News Intelligence Analysis
On Being a Liberal:
The Bible Says Christians Must Strive to Be Liberal, So When Bush-Supporters Call the Kerry/Edwards' Ticket 'Liberal,' Aren't They Praising and Blessing Them?
By Dennis Crews
July 7, 2004
After reading several news stories containing quotes that
excoriate John Kerry for being the most liberal senator,
and for choosing a liberal running mate, I started wondering
what the Bible might have to say about liberals. I looked in
my Young's Analytical Concordance of the King James Version of
the Bible and found just seven references to the world "liberal"
or some form thereof (liberality, liberally). To my fascination,
every one of them carried positive connotations. The words "conservative"
and "conserve" do not appear in scripture.
The most definitive Bible passage on liberals is found in Isaiah,
the Old Testament prophet of Christ from whom Handel drew inspiration
for his much-loved oratorio, "The Messiah." This is
telling, because most right-wing conservatives get far more traction
for their religious ideas from the Old Testament than the New.
Most folks on the religious right hate to be reminded of Jesus'
Sermon on the Mount. Nearly all the Lord's teachings, for that
matter, fly in the face of their politics. Jesus' regard for
the poor, and his warnings of the danger of riches, is particularly
galling to them. All of which makes the Bible's prophetic look
at liberalism even more relevant:
"The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practice hypocrisy, and to utter error against the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speak right. But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand." (Isaiah 32:5-8 KJV)
Never should any Christian be afraid to call himself a liberal.
Remember every passage of scripture containing any variant of
the word "liberal" is a positive reference. And in
Isaiah's passage above, I submit that "conservative"
would be a fair substitution for the word "churl."
That is, if the word "conservative" as defined by the
Bush administration's policies, and by right-wing religious Reconstructionists
and Dominionists is used. I have more repect for genuine traditional
conservatism, but that is a rare bird indeed these days, and
soon may be gone completely as the passenger pigeon or the dodo.
A few days ago I heard from an old friend, a Christian who stands
on the religious right side of our national divide. He bemoaned
that America is becoming so wicked, and he is disappointed that
so many of Reagan’s judicial appointees turned out to be
liberals. I'm sending him this message to cheer him up - the
Bible supports liberals! I reminded him that in my childhood,
people were still lynching Negroes, so wickedness isn't really
anything new. Black people weren't even allowed to drink the
same water or sit at the same table with whites, much less register
to vote. Thankfully the liberals put a stop to that. Liberals
today still want human dignity to be preserved, they still want
the poor to be fed and they want God's green earth protected
from those who would plunder it for the profits of a few.
Of course every generation has its unique problems, its own bogeymen
and its own moral battles to fight. Now it seems one of ours
is to reclaim the dignity of being a liberal - and putting those
hypocrites in their place who would "destroy the poor with
lying words" and impugn us with such churlish attitudes.
The more one studies Jesus' life and teachings, the more confidently
one can defend the cause of liberalism. Let's go to the Source
for our authority, and put the churls on the defensive for a
change - d
Dennis Crews has studied the religious right for over 20 years. He sat on the board of a conservative Christian ministry nearly the entire decade of the 1980's observing and writing about what he saw. You may reach him at: [email protected]
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