Religion and Politics
faith is that? Where would America be if the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself?"
Honest people realize the implications of their own convictions. Dishonest people pursue what they want by compromising their convictions at the expense of their own integrity and end up attempting to manipulate others by withholding truth. Political parties and candidates can weaken themselves by denying the source of those internal convictions that inform their highest aspirations.
Did we really, in 2000, elect someone as president who has done and will do what Jesus would do?
Are we remaining quiet and non-participating while the political forces around us are turning this land of the free and home of the brave into a land of the deceived and the home of the brave new cowards?
I believe that those of us with a liberal Christian viewpoint can and ought to connect with and encourage those who have been called "freestyle evangelicals," a term coined by Steven Waldman, editor of the interfaith website Beliefnet.
These are those who have defied my own conventional wisdom about fundamentalist Christians. Folks like these responded in 1976, I believe, in support of Jimmy Carter whom, regardless of his success as a one-term president, more personifies what a "Christian" President of the United States ought to look like.
It has been said that freestyle evangelicals are offended by the self-righteous antics of the leaders of the so-called religious right. They are legitimately concerned about gay marriage and abortion but may find themselves having to choose between a Christian candidate whose supporters have a strict, inflexible and extreme ideological agenda and another candidate too concerned with suppressing his own religious beliefs that he appears to be ashamed of it.
We must take that moral high ground from those who think they own it and that they can dictate to the rest of us. That includes those who have, as a blend of political and religious understanding, an expectation that we can abuse and disenfranchise each other, ignore our poor in the name of profit and greed and attempt dominion of our planet by mindless exploitation as much as we want - simply because in a coming time there will be a supernatural intervention that will clean up the mess we are making.
In that regard, if we as Christian liberals do not charge the moral high ground we will be Left Out, not Left Behind.
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