Religious Left Voter Guides

Religious Left Voter Guides [Excerpts]

Allegedly manipulative conservative religious voter guides often get lots of media play. But Religious Left groups publish their own guidance, although for a much smaller potential constituency.

The 1.2 million member United Church of Christ (UCC), whose elites are probably the most left-leaning of all major U.S. denominations, has helpfully composed “Our Faith, Our Hope” guides to direct how liberal Christians should think in politically correct terms about climate controversies, socialized medicine, the U.S. presence in Iraq, immigration and the Welfare State.

Conservative Christian groups typically focus their voter guides on issues to which Christianity has historical teachings, such as marriage and abortion, while often also emphasizing church/state and religious liberty issues. These conservative religionists usually do not spotlight issues emphasized by secular conservative groups, such as tax rates, economic regulation and foreign policy. In contrast, Religious Left voter guides merely echo the refrains of the secular left. How their guides are specifically informed by religious faith is often not clear.

On Global Warming, the UCC voter guide denounces the U.S. for emitting “almost 25 percent of greenhouse gases” in the world, while asserting that the world’s poor will be “greatly impacted because they live on and from lands devastated by climate change.” Naturally, the guide does not explain how the world’s poor will suffer from the economic strangulation that many Global Warming zealots seek in their quest to save “The Planet.”

Climate change, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, is “established fact,” the UCC voter guide insists, while urging church goers to demand that candidates explain how they will better serve “The Planet” than has the Bush Administration. The guide frets over America’s “insatiable thirst for fossil fuels,” while emphasizing solar energy and hydrogen as potentially magical solutions that are carbon free.

Chronic poverty in America, according to the UCC voter guide, is exclusively faulted on a parsimonious nation unwilling to care for the needy through a boundary-less Welfare State. Regrettably, it opines, President Bush’s 2009 budget “continues tax breaks for the most affluent, cuts health, education, child welfare and other services, seeks the highest Pentagon base budget ever, and asks for another $70 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Arguably, the billions spent by the U.S. military have provided more quantifiable results than the trillions of dollars engorged by the Welfare State. But the UCC wants more spending on failed policies, rather than examination of social pathologies that actually perpetuate poverty.

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[TBC: Having left the certainty of God’s Word, it is not surprising that the UCC has embraced the shifting sand of human wisdom that will never meet the true need of man.]