Every once in awhile I still get the question from folks in the church – why do you talk about politics so much? I really try not to be partisan, but I readily admit that I connect faith and politics, because faith is about our values and politics is where our values mix together. Hopefully that mixing is for the common good, but that effort has been hurting for quite awhile!
I also engage politics with my faith because that’s already happening anyway. All it takes is one trip to the Capitol to hear legislators evoke their faith constantly, introduce bills with prayer, or to defend desires to take science out of the classroom or to discriminate against people they disagree with by quoting the Bible.
So, that’s where I start. There are certainly many things one can disagree with when it comes to the Bible. I can understand how someone might take a different stance than I do on homosexuality from the point of scripture. Or capital punishment. Or “just war.” What I cannot understand is how people, professing “Christian” people, Bible-believing people, can read the Gospels and treat the poor and hungry so carelessly. What I cannot understand is how anyone can read Isaiah, or Deuteronomy, or Paul, not to mention Matthew 25, and come away with the sense that how we treat the “least of these” among us isn’t paramount to our faith.
Included in this year’s legislative agenda, from the state that does like to keep touting itself as decidedly Christian, comes such bills as these:
- HB1270, from Rep. Elise Hall, (R-Oklahoma City), called the “Act to Restore Hope”, which places yet another level of scrutiny between the poor and access to SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps. It seeks to ensure, in Rep. Hall’s own words, that “people who truly need” state welfare benefits “are receiving them”, because the State of Oklahoma has “limited resources.” There is no associated data verifying that abuse exists in Oklahoma.
- HB1913, from Rep. Chris Kannady, (R-Oklahoma City) and Sen. James Leewright, (R-Bristow), creates the Oklahoma Small Loan Act. This bill would create a new predatory loan product in Oklahoma which would allow interest to be charged at a monthly rate of 17%, which adds up to an annual rate of over 200 percent, four times more than what can be charged under current law. In addition, a lender could make one or more loans totaling $1,500 to a borrower without conducting any income checks to determine the borrower’s ability to pay off the loan. And loans could be made to both spouses in a single household.
Far from seeking to protect or care, both bills absolutely prey upon the “least of these”, turning our sense of public obligation, what should flow naturally from a person of faith, Christian or otherwise, into a race for “bare minimums.” What is the least we can do for the “least of these” and still appear pious? Or, as is the case with HB1913, seeking to hide our predatory practice under the disguise of “helping” people who are struggling to pay the bills each month. Why, in a legislature supposedly driven by the compassion modeled for them by their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, would they not look somewhere else other than more debt to help their constituents? How about raising the minimum wage, or seeking to bring jobs in that pay a living wage? How about reinstituting the Earned Income Tax Credit that was eliminated last year to fill the budget hole instead of going into the pockets of families in poverty all across the state? How about going after the payday lending industry that fosters an atmosphere of poverty and lack instead of supporting it?
If we’re just counting up references, scripture seems to suggest that we care a lot more about God’s preference for and our treatment of the poor (300+ verses on that) than about homosexuality (3 verses at best). Yet what we see again and again in the state that wants to place the Ten Commandments on the Capitol grounds is a profoundly selective choice of what we’re all about as a “Christian” state. Leaving me to conclude that we say that we care about Christianity but we demonstrate that we care a lot more about Capitalism. As the talk show host Stephen Colbert was quoted as saying,
“…if this is going to be a Christian Nation that doesn’t help the poor,
either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are,
or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor
and serve the needy without condition…
and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
That’s why I take my faith into the world of politics, because it’s already happening and I want to make sure that the whole message gets delivered, not just the parts that conveniently fit our narrative. Why do we only hear about it when we’re talking about who gets to go to what bathroom, or the proper use of a woman’s body by the men around her? Yes, the Bible does have a lot to say about morality. I want to help make sure that we remember exactly what it is saying, and how often that differs from the actions of the people most often waving it around.