Religion and Politics
Have the Democrats yielded or conceded the moral high ground to the Republican Party, regardless of whether or not the Republicans have embraced the far Christian Right and adopted that particular strain of morality as their own?
Liberal Democratic concerns about everything from political correctness to an almost transparent reluctance to speak on religious values because of an inordinate and unjustified subordination to the concept of separation of church and state have left their political counterview to Republican Conservatism somewhat hamstrung.
Do liberals really include a sense of public morality in their advocacy of a liberal approach to governance? We liberal Christians absolutely must include it.
Are there liberal Christians who in recent national and local elections have found themselves having to support a conservative candidate whose views are more extreme than their own because they cannot get enough information as to the true moral feelings of the opposition candidate?
Do liberal Christians then find themselves voting for the conservative candidate as the lesser of two extremes, or - perish the thought - the lesser of two evils?
The most successful Republican politicians recently have done so primarily by assuring people of faith - American voters - that they will in fact allow their religious beliefs to affect their political views.
Yet this is what we ought to desire in this country - a high moral ground from which decisions affecting our way of life can be made. Liberal politicians and liberal Christians, though certainly not one and the same in this country, have allowed the conservative politicians and Christians to claim ownership of the moral high ground and in doing so we find ourselves subject to flaming political value judgments tossed from catapults in the moral castle built by extremists on that high ground.
Our towns, villages and houses at the base of the moral high ground are suffering under a rain of these flaming bombs that land in our homes, our market places, our courthouses, our gardens and parks - even our places of worship.
It is time for us to charge that moral high ground and take it back. If we do not, we may very much find ourselves in the Letter-of-the-Law Jewish world Jesus was born into 2000 years ago. Many ideas and concepts that have already been legislated, advocated and expounded upon by the Christian Right are not biblical, not scriptural and certainly not "what Jesus would do."
Regardless of the political rhetoric, we do not
Latest Articles