The Plain Dealer reported today (10/26/21) that the six major Republican candidates running to replace retiring US Senator, Rob Portman, were at a candidates forum near Columbus this past Sunday night. The forum was organized by a group of “socially conservative evangelical voters” belonging to an organization called the Center for Christian Values. What a terrifying collection of not-so-religious bigots.
The GOP candidates pandering to secure CCV votes in next fall’s primary are even more frightening as each – with the exception of Ohio Senator Matt Dolan – dresses up to look like Donald Trump.
The Center for Christian Values is organized, not around the life and teachings of Jesus, but in opposition to LGBTQ causes in state government as well as any effort to be inclusive or work to defeat bias or bigotry in any form. The Center for Christian Values seeks to exploit fear, prejudice, and white supremacy and wrap it all with a false piety in the name of Jesus. Make no mistake. It has been true for centuries, nothing is more terrifying than religious people on a crusade to advance self-righteous prejudice.
The climate of systemic hatred, prejudice, and white supremacy exploding in Ohio, and in far too many states, is a daily attack on true Christian values; values which seek to care for the outcaste and recognize neighbors as spiritual sisters and brothers. While such attacks are always present, it is more than a Halloween Fright Night that such hatred – described as a Christian Value – is being enshrined in law and expected as the platform for all who would seek elected office as Republicans in our state.
One of the candidates Sunday night is reported to have promised that if elected US Senator from Ohio, he would go to Washington with two documents as his guide. He will have the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. My blood runs cold. He knows little of the meaning of either document yet purports to understand fully the message of both.
What exactly does it mean to be guided by the Bible? What if ones understanding of the Bible is limited to a literalist interpretation of ancient stories and completely uninformed or MISinformed understandings of what the various texts of ancient scripture MEAN or about the values for which they were remembered, treasured, and followed?
The interpretive, biblical ignorance and cultural bigotry of the evangelical right in America today is a terror growing among us. A candidate for office, for instance, who has little knowledge of biblical interpretation and who thinks the Christian Values of which the Bible speaks justify penalties of law against LGBT people, or transgender persons, or immigrant people, or a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy are not only wrong but terrifying in what such a person would have the social climate of America become or the laws our Constitution would endorse, excuse, or allow.
The biblical understanding of groups like CCV and ALL evangelical groups like them in today’s America have their origin in biblical interpretation given by religious hysterics in the late 19th century of this country. The origins of evangelical American bible waving as ultimate truth has its origins in persons who hated blacks and Jews and Asians and Roman Catholics from everywhere and whose Pentecostal fervor was fueled by unbounded sex drive, abuse, misogyny, and supremacist racial ideology enmeshed in the view that the Bible was written exclusively for the benefit and ultimate salvation of American white people. What complete nonsense. But it is the state of our present political climate and the platform for any candidate who wants to be taken seriously by the GOP electorate.
The Center for Christian Values. What a tragic joke. Do not be confused by the words they would use, the candidates they would endorse, or the crusade upon which they are embarked. It is hatred, anger, resentment, fear, and ignorance seen not in the values of love, justice and living for others that Jesus advocated, but in the flag-waving Jesus signs of insurrectionists at the US Capitol and in the self-serving politics of those who would control your life and mine from the narrow perspective of their own.