Opinion: "Whose Side is God On???"...

There will be two factions battling for supremacy in the 2008 election and it is not the Republicans and the Democrats. It will be the religious left versus the religious right. Having lost two straight presidential elections and with their power in Washington at an all time low liberals have begun to look inward. They have found that the strength of the Republican Party has come from religious conservatives. Having identified this deficiency the liberals are looking to get religion.

At an ever-increasing rate so called liberal people of faith are coming out of the woodwork to announce "Hey! I believe in God too"! Liberals from Hillary Clinton to Howard Dean are now all either quoting from the Bible or talking about matters of faith. Books are being written that attempt to relate modern liberal dogma and Scripture. They read the New Testament of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus as a blue print for an anti-war, social justice agenda. In their minds Jesus is for higher taxes, is anti-war and is for gay marriage. They look at Jesus and see a combination of John Lennnon, Gandhi and Karl Marx all rolled into one.

As absurd as this premise may sound to religious conservatives it should not be discounted out of hand. There are selected passages in the Bible that if read out of context or without understanding could be used to justify the liberal position. Enjoying uncontested ground as they have for all these years I do not believe the right is prepared to make proper rebuttal. This is potentially disastrous. And from what I have seen so far little energy or attention is being paid towards developing counters to the emergence of a liberal religious political agenda.

Over the years the religious right has gotten a bit myopic. I am of the opinion that far too many prominent members of the religious right are inordinately obsessed with matters of sexual morality. This is in no way to suggest that these is issues are not extremely important but there are other issues to consider. They need to broaden their approach if they are to counter the coming attack from the religious left. They do this not by adopting the positions of the left but by developing scriptural and policy based ideas to counter a social justice agenda. The right is currently not prepared to wage this battle.

In the final analysis both sides want to think that God is on their side. During the Civil War President Lincoln observed "Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other". The circumstances today my not be as dire as in the 1860’s but the sentiment is as true today as it was then.

Is God/Jesus a Republican or a Democrat? I suspect he is neither and moreover I think it is sacrilege to even attempt to categorize God in such crass and vulgar terms. Unfortunately, we are political animals and we all want to think that God is on our side.