Can a Christian be a Democrat?

This article is intended only for those who call themselves Christians and identify themselves as Democrats.

In writing this post, I realize that I will ruffle a lot of feathers. But that is OK with me.  There is primarily two major competing world views held by people, i.e., a biblical worldview (which relies on absolutes laid out in the bible by God who “changes not,” i.e., immutable) and a progressive/secular view (which determines right or wrong in their own mind – which is relative morality). I adhere to the biblical worldview.

I will not hold back from proclaiming biblical truth simply because someone claims what I write is offensive (which is nothing more than a deceptive and cheap way to marginalize, be dismissive, and avoid personal responsibility for their actions).

Many claim themselves to be a Christian and a Democrat.  If you claim that, you are either deceived (lying to yourself) or ignorant.   There’s an old  saying,

“Just because the mouse is in the cookie jar, doesn’t make him a cookie.”

Likewise, just because you claim yourself to be a Christian, doesn’t make you one. A christian is a Christ follower and one that adheres to scripture and is obedient to the word of God.

The Democratic party openly promotes and supports moral issues that are in contradiction of scripture, specifically in the areas of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion.

For the Christian, the Bible is the final authority for both belief and behavior.  If we deny God’s truths, we call him a liar.

1 John 2:4   “The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”

1 John 1:6   “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.”

While we may differ on the role government plays in our life in regard to social, political, economic, etc. (as pushed by Democrats and Republicans), as Christians who believe in God’s word and call Christ their Savior, there should be no conflict.  We both should see what is written in the Bible as the inerrant word of God.  What God commands us to do, we must follow.  What he calls sin or commands us not to do, we must obey.

If we claim that Christ is our Savior and Lord, and yet vote in people who knowingly promote agendas and laws that are in direct violation of scripture, we place ourselves in battle against God himself.

Let me first provide you insight on what the bible says about these issues:

Biblical View of Homosexuality

Homosexuality is condemned in Scripture. The Apostle Paul, writing by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, declares that homosexuality “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (I Corinthians 6:9; 10). Now Paul does not single out the homosexual as a special offender. He includes fornicators, idolators, adulterers, thieves, covetous persons, drunkards, revilers and extortioners. And then he adds the comment that some of the Christians at Corinth had been delivered from these very practices: “And such were some of you: But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the spirit of our God” (I Corinthians 6:11). All of the sins mentioned in this passage are condemned by God, but just as there was hope in Christ for the Corinthians, so is there hope for all of us.

Homosexuality is an illicit lust forbidden by God. He said to His people Israel, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18:22). “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them” (Leviticus 20:13). In these passages homosexuality is condemned as a prime example of sin, a sexual perversion. The Christian can neither alter God’s viewpoint nor depart from it.

In the Bible sodomy is a synonym for homosexuality. God spoke plainly on the matter when He said, “There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel” (Deuteronomy 23:17). The whore and the sodomite are in the same category. A sodomite was not an inhabitant of Sodom nor a descendant of an inhabitant of Sodom, but a man who had given himself to homosexuality, the perverted and unnatural vice for which Sodom was known. Let us look at the passages in question:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house around, both old and young, all the people from every quarter:

And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.

And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof. (Genesis 19:4-8)

The Hebrew word for “know” in verse 5 is yada`, a sexual term. It is used frequently to denote sexual intercourse (Genesis 4:1, 17, 25; Matthew 1:24, 25). The message in the context of Genesis 19 is clear. Lot pled with the men to “do not so wickedly.” Homosexuality is wickedness and must be recognized as such else there is no hope for the homosexual who is asking for help to be extricated from his perverted way of life.

The New Testament also addresses the issue of homosexuality:  Romans 1:24-27; I Timothy 1:10 and Jude 7. If one takes these Scriptures seriously, homosexuality will be recognized as an evil. The Romans passage is unmistakably clear. Paul attributes the moral depravity of men and women to their rejection of “the truth of God” (1:25). They refused “to retain God in their knowledge” (1:28), thereby dethroning God and deifying themselves. The Old Testament had clearly condemned homosexuality but in Paul’s day there were those persons who rejected its teaching. Because of their rejection of God’s commands He punished their sin by delivering them over to it.

The philosophy of substituting God’s Word with one’s own reasoning commenced with Satan. He introduced it at the outset of the human race by suggesting to Eve that she ignore God’s orders, assuring her that in so doing she would become like God with the power to discern good and evil (Genesis 3:1-5). That was Satan’s big lie. Paul said that when any person rejects God’s truth, his mind becomes “reprobate,” meaning perverted, void of sound judgment. The perverted mind, having rejected God’s truth, is not capable of discerning good and evil.

In Romans 1:26-31 twenty-three punishable sins are listed with homosexuality leading the list. Paul wrote, “For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet” (Romans 1:26, 27). These verses are telling us that homosexuals suffer in their body and personality the inevitable consequences of their wrong doing. Notice that the behaviour of the homosexual is described as a “vile affection” (1:26). The Greek word translated “vile” (atimia) means filthy, dirty, evil, dishonourable. The word “affection” in Greek is pathos, used by the Greeks of either a good or bad desire. Here in the context of Romans it is used in a bad sense. The “vile affection” is a degrading passion, a shameful lust. Both the desire (lusting after) and the act of homosexuality are condemned in the Bible as sin.

Biblical View of Marriage

In the Bible, marriage is a divinely ordered institution designed to form a permanent union between one man and one woman for one purpose (among others) of procreating or propagating the human race. That was God’s order in the first of such unions (Genesis 1:27, 28; 2:24; Matthew 19:5). If, in His original creation of humans, God had created two persons of the same sex, there would not be a human race in existence today. The whole idea of two persons of the same sex marrying is absurd, unsound, ridiculously unreasonable, stupid. A clergyman might bless a homosexual marriage but God won’t.

The New Testament has much more to say about marriage, which has yet even a deeper spiritual meaning  of Christ, the groom, and his bride, the church.

Democrats View (taken from the national web site: http://www.democrats.org)

>  Enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which includes measures prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity;

>  Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security;

>  Ensuring civil unions and equal federal rights for LGBT couples, as well as fully repealing the Defense of Marriage Act;

Democrats equate homosexuality, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, lesbian and gay behavior to race and/or gender. They love to re-label sinful behavior as a civil rights issue. The Bible calls this behavior sin, and such behavior is made by an individual as a result of personal choice, not birth. To claim that one is born that way (such as in the case of race/gender), and therefore claim they have no choice and that they are only being what they truly are, is a lie and contradicts scripture.  It is nothing more than a convenient excuse and justification for aberrant behavior.

The truth is everyone is born with a sinful nature. We choose or choose not to sin, whether that be lying, stealing, murdering, sexual immorality, and more.  We cannot call that which God calls sin, not sin.  And even more, as Christians, we should not support those parties or people who knowingly embrace, support, and promote behavior that God calls sin.

Clearly, the Democrat position violates scripture in these areas.

Abortion

The numbers are staggering.  Nearly 1,000,000 babies are aborted in the U.S. each year!  This is nothing short of mass murder.

Liberals love to scream “save our forests,” or  “save the whales,” but have no problem taking the life of an unborn child.  A wounded American eagle was found recently in Maryland and rushed to emergency treatment. However, it died and a $5,000 reward was offered for the arrest of whoever injured it. It is illegal to ship a pregnant lobster: it’s a $1,000 fine. In the State of Massachusetts there is an anti-cruelty law that makes it illegal to award a goldfish as a prize. Why? This is what it says, “To protect the tendency to dull humanitarian feelings and to corrupt morals of those who abuse them.” The same people that want to save the goldfish are leading the parade, usually, to kill the babies.

In some metropolitan hospitals, in the major cities of our nation, abortions far outnumber live births. Planned Parenthood has gone so far as to say, “This is nothing more than a means of preventing disease; pregnancy being noted as a disease.” If you think that sounds farfetched, I will remind you of a paper by Dr. Willard Kates, from the Planned Parenthood Physicians Association. The title of the paper is, “Abortion as treatment for unwanted pregnancy: The second sexually transmitted disease.”

Pregnancy then is seen by Planned Parenthood as a sexually transmitted disease that needs to be cured by abortion. Planned Parenthood has somewhere approaching 1,000 abortion clinics doing somewhere approaching 75,000 murders a year, and are receiving millions of dollars of support from the U. S. Government and the United Way, and other agencies like that. Our nation, and other nations in the world are frankly wiping out an entire generation of human beings in mass infanticide.

The official party platform of the Republicans opposes abortion and considers unborn children to have an inherent right to life (this is in line with the Bible).

The Democratic Party platform considers abortion to be a woman’s right.  If she doesn’t want to have a child, she simple chooses to get an abortion. This is like equating the issue of life/death to be as trivial as choosing which color to wear today.

The primary point of conflict in the entire abortion debate is the question of when life begins. If indeed life begins in the womb, then no one could disagree that the fetus (latin for `little one’) is a human being, and is subject to the rights (God’s laws concerning humanity) which befit a human being. First, the Bible establishes that God recognizes a person even before he or she is born. “Before I was born the Lord called me” (Isaiah 49:1).

Exodus 21:22-23 describes a situation in which a man hits a pregnant woman and causes her to give birth prematurely. If there is “no serious injury,” the man is required to pay a fine, but if there is “serious injury,” either to the mother or the child, then the man is guilty of murder and subject to the penalty of death. This command, in itself, legitimizes the humanity of the unborn child, and places the child on a level equal that of the adult male who caused the miscarriage.

Scriptural support abounds for the humanity of the unborn child. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made . . . your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Ps 139: 13-16). The Bible, in fact, uses the same Greek word to describe the unborn John the Baptist (Luke 1:41,44), the newborn baby Jesus (Luke 2:12,16), and the young children who were brought to Jesus for his blessing (Luke 18:15).

Perhaps the most stark Biblical revelation of the humanity of the unborn comes in Jeremiah 20, during Jeremiah’s cry of woe in which he laments that he wishes he had never been born, “Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying ‘A child is born to you – a son!’ . . . For he did not kill me in the womb with my mother as my grave” (Jeremiah 20:15-17).

In the aforementioned verses, and in countless other verses, the Bible does indeed establish that an unborn child is just as much a human in God’s eyes as we ourselves are. This indicates that the command “Thou Shall not Murder” (Exodus 20:13) certainly applies to the unborn as well as the already born. Thus, when we read Genesis 9:6, the full realization of what it means to murder comes in to focus, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” Murder is an abomination in the sight of God because it is the unauthorized killing of a being made in His own image, and a blurring of the creator/creature distinction (cf. Romans 1).

Clearly, once again Democrats position on abortion runs counter to scripture!

In all these issues, Democrats worldview is in contradiction to the Bible.  This secular worldview colors, taints, affects, distorts and determines how Democrats view other non-spiritual issues, such as: immigration, environmental, science, energy and civil rights, etc.

Regardless of political party, for a Christian to elect people who knowingly embrace, support, and promote behavior and actions that God calls sin, it is a direct violation of revealed scripture.  The wise and prudent Christian should ask themselves if their obedience is to a political party, or to the word of God.