The Lies I Believed | God and Politics

It’s hard to admit you have believed a lie. It’s difficult to realize you have been deceived. We all like to think we are beyond believing lies and are humiliated when we discover we have not only believed lies but spread them to others.  Like the carrier of a virus that, once infected, infects others. A human host of destructive ideas.

My next several posts will be on the Lies I believed, the lies Christianity taught me. It is my confession and my repentance. It is my apology to those whom I led into the darkness of deceit disguised as the light of truth.

God and Politics

I become a born-again Christian on April 29, 1983.  I was quickly fed a steady diet of Christian politics from TV evangelists like Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jerry Falwell.  Before this, I had never even thought about politics, but now I was told this was a Christian's sacred duty to try to bring the nation “back to God.”  Apparently, we had previously been with God, but not anymore.  I wasn’t sure what happened between America and God, but I was on God’s side now.  Jerry Falwell had started his Moral Majority Crusade and was pushing to get evangelical Christians involved in politics at every level.  On the second Tuesday in November 1984, at 18 years old, I cast my first political vote for the Church's choice. The man who would restore morality to America. Ronald Reagan.

I was taught that the Republican party was the party of moral values, family Values, prayer in school, pro-life, creationism, and restoring America to the Christianity it had left behind. It was unclear when America abandoned God, but apparently, it was somewhere in the 60s when sex, drugs, and rock and roll came along. When prayer was taken out of school and abortion legalized. These were all things that God hated, or so I was told.  

The answer to America’s illness, to her “sin,” was to elect righteous men and women to office who would then be able to change laws that would force people to do what was “right.” Then God would be pleased and bless our nation. And somehow, everyone would be happy, even those that disagreed, because they would see the error of their ways and find Jesus in a great revival.

It was clear that the Republicans were God’s chosen party, and if God has a political party, you can rest assured so does the devil, the Democrats.  I mean, Demon is almost in the name.  These liberals were killing babies and supporting all kinds of sexual immorality, teaching children about sex in schools, and they were making people irresponsible by giving them social handouts.

These were the LIES I believed.  Lies preached to me from the pulpit in the name of Jesus.  I wanted to please this new God of mine,  so I took it all in. I was going to be a warrior for Christ. 

The truth I wouldn't discover for some 20 years later was more nefarious.  The facts I were to discover were that those who claimed to have the moral high ground had secret lives engaging in the "sins" they railed against. Their love for fetuses' in someone else's womb was betrayed by their disdain for children of poverty. They refused to vote to fund social programs that would help innocent children while blaming impoverished parents for irresponsibility.  Their talk of love for humanity was hidden hatred for those who loved in ways they disapproved; their hate sprang out of the cauldron of bigotry as they proclaimed AIDS as a judgment of a loving God. A disease that decimated tens of thousands of individuals. Their cold, callus, uncaring concern for their neighbor was preached with ease as the distorted idea of the grace of God.

All this was done with a smile and a "Jesus loves you."  I was a compassionate and caring person by nature.  As a child, I would not kill a spider, and my heart would break at the sight of others in pain. I had a deep sense of empathy.  It took the lies of Christianity to teach me to see people as deserving objects of God's wrath that would cause them to suffer unimaginable pain.   Something about this never set right.  When I finally saw this for what it was, I was ashamed to have promoted these Ideas as a Christian and a Preacher.

Since forsaking these lies, I have restored compassion in my life.  I can see and care for people as they are without any judgment.  The naive ideas of Christian morality are a cloak of hated for what one doesn't understand.  I prefer to truly love my neighbor as myself and see people as human beings deserving of care and compassion and not objects of a capricious God's whims.