I want to revisit the Associated Press article on Pulpit Freedom Sunday that I linked to yesterday. The article, by Dinesh Ramde, was headlined, “Wis. pastor shares his plan to vote for McCain,” and it concluded with a jaw-dropping, horrifying statement from Pastor Luke Emrich of New Life Church in West Bend, Wis.
Emrich was one of the 33 pastors participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Those pastors, conservative evangelicals, unsurprisingly endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, and they did so on the basis of what is, for them, the foremost issue in this and any election — abortion:
Emrich, 38, told about 100 worshippers Sunday they should make their own voting decisions, but urged them to cast their ballots in favor of an anti-abortion platform.
“I’m telling you straight up I would choose life. I would cast a vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin,” he said, referring to the Republican ticket. …
“I can’t endorse everything, I can’t endorse all the policies,” Emrich said of McCain. “But friends, if we get the choice for life wrong, all the other rights and choices are just mere hypotheticals, right? You and I understand what it means to choose life.”
“The choice for life,” as Emrich calls it, is the foremost issue for him and his flock because they believe, in the starkest of terms, that abortion is morally indistinguishable from murder. The 1.21 million abortions performed in 2005, they believe, are morally indistinguishable from mass murder, from genocide. What other issue could possibly compete with carnage on such an epic scale?
This is why abortion opponents like Gov. Mike Huckabee speak of “the holocaust of liberalized abortion.” That’s how high they view the moral stakes here. That is what they regard as the gravity of the situation.
And if you really believe that, then you are obligated, at the very least, to do what Pastor Emrich did and risk the tax-exempt status of your congregation in order to speak out against this holocaust.
But here is the horrifying, astonishing conclusion of that AP article:
Despite his recommendation for McCain, Emrich said it was important not to let the upcoming election permanently divide the nation into red and blue communities.
“No matter what the outcome is on [Election Day], we’re going to shake hands, aren’t we? Because that’s what makes America great,” the pastor said. “We shake hands here in America, no matter who it is.”
That, right there, in a nutshell, is the essence of contemporary American evangelical political philosophy. Votes are cast almost exclusively on the basis of a moral claim that holds that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and millions of other Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, are moral monsters — advocates of mass murder and holocaust. But then after Election Day, they think it is appropriate to shake hands with those same monsters.
It is not possible to believe both of those things at the same time.
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