http://anti-bush.blogspot.com/Tuesday, June 08, 2004
What would Jesus do? Why, vote Republican
Sunday, June 06, 2004
N ear as Tony Campolo can tell, it was sometime in the late Eighties when Jesus switched political parties and registered as a Republican.
True, the official voter registration form has never surfaced, but the word on the street is that Jesus apparently wearied of those evangelicals for social action and the liberal church's preoccupation with poverty, racism and injustice.
Whatever his issues, we're told Jesus spent the early Nineties helping Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed pull the GOP farther and farther to the right. He was credited with rigid opinions on abortion and homosexuality, issues he barely (if at all) addressed in his apolitical youth. He became a hard-liner on capital punishment and individual responsibility, even as he lost interest in those silly verses in the Gospels that are fixated on serving the poor or suggest "from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded."
The Republicans, not surprisingly, were delighted to find Jesus on board and lost no opportunity to declare that the interests of the party and Christ's church were identical. As Campolo -- an evangelical Baptist minister -- wrote in 1995, "There is no better way for a political party to establish the legitimacy of its political point of view than to declare that Jesus is one of its members."