THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S GOT RELIGION?
                                  By Susan Stamper Brown
Apparently, the Democratic Party’s latest strategy to win the White House in 2016 is “Let’s pretend to be religious.â€Now it’s all about Hillary’s faith, according to Democratic Party Vice Presidential hopeful Tim Kaine, who told a group in New Orleans that Hillary Clinton’s faith is at the “root of everything she does.†That’s quite a statement, considering all the years she’s been in the public’s eye.
Most likely, though, Kaine was referring to Hillary’s attachment to the “Social Gospel.†The Social Gospel is a cheap counterfeit for the real thing that liberals conjured up to promote socialism while relieving people from any guilt associated with living life according to their own standards, not God’s. The Social Gospel crowd concentrates on scriptures that instruct us to help the poor and feed the hungry. They ignore the ones where Jesus told those he helped and fed to “go and sin no more.â€
But, here’s the rub. If liberals really wanted to do things the right way, they’d do it themselves and not pass personal responsibility off to the government. Jesus never said governments are an acceptable replacement for lazy, no-good followers who refuse to do what he asks.
Obviously, Kaine was trying to paint Hillary in a softer, nicer light, while at the same time courting right-leaning anti-Trump evangelicals. It’s a political ploy. In May, Slate magazine ran a piece by Ruth Graham, “Can the Christian Left Be a Real Political Force?†— suggesting that Donald Trump’s rise in the GOP makes 2016 the perfect opportunity for the Democrat Party to win over anti-Trump evangelicals if they can find a way to lop their horns and replace them with halos to make them look like the “party of God.â€
What the author, Kaine and Democrat Party strategists fail to understand is that anti-Trump conservative Christians would never vote for Hillary. Nor will they be tricked by those bearing faux religion in the name of politics. Graham did her best to make a case for liberal Christianity, writing: “It must first be said that despite the empty pews, there’s reason to believe that liberal Christianity has been dormant, not dead.â€
In reality, those empty pews are what happens when we do things our way and cherry-pick the Gospel. Aa Pew poll rolled out last year found that mainline church denominations embracing the Social Gospel, like Hillary Clinton’s Methodist denomination, are in decline across the United States. In sharp contrast, the same Pew poll found that conservative Christian churches are vibrantly alive and growing.
The Slate magazine author accidentally answered why “liberal Christianity†is little more than an oxymoron when she wrote: “There’s a cost associated with membership…churches that ask more from their followers tend to be stronger…Many progressive churches, by contrast barely demand a pinky toe…They don’t pressure me when I skip; the sermons rarely suggest it matters whether I believe the creeds…By contrast, when I visit conservative churches…they feel alive: People are there because they think it matters for their everyday lives and for their eternal souls.â€
Those churches “feel alive†because they are…alive. It’s impossible to be truly excited about something that isn’t there. And it’ll never be there if it’s about politics rather than a personal, saving faith. Graham concludes: “If there is to be a resurgent Christian left, it will need to learn a trick or two from the very movement [conservative Christian] that overtook it a generation ago.â€
Tricks cannot revive that which never existed in the first place. As C.S. Lewis wrote: “Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means…it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.â€It’s a slippery slope, that road to Hell we’re headed, that American politics has deteriorated to this.
