rand's writings came back into public notice with the advent of and media attention to the Tea Party and the Libertarians and Paul Ryan's Randian Catholicism (an oxymoron), I did not have to run out to buy the book to understand that there would be trouble ahead for women, immigrants, and the poor from anyone who followed her precepts. Which are horribly, horribly selfish precepts, and idolatrous, and about as far as one can get from the teachings of Jesus.

A group of Christian faith leaders (Faithful Filibuster) gathers every day Congress is in session across the street from the Capitol  building to read scripture out loud, especially the 2000 verses that tell us how to care for the poor. This is both a protest, and a public education service. Obviously there are a few folks in the government who have clean forgotten that the Bible has any use other than as a weapon with which to bludgeon people.

Those same forgetful folks have also forgotten their Ayn Rand. For it is not, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroic capitalists alone who bring down the government, and with it, the entire culture. It is the giddy, greedy, cruel Wesley Mouches, out for themselves.

You have changed the rules in the House so as to prevent any change in direction. You bark about the Constitution. You would edit out the uncomfortable bits of Jesus' words. Show me how you are not a Mouch.

Listen up, House. You dance yourselves into a tunnel of an ever-shrinking width. It is not the narrow path to heaven. It is a death trap. You will soon lose the ability to turn around. You are worshipping power, and money, and individualism. You are throwing other people's children into the fires of Moloch, in the belief that wealth and particular interests will take care of you if you legislate the sacrifice of others. They will not take care of you. They will use you, and devour you, and fail you, and forgetyou. They are false idols.

Relent. Repent. Come back into the daylight. Help save our country by saving its people. The Lord, which you claim to proclaim, said to love God, and love our neighbor, to heal the sick, and raise the dead. 

It's time to take Him seriously. It is time to turn around. Come back to your senses. We need you. Come back to us.