politics and Christian faith

A serious or even casual reader of this blog will detect that I'm a Christian and that I have center-right political inclinations.

So at one level, I fit the "stereotypical" religious voter that the media says was a part of why Bush won.

Stereotypes persist because there is probably some truth to it. However, stereotypes rarely give the full picture of a person or even the group being stereotyped.

Here is an item that caught my eye in my nearly daily visits at AS's Daily Dish which is currently under guest blog management. Excerpt:

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

AN EVANGELICAL LEFT: About a month ago, William Stuntz wrote this piece about political common ground between red-state evangelicals and blue-state liberals: "Helping the poor is supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics... I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it."

I have friends who are both on the left and on the right politically. Some on the left indeed are secular and don't think well of religion. But some on the left are religious folks and I can see what it is in the left the appeals to them. However, I have found the left to hold far too many views I disagree with.

In the end, if we take Christianity seriously, we are probably not going to feel too at home in either party. Christians who are part of the left will feel uneasy at the secularism of the left. Christians who are part of the right will feel uneasy at the cold calculations of the business friendliness of the right.

So, as in much of life, we try to make do the best we can.