American Christianity and politics

I recently came across this speech that Obama gave a couple of years back to a Christian group and I think it points up a trend in the influence of Christianity on US politics. One of the guys Obama mentions, Jim Wallis, was a prime mover in a delegation of US churchmen who visited Tony Blair before the Iraq war and attempted to persuade him not to jump.

My reading (from 3000 miles away) of what has happened in the US in recent years is that the Democratic party has been dominated by a secular fundamentalism which attempts to ban any reference to God in public life (e.g. the language checker in our American HR software which objects to "Christmas" and suggests "holiday" instead). This has (unsurprisingly) driven many Christians into the arms of people like Falwell and through them, the Republicans. This support has in turn been used to shore up an increasingly theocratic regime which (probably mistakenly rather than cynically) confuses America and the Kingdom of God.

I think what is interesting is that we might be at a tipping point. Even the most honey-tongued televangelist must be running out of ways of persuading anyone who has actually read the Sermon on the Mount that the current Republican executive maps onto Jesus's blueprint for human relationships! I am fascinated that Obama sounds like he thinks along the same lines as Wallis.

To make it work, I think Christians have to persuade rather than pronounce; if for example they want to lower the rate of abortions for social reasons, to provide arguments that the secular humanist can subscribe to, rather than just expecting them to accede to a Christian viewpoint. The secular humanists meanwhile have to drop this absurd notion that religion and politics don't mix and give Christians and other religious believers the space to express themselves in theological terms on the public stage as King (and indeed Lincoln) did.