As an evangelical Christian, as someone who numbers himself among the followers of Jesus, my politics point toward the left, a posture that places me squarely at odds with evangelicals aligned with the religious right. I find their unflinching allegiance to the Bush administration and its position on a range of issues -- from the environment to the prosecution of the war in Iraq -- inimical to the Scriptures that we evangelicals claim as our guide.
The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor, and Jesus spoke repeatedly about a believer's responsibility to those he called "the least of these." I've yet to understand how those teachings square with tax cuts for the affluent or the persistent refusal to raise the minimum wage. Jesus made it a habit to hang around with the cultural outcasts of his day, and the apostle Paul insisted in Christ there is no preference among nationalities and no distinction between the sexes. How are the teachings of the New Testament consistent with those who would deny rights to anyone -- or immigrants or Muslims or women or gays?
Jesus, to take another example, expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow, yet the religious right, as evidenced by a 1999 document called the Cornwall Declaration and by their silence on global warming, prefers to sacrifice the natural world on the altar of free enterprise. Wouldn't it be logical to assume that those who claim to believe in intelligent design would seek to protect the intelligent designer's handiwork? I am not among that minority of Christians who believe that the use of military force is never justified. The Allied resistance to Adolph Hitler in World War II, for instance, provides an example of a just war. But is the war in Iraq morally justifiable?
For centuries, Christians have asked certain questions to determine whether or not armed conflict is justified: Is it a defensive war? Is military action undertaken as a last resort, after all other options have been exhausted? Is the armed response proportional to the provocation? Have measures been taken to protect civilians, now perishing at a rate of more than 100 a day?
I've yet to be persuaded that the war in Iraq meets any of these criteria.
I suspect that when Jesus asked us to love our enemies, he probably didn't mean that we should torture or kill them. In the course of writing "Thy Kingdom Come," I contacted eight religious right groups with a straightforward query. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the use of torture. Now, remember that these are groups with detailed position papers on everything from stem-cell research to same-sex marriage (both of which they oppose).
Only two organizations -- the Family Research Council and Institute of Religion and Democracy -- responded to my inquiry. Both of them supported the Bush administration's policies on torture against those it has designated "enemy combatants." These are people who profess to be pro-life, who claim to be able to hear a "fetal scream." Yet they have turned a deaf ear to the cries of those who are being tortured in the name of our government.
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