My Southern Baptist neighbors give me the privelege of getting this sign in my face when I leave home and when I come home. Meanwhile, even though the sign says “Rutherford County Supports”, my two Kerry yard signs, and the intents of at least two other neighbors on the opposite side of our house, to vote for Kerry, this sign flaunts in an offensively large and seemingly illegal (for neighborhood zoning restrictions, and political representation reasons) display.

I want to enlarge into a yard sign my “God is NOT a Republican or a Democrat” sticker, but with EMPHASIS for this case, and particularly for this year and this election, that God is NOT a Republican, and that I feel it is the Christian duty of Biblical Christians to put action over piety, ministry over claim, “compassion in action” over “compassionate conservatism” that exists only in ideology and not on the street, in the world, in nature, and among the people and kingdoms of this world where the Kingdom of God is actively calling people to be. And in 2004, this cries out to be expressed in booting this epitiomy of “Anti-Christ” out of office and into the annals of history as one who placed EMPIRE above The Kingdom of God. Harsh words, but a living , breathing reality which has deceived an alarming number of people because they have not listened to to those who actually work with the people and the communities and the families who lose in THIS Country alone under this President, and those who lose by living in the same world.

Those of you that know I am a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — 1981 — before it entered into the theological dark ages (all of the professors I had are other places now, mostly in colleges that are Baptist related but more aligned with the Cooperative Baptists than with the Southern Baptist Convention) know how this irks me that this once diverse and great denomination is now overrun with this lunacy, and blind to their own betrrayal of the gospel by putting political loyalties above Scripture (of course they deny this) and somehow seem automatically swept up in the Republican rhetoric. I ought to be used to this by now (it started in earnest about 20 years ago), but I can also not let it completely go, becuase it is after all, a matter of commitment to the gospel, and it is my own Church heritage which raised me and within which I was called into ministry, that has forsaken both Biblical and Baptist principles of “soul competency” and has instead joined with the voices FOR war, for pre-emptive , unwarranted, unsubstantiated resons (as if there were actually such a thng as a good reason — but today, even plain common sense, wordly standards of truth and trustworthiness are in shambles. This administration is adopted by the Church only via deception and distortion.

The people whom Jesus had the harshest words were the religious leaders of his day who had forsaken the spirit of the law. It is has been rare in history ( particularly in our nation) that the government has been so unaplogetically opposed to many of the most basic of Christian principles: justice, compassion, aid to the needy, avoiding favortism toward the rich, and seeking peace and reconciliation. This administration is the epitomy of the opposite of all these things.