The Religious Right
Evangelicals number roughly a quarter of American politics. Though politicians desperately want their votes, neither Democrat nor Republican 2008 National Conventions major speeches did much to court them.
Compare their tepidness to the boldness of Ronald Reagan during his acceptance speech during the 1980 Republican National Convention. “Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge to us all.”
In every election since 1980, when Republicans energized the “values voter” or “Christian right” they’ve won the presidential election. When they didn’t - they lost. If the GOP continues their ambivalence towards the religious right, they’ll soon be as relevant as the Whigs.
So what do Christian-voters want? What should we want?
“It is impossible to be pro-life and have one’s compassion end at the moment of birth.”
- Governor Mike Huckabee
If politicians really want the “Evangelical Vote” they must boldly pursue it, enacting policies that are more than lip-service. And they should go after these simple principles:
“A housewife’s work … is the one for which all others exist.”
- C. S. Lewis
Sanctity of Family and Marriage: I place this first because I believe it is the most important. The family is the basic unit of civilization and it has been ever since we stopped living in caves. Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of that unit and the core of our society. It’s a system that works and the best system for the child.
C. S. Lewis was right when he wrote that all the laws of men, the military, the markets, the judiciary, and everything else – if they don’t help a woman raise her child, then they should be discarded.
Besides, there are huge economic reasons for keeping the family a priority:
“Liberals are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted.”
- Ann Coulter
Right to Life: This is such a thorny issue that I will deal with it in another part. Suffice to say, a culture that murders her own children is doomed.
John Paul II said you can tell a lot about a culture by how it treats it’s young. When you devalue anyone - you devalue everyone.
In a culture where we have a selfish disregard for human life - where we blithely murder 50 million of our own children - why should we be surprised when Wall Street moguls steal us blind, profit off selling companies short, spiral the losses of millions into a bottomless pit?
“You, in the West, have millions who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness… (You) are not hungry in the physical sense, but you are in another way. You know you need something more than money.”
- Mother Theresa
Defense of our Judeo-Christian values: Our values of compassion and tolerance made America the greatest nation on earth, and are the difference between the “greatest generation” and the people alive today. This is so patently obvious that no one bothers to refute it.
So why don’t we defend those values? What’s getting in the way?
Secularism, liberalism, and the oh-so-charitable desire not to offend.
“Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”
Believe it or not, Nietzsche - that famous “God is dead” philosopher - acknowledged that Western culture is based on Christianity. He said our Judeo-Christian values are so ingrained into the fabric of our lives that they’ve taken up a life of their own. Ominously, he predicted that if you removed Christian values, then our values would disappear as well.
How right he was! The erosion of our Judeo-Christian values has meant high divorce rates, out of wedlock children, and the crassness of society.
What logically follows can not be a surprise. Kill our Judeo-Christian culture and what America will soon adopt the culture of the rest of the world, which includes: