An Open Letter

To Senators McCain, Obama, & Biden, and Governor Palin,

As I follow this election season, I regularly hear that I am your target audience - that it is my voting group that you are particularly looking to receive this year. Yet it does not at all feel like it. Indeed, I feel quite often overlooked - and I am through.

You see, I am an evangelical. That is, I believe strongly in the power of the evangellion, the Gospel, to transform the lives of individuals, communities, and yes, even nations. In fact, that evangelical conviction is the center of my life: privately, professionally, and politically.

I am also a values voter.

I believe in the inherent value of all those created in God's image - regardless of economics, race, creed, or sexuality. And I believe it is the job those called to lead our country to protect and preserve that inherent value.

I believe in the importance of marriage, because the God of the evangellion is the God of love. Family life is the building block of our life of faith -in the many forms that modern family life takes. To degrade families with arbitrary legal definitions ("legal union," "life partnership") is to deny those families the validation of being at the center of our community life.

I am an evangelical values voter who follows the One who called us to care for the sick, the poor, the stranger, and the oppressed among us. I am an evangelical values voter who is ashamed at the behavior of the wealthy in our nation towards the poor. I am an evangelical values voter who thinks Jesus really did mean it when he said that we should love and serve our neighbor.

"God has shown you, O mortal, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

I am a values voter.
It is time you listened.

-RR

Overheard

At a public gathering, from a congregant:

"It all depends on the election. If Obama is elected, he's gonna give all our money away to those black folks."

Political Sound Off

Let's be honest, in my line of work we don't much get to share our political views - at least not with full honesty. And, really, I'm ok with that. I don't want people to be unable to hear the Gospel because they are too preoccupied with my politics. I would rather have them hear the Gospel, and have it then inform their political decisions (which happens far too infrequently among those who follow Jesus).

That said, this political season in the US has me just about bursting at the seams. Never has an electoral choice seemed so very clear to me - especially for Christians. "Feed my sheep." "Whenever you have done it to the the least of these." What have McCain/Palin ever done for the "least of these" - except for look for ways to squeeze an extra penny out of them for the benefit of big business? The hypocrisy coming out of that campaign is sickening - I will follow up with more later.

I just don't get it, I guess. We have made personal moral choices - areas about which our Scriptures are (at best) ambivelent - into the defining issues for our political debates. Instead of abortion, maybe the candidates could talk about the mess of the housing market. Instead of worrying about who is screwing who in the bedroom, maybe they could address who is getting screwed by our ever-more lopsided economy (as we watch yet another major company fold, while the ceo has a golden parachute). Just an idea.