Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez
August 30, 2019
The Democratic National Committee has taken its stand, and it’s against orthodox Christianity. It passed a resolution last Saturday calling for the Party to be more inclusive toward non-believers. On its own that’s not remarkable. But the document also strongly denounces Christian belief and action.
The key paragraph:
Those most loudly claiming that morals, values, and patriotism must be defined by their particular religious views have used those religious views, with misplaced claims of “religious liberty,” to justify public policy that has threatened the civil rights and liberties of many Americans, including but not limited to the LGBT community, women, and ethnic and religious/nonreligious minorities …
The party’s hostility toward Christian beliefs and values was clear enough before. Putting it on paper this way, however, raises the message to another level.
Trying to Put Christianity on the Defensive
The Democrats want to see Christians on the defense. And they’re good at putting us there. They have special skill with scare words. Even the simple word “particular” makes us look small, small-minded, and off in an intellectual corner somewhere. Of course none of that is true.
The saying goes, “Religions should keep out of politics;” but this is politics failing to return the favor. Democrats are poking deep into religion here. Religion should feel free to answer.
They put “religious liberty” in scare quotes, as if the concept of it weren’t in all America’s founding conversations, and in the first paragraph of the Bill of Rights. They speak, too, of “civil rights,” “liberties,” and “minorities.” America has sacralized these words, hardly ever stopping to ask when they apply, and when they’re nice-sounding words that don’t belong where they’re being used.
The Worldview Divide Behind This
And there’s no simple response to this. That’s not because the answer is unclear, but because so much needs explaining to get it across. We live in different worlds, as it were. When a party takes aim at the Western world’s moral foundation, it’s no longer making mere political statements. This is a worldview statement.
In the Democrats’ world, “civil rights” are no longer endowed by our creator. They’re human products, human inventions. Gay marriage is example number one: It became a right when five Supreme Court justices said it was.
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In the Democrats’ world, everything is about sex, race, “equality,” or economics, in that order. But economics in their world is all about sex, race, and “equality,” too, so forget I mentioned it.
In the Democrats’ world, things are simple. Elsewhere in the resolution, for example, they say, “immigrants make American society stronger.” How black-and-white can you get? Could it be that not every immigrant makes us stronger?
Politics and Religion
The saying goes, “Religions should keep out of politics;” but this is politics failing to return the favor. Democrats are poking deep into religion here. Religion should feel free to answer.
Again, though, this isn’t just about religion. It’s about Dems’ entire view of reality — a view that in many ways stands directly against a biblical view.
Christianity gets criticized for aligning with the Republican Party. I’m not comfortable with that myself. There’s great danger in tying ourselves to any political group. But what choice do Democrats leave us now? There are only two major parties. One of them has made its stand. It’s against us. We can’t vote Democrat and hold to our Christian values and beliefs.
Let me repeat that: We can’t vote Democrat and hold to our Christian values and beliefs. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with everything our president does. It doesn’t even mean we have to be Republicans. But for all the options seemingly open to Christians, one of them is shut tight, at least for now — by Democrats’ own decision.
Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream, and the author of A Christian Mind: Thoughts on Life and Truth in Jesus Christ and Critical Conversations: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens, and the lead editor of True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism.
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