Christianity and the Left

In an effort to befuddle American Christians into voting for Democrats with whom they share no values at all; Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and their minions are trying to convince you that they are Christians to, or at least respectful of Christian beliefs.

Megan Basham at The American Spectator points out that the recent events in the campaign of John Edwards puts the lie to that.

Blogging With Bile

Now that the hiring and subsequent retiring of John Edwards's two anti-Christian bloggers is over, conservative commentators from all corners of the internet have started bidding good night to the Edwards campaign. The public "nyah nyahs" demonstrate that many are still missing the larger picture of the incident: while this may or may not mean the end of the coiffed one's bid for president, it does not mean the end of unhinged hatred for Christianity from a growing faction on the left.

The blogging mischief made by Edward's staffers reveals more than his inept hiring practices and more than that secularists don't like evangelicals and Catholics expressing their faith through their politics. What we are witnessing is a loathing of Christ and of his followers that has never before been expressed so openly from such a large segment of one of our major political parties.

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How do Democratic candidates contend with a base that would treat Christianity's most basic doctrine so sneeringly, as Marcotte did when she wrote on her blog Pandagon: "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?"

Reveries about the potential abortion of the Messiah go far beyond the bounds of simply not liking right-wing believers. So did her revelation that Rick Santorum's public expressions of his religious beliefs make her want to, "go to a born-again church and scream about how God loves to come in our backyards for our milkshakes." (For those too innocent to untangle that web of putrid pop-culture metaphors, I'm afraid you're on your own.)

What Marcotte wrote wasn't just a complaint against conservative Catholics or evangelicals, it was a screed against God himself. Amongst the secular intellectual crowd, she is hardly alone.

Slate is running a weekly "Blogging the Bible" feature, ostensibly intended to retell portions of the Word in hip, modern lingo -- a caustic Cliff Notes for the Old Testament, if you will. But the flippancy used to characterize God's actions leaves the sneaking suspicion that it's more an attempt to patronize Scripture. As I write, today's entry describes the Lord of Hosts as being "Like a crazy girlfriend, [who] plays a confusing I-love-you-I-hate-you game..." Months ago in Columbus, Ohio, Moveon.org held a rally in front of a church by singing anti-Christian songs, blocking the entrance for the faithful. Hard to get more hostile than that.

Marcotte's partner in prejudice, Melissa McEwen, might have been slightly less wild-eyed in her treatment of believers, but she echoed the feelings of thousands of liberal blogs and websites when she referred to pro-life Christians as "wingnut Christofascists."

Megan Basham goes on to remind those of us who are Christian of something very important that I myself often forget, that Christ said that He did not come to unite, but to divide. We are to separate ourselves from evil, no matter how close that evil is to us if we wish to be one of God's people. That includes our practice of sacrifice, in however small a way, for others (but not for evil).

It is not an act of love to allow innocent people who are going to the market, or to the Church, or even to the Mosque, to be randomly murdered by terrorists. Yet, we now see our own Congress supporting exactly that. It is not an act of love to allow our fellow countrymen to to be threatened by madmen such as Saddam, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Kim Jong-Il. We have not done wrong to do what we did and are doing in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Bosnia. I only wonder why we are not defending Serbs and their Churches and Monasteries in Kosovo when they are now the object of ethnic cleansing.

Actually I do not wonder about that at all. The (leftist) UN as well as European and American liberals will not tolerate support for Christians, be they Serbs or Sudanese, or Iraqi. The terrorists are for them the "freedom fighters" (an argument that is a perversion of an idea of President Reagan). Liberals use the language of love and peace to support exactly the opposite. Love women? Then support abortion. Don't think of the child who is being killed because he is inconvenient to the mother. Feel sympathy for the difficult lives of prisoners? Then work to set them free. Think nothing of the people who will be victimized by recidivist criminals.

³⁴"Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; ³⁶and a man's foes will be those of his own household. ³⁷He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; ³⁸and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

⁴⁰"He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. ⁴¹He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. ⁴²And whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward."

Loving others does not prevent us from identifying evil when we see it, and separating ourselves from it.

What began as a slow murmur in film, art, and academia has now progressed to a full-tilt caterwauling on the Left: "We hates him, we haaaates him" (to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkein's most vivid creation).

At least those of us who take Christ at his word can find comfort in the idea that their very reaction validates his claims -- that he did not, as the milquetoast peace-activists are wont to claim, come to be a unifying presence, but a divisive one. As for what's to be done about this irrational hatred of us and our Savior, there's nothing we really can do. Except what has always been our commission: start fishing.

And perhaps we should pray that Ms. Marcotte experience a Damascus moment -- after all, in God's infinite humor and mercy, the greatest Christ-hater of all time wound up being the very man who planted the faith plaguing her today.