Roland Martin stated the following on his April 8^th “No Bias, No Bull” CNN program with a criticism of social conservatives:

“I’m an evangelical, but I think the faith should focus on more than just abortion and whether marriage should just be between a man and a woman. As police brutality, poverty, funding inequality in our schools, the high infant mortality rate in our inner cities—they’re all issues that I, as a Christian, care about, but they rarely top the religious right’s agenda.”

I’m glad to hear that religion now has a place at the table when it comes to social policy. For 30 years, since the organization of the Moral Majority, Christians have repeatedly been told that “religion and politics don’t mix,” “you can’t impose your morality on others,” “you don’t have a right to judge,” “there’s a separation between church and state.” But now that religion of a “Progressive” variety is being used as the guiding force for social policy, it’s OK for “religion and politics to mix.”

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The civil rights movement of the 1960s was influenced by those who brought morality to bear on issues related to race and equality. “For the first time in history, a single ProtestantOrthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish testimony was presented to Congress in support of legislation. Congress became aware that the religious community was aroused in a startling way. The participation of the religious groups in the March on Washington was another bit of evidence. Over 40,000 white church people participated in the March.”¹ With just a few changes, this description of the 1964 March on Washington could easily describe the activities of the often vilified “religious right” and their efforts to influence legislation. The similarities are not lost on Stephen L. Carter, one of the nation’s leading experts on constitutional law:

Religious organizations were among the strongest supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment and public accommodations. They testified in support of it. They made public appeals for it. And, once again, only the segregation[ist]s complained. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia charged that those who made religious arguments in favor of the legislation did not understand “the proper place of religious leaders in our national life,” adding that the religions should not “make a moral question of a political issue.” Indeed, there is little about the civil rights movement, other than the vital distinction in the ends that it sought, that makes it very different from the rightwing religious movements of the present day.²

Senator Russell maintained that the legislation had passed because “those damn preachers had got the idea it was a moral issue.”³ Civil rights legislation was passed in the early 1960s because the “moral question” was pressed by religious leaders. “When it was finally passed, friend and foe alike credited the passage of the bill to the persistent power of the church.”⁴ Hubert H. Humphrey, the leader of the struggle in the Senate for passage, along with other veteran fighters for civil rights legislation, “insisted that the churches’ efforts had made the difference which had been lacking in other struggles for such bills.”⁵

The efforts of today’s Christians on the right of the political spectrum are similar to those of black Christians of another era. While blacks fought legislative and constitutional battles for themselves, Christians today have chosen the arena of politics to fight for the unborn and against homosexual marriages as well as other causes. Just as “black people are human beings,” Christians believe that preborn babies, both black and white, are human beings. And while Christians know that the law cannot make people love their neighbors, it can stop them from killing their (pre-born) neighbors before they are born. 

It seems to me that the anti-slavery movement, the civil rights movement, the pro-abortion movement, the women’s rights movement, and the so-called gay rights movement are as narrowly focused as the pro-life and pro-marriage movements are. What do you think Martin would say to someone who offered the following quip to Christians who were working overtime to outlaw slavery and racial segregation?: “I’m an evangelical, but I think the faith should focus on more than slavery and civil rights.”

Slavery is a great moral evil, but I suspect that killing babies is worse.  Martin is concerned about “infant mortality” in the inner cities, but he’s not concerned about killing 1.5 million pre-born babies each year with a disproportionate number being performed on poor blacks. Martin is Black. “Progressive” social policies, the ones that Martin believes are Christian, have been pouring trillions of dollars into education and poverty programs since the mid-1960s. We’ve gotten more poverty, more illegitimacy, and falling test scores in our heavily tax-supported public (government) schools. Money can’t be the issue. Small private schools and homeschoolers do very well without the infusion of capital that funds our nation’s public school system.

Conservative Christians believe that government is the problem when it comes to fixing poverty and education. That’s why we don’t appeal to the State to fix them. We believe less government and lower taxes are the better solutions. While I am not an advocate of government education, there are millions of Christian conservatives who have been trying to fix their schools. Their concerns are mostly rebuffed as they watch their schools become ideological war zones. Police brutality is more a local issue and does deserve attention, but let’s not always blame police officers. Abortion has been legalized; police brutality has not. Again, 1.5 million dead pre-borns each year is pretty brutal.

The family is the foundation of society. Homosexual marriage tears at that foundation. Look what’s happened since sexual attitudes have been liberalized in America, much of it happening in our public schools. There’s an illegitimacy rate that’s near 40%. When any behavior is legitimized and subsidized, you get more of it. Is it possible that America’s high infant mortality rate is related to the rise in unbridled sexual activity that is not addressed by “Progressives” like Martin? Welfare dependency might be another cause since the “impregnators” can leave their women to the “care” of the State.

The saddest feature of the show was seeing Frank Schaeffer, the son of the late Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–1984), offer this bit of loony left drivel:

“The fact of the matter is we actually have a progressive Christian who’s a leader right now, and his name is Barack Obama. He is a born-again Christian. He is a progressive Democrat. I happen to be an independent voter. I’m not going out there for Democrats, but we do have a progressive Christian leader. He’s sitting in the White House right now having just come back from a wonderful tour of Europe where he’s wowed the world and shown them a new face of America, a more compassionate and inclusive face, and that’s really what we have to be about in the future. So I’m very optimistic.”

I suppose a “compassionate and inclusive face” is another way of hiding the ugliness of abortion, same-sex sodomy, and support for socialist economic policies. In addition to writing books and producing films denouncing abortion (e.g., Whatever Happened to the Human Race?), in 1985 Frank Schaeffer also edited Is Capitalism Christian? The book responds in the affirmative as it indicts the “radical Christian” movement at the time. Yesterday’s “radicals” are now today’s “progressives.” Here’s a portion of a review of Is Capitalism Christian? by Chilton Williamson Jr., that was published in National Review in 1986:

[T]here is an interesting introduction by [Franky] Schaeffer himself, who, after demanding to know whether any economic system has proven itself better at preserving Christian and humane values than capitalism has, fires a few volleys at that “diabolical marriage between the worst of Puritanism and Socialism,” at “Christian New Age liberals, evangelical and Catholic alike, [who] combine hatred of the flesh with coercive utopianism” at the “pernicious ideology that tries to make ordinary people feel guilty just for being alive” and ends by impoverishing whole peoples and nations. The plain truth is that, when it comes to discussing matters pertaining to either Christianity or economics, the radical [Progressive] Christian movement is talking through its hat, and Schaeffer and his gang know it.

Barack Obama and the “New Liberals” in charge of the country right now are pushing for a “coercive utopianism” that will in the end impoverish this nation and its people. What Schaeffer denounced in the mid-1980s, he now embraces with full gusto. He is being used by the “Progressives” because he has denounced his former beliefs.

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