WASHINGTON (ABP) — Former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) is criticizing his political party and many of his fellow Christians for abandoning the principles both groups are supposed to hold dear.
In a Sept. 28 breakfast meeting with Washington reporters, Danforth suggested the Republican Party is close to becoming a sectarian religious party.
“I'd like to see our party debate whether or not we're a religious party,” Danforth said, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Promoting Christian moral views as public policy may rally Christian voters but it doesn't promote real discussion of issues. “Do we attempt to energize a base or do we try to reconstitute a center in American politics?”
In a series of speeches promoting his new book, Faith and Politics: How the 'Moral Values' Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together, the retired three-term senator and Episcopal priest said Republicans and conservative Christians have gotten in bed together — and are using each other.
“The problem with many conservative Christians is that they claim that God's truth is knowable, that they know it, and that they are able to reduce it to legislative form,” Danforth said in the book, released Sept. 19. “The popular question 'What would Jesus do?' can be difficult enough to contemplate with respect to everyday interpersonal relations. It is mind-boggling when applied to the complex world of politics.”
Danforth, who served in the Senate from 1976 to 1994, is perhaps best known for shepherding Justice Clarence Thomas, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was extremely controversial, through the Senate approval process. He also presided over President Ronald Reagan's 2004 funeral at the Washington National Cathedral.
Since then, he has become more and more outspoken in opposition to his party's embrace of the Religious Right. He opposed congressional conservatives' attempts to add a gay-marriage ban to the Constitution and is supporting a Missouri ballot item to authorize embryonic stem-cell research — an issue that has divided Republicans nationwide.
Conservative Christian leaders have been adamantly opposed to such research, but many rank-and-file Christians support it. That divergence and others led Danforth to believe “religion is being used to create a sense of God's-side-versus-the-enemies-of-God's-side,” he said.
Other conservatives have criticized Danforth as being out of touch with both the realities of modern politics and the mainstream of evangelical Christianity. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told the Washington Post that philosophies like Danforth's were “what was wrong with the Republican Party and why they were a minority party” in Congress for four decades prior to 1994's “Republican Revolution.”
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