The political platform of Jesus
One kernel of common wisdom often repeated among American Christians today is that God is not a Republican or a Democrat.
The great majority don't actually believe it, of course; most of them are firmly convinced that those bastards on the opposite side of the political spectrum (by which I mean about a quarter-inch over - both Dems and 'Pubs have a fairly myopic view of what positions are available, too) are the ignorant, hateful pawns of Satan himself. And the few who do mean it when they say it are usually making the claim that Jesus simply eschewed politics altogether, not that Jesus' politics simply don't match either party platform.
They're all wrong. Of course Jesus had politics, first of all - everyone has politics, however little exercised, because they're inseparable from having a world view - and of course they don't match up along today's political party lines. In fact if Jesus were to run for president of the United States in '12, likely every voter to read or hear His platform would be absolutely horrified.
Which is why I present it for their pleasure below - 'cause that's a good enough reason for me.
Abortion: I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they claim the Bible is either silent about or in favor of abortion: I assume that they are joking. If Jesus held the predominant view of other rabbis in his time, He believed Genesis 4:10 informs us that people are alive before they are even conceived. Because God claims in that verse to hear Abel's "bloods" (plural, though most translations don't show it) and the Jews thought/still think it very strange that God did not use the singular "blood", they decided the additional blood belonged to all of the descendants Cain might have had if he'd lived. Similar ideas still stand in many sects of Judaism today.
Government Control of the Economy: In His guise as the Father in the Tanakh, Jesus set up a socialist safety net that releases many citizens from their debts and forbids landowners from reaping their entire harvests. At certain times passersby are also allowed to freely eat what they can pick from other people's property.
Sales and Work on Sunday: Absolutely forbidden, except for doctors, nurses, et al. on call.
Gay Marriage: One problem that often results from the claim that the Bible is God's Word is that it encourages people to read it as if it's a legal document and they are lawyers. Never mind the Good Book's historical context or even any clear implications one might make from its stories about how the ancient Hebrews saw the world; a contested ban must not only be very specifically written down in the Bible (with God as the speaker or that's an easy out) but also include a note to the effect of "and this holds true for every possible permutation of said offense", else it doesn't hold water. For any secular student of the Bible, the idea that any ancient form of Judaism or Christianity right back to Jesus and Moses ever looked kindly on homosexual activity is just totally bizarre. Not so for the desperate churchgoer.
The Death Penalty: Jesus approvingly quotes the Torah's well-known position on the topic in several gospels (Matt. 15:3-4 and Mark 7:8-11 - and don't let the story of Jesus sparing the adulteress fool you, by the way. It's not authentic). But try to be honest with yourself - do you really need citations to know that? That this question is ever debated is an excellent example of how Christians like to rip the Bible free of its historical context. Being against the death penalty was more or less unheard of in Jesus' time - and if Jesus had been against it, that would've been major news, certainly all the Jews needed to write Him off as a blasphemous kook.
Religious Tolerance: Jesus doesn't say much about these values, but since He is "one substance" with the Father - and since the Jews of His time still wanted to bring back the Tanakh's example of Hebrew government - we can always dig for His answers in the Old Testament. And what we find there is that in so far as religious expression goes, you really should stay in your own country if you're anything but a worshipper of the LORD - God repeatedly demands the desecration and destruction of other religions' temples and holy sites, along with the deaths of anyone who leads the public away from His worship. No separation of church and state here, that's for sure.
Form of Government: God supports a monarchy for most of the Tanakh's length and for all of Israel's existence as an actual nation (prior to that it was an alliance of tribes). Sometimes the king is answerable to a greater, spiritual guide (for instance, in the case of Saul and Samuel). For a comparison, one might look to the make-up of the Iranian government today (sans the voting pretense), with a dictator nominally in control of the country but nonetheless answerable to the ayatollah.
Yessir - and it's high-time we returned to the values on which I'm told this country was founded.
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