Bottom Line: L.O.S.E. suggests that no political party, ever, is on God’s side of any issue . . . or at least we cannot know if He is.
God is not a Republican or a Democrat!
This bit of profound wisdom, recently seen on the bumpers of Christian Democrats, should be the basis of all political decision making by the traditional Christian.
As an organization L.O.S.E. is committed to being fiercely non-partisan, just like God. It is self-evident that if political independence is good enough for the Almighty it ought to be good enough for us.
There are many implications of applying this principle universally that some Christians (afraid of consistency) will dislike. The beauty of being a political organization run by academics is that L.O.S.E. is not afraid of appearing absurd to most in order to achieve academic respectability.
The statement “God is not a Republican or a Democrat” can be understood one of two ways.
More fundamentalist readers of this statement within L.O.S.E. take it literally and believe we should do nothing God would not do. God pays no taxes. We should not pay taxes. God does not obey speeding laws. We should not obey speeding laws. In fact, God is not an American so we should not be Americans.
This causes our members that take their bumper stickers less literally (and more poetically) some difficulties. They point out that God also has no gender or single location. It has proven hard for some L.O.S.E. members to be metrosexual and omnipresent.
As a result these more “liberal” L.O.S.E. members understand the holy bumper sticker to imply that Christians can be in a political party, but cannot believe that God favors one party over any other or that one party is more godly than another.
Using God as a prop to advance a political agenda is so obviously wrong that even the “religious right” is opposed to it. They slyly claim that though God is not “on their side,” that their party has placed itself on God’s side.
This kind of sophistic reasoning has haunted American politics for some time.
Religious extremist Abraham Lincoln was simply wrong when he believed that America (or his Republican party) could be on “God’s side.”
The proper Christian response in the unpleasant and divisive atmosphere of 1861-1865, the position L.O.S.E. would have adopted, would have been to refuse to choose between the Republican party of the time and the Democrat. God was, after all, not on any side as Lincoln himself pointed out . . . and how could anyone claim to know His will regarding such difficult issues?
It was wrong for Lincoln to troll for conservative Evangelical votes in the North by claiming that by ending slavery his party and the Union had put itself on God’s side. The political parties of the period were very complicated. If the Republicans got slavery right, what about their tariff policy? How do we know God’s opinion on that?
How did Lincoln dare to think the injustice of slavery greater than other political issues of the day?
L.O.S.E. is opposed to evil. Be clear on this: Evil is Wrong! We will never compromise on this, but at the time of the Civil War good and academically respectable people disagreed on whether slavery was wrong. By taking a position on the issue, the American Evangelical Church in the North shamed itself by associating with abolitionism and the Republican Party before it was universally accepted by all scholars that abolition was good!
Now of course L.O.S.E. is boldly opposed to American slavery since such a position unites and does not divide.
What of our prophetic witness some will ask? Of course, preachers should have pointed out that slavery was evil, but they should have not been so partisan about it. After all, some Republicans were pro-slavery and some Democrats were anti-slavery. The fact that the overwhelmingly majority of Republicans were opposed to slavery and were (on the whole) the only effective anti-slavery political force is beside the main point.
The church’s main objective politically is to appear non-partisan. Even at the expense of prolonging a particular evil, it must not compromise its neutrality by allowing its prophetic message to be co-opted by a party.
To show the reader how bad partisan deployment of God-talk can become it will be vital to give you an example. This example is extremely narrow, sectarian, and (in fact) marks one of the low points of Church-state relations.
Next term several Christian Colleges are planning a conference to repent of the following rhetoric and the partisanship it displays.
Here is an ugly example of Christian leaders equating a War driven by the Republican Party with Christianity:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.Chorus
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my condemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.”Chorus
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.Chorus
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.Chorus
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.Chorus
How dare the writer of this wildly un-American song mingle church and state in this way? How dare the Republican Party of the period use it? How dare the leader of that party spend most of his first speech of his second term in office maundering about the Bible and “being on God’s side?”
The Republicans of that period repeatedly impugned the patriotism of a brave soldier, George McClellan, because he had the courage to challenge the military wisdom of a partisan Republican president (following numerous changes in generals and strategy by that hapless Republican who had no military experience worth citing by his own admission!).
And sadly that tactic worked as the partisan leader was reelected in great part on the ballots of Evangelicals.
Was it then proper for the man elected after such a vote to wrap his second term in God and the Bible?
Could anything be worse than the bloody war time leader of a party (following a divisive election) who was the head of only a part of the nation having the nerve to say:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The arrogance of the man! Having conceded that Godly men could be found on both sides, Lincoln went on assuming that slavery must end and that the war should continue. He had the nerve to believe he knew the mind of God well enough to continue a war that would kill hundreds of thousands of people.
We have seen this kind of self-assured, religiously driven hubris in war-time Presidents since.
Lincoln kept forgetting that the fact that “God is not a Republican or a Democrat!” implied that both parties were equally right about the great issues of the day.
Bluntly: the more a political party agrees with the Church the more we should rush to keep our distance from it. It is even more important to find a few token people in the other party to support. The very ineffectiveness of this strategy is a sign of its prophetic and other worldly power.
In any case, there are always some people in both parties who disagree with the mainstream position of their party. Didn’t it disempower abolitionist Democrats when abolitionists went off in a rush to the Republican Party?
It is merely being foolishly practical (and not prophetic) to note that abolitionist Democrats would have supported slave owning Democrats for chairs of Senate and House committees. Isn’t it more important to have some abolitionists in both parties, even if only a few in one, and so remain non-partisan than to worry about whether the Speaker of the House owned a slave or two?
The majority of L.O.S.E. takes comfort from this fact and is willing to equate issues on which God’s opinion is clear (pro-life, defense of traditional marriage) with issues where His opinion is not clear.
God wants us to help the poor, but He hasn’t said that the government should do it through progressive taxation.
Nevertheless, it COULD BE that this is the best way to fulfill God’s will. We shall take the possible (one means of helping the poor) good as being as important as the certain (pro-life) good in politics!
The fact that Democrats are certainly wrong (nationally) about the fundamental areas where God has spoken does not diminish the fact that they might be right (and most academics think they are!) about areas that are less clear!
Which ever view of the Remarkable Bumper Sticker one takes (”God is not a Republican or a Democrat”) is is obvious that a Christian cannot advocate joining a political party. Doing so might be wrong and Christians should avoid taking any position that might be wrong.
If we are wrong, then it would bring shame to the Church!
Like most academics, we here at L.O.S.E. would rather commit one thousand sins of omission than one sin of commission.
The easiest way to never be wrong is to oppose evil and all sinful behavior without mucking about too much in the means of ending it.
While it is true that one party helped end slavery in the USA and another helped defeated fascism, we must avoid the error of the Christians of those times of thinking that this placed those parties on “God’s side.”
It is so hard, very, very hard to know God’s side. Scores of academic conferences have shown how thinking the Civil War had anything to do with ending slavery or World War II had anything to do with ending fascism is simplistic. So much of normal reasoning, outside of academic conferences is simplistic.
Some will say that in the case of a “culture of life” God’s opinion is obvious. They will think that being alive is more important than receiving a welfare check.
But is this true? Or is it more simplistic reasoning?
This is a matter for study by academics over the next several decades. How do we know that those done to death in the culture of death would not prefer that to a culture in which art is not subsidized by the government?
These are issues best left to academic study and not to simplistic equation of “pro-life” with being in fact “pro-life.”
After all there is an argument to be made that the best way to reduce abortion is to elect candidates who are in favor of abortion.
If Northern Evangelicals had not fallen prey to the equally simplistic “pro-slavery continues slavery” argument, then perhaps they would have not rushed off to the Republican party. God was, after all, neither a Republican or a Democrat.
L.O.S.E. hopes you think about it.
