Saturday, September 18, 2010

What "Christians"? I see none here.

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of religion.  Consequently, I usually don't agree with any of the religion articles on the Huffington Post, especially since they're usually filled with all sorts of unsupportable, flakey new age nonsense.  But this one is dead on and reflects many things I've been thinking about for a while now.
According to data released this week from the Census Bureau, one in seven Americans are living in poverty. This means that in 2009 a staggering 43.6 million people live in the degradation of food, health care and housing insecurity. Each one of these Americans represents a colossal moral failure of our nation.
...
With a startling lack of self awareness, the Values Voter Summit began their conference two days after the census report on poverty levels was released. However, poverty is not what concerns these 'Values Voter.' According to their website their values instruct them to: "Protect Marriage • Champion Life • Strengthen the Military • Limit Government • Control Spending • Defend Our Freedoms."
Now these objectives do represent values - but whose?
...
The Values Voter Summit wants to bring God, and more specifically Christianity and the values of the New Testament into politics. But anyone who has read the words of Jesus knows what his values are - and they don't include strengthening the military. Jesus came to give life abundant to all people, to liberate the captive, bring freedom to the oppressed and called the poor blessed. There is not one thing that Jesus talks more about than the need for justice for the poor. In fact, the word poor occurs in the bible over 2,000 times. Any attempt to bring religious or Christian values into politics must make justice for the poor a priority - or they are not truly representing the Gospel.

The modern merging of evangelical Christianity and far right politics represents a co-opting of religion by politics.  The point of Church-State separation is to protect those who don't want religion foisted on them by the majority but also TO PROTECT RELIGION FROM BEING SUBVERTED BY POLITICS AND THE STATE.

By embracing right wing politics and making it their own, the evangelicals have lost the very thing they most cherish.  They've become nothing but shills for the Republicans and support policies that go directly against their supposed faith.

I mean, really.  Is this your Jesus?

2 comments:

David Fair said...

That's not my jesus, my jesus uses a good reliable automatic weapon, not a short-range scattergun.

Ipecac said...

I really enjoyed that.