Social Justice Christianity

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is acting irresponsibly when he compares Barack Obama and his stand on contraception and other women’s services being provided by religiously based hospitals and universities to their workers, many of whom are not of that religious group, as an attack on religion.

Claiming that Obama is warring on religion, which is totally preposterous, instead what Rick Santorum offers is promotion of theocracy, by his failure to accept what another fellow Catholic, President John F. Kennedy, advocated–separation of church and state.

When Santorum is calling what Obama is doing the first stage toward the French Revolution, emphasizing the secularism and attack on organized Christianity (Catholicism) in that famous decade of the 1790s, he is being reckless and also inaccurate historically about one of the key events of modern times, an event which moved Europe toward the goals of freedom and the basic rights of man.

Anyone who wishes to be honest about history knows that NO Christian group, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, or others came about with any less violence and persecution against non believers, than the terrible bloodshed of the French Revolution. The level of violence of the French Revolution was horrific, but no less in the entire history of Christianity. And no one can say that any traditional Christian group has ever promoted democracy and the rights of man, when instead they have promoted obedience and lack of tolerance toward non believers throughout their history. Instead, all of the groups have endorsed, at one point or another, racism, anti semitism, denial of women’s rights, and the endorsement of slaughtering native Americans to conquer the North American continent, as well as South America.

This does not mean that there have not been outspoken religious people who have fought to bring open mindedness and tolerance to their faith, but they have fought this fight with great stress, and much discrimination visited upon them, and often been expelled for their challenges to the religious establishment.

We do not want a religious fanatic in the White House; instead we want a person who, like John F. Kennedy, did not promote his faith, and believed in total religious tolerance. Rick Santorum is such a fanatic, and is dangerous in that he would promote government endorsement of religion, which is NOT its role in our history, and not promoted by the Founding Fathers.

Despite vicious attacks by critics, many of whom claim to be “good Christians”, Barack Obama and his vision of Social Justice is the only kind of Christianity, or really any religious group, that makes any sense for a society in which there is too much worship of the almighty dollar, and not enough for human beings of all backgrounds who are being left in the dust as the nation moves inexorably toward a stratified society that bodes ill for the future stability of America!