FreeDerekWebb ends today. If you don’t have Mockingbird, today is your last chance to get it for free. I recommend it.

NPR recently featured Derek Webb. One of the things they said about him was “Chris Tomlin whose been at the number one spot on the Christian charts for eleven weeks running. On the other end of the spectrum is Derek Webb.” There’s a link to the story at Derek’s website and I think it is worth the 5 minutes to listen to it.

In Derek’s song “A King and A Kingdom” he sings

There are two great lies that I have heard,
The day you eat of the fruit of that tree,
You will not surely die.
And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
And if you want to be save, you have to learn to be like him.

You can see that this isn’t the kind of stuff that wins many friends in the suburban evangelical largely-Republican market. But Derek explains, “I rerecorded that song recently for an acoustic record and I thought about changing that line to ‘And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Democrat’ because the answer I’m saying is not to be a liberal. I’m saying you need to be a moving target.”

I think Derek is right on this. If we ally ourselves with any one political party we are not free in the public eye to be Christians, they see us as Republican Christians or something like that. That means accepting that party’s platform as a public mantle even if we don’t agree with it. We are opposed to abortion and so we ally with the Republicans because they are too. Whether we agree or with it or not, support of big business and a reticence to support social programs are part of that party’s platform. In the public arena, we are then perceived to agree with those issues. I don’t think Derek is saying that we need to constantly flip sides in order to be a “moving target”, I think his point is that we must take consistently Christian stands on issues and that will place us in different camps on different issues.

Anyway, get Mockingbird today if you can. You have to enter the email addresses of five friends to get it. They don’t spam or retain them, they just send them an email so they know about the deal. You can use timonmac at yahoo dot com as one of them if you’d like. That’s my spam magnet address.