Smart Pastor

As you may be aware, there are some vague rumblings that the so
called "Christian Right" would sponsor a third party run for the
President should the Republicans run someone (Rudy) who does not pass
their values tests. 

Many, myself included, think this would be crazy (politically speaking) as it
would probably hand the election to someone even worse to them than
Rudy…Hillary! 

I read a post this weekend that thinks just such a scenario might be
the best thing that could happen for the Kingdom, if not the
"evangelical right."  Check it out…

One result of the political presumptuousness of Fallwell, Dobson,
Pat Robertson, and others has been to make atheism fashionable in the
United States. Their un-Christian legalism has made it easy for
shallow religious provocateurs to fashion a false “straw man”
Christianity which, with no intellectual effort and scant evidence,
they can knock down to “prove” that God doesn’t exist and that the
claims of Christ are wrong. An uninquisitive media haplessly
abets the misimpressions of Christian faith created by Dobson et al by
treating their presumptions as true.
………

This isn’t to say that the Religious Right is devoid of influence.
Dobson and crew may be able to convince a fraction of the electorate to
vote for a third-party candidate in 2008. It would be a quixotic effort
which, I hope, would demonstrate to the mainstream media and American
mass culture that the Religious Right isn’t synonymous with
Christianity.

A drubbing might be a wake-up call to those involved in the
Religious Right not to give up on politics as an individual pursuit,
but to renounce the hubris of believing that they and God see
eye-to-eye on political issues, to adopt more humility about their
politics.

More importantly, it might convince some Christian leaders to focus
not on securing votes, but on fulfilling Christ’s command that we "make
disciples."  In the end, committed disciples, people who follow Christ,
will live
their lives differently, creating cultural differences that will render
legal mandates unnecessary.  (Source)

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