Are Political Labels Christian?

Sometimes I am hesitant to make direct correlations between Christianity and politics.  Certainly there is a Christian perspective in moral issues such as homosexuality and abortion, but unfortunately some Christians have equated Christianity with certain political perspectives.  For example, to be a Christian you must not only be pro-life but also pro-gun and pro-capital punishment.  I am not at all saying that I am against those things; as a matter of fact I am staunchly in favor of capital punishment.  However, I want to take a look at the attitude being statements like these.

First of all, to be fair, I do care a lot about politics.  I’m not a fan of identifying myself with a party, but if I was asked to give a black-and-white answer, I’d say that I am an old-school Republican.  However, I don’t like being identified as a Republican, because, to be honest, I don’t agree with everything Republicans do or stand for.  Most Republicans that identify themselves as pro-life give exceptions for rape and incest.  I do not believe that exception should exist.  Mitt Romney wanted to restrict internet pornography by making new computers filtered.  Although most Republicans were opposed to that because it possibly meant more government control, I was in support of it.  You get the idea.

I confess, I grew up in a family of Republicans and in a church that was mostly Republican.  So do you know what I thought about Democrats when I was a kid?  You probably have a pretty good idea.  If my mind was a dictionary, the entry would have sounded something like this: “Democrat.  An ignorant and idiotic moron who believes in pouring money we don’t have into the hands of the unemployed who waste it on booze and drugs.”  Gradually, I heard the tag “liberal” associated with Democrats, so I grew to associate the same definition with the word “liberal,” and thus, to me, the most unintelligent person on God’s green Earth had to be a wide-eyed liberal Democrat. 

Then a wrench got thrown in my philosophy.  When I was growing up we had a close family friend that lived pretty close to us that watched me quite a bit.  At some point during my childhood, I found out that she was a Democrat.  My entire world of prejudice and bias came crashing down.  She was an intelligent, kind, God-fearing woman who spoke common sense.  We just disagreed on some political issues.  That helped me to begin to see a very helpful truth.

In one of my communication classes, we’ve been talking about something called Heuristic cues.  When we are considering an issue but don’t want to exert the mental energy to think seriously about the topic and the arguments for whatever reason, we use cognitive short-cuts.  Some of those are things like credibility of the speaker, attractiveness of the speaker, so on and so forth.  One of those heuristic cues is political labels.  If someone says something challenging that we don’t like, we think, “Well they must be a wide-eyed liberal!” or “Well they are just a society-loathing conservative!”  Now comes the point of this entire post: are associations like that Christ-like, regardless of which side we are coming from?

Titus 3:2 “speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people.” 

It’s pretty hard to show perfect courtesy toward all people when we’re screaming at them for being idiotic liberals or narrow-minded conservatives.  This is the part where people are apt to misunderstand me.  Allow me to clarify.  I am not at all saying that it doesn’t matter where you stand on political issues.  Many political issues can have moral and spiritual implications.  However, what I am saying is that we cannot be judging people’s integrity based on their political alignment.  As a matter of fact, if I had my way, we would do away with the terms Republican, Democrat, conservative, and liberal altogether.  Let’s be Christ-like in our interactions with each other and learn to have cool and collected open discussions with each other.  Otherwise, we may be found to become what we hate most: the angry close-minded bigot.