Pope Francis and the Wayward Focus of American Christianity

This right here is why I really, really like Pope Francis:

He was asked about a blog post in the Economist magazine that said he sounded like a Leninist when he criticised capitalism and called for radical economic reform.
“I can only say that the communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian. Poverty is at the centre of the Gospel,” he said, citing Biblical passages about the need to help the poor, the sick and the needy.
“Communists say that all this is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later. So when they speak, one can say to them: ‘but then you are Christian’,” he said, laughing.

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The Green family, good doctrinaire Catholics that they are, could really take a good lesson from Francis on focus. Because Francis really gets where our energies as Christians need to be turned primarily.

Also, I love his willingness to challenge long-hold ideas about how Christians and Catholics are supposed to think about the world. Can you imagine John Paul II or Benedict saying anything about Communism that wasn't centered around a scathing denouncement?

Elizabeth Stoker Bruening captures the conservative American Christian's relationship with politics and theology:

You don’t have to do much googling to find hand-wringing over whether or not Pope Francis is a Marxist, Leninist, communist — or some other permutation of politically charged bad guy. These accusations are never meant to argue seriously; they’re smears, they’re an attempt to take a claim that is radical and domesticate it, make it familiar and digestible to an audience that doesn’t want to deal with a disrupted political narrative. It is quite flatly uncomfortable to imagine politics to be the province of Christian ethics, and economics at that; it is troubling to think the eye of God peers into the market, where some other invisible hand is usually the preferred deity. It is easier to pretend Pope Francis’ ethical analyses of economics aren’t religious, that they’re purely of a secular vein of prima facie rejected political orders still coasting along in collective middle American nightmares on the bad fumes of the Cold War. The Pope is a Marxist! isn’t the whole narrative, it’s just a metonymy; the narrative is: The Pope is a Marxist because he claims poverty is injustice and that it can be corrected in part through state activity, and we all know this Marxist diagnosis is unChristian and unAmerican and wrong.

Absolutely right. The major sickness of American Christianity, summed up in one paragraph.