As Christians across the human race set up to observe the birth of Jesus, it's a adjustment minute to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, lip service that is our Christianized Republican Party.
There's nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven old age ago, when debating Aluminum Gore, then-candidate Saint George W. Shrub was asked to place his favourite philosopher and answered "Jesus." This year, however, the Christianization of the political party reached new high with Hand Romney's declaration that he believed in Jesus Of Nazareth Of Nazareth as his savior, in an attempt to stem the flowing of "values voters" to Microphone Huckabee.
My concern isn't the rift that have opened between Republican political pattern and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Fundamental Law that there would be no spiritual diagnostic test for officers in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the spread between the instructions of the Evangel and the sermons of the Gospel's Own Party that have widened past the point of absurdity, even as the apparent Christianization of the political party return apace.
The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser grade within a model of worldly standards. But if Shrub can conform his advocacy of pre-emptive war with Jesus' Sermon on the Saddle Horse warning to turn the other cheek, he's a more than originative theologist than we have got given him recognition for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this calendar month when he threatened to blackball House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.
It's not just Shrub whose catechism is a merry premix of torment and piety. Virtually the full Republican House deputation opposed the prohibition on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, lone Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have got come up out against torture, while only libertarian Bokkos Alice Paul have questioned the philosophy of pre-emptive war.
But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans — campaigners and electors alike — really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on in-migration as such as but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, observes not just Jesus' birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journeying obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Book isn't large on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a alien nor oppress him," Exodus states the Godhead told Moses on Saddle Horse Sinai, "for ye were aliens in the land of Egypt."
Yet the typical outcry coming from the Republican alkali this twelvemonth isn't simply to command the flowing of immigrants across our boundary lines but to penalize the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.
So Romney onslaughts Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee supports himself by parading the blurb of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose grouping harasses twenty-four hours manual laborers far from the border. The demand for a more than regulated in-migration policy come ups from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the pushing to persecute the immigrants already among us come ups distinctly, though by no agency entirely, from the same Republican right that protestations its Christian religion at every turn.
We've seen this sort of Christian Religion before in America. It's more than tribal than religious, and it billows at those modern times when our state is growing more diverse and economical chance is not abounding. At its tallness in the 1920s, the Rutherfordium Klux Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political look of nativist Protestants disturbance by the growth ranks of Catholics in their midst.
It's difficult today to conceive of KKKers thought of their missionary post as Christian, but billions of them did.
Today's Republican values electors don't really conflate their fury with their faith. Lou Dobbs is a purely laic figure. But nativist dogmatism is strongest in the Old Time Religion precincts of the Republican Party, and suffering betide the Republican campaigner who doesn't encompass it, as Toilet McCain, to his recognition and his political misfortune, can attest.
The most blue thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party's rank and register necessitate their campaigners to turn meaner with each passing play week.
And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, come ups Christmas, a vacation that couldn't be better calibrated to expose the Republicans' rank, fetid hypocrisy.
Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly. This article originally appeared in The American Capital Post.
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