Now here’s an idea.
Members of an Idaho county Republican Party recently sent a letter to the state GOP asking that it endorse a proposal to get the legislature to declare Idaho “formally and specifically a Christian state.”
Apparently a lot of Republicans across the nation think this is a good idea. According to a new Public Policy Polling survey 57% of them would like for the U.S. itself to officially make Christianity our national religion.
Wow! What a great idea. Think of all the possibilities if the U.S. declared itself a Christian nation.
A host of new laws would be passed to show we meant business.
First among them would certainly be placing restrictions on the selling and buying of guns, as well as banning military type rifles to the general public. Any genuinely “Christian nation” would do everything it could to reduce the violent crime rate in the U.S., the highest among all Western nations.
Capital punishment would be banned, of course, simply because real Christians do not believe in an “eye for an eye” criminal justice system, especially one fraught with failures and mistakes.
Equal pay for equal work for women would become law because real Christians reject any form of economic inequality.
The Voting Rights Act would be reinstated fully because real Christians reject discrimination under any circumstances.
Gays and lesbians would be given the same civil rights all other Americans enjoy because real Christians believe in equal treatment under the law for all citizens.
Military spending would drop like a rock. No genuinely Christian nation would maintain a military industrial complex, believing as it would what President Eisenhower said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Funding for programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Head Start would increase by millions, and Obamacare would be expanded into Medicare for everyone because this would be a practical way a genuinely Christian nation could show it believes in loving your neighbor as yourself.
Every young person wanting to go to college or get vocational training would receive whatever financial aid he or she needed, believing as a genuinely Christian nation would that caring for the future of its children is one of its first moral obligations.
And perhaps best of all, all politicians – all – would immediately be held to a radically new moral standard because a genuinely Christian nation would not accept the notion that business as usual was the best its government could do.
I don’t know about you, but I think that Idaho county Republican Committee is on to something.
What better way to put this country on a new road to freedom and justice for all than to officially make ourselves a Christian nation?
So I hope all progressive Christians in Idaho, and around the nation, will get behind this initiative…except for one small caveat.
That those behind the idea prove to the rest of us that they honestly want to put into practice what it truly means to be Christian rather than just baptizing their conservative political views and calling them “Christian.”
linnposts.com 