A Fusillade at the Christian Right

I suppose I would say first that I don’t think there should be a Christian Right. I think religion is a terrible thing to mix with politics – neither side comes out of this clean. Once a candidate becomes a Christian candidate, everything done by him or under him is linked to Christianity. You know what Christians seem like to the rest of the world right now? Opinionated, intrusive, war-like people who know that everybody else is wrong. Strangely, everything that comes out of America is also associated with Christianity, so along with these traits, people (in the Middle East, particularly) link Christianity with pornography, alcohol, and sacrilege of all types. Advertising ourselves as a Christian nation pulls everything within our nation under the Christian banner, and I find that appalling.

Nor do the politicians come out of this easily, necessarily. If a candidate admits his faith, he has to battle with people who want to put him in the same camp as Westboro Baptist Church (known and vilified for its outspoken stance that “God hates fags”), or as the people who think evolution should be banned from schools. Frankly, I don’t care if the politicians make it out easily or not, but I would like it if these sections of Christianity could stay out of the press for a whole week.

I find it mortifying that the same Christian Right who purports to stand for freedom, democracy, and the “American way” wishes to stifle all opposing voices so that it can form a homogeneous voting bloc with which all must assimilate. The group that wants personal freedom to own guns wants to eliminate the freedom to disagree. [It just occurred to me that those two desires are particularly creepy when put together – who would disagree with the barrel of a shotgun?] But seriously – how can you support freedom of speech in one way (I think of the Right’s disdain for “political correctness”) and at the same time wish to forbid speech acts like flag burning, or, yes, even disagreeing with the president? How can you claim free speech as the basis for allowing the Ten Commandments while trying to ban talk of evolution?

The Christian body is diverse – that’s why it’s a body, and not a colony of single-celled organisms in a Petri dish. The Christian Right does not allow for this in the slightest: the topics of interest are established (abortion, public prayer, taxes – wait, what do taxes have to do with Christianity?), and the others discarded. If you have an interest in using government aid to help house and educate the poor, or to develop the ailing arts, you have no place in the Christian Right, and by their logic, no place in Christianity. Because a true Christian would value lower taxes. (Here’s a sobering verse: Proverbs 22:16 – “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.”).

The conflation of faith with politics, the idea that a belief in one area equates certain beliefs in the other, is as dangerous as it is ubiquitous. Even the president of my own educational institution does it. And believe me – that makes me angry. What follows is an excerpt from the CCU Profile section, “Greetings From the President”:

"Colorado Christian University is very different from the typical American university. We hold tightly to traditional values and high academic standards. We strive to impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, and other such causes that preserve and promote high moral and ethical standards." (italics mine)

Regardless of what I personally believe about these issues, I believe it is a terrible thing that our president (a former congressman, incidentally) felt the need to pin down a list of “Christian” stances, and then, of all things, to use our university to support a political platform. How can the leader of a university – supposedly a marketplace of ideas, a center for debate and critical discussion – declare what the body stands for? This is an abuse of the faith, an abuse of the institution, and a crime against the American political system. I might even extend that accusation to the Christian Right.

My own stances on conservative issues are very mixed. Sometimes I even agree with the Christian Right. But the day I let Dr. Dobson read my Bible for me and then tell me how Jesus wants me to vote is the day that...