Occasionally I come across websites that are worth passing along, not because they are thoughtful or helpful or truthful but because they are, well, just so bizarre.

The first website….

As most of the readers of this blog know, this past week brought the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, along with the continual reminder of the evil tragedy of almost 50 million human deaths. As I spoke in our chapel service this past Friday, I urged our campus community never to lose the crucial importance of the sanctity of human life as foundational for all other truly moral causes. I quoted from an article by Joel Belz, which I also quoted in an earlier blog:

It’s hard to see how anyone can claim to be a protector of the environment and not put high priority on the preservation of human babies. To defend a focus on the future of polar bears and whales, while asking evangelicals to get less noisy about infant humans, is an embarrassing contradiction.

And I quoted from my wife Kathleen:

Abortion is not a single issue; it is fundamentally tied to all the others, because it is about the most basic level of human life…Just as there is no “neutral,” there is no “single issue.”

Last Friday the Obama administration rolled back what is known as the Mexico City policy, which was put in place early in the Bush administration to prohibit the use of our tax dollars to subsidize the promotion of abortion in other countries. This is the first of several anticipated moves by the current administration to fulfill its commitment to support the pro-choice agenda, and this is a time to redouble efforts to defend and care for the unborn.

In the midst of my reflection on all this, this website came to my attention. Clearly directed at children, this campaign shamelessly plays on sentimentality and rewrites the dictionary to recruit the next generation to its “moral” cause.

On the one hand, we might simply say “How utterly silly!” Imagine the valuable resources of people and money and time invested/wasted in creating these cartoon images, writing the text, and creating and coordinating the website and its links. And imagine where this trend could go, e.g. we could reverse things and call kittens “land trout.” Or how about calling a cow a legged, lactating turnip, and – Voila! I’m a vegetarian. Now you try it!

On the other hand, this really isn’t silly at all. We should recognize the connections here with a broader and perverse strategy to overturn the moral order of God’s creation. While the PETA folks urge us to treat fish like kittens, and others of similar mind-set demand that we treat kittens and cows like humans, our society continues down the road of treating human beings like lumps of bio-matter – 50 million of them – and often with the energetic support of the pro-fish, pro-kitten people, as well as political leaders. What a horrific example of upside-down, and what a foolish rebellion against the biblical framework of creation.

(An aside: There are those in the pro-abortion army who do regard unborn children as fully human; they contend that, in a world of scarce resources and high-stakes decisions, some have to die for the greater good. I wonder how the PETA people would respond on behalf of the fish?)

Now for the second website….

For many of us, our convictions regarding the sanctity of life and the protection of the unborn are grounded in our faith and our faith commitments. We participate in pro-life efforts, both political and apolitical, because of our biblically-based worldview. This integration of religion and politics has often been criticized and ridiculed as an unholy alliance, a Constitution-contradicting intrusion of personal beliefs into the public square.

How interesting, then, to come across this website. It’s the brainchild of Norman Lear and carries a prominent link to People for the American Way, an organization whose advocacy includes such causes as “fighting the right” and “marriage equality” (i.e. homosexual marriage). Note first that this initiative co-opts for its own purposes the phrase “born again,” whose original meaning and intent is found in John 3 and the story of Jesus and Nicodemus. Note second that the organizers do not hide their desire to understand their rebirth in “spiritual” terms: The lyrics of their theme song include the phrase “the harvest of the spirit has begun.” Nor, third, as evidenced by the line “my Bible and the Bill of Rights,” do they avoid mixing religion and politics.

Now imagine those words in the mouths of religious/political conservatives. Harvest of the spirit? My Bible and the Bill of Rights? Can you hear the howls of protest from the left?

My point is not to justify all cases of the mixture of religious belief and conservative politics. It’s easy to point out many bad examples which involve poor religion or bad politics or both, and all along the political spectrum. In fact Born Again American’s connection of the Bible to the radical, pro-homosexual agenda of People for the American Way is an especially “good” bad example. My point is rather to note that the objection to the mixture which has been for so long directed at conservatives now has its ready targets on the left. With the momentum moving in their direction politically, I wonder if the critics of conservatives’ mixing religion with politics will similarly take on Lear and People for the American Way.

Whether that criticism is forthcoming or not, as Christian believers we should not be surprised by the religious overtones of the Born Again American initiative. We do, in fact, live in the midst of religious and spiritual realities, and all people, Christian or not, liberal or conservative, want and need eventually to understand themselves and their lives in religious and spiritual terms. The only surprise here is that religious conservatives would have allowed the criticism of their use of explicitly religious language in the public square to cow them into silence and inaction. Conservative Christians should not make that mistake again. Hearing those words in others’ mouths now, albeit with radically different meanings and implications, should help restore the courage of their convictions and embolden them to think and act Christianly about politics and political issues, particularly during these days of elevated threat to the lives of the most helpless of all.

An addendum….

The Born Again American folks provide an example of how to mix religion and politics very poorly, grabbing religious-sounding phrases with no sense of their real meaning in order to support their radical agenda. At Covenant we aim to help our students learn to do it well – thorough and thoughtful understanding of God’s Word and God’s design for his creation, connected with wisdom and discernment to real life in the real world. We are grateful for the calling we have to equip our students for truly biblical engagement with every sphere of creation, including politics and government.