The Liberal and the Christian: A Cautionary Tale

Once again, as we do every 2 years, we’ve come around to another election cycle. After a few surprising and devastating defeats, the liberals have chalked their lack of success up to one group: the evangelical Christians. It seems that these evangelical Christians can’t seem to make a right decision when it comes to politics, and quite monolithically vote Republican. After their loss in 2004, their new plan was to start picking off evangelicals, pushing them towards liberalism.

Now, most of the politicos live and die as secularists, which is why they have felt the wrath of the Christians these past few cycles, and so they have cast about for anything that might help them get into the Christian graces. The golden ticket to this wonderful candy land seems to be a social morality, or the desire of most Christians to make the world as convenient as possible with out all those non-prosperous-non-Christians around. The problem they have is using this ticket aright. Being secularists, they wield it like secularists. Not once have I actually heard a liberal use Christian language like they believe it. Rather they use it to prove how stupid and uneducated those who believe in a higher and better being are. When dealing with social morality, they divorce the spiritual implications of what Christ says and focus only on the physical aspects of it. “See Jesus fed the masses, if you were really a Christian you would want to feed the masses as well.” “When Jesus said that we should love our enemies, he probably meant that we shouldn’t kill them.” “Jesus was a Liberal.” All of these monuments of deep thoughts from the bottom of an expensive Chianti are actually said and printed in our current culture. They even sound good on the surface but scratch the surface and all you get is a superficial “Jesus was a hippy and God is an opiate” spirituality that dismisses the spiritual as idiotic.

But it wasn’t always so, there was once a time when the Christian spoke of the conservative side as the devil’s side. When liberalism, or at least progressivism, was seen as the best idea for the church to get behind to bring about a better world. This magical world existed not eons ago or even with the advent of Christ, but rather was only 80 or so years ago. The church was involved in a fight over what seems to have been the death-knell for the modernists (liberals) called the Social Gospel.

Those familiar with that concept may look askance and wonder why I mention this heresy in the same paragraph as Christians, but believe me at this time it wasn’t just Modernists that voted and pushed for progressivism, the conservatives did as well. J. Gresham Machen, the man that stood up and killed the Social Gospel and Modernism would have a lot to answer for if he was alive today and his voting record was known.

But what happened with the progressives at the death of the Modernist Church is the cautionary tale for conservatives today.

The death of the Modernist Church took a while, and while it was dieing its standards where taken and stripped of all spiritual moorings and made into an humanist/secular philosophy.

When Gresham defined Fundamentalism (He had more drinking, smoking and dancing in his than Fundies today could even imagine) he coalesced a group around his thought that we know of today as Evangelicals. For anyone who still believed that the Bible was something more that a comic book and that God and Jesus actually existed this was the only place to go. But for a long time they were so busy with trying to sort things out that politics was left without the Christian view for a while.

During this Christ free time the ideas that had started as Liberal Theology and over escatatilized Christianity finished their move to the totally secular left. As secularists they tried their darndest to excise any vestiges of Christian morality from their view and to set it up on the shaky legs of some modernist/post-modernist ethic. The one thing that they didn’t excise however was the dignity of man, the foundational belief of their kind and the impetus for all actions.

But that was it, all else, particularly the balancing ethic of the importance of God as compared to man, was thrown over to lighten the morality boat and allow them to actualize their vision. But they went a bit too far and woke up the slumbering Christian when, in the name of a woman’s dignity they allowed for the killing of babies.

Roe vs. Wade will be seen as the turning point for liberals for a long time to come and will eventually be the death of them because they can’t drop it. By the time that abortion came down the pike, Liberals had so obscured their original Christian heritage that when Christians woke up and began to fight it was a surprise to them that such an animal still existed.

But they did and they still do in growing numbers every cycle and the Liberals have just lately woken up to the fact that they need to be courted not belittled. But it is too late and the courting will fail because they have gone so far away that Christians can only see their moral failings, and are able to completely separate anything they may as a pure accident.

But the end of the progressive or liberal wing in America is about 4 years away. They are already dead now, but we are just waiting for the death-throes to be over with. Conservatives have caution this is you’re your possible fate. Christians vote with you right now purely for moral reasons and the social issues are a by-product that many of them have to swallow for a greater good. You are right now the lesser of two evils that we need to get along with to get rid of the big problem right now.

There was a time back in the 60’s when the Republican party was fighting for its life and a man named Goldwater out maneuvered a lady by the name of Rand so that the moral conservatism became the defining characteristic rather than economic conservatism. This is why Christians are with you, but if you reverse Goldwater’s victory then you have lost us.

Remember, it is important to us that the non-prosperous-non-Christians still get dealt with. To us humans still have dignity and if that is lost to you, then we are lost to you