A few weeks ago, I was told a story that left an indelible mark on me.  Since that mark was one of profound disgust and sadness I am going to keep the identities of those involved under wraps.

The story centers around a conversation, a conversation that I fear has occurred too many times in the last few months as we have discovered how divided we truly are as a nation.  This conversation was both personal and professional, as the parties involved had known each other socially for years while also having some business involvement.  In that setting, it was not unusual for talk to turn to economics and politics.

While the topic of politics was treated carefully, as there was some sensitivity towards difference of opinions around the table, one statement was made that was responsible for the mark I mentioned upfront.  In bemoaning the costs of Obamacare (or some other policy established during the previous Democratic administration), one individual remarked that he felt that he was being unfairly taxed.  He had worked hard all his life and money was being taken out of his pocket to help others who hadn’t worked as hard.  He excused his comment by saying, “sorry if that sounds un-Christian”.

Let me be very clear.  That doesn’t “sound” un-Christian, it is un-Christian.  The very willingness of a self-proclaimed Christian to try and excuse his behavior by making it someone else’s perception issue is deplorable.  I will try to refrain from judging the person but cannot avoid judging his actions.

There were many issues that bothered me during the recent election cycles and many discussions that I participated in where I became overly passionate.  I particularly was aggrieved by the many self-proclaimed Christians who were willing to support a candidate with questionable stances around women and minorities purely based on his support of overturning Roe v Wade.  I couldn’t fathom how many people were willing to become single issue voters and allow a fervent desire to ban abortions blind them to the other issues.  But now I see the truth.

These people weren’t single issue voters.  They were hiding behind the abortion issue because they couldn’t openly reveal their disgust for a system that they thought taxed them unfairly to help those who were “lazy”, or “stupid”, or simply “backwards”.  These folks were smart enough to realize that confessing their real reasons for voting for the Republican party would make them look “un-Christian”, or worse “racist”.  They chose to hide behind a very clearly defensible stance which would enable them to look good.

Yet even this anti-abortion stance was un-Christian as it focused on being pro-birth and not pro-life.  Their platform cared more about a fetus not being killed than it cared about a life well reared.  There is a great quote from Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Catholic nun who talks about human rights, war, poverty and women’s rights:

I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

Let me pause to be clear on one point—I am not painting every Christian who voted Republican as either a single-issue voter or a racist.  They are plenty of people who I respect who wrestled with the totality of their faith against the totality of the issues and made well-considered choices for one or the other candidate.  But I know that there are more than a handful of people who fit into the situation above.

While there has been plenty of scholarly discussions about to whom Jesus referred when he talked about “what you have done for the least of these you have done for me”, it is clear that care for the poor and the sick and the injured are core tenets of Christ’s teachings.  He asked us to “love one another as we love ourselves”, stated that the “meek shall inherit the earth” and chose as his friends those from whom society would turn away.  It seems clear to me that to be Christian one needs to be concerned about these very people.  To be a Christian, you must embody and practice the notion of universal love and acceptance that Christ showed.  No one was above or below Christ’s care.

I think that a person can believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Redemption and still not be a Christian.  It’s easy to subscribe to faith-based ideas that then have no impact on your daily life.  But if you see others as less worthy, if you feel that it’s not up to you to lend a hand, if you begrudgingly extend a meager offering worth less than the widow’s mite you are not a Christian.  Let me repeat, it’s not that you don’t “sound” like a Christian, you simply aren’t.

To wrap it up, I will paraphrase a wise scholar who shared her insights on this story:

Those of us who are blessed must realize that we were given good health, gracious parents who did not abuse or neglect us, the gift of good schooling, the “luck” of escaping addictive behavior and so forth.  For without these gifts, who may we have turned out to be?  If any people should be generous with their resources, it ought to be Christ’s followers who know that by grace alone they have salvation.