non-metaphysical stephen

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

And if we have not charity….

I ran across this article from The Daily Kos, which reflects many of my own complaints against my former political party: a seemingly complete lack of compassion for other peoples, especially for peoples who have been prevented from having equal access to opportunity and/or denied their status as full human beings, and who are in many ways still aren’t given a level playing field.

To go one step further than Kos, I believe that empathy is a Christian value, and it’s one of the reasons I get so annoyed by hearing people on the Right spout off about Christianity this and God that. I left the Republican Party because I realized that the Bible seems more supportive of the values found today amongst the left: charity, compassion, humility, respect for differences, etc. In leaving behind the GOP, I broke out of the restraints that kept me from truly loving others.

The post also contains another thing that REALLY grates on my Christian nerves: American exceptionalism, as seen in the passage quoted from Liz Cheney. I first noticed the ugliness of this belief years ago in a copy of The Limbaugh Letter, and I still can’t see how you can justify it as Christian. My Bible is quite clear that nationalism is a rebellion against God, a sure way to bring judgment upon the nation. (Just in time for July 4th–huzzah!)

May God have mercy on us and not deal with us as we deserve. Instead, may God instill within our hearts that compassion, humility and generosity of Christ Jesus. Amen.

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…)

This weekend we watched all four episodes of the documentary The Century of the Self, which discusses the way Freudian ideas were imported into British and American culture through Freud’s daughter and nephew. The final volume looks at the impact on politics, especially on the Reagan/Thatcher revolutions and the later Clinton/Blair victories.

One thing in particular chilled me: In discussing Reagan’s rise to power, he says that Reagan found favor with the American middle-class by giving them permission to reject calls to charity (e.g., the welfare system) and instead to blame lower-classes for their own situations.

Is this really what a “Christian nation” is supposed to do? How can we continue to associate Reagan conservatism with Christianity?