non-metaphysical stephen

…I found Christ and left the GOP: because they lack charity.

And if we have not charity….

Here’s the message I wish I could get across to all the conservative folks who try to use Christianity to explain their political policies:

1. Do you follow the Constitution or the Bible?
2. Do you trust in the Founding Fathers or in Jesus?
3. Do you serve the USA or the Realm of God?
4. Are you a citizen or a priest?

You can’t serve two masters. It’s time to pick one.

That’d be my billboard. What’d be on yours?

And I say, Right on, Brother Frank!

Far-Right Evangelicals And The Campaign Against Obama

Above all, ordinary Americans—and especially religious people who seek faith rather than power—need to understand that the evangelical right is basically unpatriotic and anti-American.

As I have said before, the Religious Right has turned the nation into an idol and now worships the scriptures of The Constitution and The Wealth of Nations. So I’d say they’re also un-Christian….

May God deliver us from all who advocate nationalism in place of the humility and charity of Christ. Amen!

Another interesting column from the same paper as the previous post, this one by Bob Gourley. He notes how the “battle for the Bible” has been tossed aside in favor of issues that have no connection to biblical teachings:

Associated Baptist Press - Opinion: Losing the Bible.

Today, the agenda of the Religious Right, including many prominent fundamentalist Baptists, lies outside the Bible. That their politically conservative but extra-biblical agenda is a construct of modernist thinking seems to be of no concern: they proudly pledge overarching loyalty to the human construct of inerrancy  and fidelity to unrestrained capitalism.

And later,

Rising hand-in-hand, Baptist fundamentalism and small-government Republicanism are adrift together, struggling to stay above water. Unable to reverse the demographics, Republicans hope to “increase their share of the minority vote“ (including Southern Baptists), while one fundamentalist Baptist response to denominational decline focuses on making more Baptist babies and Liberty University recently banished Democrats from campus. For some Baptists, procreation and political correctness offer hope where an inerrant theology has failed.

So true, and not just for Baptists….

The Center for American Progress has published an article by Lester Feder–”Is the Religious Right Losing Its Grip?”–that resonates with me regarding the reasons I left the conservative Republican/Christian movement. And it suggests that the leaders of the evangelical right (Feder mentions Dobson, Perkins and Bauer by name) simply are not paying attention to what’s going on around them.

I should explain that one of the reasons I grew disenchanted with the Republican-Christian movement is that, through reading the Hebrew prophets, I realized that many of the values and goals of the Religious Right were the very things that the prophets warned AGAINST. That is, the Religious Right was being unbiblical. As I learned more about the scriptures (that is, reading something other than Paul and Deuteronomy), I realized that the Bible is very clear about the need to protect the poor, the weak, the oppressed, and the foreigner, and that the Bible strongly condemns nationalist arrogance, reliance on military, economic and/or military might, and the luxuries that come from greed, gluttony, power and wealth. And by and large, the latter have been more important to conservatives than the former.

So as I read Feder’s article, I saw that many of the reasons I had left the movement are still in place, in spite of many defections to a growing, more progressive evangelicalism that embraces the call of the prophets on such issues as social justice, poverty, environmentalism, imperialism, etc. (more…)