God's Politics

Picked up an interesting book tonight at Powell's called God's Politics, by Jim Wallis. The basic premise of the book is that American politicians, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, are missing the point of religious issues by either perverting religious beliefs and focusing on key issues to pursue their agenda (such as focusing on abortion without tackling AIDS or people dying from the war in Iraq, as the "religious Right" are), or ignoring religious beliefs altogether and not allowing the various faiths of most Americans to play a role in politics at all (as the "secular left" are).

Very interesting read so far, the author is an editor for Sojourners magazine and apparently quite active both in evangelical Christianity and politics. He also comments every once in a while on the polarization of religion/secularism that mainstream media performs, something which I personally hate to see. Just tonight the local news, KGW, had a story about a group of "Christians" from a church in Kansas came all the way to Beaverton to protest Southridge High School's debate over the play The Laramie Project. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the article, but here's a related article from when the whole issue began [Edit: here's the article]. Now why did they have to go to all the trouble to label them Christians? Why not a more appropriate label, like "self-righteous judgmental compassionless bigots", who rather than showing anger at the fact that a human being who was created in the image of God was murdered, instead chose to focus on the fact that he was gay.

The introduction to God's Politics talks about Sojourners' campaign before the 2004 elections calling for people to realize that "God Is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat." Their campaign led to an ad that was published in more than 50 newspapers across the country. Here's a link to the ad itself [PDF].

This book has stirred up strange emotions in me so far. More than anything, it makes me wish that I was more active, more civic, more vocal about what I truly believe, what Jesus actually teaches us in the Bible, rather than what I have learned to associate with Christianity through the media and through popular beliefs. Christianity is NOT the same as being an American! While both are perhaps good in concept, we as a country are not following either ideology.