Who would Jesus vote for? The unassailable link between Politics and Religion.
By Miguel Guanipa (05/17/06)
In a recent Time magazine article Andrew Sullivan describes a political phenomenon he cleverly dubbed "Christianism". According to Mr. Sullivan, Christianism (not to be confused with Christianity) is a type of pseudo cult that some people adhere to. This misguided sect allegedly holds to the erroneous assumption that the terms Republican and Christian are virtually synonymous. But this is not the same thing as being a genuine Christian, which Mr. Sullivan maintains has nothing to do with pledging allegiance to any specific political party. Mr. Sullivan calls himself a Christian, and declares that many like him are not supportive of this type of "politization" of the gospels.
I believe Mr. Sullivan makes an interesting point, but still misses the mark.
It is no big surprise that many Republicans and not as many Democrats consider themselves Christians. By definition a Christian is one who follows Jesus Christ; that is, one who has at least a cognitive awareness that prompts a sincere desire to yield to God’s guidance even though there is plenty of back-sliding and failings along his or her pilgrimage.
What Mr. Sullivan seems to imply in his article is that this fringe contingency does not represent what the majority of Christians stand for. Genuine believers in Christ supposedly should have no desire to get entangled in politics; especially since the Republican Party has been “co-opted” by a breed of ultra-conservative religious zealots who do more harm than good to the name of Christianity. These extremists forget that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican and also ignore the reality that God is unknowable, so it would be highly presumptuous to claim direct revelation of God’s bias towards one particular political party over the other.
The first problem in Mr. Sullivan’s thesis is that he fails to recognize that there is a crucial distinction between saying that God can not be “known” and saying that God can not be “decoded”.
We will never be able to put God in a box so that he can be studied, probed and eventually figured out and shelved for our periodic amusement. In a multitude of ways, God will never cease to amaze us. Yet God’s attributes can be sufficiently known so that we can choose to follow his lead. The imperfect ways in which we manage to do this lie only in our own character and not in God’s. That is one of the reasons why he gave us his word. He actually wants to be known; to have a personal relationship with his creatures.
Mr. Sullivan’s God is more of a mysterious, impersonal higher power that wants fawning devotees to acknowledge him or “it” in their own discretionary fashion and through their own personal rituals, and specially, in the privacy of their own quarters, while treating the more earthly business of political involvement as a wholly separate compartment, or at least relinquish it to the secular minions of Caesar’s domain. To support his thesis Mr. Sullivan quotes Christ’s admonition: My Kingdom is not of this world.
It is astonishing what outlandish conclusions can be arrived at when a text of scripture is arbitrarily wrenched from its original context.
Unlike Mr. Sullivan’s God, the God of the Bible calls his followers to be effectively engaged in the world. They are not called to merely curse the darkness, but rather to become agents of positive change. One practical way to do this is through political involvement, and by supporting those public officials they happen to empathize with when it comes to responding to the important issues and challenges of their generation.
It is correct to say that God may not have a particular affinity for either one of the two prevailing parties in this country’s political arena; It is another thing to say that a person’s personal religious convictions should not enter into the equation when making a decision in the area of politics.
I suspect it is probably because Mr. Sullivan has resigned himself to the fact that Christians traditionally align themselves with the Republican Party that he has written such counsel, which is nothing more than another liberal’s veiled directives for people with religious convictions to disengage from the political process. His other option -which he is not likely to entertain-would be to pander to the religious contingency like Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean have been doing of late in their recent public overtures to pro-life camps and anti-homosexual marriage groups, in order to lure them into their camp.
As for Mr. Sullivan’s point that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, I bet that if Jesus was pressed to choose a political party, (a wholly preposterous notion anyway) and he carefully weighed the types of issues that are part of the Democratic Party’s repertoire such as abortion on demand, the legalization of euthanasia, homosexual rights, a therapeutic approach for addressing global terrorism, and overreaching fiscal policies that often fail to dislodge the entitlement mentality, I seriously doubt that he would be casting a ballot for the democrats; which would leave him with only one other alternative.
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