Politics and Religion in SW Ohio.

[Kukesa]

I thought I learned in a long-ago-taken Civics class that here in the USA we don't mix religion and politics. Something about the beliefs of our founding fathers, maybe? Feel free to jog my memory.

This week, on a drive down SR 73, east to Wilmington, I passed three churches with signs on their front lawns. Here's how they read:

"When the righteous rule, the people rejoice."

"We voted the Bible!"

"Protect our unborn children. Vote the Bible."

And, here in Dayton, the GOP had a huge GOTV rally HOSTED BY A CHURCH on the Saturday before Black Tuesday. It was attended by over 2,000 folks and the speakers included Sean Hannity and Oliver North.

And then, there's that huge styrofoam Jesus on I-75, just south of Middletown -- we discussed this in another thread. The pastor is the guy who originated the catchy and glib phrase "Vote the Bible".

Do any of you think there's something terribly wrong here?

Don't churches fall into the tax-exempt category?

What the hell is going on, and is there anything we can do about it before it gets even worse?

:shrug:

[BayStateBoy]

1. Yes, They Are Tax Exempt but of course shouldn't be n/t

[unblock]

2. the problem is, do YOU want to be the politico that calls to tax churches?

[LiberalFighter]

4. I wonder how many regularly attend church vs don't and...

how many enjoy paying more taxes because churches don't.

[Kukesa]

13. Hmmm . . . it's becoming clearer. Thanx unblock. n/t

[demodonkey]

3. Speak UP, Ye of the Christian LEFT!

[mahina]

9. That is why the response has to come from the people.

We have more power together anyway.
Use http://www.fundrace.org/block_party.php you can look up any number of locations and download the data into excel , mailmerge, send requests to other dems in your area to raise a ruckus. Meet the pastors. You don't need a group, just you and he , and the next person and the next person will have even greater impact. WE are just as responsible if we let it happen.
Please see my tagline.

If you don't love your neighbor you don't love God, right? We can be missionaries just as much as they can.
If we suceed and they find out how badly they have been deceived I promise you they will move mountains too.
This kind of thing doesn't have to wait for some big politician to do something, it is up to us. Distributed action, baby!

Off to leaflet the fundy church parking lot here with a loving introduction to christian philosophy and the conflicts between that and our actions as a nation.

Edited to say, my tagline vanished..."Dissent without resistance is CONSENT" - Thoreau

[lizzieforkerry]

15. Where did you get the leaflets?

[mahina]

18. Just winged it, I'm sure someone else could have done better.

Who said "the perfect is the enemy of the good?"

[SharonAnn]

5. They were the third reason I left the Republican Party and joined

the Democrats. You see, I vote my values.

It was a three stage process.
1. Under Reagan, I stopped voting for Republicans because of the environment. I started supporting women candidates because of EEO and women's issues when Clarence Thomas was appointed by Reagan to head EEO.
2. Under Bush, I started identifying myself as an Independent rather than a Republican. Still didn't vote for Republicans. After the Clarence Thomas hearing, when they insulted Anita Hill, I started strongly supporting (financially especially), the candidates on Emily's list.
3. When the Religious Right (which is neither) ran a slate of stealth candidates to try to take over the State School Board, to remove the teaching of evolution in schools and other agenda items, I realized I'd been supporting the Democratic Party platform for many years and so I officially joined and identified myself to family and friends as a Democrat.

All that time I was living in the Dayton, Ohio area. I saw lots of changes over the years, and they were mostly ugly and mostly identified with Reagan, Bush I, and the Religious Right. I thought they were all very, very frightening.

[holiday]

6. I live in this area..

I think Churches should stay out of it. They need to realize that they help lead their congregation but the people need to vote for what they believe.

Besides, Dubya isn't a true "Christian" in my mind. He talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.

[AwakeAtLast]

7. Will I get flamed if all I say is...

AMEN!

And don't forget, people that SW Ohio is close to Indiana.

If we all truly voted the Bible, there would not be one Repub in office.

[morcatknits]

10. They can reference the Bible

But they surely don't quote much of it, especially the Sermon on the Mount. I'm noticing a dangerous trend for the far right to over-identify themselves as "the righteous" instead of "sinners saved by grace." That's a free pass right into the fascism that they seem to be practicing.

It is important for liberals and progressives to identify issues other than just sex, as being moral value issues. The religious far right doesn't understand it. I was raised in a fundamentalist tradition, and whenever the word "moral" was uttered, it was always in the sexual context. We need to find venues for showing that following Jesus doesn't mean slaughtering innocent living children, nor does it mean gutting the environment. We need to show that having an education doesn't automatically mean one is an "educated fool," as the saying goes here in Texas. For the far right religious, education goes against God.

Liberals and Progressives are able to settle for fewer absolutes than conservatives, thus the conservative inability to tolerate those who think differently. It is a very difficult problem, and there are probably many approaches to addressing it.
morcatknits

[Selteri]

12. That is very similar to my own voting evolution past that I

couldn't vote for Bush the first due to my age, I missed the Clinton election by less than 6 months which was annoying, but acceptable since I would have voted independant. in 96 I was foolish enough to believe the bull**** but have since then found that the republican party has become increasingly more and more fascist and blind to the reality of the world around them. At this point they are histrically very close to the Dixiecrats of the laste 50s before they began their downfall.

So why can't they fall faster?

[Malva Zebrina]

8. Language

Protect our unborn children. Vote the Bible."

First of all, a four celled fertilized egg is not a child. I soon expect them to be taking tax cuts for their "child"

Second, my fetus is not THEIR child and neither is anyone else's. The so called unborn children are not "our" children. The only thing that is theirs is their own potential child. All pregnancies do not belong to them.

It is amazing how the use of language is never scrutinized by the sheep.

[Gyre]

11. The bible

Is a long-winded fairy tale; nothing more. Hardly a chart by which to set the course of the US ship of state.

Gyre

[AngryOldDem]

14. This mix of politics and religion is indeed toxic

I swear -- if Christ and God were walking the earth during the past six months, I believe they would have taken out cease and desist orders to stop the unauthorized use of their images and likenesses by certain politicians, political parties, and churches alike.

When these churches begin to speak out against the war; when they begin to advocate for affordable housing for the poor; fairer tax solutions to fund schools; nonpunitive welfare-to-work programs; health care; and all those other issues that will substantially impact the quality and value of life in this country, THEN I might listen to what they have to say on politics.

It was especially galling to see the Catholic Church at work this year. It will protect its nonprofit status until Christ comes back -- and they went right up to the line on it this year. We were all told how to vote -- but it was done so skillfully that no legal objections could be raised. Issues like the ones I wrote about above were conveniently glossed over in favor of one -- abortion. Guess what. No issue operates in a vacuum. If we want to reduce the rate of abortion, we have to make the climate in this society more receptive to life. And it's not by a war based on a lie, it's not by punishing single mothers who find barely-minimum wage work and then have their families' food stamps cut; it's not by making people grow up, live, and die in homeless shelters.

I've been through a lot with Catholicism, but this is really stressing my continued relationship with it. Hell yes -- revoke their tax status. Then they can speak out all they want on politics, and not insult my intelligence as they do so.

[lizzieforkerry]

16. This is what I have been saying since Tuesday

" I just don't understand, after all of the work the Churches did to get people to vote the Bible, they went and voted for Bush anyway" :shrug:

[Kukesa]

17. Maybe Hitler was onto something . . .

The National Government will regard as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
>
--Adolph Hitler, My New World Order, Proclamation to the German Nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933
>

I think I'll use that as my tag line.

[Philostopher]

19. Sadly, this has been going on for decades, lady.

The ministers at my church down in the boondocks near Cinci was preaching Reagan in veiled ways from the pulpit as soon as he got there in about 1982. I'll tell you who's responsible for this, too -- bible colleges like Cincinnati Christian Seminary, who encourage their ministers to worship neocon politics as if it were religious dogma. They're taught that radical right-wing Republicans are their allies in 'saving us all.'

For my part, I went through the opposite revolution others on this thread did -- my liberalism caused me to leave church. I got sick of the one-issue thing about abortion, which CCS ministers all, to a man, use to try to drive a wedge in their congregations or browbeat them into voting for Republicans.

My dad -- who also left the church because of this, and still wasn't a church member when he died of cancer in 1996 because of it -- believed a progressive attitude of being kind to those less fortunate and not letting oneself get all caught up in the details was the most Christlike behavior. The minister of the church he'd attended for about 30 years visited him once in the last four months of his life; the Methodist minister came by and saw him every week. I think my father still considered himself Christian when he died, but I don't believe he considered himself a member of any church.

My mother still attends that church, all her friends are there -- she's attended the same church since she was a child. She told me that this year, if she'd heard one peep of politicking out of the pulpit, she'd have gotten up and left -- but for some reason, the guy kept his mouth shut, this year. Perhaps he was worried about endangering the church's tax status -- he was egregious back in the Reagan era, and I think my dad may have threatened him with reporting the church to the IRS over it, when he had his final meltdown and bailed out.

It saddens me, in some ways, though I'm not sorry I stopped identifying with evangelical Christianity. For me, it was philosophically too narrow -- even when I still attended, I kind of felt like we all reach our own level with religion. Regrettably, it looks like many churches have made a bargain with a beautiful man that may not be the beautiful man they think he is. For some reason, they just can't smell the brimstone ...

[AngryOldDem]

20. Christ, remember, gave only two commands

>>>My dad -- who also left the church because of this, and still wasn't a church member when he died of cancer in 1996 because of it -- believed a progressive attitude of being kind to those less fortunate and not letting oneself get all caught up in the details was the most Christlike behavior.>>>


Christ's sole directives to us were thus: Love thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might; and love thy neighbor as thyself.

The rest, as my brother-in-law likes to put it, is commentary.

[Kukesa]

21. "reporting the church to the IRS . . ."

is this a possibility?

Something we can get involved in?

Help me here -- I've always been a Democrat, but this is first time I've become actively involved in a presidential campaign. I'm still wet behind the ears.

Do tell, nownow, do tell.

[Philostopher]

22. I don't know -- it's a fine line with that stuff.

I think you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a minister encouraged people to vote for a specific candidate. I think they can be as partisan as they want, as long as what they're saying isn't perceived to be an actual encouragement to vote for a particular candidate.

Another thing -- there are plenty of African American churches that also toe the line encouraging people to vote for Democrats, apparently. If Dems start nicking evangelical white churches for this, do you doubt that the GOP would start hammering AA churches for the same behavior?

They've got Christians over a barrel on this one. My dad was pissed off about it, and said something to the minister -- Mom said she hadn't heard anything out of the guy since Dad died. I wonder if maybe my father's death, though the minister clearly didn't respect him, might have had some effect on his thinking in the past eight years. It may have occurred to him that being too clearly partisan was hurting the collection plate. That's my guess.

Bible colleges teach ministers what they can and can't say, and I'm sure they help them determine exactly what line they can't cross, what line would endanger their non-profit status. Doubtless white bible colleges like CBC/CBS/CCS/whatever it's going by this year are very, very specific about how their graduates can influence their congregations to vote for Republicans without endangering their status. But, then, black bible colleges may do the same thing.

[AngryOldDem]

23. African-American churches and candidates

I believe some people have quietly raised the issue about candidates appearing in African-American churches -- they say it is a double standard to get on some churches for getting into politics while giving these churches a "free pass" on the same thing.

I don't quite agree. First, African-American churches invite candidates -- all candidates -- in to speak before their congregations. In effect, this is the same as a candidate appearing before the Elks Club, a trade organization, or a professional group. The candidate is there to "prove" that he or she is worthy of the congregation's time. Plus, in the African-American community, church is the thread that holds the social fabric together -- candidates need to go where the people are. And they're most often in church.

I agree this is a thorny issue. And my Solomon's wisdom thinks that all political activity should be declared out of bounds in church. But I don't think the solution is that easy.

[Philostopher]

24. It's never really simple, is it?

As you say, it's a different ballgame for African Americans. The church is a different kind of social nexus than it is for 'white America.'

Their churches always have been centers of more than religious activity -- they were the only places African Americans were allowed to gather unmolested before the civil rights era, so they had to get everything done at once, and if church was where you got it done, it just was. The civil rights marches often were coordinated through northern (white) and southern churches back in that era -- they were the communication system for many very poor communities, since often African Americans didn't have the luxury of things like a private line telephone. They could only discuss and plan things face to face if they did it at church. If they'd tried to gather and discuss and organize in any other context, most likely they'd have been arrested.