This article by Phil Zuckerman and Dan Cady at the Huffington Post is an example of the mischaracterization and failure to understand that I am discussing in this blog.
Zuckerman and Cady's thesis is that Evangelicals hate Jesus--or, rather, would hate Jesus if he were teaching today--because their political behaviors as primarily conservative Republicans makes them stand for everything that Jesus would be against: letting the poor go hungry and the sick go untended, believing in things like the death penalty.
While I wouldn't DISAGREE with Zuckerman and Cady entirely--I have met my fair share of religious individuals who place their political ideologies before their moral centers--I would have to argue that leaping from distrust of government as an entity and fear of concentrated power in a select few (which is what late-20th and early-21st century "conservatism" essentially entail), and allowing that distrust to be critical of attempts to centralize power for WHATEVER reason (even if it is to "feed the poor") because that centralized power could then be used for other, more nefarious purposes, and deducing from this that such people hate the poor or "hate" Jesus, is a massive leap in logic that is facilitated by Zuckerman and Cady's political position but NOT by their understanding of Christianity.
This is not to say that I think conservatism, Republicanism, and/or capitalism are good or right or God-given; I don't; but to equate Jesus's teachings with a political conception that ante-dates him by nearly 2000 years in order to make a political point is a stretch at best, disingenuous at worst.
There must be better, more accurate, more methodological ways to use Christ's teachings as a critical tool rather than merely using them to score self-centered political points.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me to criticize Zuckerman and Cady for being less-than-Christ-like and not seeking to understand, charitably, those they disagree with (or who disagree with them), and then for me to be less-than-Christ-like towards them in the same way.
So, if I were to ananlyze this from a Christ-centered perspective, how would I go about it? Would I suggest that they have judged unrighteously if for no other reason than that Evangelicals have often mis-represented "liberal" trust in "Big Government," and that, because they do not like such misrepresentation (which Zuckerman and Cady might argue is the result of a level of ignorance on the part of critics), then they should not engage in such misrepresentation, either? Should I address this by suggesting a conversation, one that assumes misunderstanding rather than misrepresentation, and seeks to peaceably explain and overcome the misunderstanding?
