Religious Left | OrthodoxNet.com Blog

‘O,’ He of Little Faith

October 10, 2010

10/10/2010 – Peter Heck -
In light of the fact that an increasing number of Americans are questioning his faith, President Obama has apparently been told by his advisors to ratchet up the Jesus talk. So at a staged event in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Obama complied by responding to a question about why he became a Christian.

“I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead,” he explained, adding that he was moved by the thought of “being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.”

One has to wonder whether such an answer was really what his advisors wanted. After all, who would ever suggest that the president use the Biblical phrase “being my brothers’ keeper,” when his actual half-brother (blood-related) resides in a shack in Kenya? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Leftist Hypocrisy, Moral issues, Politics, Religious Left

Religiously Dissing America’s Independence Day

July 9, 2010

7/6/2010 – Mark Tooley -

Predictably, Jim Wallis’s Religious Left Sojourners blog dishonored Independence Day by featuring an op-ed headlined “Why Christianity and July 4th are Incompatible.”

In it, a young pacifist pastor explained why Christians can’t “celebrate” having “killed thousands upon thousands of people because they [the British] were taxing us without giving us representation in parliament.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: American history, Leftism, Religious Left

An Ungodly Immigration Policy?

June 1, 2010

6/1/2010 – Mark D. Tooley -
The 1.1 million-member United Church of Christ (UCC) is trying to raise $50,000 for a media campaign to blast Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law. Church prelates hope the ad will appear on May 29, when reputedly 500,000 will march in Phoenix against the law.

As America’s most left-wing Christian denomination, the fast declining UCC’s zeal for political activism perhaps compensates for its lack of evangelism. Having lost about half its members in recent decades, and several hundred congregations in recent years, the 1.1 million member denomination, at least as expressed by its elites, unapologetically plunges ahead with the latest causes du jour. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture war, Illegal Immigration, Leftism, Religious Left

Embracing the Tormentors

May 26, 2010

National Council of Churches Promotes Communist Agenda

5/26/2010 – Faith McDonnell -
Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They “spiritualize” the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.

Church officials and partner organizations such as the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) issue strident policy statements on such topics as “eco-justice,” broadband access for “economically depressed rural areas,” the Israeli “occupation,” and “unnecessary Department of Defense spending.” But one is hard-pressed to find these church leaders denouncing the recent appointment of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. One searches in vain for an expression of solidarity with the Christian community in Jos, Plateau State, in central Nigeria, where hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Fulani jihadists during March and April of 2010. If there are any such statements, they address vaguely “ethnic conflict” and are masterpieces of moral equivalency. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christian Persecution, Communism, Leftist Tyranny, OPF/NCC/Christian left, Religious Left

The World Is a Cruel Place – and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler

May 25, 2010

Dennis Prager

5/25/2010 – Dennis Prager -

One of the many beliefs — i.e., non-empirically based doctrines — of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leftism, Leftist Tyranny, Moral issues, Religious Left

Christ: An “Undocumented” Migrant?

May 10, 2010

5/10/2010 – Mark D. Tooley -
The old Religious Left has long championed virtual open borders and slammed national sovereignty as idolatrous. Now the new Evangelical Left is chiming in with its own sentimentalization of illegal immigration, identifying Jesus Christ Himself as an illegal immigrant.

“We are exiles who follow an alien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,” insisted Debra Dean Murphy, a religion professor at United Methodist affiliated West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her recent column was carried by Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and illustrates the merging thought of old Religious Left and new Evangelical Left. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leftism, Religious Left

Prophet Jim Wallis and the Ecclesia of Economic Ignorance

April 14, 2010

Jim Wallis

Acton Institute | by John Couretas | 4/14/2010

This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886)

For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really a sin – of biblical proportions. We have indeed seen class warfare, but this war has been waged by the wealthy and their political allies against the poor and the middle class. – Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (2010)

One of Jim Wallis’ long running aims at Sojourners is to cast himself as a moderate or centrist (God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat). This is howling nonsense to anyone who pays attention to his policy prescriptions or watches the progressive/liberal company he keeps. With his new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010), Wallis drops all pretense to holding the center as he piles on with the horde of religious left activists and others now demonizing Wall Street. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communism, Culture war, Economics, Leftism, Religious Left

British Bishops Urge ‘Carbon Fast’ for Lent

February 17, 2010

AOI | by Fr. Johannes Jacobse | Feb. 16, 2010

LONDON (AP) — Several prominent Anglican British bishops are urging Christians to keep their carbon consumption in check this Lent. The 40-day period of penitence before Easter typically sees observant Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians give up meat, alcohol or chocolates [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leftism, Religious Left

The Hypocrisy of the Left

December 29, 2009

American Thinker | by Robin of Berkeley | Dec. 28, 2009

I have been looking for God my whole life. I first recognized Him in the black foster parents I worked with who manifested Christ-consciousness.

I then found him four years ago, when my parents died three weeks apart and I was carried by a force stronger than myself. And more recently, as I’ve gone from left to right, I have discovered him in the many conservatives guiding me, such as AT readers. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leftist Hypocrisy, Religious Left

Adaptive Liberal Hypocrisy

December 7, 2009

American Thinker | by Deborah C. Tyler | Dec. 6, 2009

In recent weeks, we have witnessed liberals in the highest level of government sanctimoniously defend terrorists who kill us while persecuting those who defend us from murderous attacks. In an effort to understand this reversal of good and evil, it has become a cliché to call liberals crazy. But while supremely hypocritical, liberalism is not insane. It is a highly adaptive ego device that enables people to violate commitments, vilify those who are true to their faith, and avoid personal sacrifice while feeling great about themselves. The only defense against hypocrisy is self-knowledge, but the politics, spirituality, and morality of liberalism are well-constructed firmaments of self-delusion. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Leftism, Politics, Religion in America, Religious Left, Terrorism Apologist

Revisionism from the Religious Left

November 13, 2009

FrontPageMag | by Mark D. Tooley | Nov. 12, 2009

Leftist church elites are fondly remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall as though they could claim some credit for its fall. Conveniently, they forget their own complicity with the former tyrants of East Europe and the Soviet Union.

“Christian hope and perseverance contributed significantly to the fall of the Berlin Wall”, World Council of Churches (WCC) chief Samuel Kobia recently declared. True enough. Millions of Christians and other people of faith, despite persecution and martyrdom, endured for decades under communist rule. But their perseverance owed little to groups like the WCC and other leftist Western church groups, who cheerfully demanded appeasement of the old Soviet Bloc as the price for peaceful coexistence. These church leftists prioritized world “peace” over solidarity with oppressed fellow religionists behind the Iron Curtain, whose suffering was too inconvenient for ecumenical public attention. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communism, Leftism, Orthodox Christianity, Religious Left

America’s Uncontrolled Debt and Spending is the Real ‘Waterloo’

October 26, 2009

Acton Institute | by Ray Nothstine | Oct. 21, 2009

Religious left icon Jim Wallis has popularized the maxim, “budgets are moral documents.” Yet the often repeated declaration is true in a way Wallis hasn’t envisioned, signaling bad news for Washington’s big spenders and those stuck footing the bill. Currently this country is facing no greater crisis than out of control spending and a mounting federal debt—a moral problem of prodigious proportions.

The Office of Management and Budget is projecting $9 trillion in deficits over the next ten years. Washington’s leaders have long paid lip service to the crisis, but their actions betray their words. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economics, Government Incompetence, Leftism, Religious Left

Green Patriarch Bartholomew Embraces Leftist Environmental Agenda

October 23, 2009

AOI | by Fr. Johannes Jacobse | Oct. 22, 2009

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew lost no time ringing the alarmist bell as he officially opened the symposium, “Restoring Balance: The Great Mississippi River” today.

He said that, “we have reached a defining moment in our history … the point where absolute limits to our survival are being reached … instead of living on income, or the available surplus of the earth, we are consuming environmental capital and destroying its resources as if there is no tomorrow.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Environment, Leftism, Religious Left

Turning a Blind Eye to Murdered Christians

August 17, 2009

FrontPage Magazine | Mark D. Tooley | Aug. 17, 2009

In June, North Korean’s beastly communist dictatorship executed a 33 year old Christian woman for distributing Bibles, while also imprisoning her 3 little children, husband and parents, in conditions undoubtedly ghastly.

Several weeks ago, mobs involving hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of enraged radical Islamists destroyed several Christian villages in Pakistan, responding to incendiary rumors about Christians supposedly desecrating the Koran. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, and at least 14 Christians were murdered, including three Christian women and a child who were burned alive as the radicals torched houses and shops. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christian Persecution, Islamic violence, Religious Left

Missions and Marxism

July 22, 2009

FrontPage Magazine | Mark D. Tooley | July 22, 2009

During the 1980’s, United Methodist Church missionaries toiled in Nicaragua, not planting churches or winning souls, but flaking for the Sandinista experiment with Central American Marxism. Today, some of those missionaries have reemerged to agitate for Honduras’ ousted leftist President Manuel Zelaya, whom the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, with the military, removed for attempting unconstitutionally to prolong his presidency.

Zelaya’s “overthrow was carried out in violation of Honduran law,” and “those who today control the de facto government of Honduras have no legitimate right to do so,” declared 36 United Methodist missionaries currently or previously in Latin America, in a public statement. Conspiratorially, they implored President Obama to investigate “any involvement of U.S. government-related agencies, including the International Republican Institute, in encouraging or preparing the rupture of the democratic process in Honduras.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communism, Leftism, Religious Left