Hate right-wing religious politics? New left-wing group’s just as bad

By David McElroy · July 10, 2012

For more than 30 years, the Christian Right has been vilified for forcing its socially conservative views on the country. Starting with Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and then moving along to Rev. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, these groups had a tremendous influence on getting conservative Republicans elected, both nationally and in countless GOP primaries where the candidates were forced to fight over who was most conservative.

All along the way, Democrats and those on the political left have bemoaned the mixing of politics and religion. For more than 20 years, I’ve agreed with them at every step along the way on that point. I hated the way the Religious Right tried to use government power to force everyone to behave in their personal lives according to their own socially conservative agenda. And I hated the hypocrisy of fighting battles for allegedly Christian motives, but with tactics that would have sometimes made the devil blush with envy.

After years of telling the Christian Right how wrong it was to force its views on other people, the Christian Left has a new tactic. They’ve decided to organize politically to force their religious views on the rest of us, too.

The political organization is called Christians for Change. (You can see their promo video below.) They’ve been organized as a “Super PAC” by a group called The Christian Left. They’re not about saving souls or personally helping anybody. The group is unabashedly planning to try to force a progressive left agenda on the country.

What do Christians for Change believe? Let’s take a look at a sample from their page about their beliefs. This is the entry about “Faith in Economic Justice”:

We believe we all deserve a fair shot at the American dream and that everyone bears an equal responsibility to build and sustain this great nation. We dismiss the flawed argument that corporations are people and we reject unequal tax policies that penalize middle-class and working-class earners while rewarding greed and avarice among many of the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporate giants.

I seem to have missed the part in the Gospels in which Jesus talked about “unequal tax policies” and the whole legal argument about corporate personhood. Does anyone recall which book that was in?

If you look at the group’s agenda, it’s clear that it’s nothing but standard progressive left ideas dressed up in religious language. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what people on their side have criticized the Religious Right for all these years?

They say this of their objective: “Our goal is to expose hypocrisy in politics and be a credible, common sense voice for progressive Christians in our nation’s political discourse.” So far, all I can see is that the Religious Left is just as hypocritical about politics as the right is. If it’s wrong for the Religious Right to advocate a non-biblical political agenda in Jesus’ name, it’s just as wrong for the Religious Left to do the same thing.

And this is the thing that bothers me the most about both sides of this insane divide. Jesus never took a political position. If you look at the things both sides believe, you won’t find any support in the Gospels for what they say is their version of the Christian agenda.

You can make a New Testament theological argument that homosexual behavior is wrong, for instance, but you cannot make a New Testament argument in favor of governments enforcing rules about it. You can make a good biblical argument in favor of all sorts of moral behaviors for individuals to choose to follow, but you can’t find any such support in the Gospels for using force to ensure that other people obey those moral laws.

You can make a New Testament argument that it’s a sin to let poor people starve, but you cannot find any support in the Gospels for taking money by force from other people to feed the poor. Jesus commanded His followers to take care of those with needs, but that command was to His followers. There’s no support for the notion that His followers are to go take money from others in order to help meet their own obligations.

The Jesus of the Gospels is starkly non-political. He encounters those who He called in very personal ways, calling them to give up the things of this world and follow Him. It’s not just misleading to say that Jesus’ words support the Religious Right or the Religious Left. It’s a lie to make either claim.

There’s no evidence that Jesus supports your coercive state, no matter which political side you fall on. If you’re trying to pretend that your own agenda is God’s agenda, I suspect you’re going to have something far worse to deal with than fighting a political battle. You’re going to have to face God’s wrath for lying about Him.

I oppose the Christian Right and the Christian Left for dragging religion into politics. But as a Christian, I’m far more upset that these deluded people are dragging the evil of the world into the church and pretending that it’s the Good News. That’s not biblical and it gets in the way of the actual Gospel that we Christians are supposed to be spreading.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts