Why do American Christians impose their own political beliefs on God?

By David McElroy · November 6, 2011

Jesus wasn’t an American. He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s not asking you to vote for a “pro-family agenda.” He’s also not calling you to elect politicians to achieve “social justice.” These things are news to some people.

There’s absolutely no reason to think God even wants you vote. You’re lying to yourself and to others if you superimpose your own political views onto God — no matter what your beliefs are.

It’s been common throughout history for nations to claim that God was on their side, regardless of what they called God and regardless of what the rest of their theological beliefs were. Whatever “our side” did was favored by God — or the gods or Allah 0r whatever they called their deity. If you’re a Christian and you’re doing this today, you’re engaging in blasphemy, because you’re claiming to speak for God — and you’re just making things up and claiming they’re from Him.

I don’t have the exact quote anymore, but I once heard talk radio host Ian Punnett say that for many people, God is simply themselves with a deeper voice. Sadly, that’s true.

For Christians who hold conservative political positions, they somehow manage to come to the conclusion that God believes exactly what they do. What a relief. God wants a strong government to control people’s morality, but He also likes invading foreign countries that have those dirty people who talk funny and aren’t much like us. (He obviously didn’t really mean those things about loving enemies, so it’s safe to ignore those things as we cheer people being blown up and prisoners being tortured by the U.S. government.)

For Christians who hold progressive liberal positions, they somehow manage to come to the conclusion that God also believes exactly what they believe. Who would have thought? This saves them the trouble of having to think about any conflicts between their own political goals and what God wants of them. God wants a strong government which takes things from “greedy people” and gives things to poor people. Jesus talked about helping poor people, so He obviously wants us to force other people to obey what He said. Right?

When you worship God in these ways — and define Jesus in these terms — you’re creating your own god. Whoever that is who you have in your mind isn’t the Jesus of the Gospels. He’s your own creation — and that god seems an awful lot like you — just with a deeper voice.

If you call yourself a conservative, I challenge you to find a single example in the Gospels in which Jesus suggested the use of force to get anyone to obey Him. (Hint: You won’t find such an example.) Jesus isn’t calling for the FCC to stamp out obscenity or for police to arrest gay people or use force to stop people from making porn. Those are your positions, not His.

If you call yourself a progressive, I challenge you to find a single example in which Jesus suggested that His followers use force to ensure that other people obeyed the commands He gave to His own followers. (Hint: You won’t find any.) Jesus doesn’t “love the public option” or favor universal health care or whatever else you want to superimpose on Him. Those are your positions, not His.

You do understand that government is simply force, don’t you? Without force, the coercive state couldn’t function, because it would have to depend on people’s voluntary co-operation. And if people are to be allowed to do what they want (so long as they don’t violate other people’s rights or property), well, the state isn’t necessary in the first place.

If you’re a Christian, God has called you to live in certain ways and be certain things. He’s called us to help the poor and to quit worshipping our own pampered and luxurious lifestyles. (On this particular subject, I highly recommend a book by my own pastor challenging Christians to live a “Radical” lifestyle instead of the modern American materialist dream.) God has called us to be holy and moral people. But you won’t find one single example of Jesus suggesting that a government enforce the commands that He gave to His own followers. No, that’s the part that you and your friends (and your enemies) have added all on your own.

A friend told me this week that his own pastor recently said during a sermon that people who don’t vote are “almost sinning.” This pastor believes that not voting is somehow a violation of the command to love our neighbor. In other words, we are supposed to show we love some of our neighbors by having people use violence (or threat of violence and punishment) to arbitrarily steal money from other neighbors. That’s not following God. That’s simply finding ways to pretend that God supports what you wanted to do anyway.

God calls Christians to do certain things with their lives. He never calls us to force other people to obey His commands. If you’re using the name of God to justify using the coercive state to achieve what you want, you’re not serving God. You’re falsely speaking in His name and adding things to the Bible that just aren’t there.

Stick to what Jesus actually said. We have a long way to go before we’re living as He called us to live. Even if it were legitimate to force other people to live in accordance with Jesus’ teachings — which it isn’t — don’t we have a responsibility to live it first? We’re a long way from obeying Him ourselves.

Let’s quit trying to pretend that we’re qualified to give people orders in God’s name. We’re not qualified to do that and we never will be.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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