By Lee Duigon
MichNews.com
Aug 24, 2005
Over the past several months, angry leftist e-mailers have been instructing me in how to be a Christian. Not that the Christian faith is true, mind you. After all, no one's set of beliefs is objectively "true." Except theirs.
I don't understand why atheists and moral relativists should want to set me straight about Christianity. But I'm beginning to grasp their theology, and I can now identify some highlights of the version of Christianity they want me to believe in.
1. Make no moral judgments whatsoever--unless they're directed against George Bush, the United States, capitalism, heterosexual white males, evangelical Christians, Republicans, the Boy Scouts, and anyone or anything else targeted by the Left. Everyone's morality is "right for him," unless it's wrong.
2. The essence of Christianity is the use of coercion to redistribute wealth. If you can't find Bible verses to support this, fall back on the other Sacred Writings of the Left: the New York Times, the Nation, Marx and Engels, etc.
3. There is no such thing as sexual morality or immorality, and to say otherwise is immoral. If you have any trouble with the logic of this statement, you're not alone.
4. It's self-righteous and evil to believe that the Bible is the only authoritative source of truth, when everybody knows that Michael Moore, Joan Baez, Cindy Sheehan, and Jimmy Carter have that honor. In fact, every single Senate Democrat is an oracle.
5. A real Christian believes that all religions are equally true. For that matter, so does an atheist.
6. Defending the United States is always wrong, unless a Democrat is in the White House. You "support the troops" by insisting that they are engaged in a corrupt and immoral enterprise, dying for nothing, massacring civilians and torturing prisoners on a scale not seen since the Third Reich--and, of course, identifying the "Iraqi insurgents" (especially the ones from Syria and Saudi Arabia) as the good guys and rooting for them to defeat the U.S. Army. That's how a true Christian supports the troops, according to my advisers.
Moral relativists identify conservative Christians as immoral. The fact that logical consistency would forbid them to brand even the Spanish Inquisition as immoral is a fact they consistently ignore.
Yes, there are rational and even Biblical grounds for dissenting from America's current policy of trying to "democratize" the Arab world. There has always been a Christian calling to relieve the poor--and we might well ask what effort along those lines the secular Left has ever mounted to compare with the steadfast labors of the Salvation Army.
But when it comes to taking religious instruction from the Grey Ponytail Brigade--thanks, but no thanks.
--------------------------
Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu.