How Would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative

Book by Klinghoffer David

1
With God, or Against Him

To anyone who takes God seriously, every election poses a radical question. Will we vote with Him, or against Him? The Bible is an unapologetically political book and an extremely conservative one. Some political views offend God, and those views are mostly liberal. To misperceive Scripture's political meaning is as much an error as to misperceive its moral meaning.

Yet liberal leaders and left-wing activists have obscured these clear truths. One thinks of Senator Hillary Clinton, who in a June 2007 forum on CNN claimed that it was her Christian beliefs that underlie her stands on controversial issues. With reference to herself and her fellow Democratic candidates, Clinton forthrightly said, "I think you can sense how we are attempting to try to inject faith into policy." That line alone, spoken by a Republican, would have been trumpeted on the front page of countless newspapers and Web sites as proof that the speaker harbors a secret plot to turn America into a theocracy along the lines of Iran or Saudi Arabia. Even a forthrightly Christian candidate like Mike Huckabee feels he has to be more cautious with his rhetoric than any Democrat does.

Most Republican politicians, in their usual timid fashion, would probably endorse the sentiment expressed by Religious Left guru Rev. Jim Wallis: "God is not a Republican or a Democrat." That sentiment is, however, obviously disingenuous. In his best-selling book God's Politics, Wallis makes it plain that he thinks Jesus was a left-liberal. Since the book came out in 2004, Wallis and his message have been taken up by the 2008 Democratic presidential contenders, who disguise in religious finery positions that in fact derive from a secular worldview, the very opposite of the biblical one.

As an Orthodox Jew, I offer this book as a call to arms to America's mostly Christian conservative voters. Some of those voters may follow other Republicans in feeling intimidated by Democratic rhetoric. They might be attracted to the advice of Evangelical former Bush aide David Kuo, who in his own best-selling memoir, Tempting Faith, advocates a "fast" from politics, a temporary break or abstention from practical advocacy: "By so passionately pursuing politics Christians have alienated their 'opponents' by giving the sense that to be Christian means to embrace certain policies. But the reality, of course, is that Christians can disagree about virtually any policy matter."

No, that's not the reality. Jews and Christians are free to think anything they want, however ridiculous. An American who says he bases his outlook on the Bible may turn out to believe in the tooth fairy as well, but that doesn't mean such belief finds support in Scripture. In fact, the Bible is as clear on politics as it is on morals. Plenty of Christians and Jews fail morally-I certainly do-but we would be wrong to pretend that, in doing so, we are being true to our religious beliefs. John McCain was right when he said, in a 2000 interview on beliefnet.com, that our "nation was founded primarily on Christian principles." That fact should have practical consequences.

It has become both more important than ever to state this openly and fearlessly. For we live in an era when faith is under sustained intellectual assault, and any suggestion of biblical religion's true political relevance is greeted with accusations of "theocracy."

A succession of New Atheist tracts shooting to the top of the best-seller list lately have seemed like distress flares launched from the deck of a foundering ship at sea. What happened to all that talk, once a favorite among conservatives, about America as a Christian nation? Surely the wildly enthusiastic reception bestowed on Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion signals that something has gone wrong with our supposedly religious national culture.

Yet even as the rise of the New Atheism signaled that the country's religious identity was less secure than previously thought, atheists and other advocates of secularism made a startling charge: that conservative religionists seek to foist theocracy on us all. As Dawkins himself observed, "Absolutism is far from dead. Indeed, it rules the minds of a great number of people in the world today, most dangerously so in the Muslim world and in the incipient American theocracy."
The charge has been echoed countless times from the political Left. Iran's rulers are classic theocrats, whose regime subjects their country to religious sharia law. Can we say the same of a Christian like George W. Bush? Indeed so, according to prominent recent books, including Kevin Phillip's American Theocracy, Rabbi James Rudin's The Baptizing of America, Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, and Chris Hedges's American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. As Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, asked after Bush sought to keep the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo from being dehydrated to death, "Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tells us what to do?" Even a GOP legislator, Connecticut's Christopher Shays, has lamented that his party is morphing into the "party of theocracy."

Is it true, as the atheists contend, that theocracy is implicit in the idea of religious conservatism? Every conservative I know denies this. A Christian leader I particularly admire, Charles Colson, calls the theocracy accusation "a false and malicious charge, and our critics know it." I believe they do know it.

In fact, the secular think tank where I'm a senior fellow, the Discovery Institute, has been tarred with the charge of theocracy because of its advocacy of allowing high school teachers to introduce mainstream scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution in the classroom. In the discourse of the secularist Left, the word "theocracy" functions as a synonym for "Silence them!"

But I hereby cast aside the fear of such slanders. Precisely because our country is steadily losing its religious mooring, it is time to be frank about what we want, or what we should want. No, it's not the theocracy of secularist imagining. That is a canard, sheer propaganda. Instead, it is a democratic and constitutional government but of a special kind: open to looking to the Bible for political wisdom. It is a biblically correct democracy.

My hope is to help Americans, especially those on the Right, stop feeling so shy about God talk when we discuss what's best for our country, to give people courage about applying biblical wisdom, openly, in our public lives. This makes most conservatives nervous, as if someone's going to accuse them of being a would-be mullah. The conservative establishment's allergy to religious talk explains the mass sneezing fit that greeted the sudden rise of Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, as a serious presidential contender. But just for a change, let's take the offensive and fight to alter the terms of the debate, because we are not exactly winning the argument right now. Pretending to fight "theocracy," secularists are in fact attempting a radical redirection of American life that seeks to silence the authentic Judeo-Christian heritage that has sustained America since the country's inception.

Meanwhile the folks you'd expect to be defending tradition are strangely mute, unintentionally lending support to the outdated secular insistence that the Bible be kept out of politics. On issue after issue-abortion and gay marriage come readily to mind-"respectable" conservatives and Republicans feel obliged to make their case entirely without reference to the true biblical underpinnings of their beliefs. Everyone knows that scriptural teaching is the main reason most conservatives feel as they do about the leading moral-political questions, but we obey a virtual code of silence-omerta, as the Mafia would put it-about this fact. We sound defensive, weak, ashamed, and dishonest. Then we wonder why the field of 2008 Republican presidential contenders was perceived as so unexciting. We sincerely ponder the enigma of evaporating Evangelical Christian support for "conservatism." The proportion of Evangelicals who think of themselves as Republicans has sunk from 50 percent to 44 percent since 2004, reports John C. Green, a political scientist with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Finally, finally, please-let's be brave and honest in stating what a biblical politics necessarily entails. That is what I do in this book, which examines twenty hot-button political issues in light of the scriptural worldview. What does God think about immigration? About gun control? About global warming? About the threat of so-called Islamofascism? It should go without saying that my political reading of the Bible is my own, drawing on the oldest biblical interpretive tradition, claiming roots that go back three thousand years and found in the Talmud and other ancient rabbinic texts. Yet Scripture's vision of the ideal society does not belong to Jews alone. A true Jewish and a true Christian politics are, I will argue, almost identical.

Such a vision is very different from that of secularism-including one way that will probably surprise and outrage many of my fellow conservatives. I refer to Chapter 20 of this book, which I introduce by noting how the Bible casts doubt on the neoconservative preoccupation with fighting "World War IV" against "Islamofascism." The Bible has a political vision and it is not neoconservative. It emphasizes the struggle against domestic cultural decay over a fight against foreign enemies.
Up till now, it has been impossible to have this conversation because conservatives were stampeded by political opponents. Now, despite the evidence of the New Atheist phenomenon that "Christian America" is weaker than e...