Rick Mercier of the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., pens a thoughtful commentary, too rarely seen in larger news media.
Introductory paragraphs:
I cracked open my Bible and started rereading the Gospels.
And you know what? I can’t see what all this sanctimonious [election moral] values
rhetoric has to do with Jesus. I’ve compared what I read in Gospels
with what I’ve been hearing from the Religious Right, and I’ve
concluded that the holier-than-thous must have traded in their
red-letter editions of the Good Book for red-state versions that omit
most of Jesus’ teachings.The truth is, if you depend on the Christian right for your
theological sustenance, you probably won’t recognize the Jesus of the
Gospels.
Parable by parable, Mercier cites the religious right’s wrongs.
Many fundamentalists are beginning to see that what is currently happening in the American fundamentalist community is really a perversion of Christianity. Check out, for example, these remarks from the Public Christian blog:
“Did you know that Paul talks about greed – he equates it with idolatry – more than he talks about homosexuality? But the churches and the religious political activists don’t. And many Christians certainly don’t get as angry about greed as about homosexuality. But Jesus did. He also mentioned greed a number of times, and he never did specifically mention homosexuality.
“We get so worked up about sexual immorality among homosexuals we don’t know, and seldom mention pornography usage among fellow church members, or habitual flirting or other types of adulterous behavior. American culture is soaked in invitations to heterosexual immorality, and the Bible repeatedly speaks against it. But where was the Christian support for a constitutional amendment against heterosexual immorality? In fact we honor preachers who are guilty of those
behaviors.”
You can read the whole piece here:
https://www.publicchristian.com/bibletoday/peacesermon.shtml