From Salon:
[quote begins from Salon article by Michael Scherer, "How Would Jesus Vote?"]
Pastor Chris Stephens runs his church services like a rock show. Colored strobes dance across the stage, electric guitar solos punctuate the hymns, and his sermons are filled with exhortations like, "We need a God explosion." The roughly 2,000 worshipers who belong to Faith Promise Church know to expect a blunt-talking believer when they come to Sunday services, a man unafraid to take a stand for Jesus.
So it was no surprise two years ago when Stephens devoted a sermon before the presidential election to a discussion of God's hopes for the ballot box. "If you are a Democrat or a Republican before you are a Christ-ocrat, you are an idol worshiper," he told his congregation. As he explained it, God cared most about just a few core issues in 2004: ending abortion, opposing gay marriage, appointing conservative judges and ensuring the freedom to pray in the public square. Christian voters, he told his congregation, ignore these issues at their own peril. "If you reject Christ, if you have never been born again, you are not going to heaven," he said at the end of the sermon.
[quote ends from "How would Jesus vote?"]
The real issue with which this article is concerned is the apparently successful attempt of an allegedly "moderate" gay marriage-opposing, right to life "Democrat" to peel off the evangelical base from a "right to choose" Republican.
I don't think Democrats have to take that stand to win back Christian voters. I don't mean the extreme or extremely stupid kind who are governed by emotion, but the thinking, caring ones. Those people vote Republican out of various fears, some more worthy than others. But the Christian who is not a Christocrat but a believer whose religion really matters to him or her could very easily, by making the correct argument, cause at least some of those people to rethink the notion that Jesus wants Christians to be Republicans.
Rather than argue about abortion or gay marriage, Democrats need to cite the substantial amount of text in the gospels that focus on private prayer, on making sacrifices (e.g., the widow and her mite) for the benefit of the community and especially the poor, and on his insistence that mere belief in what he propounded would NEVER be enough.
The very ads used by the Republicans to discredit opponents could be turned against them in such a case. In the Tennessee campaign with which the Salon article is specifically concerned, the GOP has used ads with definite racist implications intended to ring those fear-of-the-other alarm bells in white Republicans. Would Jesus approve of that? I think not, my friends. I think not.
The religious left needs a credible ministerial voice to remind people that Jesus was all about acts, not words or beliefs. Regardless of ambiguous statements that he came to fulfill the law, he was clear that the law which he fulfilled imposed two basic duties: to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind ("the first and greatest commandment"; and love your neighbor as yourself (the second commandment which is "like unto it.") From these injunctions, he said, "flow all the law and the prophets."