Who Hijacked Christianity?

June 26^th, 2007

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked.” So lamented Barack Obama, presidential candidate and senator from Illinois, as he addressed the General Synod of the United Church of Christ (UCC) about his own spiritual journey and the social duties of faith in this world.

Obama subscribes to the Social Gospel brand of Christianity, in which the death and resurrection of Jesus are superseded by His social teachings. It is this theologically and politically liberal faction that acted as the religious wing of the progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their ultimate goal is to perfect government and man to create a society devoid of social evils. This type of activism has its repercussions, however, and in the years since we have witnessed its consequences: the steady decline of responsibility and the disturbing expansion of government intervention on behalf of the individual. In decades past the Social Gospel manifested itself in labor reform, mandatory public schooling, and prohibition, utilizing Christian language and sentiments to achieve progressive ends.

It is this history that Obama was influenced by when he stopped being a spiritual man skeptical of organized religion and joined the UCC. "In time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world." He discovered the efficacy of religion as a tool for the defense and extension of liberalism - the Democratic Party's emotional pleas hidden behind the cross. The Social Gospel is a hijacking. It is socialism marketed as socially conscious religion.

So what is the senator's message? Essentially, the right has stolen the Christian label and maliciously used it to divide the nation. It has focused exclusively on issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the lack of religion in school, all issues we must move beyond because…cue vague Obama abstractions about division and renewal. The speech quickly descends into a catalogue of political initiatives we can undertake to participate in his faith-based Marxism, each carefully wedged between the words "conscience" and "moral." To even begin to perfect society we must end poverty, adopt universal health care, end the genocide in Darfur, acknowledge the value and dignity of every person regardless of "where that person came from or what documents they have," redeploy the troops in Iraq, and close Guantanamo Bay.

If his lecture weren't viewed through the prism of opportunism, it would be comical. Obama's only two mentions of abortion involved seeing past it. Almost immediately after the first mention, he applauds communities of faith across the country that are instead "sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, and in so many other ways, taking part in the project of American renewal." There is something naïve about believing the American public should be so selective about human dignity; it is God's will that there be day care programs, but there's nothing in there about abortion?

Obama frequently abuses and misuses words. When he says we must look beyond abortion and gay marriage, what he means is embrace. He would not congratulate the UCC for being "welcoming" (it is the first denomination to ordain a gay man and it supports gay marriage) if he didn't. He condemns divisiveness by asking us to isolate and disregard religious issues important to conservatives while accepting the Democratic Party agenda as the twenty-eighth book of the New Testament. Nonsense. Either Obama believes Christians must "rise above" conservatism and take up the banner of socialist government or he believes there is a genuine debate in America over whether or not poverty is a good thing. These are all merely the same liberal ideas dressed in Christian terminology. Tell me again Senator, who is hijacking faith?