(Updated in case anyone wants to share it with others)
So let’s get specific about applying the principle that faith and politics go hand in hand for religious people.
Despite what conservative Christians believe, voters – Christian and non-Christian – have proven that America is not a Christian nation.
How? By electing and re-electing politicians who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
Polls continue to show that a majority of Americans don’t support the new law. The caveat, enigmatic as it may be, is that the majority don’t want it repealed either. But the fact remains that the majority have yet to say they support Obamacare.
What does that have to do with being a Christian nation? Here’s what: You can’t be a Christian in practice and not support an effort to make healthcare universally available regardless of one’s ability to pay.
It is quite easy to understand why I would say this.
For all its weaknesses, the Affordable Care Act was and remains an attempt to create a just and compassionate healthcare system. In other words, the new law was and is an act of social justice.
The system we had before the law was passed created this need.
What we had was a for-profit free market system that made healthcare available only to people who could afford it, and in the process was the primary factor in 45 thousand Americans dying every year because of the lack of medical care access. Forty-five thousand!
How in the name of Jesus can anything be Christian about that?
The Affordable Care Act was passed to try to stop that carnage, to undo something that was morally wrong, at a time when nothing else of substance was being done.
We were and still are the only developed nation in the world with a for-profit healthcare system. The only one.
No Christian nation can believe treating sick people only if they can afford to be treated and making medicine available only to people who can pay for it is morally right.
That is why I say opposition to the Affordable Care Act is unequivocal evidence that we are not a Christian nation, officially or unofficially.
Instead, we are a nation where a majority of people continue to believe the free market can take care of everything and everyone if the government would just get out of its way, even when history proves that is not true.
But there is one exception to what I am saying – people who oppose Obamacare because they have a better plan for universal healthcare. I’m not talking about tweaking the old system with a few incentives here and there that will still leave millions without coverage.
I’m talking about opposition to Obamacare because there is a better way to achieve the same goal. Otherwise, it is opposition for the sake of opposition.
So at this point the way Americans vote, including Christians, shows a stunning lack of concern and compassion for those among us who do not have healthcare or access to medical treatment.
That, I believe, is proof positive that whether or not we were intended to be a Christian nation, the fact is we never have been and apparently never will be in actual practice.
