Excerpt from the Harrisburg Patriot News

by BILL FENSTERMAKER

We should vote based on Christ

Sunday, September 28, 2008

... I put a political bumper sticker on my car, primarily to stimulate discussion, especially among my Christian friends. In all my life I've never had a political sticker on my car. And for most of my first 50 years I was a staunchly conservative, right-wing Republican -- a supporter of every Republican all the way back to Barry Goldwater. And for most of those years I had never felt any conflict between those positions and my equally firm grounding as a born-again evangelical Christian.

That is no longer the case.

Rather than stimulating discussion, the effect of my sticker seems to have been the opposite: A lot of my Christian friends seem to have simply stopped talking to me....

I would urge anyone who calls himself a Christian to take some time, take a few steps back from all the campaign-season hype, and critically examine our nation and our world from a truly Biblical Christian perspective.

First, I am questioning when and how we as evangelicals allowed a few individuals to establish two (sometimes three) criteria for determining what constitutes an acceptable candidate for public office. Jesus never said a single word about abortion or homosexuality or evolution.

Jesus did have a lot to say about things like divorce, about loving your neighbor, about loving your enemies and about taking care of those less fortunate. In fact, in Matthew 25, starting at verse 31 --just before he entered Jerusalem to die -- the only time Jesus ever talked about the final judgment he said that "all nations" will stand before the Lord, and He will separate them into the sheep and the goats, based upon their behavior on the earth. The goats are condemned to hell as a result....

Using the criteria from Christ himself, do you believe America will be rewarded, for example, for how many countries we have converted to democracy? Or for how many immigrants we have deported? Or how many more of the huddled masses we have prevented from emigrating? Or for how many millions of children have starved to death worldwide while we burn huge amounts of our precious corn harvest every day in our car's fuel tanks?

Will the Lord say to America, "Well done, my faithful servant," because of the tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees who have fled their homes due to the unrest we have created in their homeland? Or for how many innocent Iraqi civilians we have killed or caused to die for the cause of spreading democracy? Or for how many enemy combatants we have locked up? Or how many we have been able to torture into giving us information? Or for how many terror attacks we have prevented? Or how many "insurgents" we have killed? Or the billions of dollars that the wealthiest nation on earth has NOT been able to contribute to worldwide disaster relief and famine relief because we have been spending so much on our own so-called defense?

I personally believe these are nothing short of national sins. And these are only examples....

As Christians, if all we use as our criteria are the words of Jesus himself --and honestly, isn't that all we should use? -- America has not been behaving in a Christ-like manner. In truth, much of our nation's foreign and domestic policy in recent years has been decidedly non-Christian. How have we allowed this to happen? ...

The Christian's responsibility is to be diligent in scrutinizing both [parties], in the cold light of the New Testament and the teachings of Christ. This we have not been doing in recent years, and it's time we start. We can't keep giving any political party a "free pass" to commit all sorts of atrocities, both at home and around the world, just because they happen to share our view on one or two so-called "moral" issues. This is simply wrong....

As we approach the election, I am still making up my mind about whom to vote for. But I can tell you this: My decision is NOT going to be based upon the recommendations of pharisees like Jim Dobson, or kooks like Rush Limbaugh, or the MSNBC or Fox News commentators. None of these people speaks for Jesus. NONE of them. My guide is going to be how close each candidate and each platform comes to the words of Christ himself in places such as Matthew 5, Matthew 22, Matthew 25, Luke 6, Luke 10 and Mark 12.