What’s Wrong with the Religious Right?

As an evangelical Christian, as someone who numbers himself among

the followers of Jesus, my politics point toward the left, a posture
that places me squarely at odds with the Religious Right. I find the
Religious Right’s unflinching allegiance to the Bush administration and
its position on a range of issues – from the environment to the
prosecution of the war in Iraq – inimical to the scriptures that we
evangelicals claim as our guide.
 

The Bible contains something like two thousand references to the
poor, and Jesus spoke repeatedly about a believer’s responsibility to
those he called “the least of these.” I’ve yet to understand how those
teachings square with tax cuts for the affluent or the denial of a
living wage to unskilled workers. Jesus made it a habit to hang around
with the cultural outcasts of his day, and the apostle Paul insists
that in Christ there is no preference among the races and no
distinction between the sexes. How are the teachings of the New
Testament consistent with those who would deny rights to anyone – women
or Muslims or immigrants or gays? 

Jesus, to take another example, expressed concern for the tiniest
sparrow, yet the Religious Right, as evidenced by a 1999 document
called the Cornwall Declaration and by their silence on global warming,
prefers to sacrifice the natural world on the altar of free enterprise.
Wouldn’t it be logical to assume that those who claim to believe in
intelligent design would seek to protect the intelligent designer’s
handiwork? 

I am not among that minority of Christians who believe that the use
of military force is never justified; the Allied resistance to Adolph
Hitler and Nazism in World War II, for instance, provides an example of
a just war. But is the war in Iraq morally justifiable? For centuries,
Christians have asked certain questions to determine whether or not
armed conflict is justified: Is it a defensive war? Is military action
undertaken as a last resort, after all other options have been
exhausted? Is the armed response proportional to the provocation? Have
measures been taken to protect civilians? 

I’ve yet to be persuaded that the invasion of Iraq meets any of these criteria. 

I suspect that when Jesus asked us to love our enemies, he probably
didn’t mean that we should torture or kill them. Yet, in the course of
writing “Thy Kingdom Come,” I contacted eight Religious Right groups
with a straightforward query. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your
organization’s position on the use of torture. Now, remember that these
are groups with detailed position papers on everything from stem-cell
research to environmental conservation (both of which they
oppose). 

Only two organizations responded to my inquiry. Both of them
supported the Bush administration’s use of torture against those it has
designated “enemy combatants.” 

These are people who profess to be pro-life, who claim to be able to
hear a “fetal scream.” Yet they have turned a deaf ear to the cries of
those who are being tortured in the name of our government. 

What about social issues, especially abortion and homosexuality?
Here I find a curious inconsistency among those who claim the
scriptures as the basis for their beliefs. The Bible says a great deal
about acting with justice and caring for the poor, but comparatively
little about homosexuality and virtually nothing about abortion (we
could quibble over a couple of verses). Yet the Religious Right has
fashioned its entire “family values” agenda in opposition to
homosexuality and abortion, advocating positions that would seriously
compromise personal liberties. (I happen to believe that the surest way
to curtail the rate of abortion is to change the moral climate
surrounding the issue. I have no interest in making abortion illegal; I
would like to make it unthinkable.) 

I follow a man who called his followers to be peacemakers and who
suggested that the meek would inherit the earth. This Man of Sorrows
endured torture at the hands of his political enemies.  

I won’t be marching anytime soon in the ranks of the Religious Right.