How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative

1 With God, or Against Him To anyone who takes God seriously, every election poses a radical question. Will we vote with Him, or against Him? The Bible is an unapologetically political book and an extremely conservative one. Some political views offend God, and those views are mostly liberal. To misperceive Scripture's political meaning is as much an error as to misperceive its moral meaning. Yet liberal leaders and left-wing activists have obscured these clear truths. One thinks of Senator Hillary Clinton, who in a June 2007 forum on CNN claimed that it was her Christian beliefs that underlie her stands on controversial issues. With reference to herself and her fellow Democratic candidates, Clinton forthrightly said, "I think you can sense how we are attempting to try to inject faith into policy." That line alone, spoken by a Republican, would have been trumpeted on the front page of countless newspapers and Web sites as proof that the speaker harbors a secret plot to turn America into a theocracy along the lines of Iran or Saudi Arabia. Even a forthrightly Christian candidate like Mike Huckabee feels he has to be more cautious with his rhetoric than any Democrat does. Most Republican politicians, in their usual timid fashion, would probably endorse the sentiment expressed by Religious Left guru Rev. Jim Wallis: "God is not a Republican or a Democrat." That sentiment is, however, obviously disingenuous. In his best-selling bookGod's Politics, Wallis makes it plain that he thinks Jesus was a left-liberal. Since the book came out in 2004, Wallis and his message have been taken up by the 2008 Democratic presidential contenders, who disguise in religious finery positions that in fact derive from a secular worldview, the very opposite of the biblical one. As an Orthodox Jew, I offer this book as a call to arms to America's mostly Christian conservative voters. Some of those voters may follow other Republicans in feeling intimidated by Democratic rhetoric. They might be attracted to the advice of Evangelical former Bush aide David Kuo, who in his own best-selling memoir,Tempting Faith, advocates a "fast" from politics, a temporary break or abstention from practical advocacy: "By so passionately pursuing politics Christians have alienated their 'opponents' by giving the sense that to be Christian means to embrace certain policies. But the reality, of course, is that Christians can disagree about virtually any policy matter." No, that's not the reality. Jews and Christians are free to think anything they want, however ridiculous. An American who says he bases his outlook on the Bible may turn out to believe in the tooth fairy as well, but that doesn't mean such belief finds support in Scripture. In fact, the Bible is as clear on politics as it is on morals. Plenty of Christians and Jews fail morally-I certainly do-but we would be wrong to pretend that, in doing so, we are being true to our religious beliefs. John McCain was right when he said, in a 2000 interview on beliefnet.com, that our "nation was founded primarily on Christian principles." That fact should have practical consequences. It has become both more important than ever to state this openly and fearlessly. For we live in an era when faith is under sustained intellectual assault, and any suggestion of biblical religion's true political relevance is greeted with accusations of "theocracy." A succession of New Atheist tracts shooting to the top of the best-seller list lately have seemed like distress flares launched from the deck of a foundering ship at sea. What happened to all that talk, once a favorite among conservatives, about America as a Christian nation? Surely the wildly enthusiastic reception bestowed on Christopher Hitchens'sGod Is Not Greatand Richard Dawkins'sThe God Delusionsignals that something has gone wrong withKlinghoffer, David is the author of 'How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative', published 2008 under ISBN 9780385515429 and ISBN 0385515421.