Many of us made unsuccessful attempts to stave off such categorisations. Eventually, a group of one-time Evangelicals, drawn from the Pentecostal to the Roman Catholic communities, got together to come up with a new name. Henceforth, we said, we are no longer going to call ourselves Evangelicals. We are going to call ourselves Red Letter Christians. Our name refers to the red letters in the Bible. In many editions of the Scriptures, the words of Jesus are highlighted in red letters.
While holding to the same orthodox theologies as Evangelicals, those of us who call ourselves Red Letter Christians point out that our lifestyles are, as much as possible, those prescribed by the words of Jesus. We recognise that the ethic of Jesus, especially as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount, is a higher ethic than anything we have found in the Hebrew Bible. The call to love our enemies and to overcome evil with good has turned most of us into advocates of non-violent resistance. Certainly, we are not in favour of capital punishment, given that in the red letters we read that Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
The primary focus of we Red Letter Christians is on what Jesus had to say about the poor. We realise that the only description that He gave of Judgment Day (Matthew 25) was through a parable in which people were evaluated as to whether or not they fed those who were hungry, naked, sick and imprisoned. Many of us take literally the red letters stating that it would be harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. From this we have deduced that a simple lifestyle must be embraced by those who call themselves Christians and that money should no longer be spent on unnecessary luxuries, but should be spent wisely and invested carefully on behalf of those in need. Jesus said that to be one of His disciples we should be ready to sell what we have and give the money to the poor, and we take Him literally.
It is acknowledged among Red Letter Christians that the ethic of Jesus, if taken at face value, would make His followers into radical, counter-cultural persons who recognise that their American lifestyles have to be abandoned. We recognise that our lifestyles have been largely responsible for depleting the non-renewable resources of the planet, including the oceans and the air, and exploiting underpaid workers in Third World countries to produce bargains for our American consumption, and for this we must repent.
Red Letter Christians recognise that not only must we be involved on the micro level, living out the teachings of Jesus, but that we also must be intensely politically involved. But we are quick to declare that Jesus is neither Democrat nor Republican, and advocate that Red Letter Christians should invade both political parties to be “the leaven” transforming those parties in accord with the teachings of Jesus.
