ABCs Of The Religious Right
By James Bowden (05/02/05)
The Liberals howled at “Justice Sunday”. Way too ‘uppity’ of Senator Frist to speak about a political issue, a majority rules vote on judges, from a Baptist church in Kentucky and simulcast to over 1,000 other churches – when the church isn’t predominately Black! Conservatives condemned Democrat hostility to ‘people of faith’ and not one of their church leaders was a practicing homosexual. That Religious Right is not supposed to speak out in public. Or serve as judges. Or get elected. Or even vote. But millions did in ’04. Liberals hate that and covet the votes. Liberals just don’t understand the ABCs of the Religious Right.
Democrat Chairman Howard Dean remains clueless on winning votes among Southern Christians. I predicted that the Liberals would trot out their churchy people for the Main Stream Media (Google: ‘Secularists Strike Back’). Regardless, the Religious Right will lead the fight against judicial tyranny. It’s all about your A, B, Cs.
Assemblies (of God), (Southern) Baptists, and (Roman) Catholics are the ABCs of the Religious Right. There are others, especially independent community Bible churches and the Orthodox Jews, but the unity and numbers presented by ABCs’ disparate people of faith are the building blocks.
The irony of the ABC alliance is that these Pentecostals, orthodox Protestants, and traditional Catholics hold such diverse views on church dogma. Formerly, they held one another in contempt more than in Christian love. But, today, the very fundamentals of their theology, which are the same, are threatened by Human Secularists from home and Islamists from abroad. The future of the Nation and Western Civilization depends on ABC ecumenical agreement on basics. The ABCs agree to disagree respectfully, privately, on succeeding levels of details in how to be the physical body of Christ on Earth as His Church.
Yet, not every co-religionist is Religious Right voter. Most of the Baptists (17 million), and Assemblies of God (3 million) and about a third of the Catholics (20 out of 60 million) will vote Christian values. You can trace voting patterns based on who reads the Bible (see www.Barna.org). So, some Eastern Orthodox, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even Episcopalians will identify as Religious Right. Those other denominations represent their own minority. Their Bible believers are on the defensive in their churches against the ‘Sissy’ Christians.
Sissy Christians, who like to be called ‘Progressives’, confuse sodomy with sacraments. Their selective reading, editing and ignorance of the Bible elevates fundamentalist snake-handing Christians to appear relatively thoughtful. Sissy Christians hate the ABCs more than Satan – even if they believed in Satan. Sissy Christian denominations are declining. The ABCs are growing.
The ABCs can’t be fooled, bribed, or intimidated by the Liberals. The day that Biblical speech about homosexuality as sin becomes a ‘hate crime’, as it is in Canada and Europe, the ABCs will set up microphones for person after person to read the truth from the Bible. Let the Human Secularist Totalitarians reign with whatever terror they will. ABCs’ ancestors weathered worse before and co-religionists suffer and survive more overseas today.
In America, the ABCs must connect the dots from Bible values to issues not political parties. The Republicans aren’t salvation. The Republicans respond to political power. ABCs must not put trust in Republicans like most black Protestants serve the Democrats as master. The movement of black Christian ministers and flocks off the Democrat plantation is slow indeed, but gaining. If and when Republicans fail to produce results, ABCs should dump them.
ABC churches need to focus on the Great Commission. Don’t push politics. Most new, but not all, Bible-reading Christians will come to the Religious Right’s conclusions about the Great Experiment.
The ABC Catholics bring a confidence from tradition that is absolutely unshakeable. The Baptists and Pentecostals bring what historian Arnold Toynbee described as the uncommon energy, activity, purposefulness and uncommon assurance of Calvinism. Theologians may sniff that neither faith is strictly Calvinist. But they inherit enough to maintain the undiminished missionary dynamism for over four hundred years. Despite their small numbers they remain ‘Possunt quia posse videntur’ (they can because they believe they can) – and will.
The ABC core beliefs created the courage of convictions for our Revolution, Civil War, Manifest Destiny, Unions and Industrial Age reforms, Integration, Defending Freedom, and now are the fire in the belly for this ACW II (the Culture War) and WW IV (Islamist Terrorism). The Sissy Christians are correct that their churches shared this heritage, but that was when they were actually, wholly, and biblically Christian.
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