Is God a Republican?

One day last week, I was browsing at the local branch of our county library when this title caught my eye: "God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right" (2012). The author, Michael Sean Winters, who writes for National Catholic Reporter, traces Falwell’s rise from obscurity to national prominence as the founder of the Moral Majority.

The library where I found the book happens to be in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I now reside. It was here that Falwell established his megachurch and went on to become a television evangelist and a political activist. Here also is where he established a small Bible college that grew into Liberty University — a bastion of fundamentalist Christian nationalism with a worldwide online enrollment of over 115,000 students and an on-campus enrollment of 15,800. Liberty’s overriding mission is to train "Champions for Christ" — all of whom are expected to go forth and fight against the forces of secularism and for the political primacy of their brand of Christianity.

I’ve spent a lot of time on Liberty’s campus, attending student convocations and special events — including a Conservative Political Action Conference hosted there in March 2019. I wrote about that in a previous column ("Reporting from the right’s annual rally," March 8, 2019). It was, as I wrote then, "a moveable feast for devouring Democrats." The God they worship at Liberty, along with the rest of the Christian right, is a Republican and a reactionary conservative.

Personally, as I’ve confessed before, I don’t believe ours is a personal God who takes sides in partisan politics. But if ours were such a God, I have to believe He, She, or It would be a woke Democrat and a liberal. The irony is that Liberty University holds the Bible to be "inerrant . . . and authoritative in all matters." That view, of course, is widely shared among members of the Christian right. How then do they square their political activism with a New Testament God who drew a sharp distinction between the secular and the sacred. Christ is credited with telling his followers to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s" (Mark 12:17). He likewise insisted that his kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36).

Republicans, however, are nothing if not worldly. They are known for revering the right to acquire, own and protect property. So would a Republican God encourage people to sell their possessions and to give to the poor (Matthew 19:21)? Also, I doubt that the Jesus I learned about would disparage the downtrodden as responsible for their own plight and therefore undeserving of sympathy and support. Much less would that Jesus demonize members of the LGBTQ community. He epitomized tolerance. He warned his followers to judge not that they be not judged (Matthew 7:1). He was not above socializing with sinners and even with "publicans" — government officials (Luke 5:29-35). And he was all about love and forgiveness, even of one’s enemies (Matthew 6:14-15, et al).

Contrast all that with Jerry Falwell’s take on the 9/11 attacks. He claimed God had withdrawn his protection from America for tolerating homosexuality and abortion. Falwell was obviously harking back to the vengeful God of the Old Testament — the one Republicans obsessed with crime and punishment seem to worship. Again, the Jesus I learned about understood and forgave human frailty. Remember how he saved a woman taken in adultery from stoning? He recommended that a person without sin cast the first stone (John 8:7).

This Jesus, moreover, is said to have been the Prince of Peace. He warned that those who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). Which is not to say he was a pacifist. I just doubt Jesus would revere our military as much as most modern-day Republicans profess to do.

Finally, what about Christ’s attack on the sellers and money changers in the temple (Matthew 11:15-17)? A deity with no respect for small business and laissez faire capitalism is certainly not a Republican. Nor is the alliance between the Christian right and the Republican Party a holy one. It’s an appropriation in the pursuit of power.

More to the point, it’s insidious. As Jennifer Rubin wrote recently for the Washington Post (April 27, 2022), a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings Institution survey found that more than half of the GOP respondents agreed, or mostly agreed, that to be truly American is to be a Christian and that "God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society." Even more worrisome, half of the Christian nationalists polled support breaking rules to "set things right," and 40 percent believe "true patriots may have to resort to violence."

The America I learned about was not meant to be a Christian nation, much less a theocratic one. It was founded to be a multicultural, tolerant secular society in which people of all creeds, or none, can live together in peace and harmony. The best way to make America truly great — not again but in the first place — is to actualize that vision once and for all.

Contact Ed Palm at majorpalm@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Is God a Republican?