How George Bush won the election

As a member (at least in appearance to people who don’t know me, or read this site) of the “evangelical Christian” group, I want to respond to this:

Looking out across America, what’s one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.

I am not one of these people. I guess I like to think of myself as being a little smarter than that, and a little more comfortable in my faith to think that way. First, I realize how our government is supposed to work. I understand that the country was founded on the idea of religious freedom (see Pilgrams, The). I also understand that being a single issue voter doesn’t really work if you’re a Christian, regardless of what anybody tells you. I realize that our current form of two party government will never, ever permit real, Biblical Christianity from having a material influence on the politics of this country.

That said, I agree with Kottke’s basic premise:

And we’re lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green…we all share the blame.

It’s much easier, I like to joke, when someone else makes the important decisions for you. We like to claim that this place is a democracy, and “power to the people” and that, but when things fall to pieces, we don’t see ourselves as being responsible. We can just point our fingers at our elected officials (or in the Democrats’ case, the unelected officials). And we certainly don’t want to think for ourselves. Christians fall into the trap with the abortion issue — the “culture of life” that they want is a big lie — think about then-governor George Bush mocking a death row inmate asking for a stay of execution — or pehaps a conservative’s lack of compassion for the poor. But that door swings both ways, and there are plenty of way Democrats do the same. Maybe the government should require a civics test before you vote…

Posted on 5 November 2004