Posted on 11/08/2004 6:27:21 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
I know bunches of people who take their faith very seriously and shudder at the works of George Bush: the WARMONGERING, the DISREPECT FOR THE POOR and the WEAK, the ARROGANCE.
Here’s the problem: RELIGIOUS LIBERALS don’t wear their faith on their sleeves. We don’t evangelize; we consider it disrespectful to shove our spiritual views down other people’s throats.
Faced with a movement that has no such scruples, unfortunately, we’re flummoxed.
We’re always on the back foot, being forced to resort at the last minute in an election cycle to taking out ads in newspapers under the umbrella of People of Faith Against the outrage du jour: wars, the death penalty, assaults on women’s rights, whatever.
Candidates like John Kerry who share our values feel they have to make uncharacteristic public noises about their religious views. It all seems kind of tacky. We’d prefer to wear our faith like a nice little black dress, not like a G-string.
If you think that analogy is over the top, consider a conversation my kid had at school last week. They were discussing the election, and the other child said, “KERRY’S for QUEERS.” She also informed my daughter that “GOD KILLS QUEERS.”
You see the problem? The other side’s ammunition is so inane, we haven’t taken it seriously. But they’re WINNING. These little slogans, appealing to gut instinct, beyond rational discourse, have power. That’s partly what being a liberal is about: live and let live.
But times have changed, and we need to change with them. The RELIGIOUS BIGOTS, who think it’s CHRISTIAN to hate gay people and who are ready to forgive any degree of callousness toward their fellow humans — as long as it’s cloaked in pious clichés — are winning the ideological battle in this country.
The rest of the world is horrified and perplexed. Friends from other countries ask me, “How could you let this happen?” I have to admit that I don’t have a good answer. Or maybe the answer is just too uncomfortable.
We’ve screwed up. We haven’t found a way to counter the religious right, because we’re all too damned tasteful and tolerant to be pushy about our beliefs.
That has to end, friends. We have our work cut out for us. If we’re going to rescue this country from the GAY-BASHERS, the CREATIONIST SCIENCE-HATERS (Good Lord, what more gorgeous divine plan could you find than evolution?), we’re going to have to stop being so nice and restrained.
We’re going to have to start doing some pulpit-thumping ourselves. We’re going to have to put OUR VALUES(you remember the ones: CHARITY, LOVE, that sort of thing) back into the public eye and we’re going to have to be loud about it.
We’re going to have to stop being so WASPY and RESTRAINED. We’re going to have to take on these neo-Pharisees, Bible verse for Bible verse.
We haven’t really lost this fight. The problem is that we haven’t been fighting at all.
Susanna Rodell is editorial page editor of The Charleston Gazette. E-mail: srodell-wvgazette.com
the death penalty, assaults on women’s rights,
How can you be a Christian and believe that it is not okay to use the death penalty on heinous criminals but it is acceptable to use the death penalty on an innocent child?
"Those were kid gloves? Made from real human kids..."
How modestly proposed! (BTW Swift's essay was written in 1729).
If they did, they would have to admit to their true beliefs.
"RELIGIOUS LIBERALS don’t wear their faith on their sleeves. We don’t evangelize; we consider it disrespectful to shove our spiritual views down other people’s throats."
In fact, they don't believe in much of anything (except that the "Religious" part of their title is vaguely embarassing to them).
Sure, there are some who "fry out" but the dropout rate of Orthodox to secular is very low compared to the Ba'al Tshuvah movement of secular to religious.
my cousin in Mishmar Haemek has by now ten grandchildren... And believe me, she hates the haredim!
What are you more proud of, that she has 10 grandchildren or that she hates other Jews?
My children are not yet married, but they will...
Since you teach them to hate other Jews, guess they might end up marrying...non-Jews.
These clueless denizens of apostate churches actually sport bumper stickers that proclaim: "Pro-Faith, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice."
So my degree in Mathematics is a figment of the imagination?
It is easy to spot liberals by how much they throw around the word 'hate'. Everything they dislike or distrust or are concerned about they 'hate'. Honestly I don't know how anyone can live with all that anger. But don't worry. I am a Christian and I forgive you.
Conservative = backbone
Liberal = wishbone
Brian
Not really. I can see I know a lot more about this topic than you do.
There were fanatics and ignorant in shtetl, especially with the rabbis...
Oh yes, those ignorant rabbis - studying the Torah all day long.
The rabbis for instance were there against women learning...
LOL!!!
Apparently you think the only reliable historical source on shtetl life is the movie Yentl!
The rabbis may have been opposed to women spending all their time as Torah scholars, but few communities in world history had women as literate as those shtetl Jews did.
My family was urban and educated, and contarrily to Alouette's remarks, quite orthodox then...
As are Orthodox Jews today.
Well, at least you're still urban!
More like fear, as most are afraid of what they may have to give up! I love people who know that the gospels are false, you prove how little you actually know.
Simple - they have to have a scapegoat. It couldn't be their fault that Kerry was rejected.
"Religious liberals? What's the definition of THAT species?" ~ austinaero
This will get you started:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1237389/posts?page=26#26
Saul Alinsky - The Religious Left follows him "religiously". Their flagship magazine: Sojourners
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=Soj0003&article=000311
Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals - By Saul Alinsky
In the 60's, as a radical mentality herself at Wellesley, Hillary Clinton was so enamored of Saul Alinsky and his *methods* she wrote her senior thesis under his mentoring. She uses his "how to fool the useful idiots" tactics to this very day, and will use them in her quest for the presidency.
As an aside ... at the "Sojourner Magazine" website linked above, a little window pops up asking the trick question, "Is Jesus a Republican or a DemocRAT?".
Wrong question. The question they know better than to ask is, "Is Jesus a moral RELATIVIST?"
*
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1253445/posts?page=31#31 Excerpt:
Since O'Reilly had a couple of guys on his program last night (10-21-04) from the Religious Left - one of whom was specifically referred to as being affiliated with Sojourners - the flagship magazine of the Religious Left - maybe we should request that he give equal time to a Capitalist like Ron Nash (see post #28). http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1253445/posts?page=28#28
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1253445/posts?page=33#33
*
Book Review: Why the Left Is Not Right -The Religious Left: Who They Are and What They Believe by Ronald Nash Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - December 1997 by Doug Bandow http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3918
When it comes to religion and politics, most media attention is focused on the right. And it usually isn’t positive coverage. Religious conservatives are presented as threatening America’s constitutional balance, women’s right to choose, gays’ civil liberties, and much more.
Yet religious activism runs both ways. As Ronald Nash, a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, notes in Why the Left Is Not Right, there is an active and diverse religious left in the United States. To be sure, these people, who once “proudly proclaimed their liberal or radical connections,” now “describe themselves as moderates and centrists,” notes Nash. But their policy positions remain unashamedly left-wing.
Nash divides the religious left into three parts: liberal mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, and left-wing evangelicals. There’s no doubt where Nash stands. He argues that these groups have been used (willingly or unwillingly) by the Democrats for electoral purposes and have helped “demonize politically conservative Christians.” A prolific author and entertaining speaker, Nash obviously views himself as among the demonized right.
In his view, the central argument is not whether people of faith should be concerned about peace and justice, but what those terms mean. The evangelical left has appeared to have simply assumed the standard liberal understanding of the words and then discredited anyone (including their politically conservative brethren) who understood the terms differently and who pursued the objectives of peace and justice in a different way.
Perhaps the greatest value of Why the Left Is Not Right is that it shows how political activism by people of faith is neither new nor restricted to conservatives. Indeed, even as evangelicals were receiving exaggerated public attention for entering the political process, mainline Protestant denominations were promoting Democratic political causes domestically and communist revolutionary movements abroad. It is a story worth remembering when the media and political establishments pour obloquy on traditionally less active evangelicals and fundamentalists as they seek to protect themselves and their values from government intrusion.
Much the same politics has been on display within the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics were once “thoughtful enemies of secularism, humanism, and the liberal welfare state,” writes Nash. Many still are, but as Nash puts it, “large cracks have appeared in the political and social thinking of many educated Catholics.” The 1985 Pastoral Letter on the economy, for example, was as political as anything emanating from the Christian Coalition. Even more radical have been specific segments of the church, such as the Maryknoll Order.
However, Nash devotes most of his attention to the lesser-known left-wing evangelicalism. He argues that the New Left and “the adversary culture” of the 1960s spawned political liberalism among Protestants who purport to hold a more conservative, orthodox theological view. Nash focuses on three leading leftish evangelicals: Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine; Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action and author of Rich Christians in a World of Hunger; and Tony Campolo, sociology professor, well-published author, and presidential confidante.
The scrutiny is warranted, though Nash seems more skeptical of the trio’s good intentions than is justified. Wallis, for instance, lives his beliefs. Two decades ago Wallis moved his magazine to a poor section of Washington, D.C., and formed a community of the same name. At the same time, however, he has, as Nash points out, remained imbued with the leftist Zeitgeist of the 1960s. The boat people fleeing communist Vietnam, Wallis wrote, were leaving “to support their consumer habit in other lands.” Their departure should not be taken to “discredit” Vietnam. Wallis’s views toward Cuba and Nicaragua were similarly skewed.
Wallis’s economic opinions also were long solidly collectivist. The collapse of socialism abroad seems to have chastened himhe now calls himself centrist and asserts that he is independent of Democrats and Republicans alikebut he remains wedded to interventionist policies. Conservatives, Wallis charges, retain an “attachment to institutions of wealth and power, preference for the status quo, and the lack of a strong ethic of social responsibility.” Unfortunately, while Wallis now criticizes abuses by government, he underestimates how the activist state promotes concentrations of wealth and power, supports the status quo, and undermines social responsibility.
Similar is Nash’s case against Ron Sider. Sider is a gentle spirit who has borne substantial liberal criticism for his opposition to abortion and gay rights. Unfortunately, however, on economic policy he has always placed intentions before results. Thus, as Nash documents, Sider has long advocated the sort of government intervention that has been tried and found wanting throughout this century. While criticism is rife of the Christian Coalition for seemingly attaching itself to the GOP, Nash points out that “Ron Sider, the person who comes closest to being a moderate member of the evangelical Left, has himself spent years trying to elect liberal, typically Democratic, candidates to public office.”
Tony Campolo is probably the most public of the three, given his high-profile contacts with President Bill Clinton. Campolo also criticizes government, but seems committed to statist remedies when it comes to solving specific problems. Nash doesn’t stop his criticisms here, however; he goes on to question Campolo’s evangelical credentials, given the latter’s views on such issues as abortion, feminism, and the environment.
Through his analysis, which concludes with chapters on economics and poverty, Nash shows how even the best-intentioned of religious believers can come up with solutions inimical to the interests of those they wish to serve. But Nash, who has been on the receiving end of endless left-wing barbs, puts an unnecessary edge in his own analysis. Perhaps nothing irritates Nash more than the evangelical left’s flirtation with Bill Clinton.
Yet the opinions of Wallis, Sider, and Campolo reflect ignorance rather than malice. I’ve met and debated all three. All want to help those in need, seem to have been affected by the decline of statism, and were willing to acknowledge contrary arguments. They deserve to be criticized, not demonized.
Why the Left Is Not Right deals seriously with an important subject. Despite the public perception that religious activists gravitate toward the right, many people of faith have embraced collectivist remedies despite the ill effects on those most in need. In short, Nash’s basic thesis is correct: the left is not right. []
Zondervan • 1996 • 222 pages • $10.99 paperback
Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
28 posted on 10/22/2004 12:22:45 PM EDT by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1253445/posts?page=28#28
IMHO,
"religious" liberals are oblivious about the cracks preparing to open up in the earth's crust to receive them.
They are among the most dispicable--pretending to be Christian but denying the power of God just as Scripture warned about.
They will receive some of the harshest and earliest judgment.
Why so much hate, truly someone as "wise" as you should know that hate only stirs up all kinds of illness mentally and physically. Well regardless of how much you think you know you will bow down before the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, for your sake I pray that it will be before you are standing in front of him for judgement.
If the terrorists could somehow be coverted to Christianity, they would become civilized.
tooo d*mned tasteful?
NO! TOOOOOOOO DURNED CLUELESS!
Some conservatives need to learn much better about hating sin and loving the sinner.
Whole massive amounts of religious liberals need to learn that there REALLY IS A GOD and He really does expect obedience to His Word and His Voice/Spirit.
A lot of liberals have more emotion over a football touchdown than they ever have had about God. Religion for them is another social club.
bttt
The Presbyterian Church USA has called for churches to explore selective divestment of stock in companies doing military and security business with Isreal.
"Not sure what the exact definition would be.."~ tacticalogic
See #113
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