Paul Wilczynski's Observations

Amy Smith: Vote 'Wrong', Go to Hell?

Amy Smith has a good commentary in the LA Times about the repercussions of the actions of Pastor Chan Chandler of the East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states!"; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women's suffrage and the civil rights movement.

So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough. U.S. senator and former Sunday school teacher Hillary Clinton is accused of faking religion when she talks about faith. Pope Benedict XVI talks about a smaller, purer Catholic Church and the first to be counted out is Father Thomas Reese, a liberal Jesuit who was the editor of America magazine until he was forced to resign last week.

Conservative leaders use the phrase "practical secularists" to describe believers who they feel are inadequately observant. CNN host Wolf Blitzer buys into the spin and suggests on-air that conservative columnist Robert Novak is a better Catholic than the devout Paul Begala, presumably because Begala is a Democrat.

This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don't have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.

Thanks to Holy Weblog for pointing this out.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:28 AM