Are we on God's side?
Religion and politics
There is a story from the American Civil War. As President Lincoln was meeting with a group of advisors, an aide brought him news that the Union army had just won an important battle. One of the advisors triumphantly said, “God is on our side!” The president replied, “It is more important for us to be on God’s side.”
I thought of this story recently while browsing the internet for spiritually uplifting material and insight. While I am a believing Jew, I also cherish the spiritual insights of other religions. I appreciate their scriptures without endangering my own beliefs.
While searching for a specific scripture of a specific religion, I stumbled on a website operated by an American religious organization. I started to read their posts from the last few months, and was revolted by what I read.
You see, they were quite explicit in their over-the-top rage at, and condemnation of, President Donald Trump and all his supporters. The religion in question teaches the importance of detachment, non-discrimination, and universal love and peace.
I was not terribly shocked by the discovery. I have long known that many religious organizations are merely fronts for partisan political activism (just like schools and media outlets). They are branches of political parties, clothing themselves in a very small fig leaf of morality.
Exit polls showed that in general, people who are more religious tended to vote more conservatively than people who are less religious. I considered why that is, and whether that tendency is justified.
Conservatives tend to prefer a more structured, traditionally oriented society, with codes of conduct that discourage certain types of behavior. This is a worldview common to most religions.
On the other hand, the scriptures of most religions prescribe a very generous social safety net for society: a net not controlled by the government, to be sure, but one funded by generous contributions by the people - and those contributions are not always voluntary. This is a worldview that is congenial to the modern liberal.
If we are going to present ourselves to the world as believers in God’s holy words, then we must put His expectations ahead of our own political philosophies. Thus neither major political party owns God. But woe to the party that rejects God.
The concerns in this column are somewhat connected to the concerns I have regarding the recent explosive debate over H-1B visas - and a gift of a book that I just got from a friend. I will discuss these with you next time.
It is rather distressing how much politics has injected itself into religion, and, to a certain extent, how religion has affected politics. The former yields mostly bad results, while the latter is somewhat mixed. The leftist politics has damaged religion, but the far left would prefer to eliminate religion. God is invoked by the left, generally insincerely. On the right, especially in the South, religion is often into politics. This is generally positive as it reinforces respect for/of life and the practice of Biblical ethics/morals. One would think that Jews would be swinging to the right and would welcome some politics in the religion. They mostly stick to the left, where the Jews and the Jewish homeland are not well received, to state it mildly. It is mostly the religious, ultra religious that are on the right (and this seems to hold with Christians). We all should be on God's side.
Here here, the values that Judaism and Christianity bring are the result of being on God’s side.