Religious Left

Leave Jesus Out of the Budget Battle

Gary Bauer
Gary Bauer
by Gary Bauer –

We have an obligation to help the poor. But nowhere does the Bible state that the power of government should be used to take one man’s money by force of law and give it to another man. Jesus’ admonition was a personal command to share, not a command for Caesar to “spread the wealth around.” …

Jim Wallis, a self-identified “Christian leader for social change,” has embarked on a crusade against Republican budget cuts he believes are “unbiblical.” But Wallis and others on the evangelical Left are on dangerous ground when they claim to know exactly which budget items God would approve and which he would cut.

Wallis has launched the “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign to fight against Republican cuts in the 2011 and 2012 budgets—cuts to welfare programs, college grants, and international aid—and against Republicans’ proposed 2% increase in defense spending.

The campaign’s premise, as the group declared in a recent Politico ad, is that “cutting programs that help those who need them most is morally wrong.” [Read more…]

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What Would Jesus Cut?

by Mark Tooley –
After any successful election for Republicans, the Religious Left immediately becomes alarmed about supposedly massive federal budget “cuts,” i.e. some reductions in budget increases, for some social welfare programs. In the Religious Left’s ultimate vision of the Kingdom of God, the federal government spends unlimited sums on the nation’s every supposed social need, regardless of result, while spending nothing on national defense, and only increasing taxes.

In 1981, responding to President Reagan’s budget “cuts,” the Religious Left endorsed a huge “Solidarity Day” protest march in Washington, D.C. to deplore the “transfer of billions of dollars from the social needs of people to the production of massive new weapons and strategic defense systems.” One United Methodist bishop explained: “For us to take out of the mouths of the hungry and the poor and the oppressed the funds that will build bombs and bullets and airplanes seems to be terribly incongruous with our understanding and the quality of life in the world in which we live.” [Read more…]

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Neutering God

by Mark Tooley – It’s a wonderful mercy that much of the more extreme elements of radical feminist theology in the churches peaked in the 1990s and have since faded. The high tide of radical feminist theology was the 1993 ecumenical Re-Imagining Conference, endorsed by nearly all the Mainline Protestant denominations or their women’s agencies, where speakers condemned traditional Christianity as patriarchal and instead acclaimed ancient feminine deities like Astarte, Isis, and Athena. God was also commonly called “Sophia,” based on the Greek word for wisdom. There was a special altar call for lesbians, not for repentance, but for acclamation. A milk and honey ritual replaced the traditional Eucharist. [Read more…]

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The Religious Right Takes a Hard Left

10/24/2010 – Robert Huff –
We live in an age of scientific hegemony (if I may borrow a term from the Marxists and feminists), where access to intellectual power and influence is granted to those who demonstrate their loyalty to the approved theories of the ruling elite. Scientists who refuse to bow at the altar of uniformity are labeled heretics and cast out of the intelligentsia, condemned to lives of unfunded grant proposals, tenure denials, and ruined reputations. [Read more…]

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Religiously Dissing America’s Independence Day

7/6/2010 – Mark Tooley –

Predictably, Jim Wallis’s Religious Left Sojourners blog dishonored Independence Day by featuring an op-ed headlined “Why Christianity and July 4th are Incompatible.”

In it, a young pacifist pastor explained why Christians can’t “celebrate” having “killed thousands upon thousands of people because they [the British] were taxing us without giving us representation in parliament.” [Read more…]

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An Ungodly Immigration Policy?

6/1/2010 – Mark D. Tooley –
The 1.1 million-member United Church of Christ (UCC) is trying to raise $50,000 for a media campaign to blast Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law. Church prelates hope the ad will appear on May 29, when reputedly 500,000 will march in Phoenix against the law.

As America’s most left-wing Christian denomination, the fast declining UCC’s zeal for political activism perhaps compensates for its lack of evangelism. Having lost about half its members in recent decades, and several hundred congregations in recent years, the 1.1 million member denomination, at least as expressed by its elites, unapologetically plunges ahead with the latest causes du jour. [Read more…]

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Embracing the Tormentors

National Council of Churches Promotes Communist Agenda
National Council of Churches Promotes Communist Agenda

5/26/2010 – Faith McDonnell –
Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They “spiritualize” the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.

Church officials and partner organizations such as the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) issue strident policy statements on such topics as “eco-justice,” broadband access for “economically depressed rural areas,” the Israeli “occupation,” and “unnecessary Department of Defense spending.” But one is hard-pressed to find these church leaders denouncing the recent appointment of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. One searches in vain for an expression of solidarity with the Christian community in Jos, Plateau State, in central Nigeria, where hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Fulani jihadists during March and April of 2010. If there are any such statements, they address vaguely “ethnic conflict” and are masterpieces of moral equivalency. [Read more…]

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The World Is a Cruel Place – and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

5/25/2010 – Dennis Prager –

One of the many beliefs — i.e., non-empirically based doctrines — of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism. [Read more…]

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Christ: An “Undocumented” Migrant?

5/10/2010 – Mark D. Tooley –
The old Religious Left has long championed virtual open borders and slammed national sovereignty as idolatrous. Now the new Evangelical Left is chiming in with its own sentimentalization of illegal immigration, identifying Jesus Christ Himself as an illegal immigrant.

“We are exiles who follow an alien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,” insisted Debra Dean Murphy, a religion professor at United Methodist affiliated West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her recent column was carried by Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and illustrates the merging thought of old Religious Left and new Evangelical Left. [Read more…]

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Prophet Jim Wallis and the Ecclesia of Economic Ignorance

Jim Wallis
Jim Wallis

Acton Institute | by John Couretas | 4/14/2010

This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886)

For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really a sin – of biblical proportions. We have indeed seen class warfare, but this war has been waged by the wealthy and their political allies against the poor and the middle class. – Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (2010)

One of Jim Wallis’ long running aims at Sojourners is to cast himself as a moderate or centrist (God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat). This is howling nonsense to anyone who pays attention to his policy prescriptions or watches the progressive/liberal company he keeps. With his new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010), Wallis drops all pretense to holding the center as he piles on with the horde of religious left activists and others now demonizing Wall Street. [Read more…]

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