An interesting list:

RELIGION AND PUBLIC POLICY (2/13)

For some time I have been curious as to how conservative religion gets so easily enmeshed in conservative politics. I have been surfing the 11 religious channels on Direct TV, and have gone through a ream of pages from fundamentalist magazines and pamphlets. Here are some of the public policy issues widely supported by Christian fundamentalists. The more conservative the religionists seem to be, the more the following are emphasized.

Support of:

Unfettered capitalism and free enterprise

American exceptionalism

America’s recent wars

Israel, over against the Palestinians

Capital punishment

Restrictive immigration policies

Low tax rates, particularly for the most wealthy

And opposition to:

Organized labor

Food stamps and other parts of the social safety net

Obamacare and other forms of so-called “socialized medicine”

Gun control

Government-authorized foreign aid.

Then there are the sexual and gender issues:

Opposition to all abortions

Opposition to gay rights, including marriage

Opposition to military service for gays

Limited availability of birth control for all but married women—and in some cases not even for them.

In regard to these sexual matters, there is a handful of biblical references. Concerning abortion, the Biblical evidence is sparse at best. The only thing the Bible says directly is found in the book of Numbers, chapter 5, which details a formula to produce one! It involves religious incantations and the consumption by the woman of a potion. This combination of superstition and medicine is supposed to make her “womb discharge and her uterus fall.” There are seven Biblical references to homosexuality which form the core of religious opposition to that life-style.  All of these citations grew out of issues within the societies where the texts originated.  How they are interpreted must relater to what he culture during the tie they were written. The root issues are always domination and subjugation.

What seems apparent to many of us is the recognition that most of these         issues have nothing to do with any aspect of the Christian faith. They rather flow from a cultural ethos not only devoid of any Christian understanding, but in most cases, quite opposed to it.

Biblical snippets are picked out to justify almost anything, whether or not the text relates to the contemporary issue. So when Jesus said the night before he was crucified, “two swords are enough,”  (Luke 22:38) that handful of words is used to support opposition to gun control. The fact that Simon Peter had a sword also justifies the possession of guns for self-defense. So Biblical words can be used to say whatever you want them to say. One of the favorite texts used to justify any number of public policies is 2 Chronicles 7:14.  “If my people, who are called by my name, humble themselves, pray, seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven, forgive their sins and heal their land.” That one can be used to cover about anything. You just slip your particular national issue into it, and presto!

Before we liberal religionists get puffed up, I wonder if we do the same thing. My own prejudices suggest that how we feel about justice, violence, prejudice, war and all the rest somehow flow from what our faith tells us. My guess, however, is that we too may use our religion to justify what we have already decided politically.  At least that is a serious risk.  We Christian liberals have about ten New Testament texts we continually pull out. We lean heavily on Jesus’ sermon at Nazareth and the parable of the last judgment. We repeat Paul’s statement that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, while we manage to explain away his pervasive male chauvinism. We too ignore or explain away those texts with which we politically disagree. For instance, if you do a study of slavery in the Bible, slave-holding wins every time.

Whether any of these politically charged issues was first developed out of some religious motivation is another issue. My guess is that there is some relationship between the religious commitments held by a culture and the public policies which grow out of it. But we need to take care lest we then sometimes decide what is a right public policy, and then seek some religious justification for what we have already concluded.

Charles Bayer

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(If you’re interested in receiving future writings by Charles, drop him a line).