The Religious Left’s One-Sided Shutdown Anger

If ever there was a fight in Washington that could fairly be described as a purely political, it would have to be the recent failure of Congress to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Democrat-controlled Senate each passed their own versions of the bill, refusing to compromise even as the government shut down. At the heart of the debate was a provision to defund Obamacare that was present in the House bill, but absent from the Senate bill.

A Pew Research poll taken just before the shutdown found that 39% of Americans believe Republicans would be more to blame if the government shut down, while 36% would blame President Obama. 17% would blame both, 2% would blame no one. But despite Americans being somewhat divided on whom to blame, prominent members of the religious left decided this would be the perfect time to pick sides in a purely political dispute.

Just before the shutdown, an interfaith coalition (including representatives of the National Council of Churches, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Methodist Church) signed onto a letter to members of Congress, castigating them for a failure to find a compromise. In theory, the faith leaders’ letter applies equally to all members of Congress. “Our democracy rests on principles of reason, compromise, and a commitment to the common good,” the letter reads. However, the following sentence makes it clear that they hold one faction of Congress more responsible than the rest. “To hold our governance processes and financial credibility hostage to narrow priorities is not only dangerous to the nation’s near-term financial well-being, it threatens the very foundations of our democratic process and our capacity to live united in community.”

The hostage language is of course a favorite of critics of the GOP plan to defund Obamacare, including none other than President Obama himself. It takes some serious cognitive dissonance to call your well-meaning opponents hostage-takers and then in the same breath lament about “our capacity to live united in community.” Latter on, the faith leaders make it even more clear that instead of lofty concerns about bipartisanship and the common good, their real concern is Obamacare. “It ill serves our nation and people to stand in the way of funding federal operations or raising the debt ceiling in an effort to block implementation of health care legislation that Congress duly enacted.”

Meanwhile, Sojourner’s Jim Wallis put out a YouTube video leaving little doubt as to whom he blamed for the shutdown. “Those political extremists- and I’ll call them that- who want to shut down the government … they’re against government per se. They want to destroy the House and shut it down.” Wallis is either confused or intentionally distorting his ideological opponents’ views. No serious politician has ever expressed their opposition to government as an institution, just their desire for less of it. And no one, Republican and Democrats alike, have claimed that the shutdown was what they wanted. All sides in this political fight were opposed to having a government shutdown, but in the end both sides allowed it to happen rather than give up on their political aims.

Wallis continues by saying that those who hate the government really actually hate the poor. “Because government has a biblical responsibility to care for the poor, they’re against poor people! They get hostile to the poor, because they’re hostile to government.” Of course, Wallis avoids naming any programs that will be negatively affected by the shutdown, perhaps because he recognizes that, under the shutdown, all major welfare and entitlement programs are still being funded for the foreseeable future. If Tea Party Republicans actually shut down the government to spite the poor, they didn’t think their plan through very well.

With his two step approach, Wallis has practically descended into parody of how liberal Christians approach government. Take his assertion that those who want a smaller government actually hate and want to destroy government, throw in the assertion that hating government is the same as hating the poor, and what have you got? Wanting to cut government spending means you hate the poor. With two broad strokes, the overwhelming Washington consensus that serious cuts are needed is unbiblical and hateful.

It would have been very easy for the faith leaders to come up with genuinely reconciling statements that called for real compromise from both sides. Instead, the letter and Wallis both crafted an argument that alienates the 53% of Americans that believe the other side shares some of the blame. Ironically, while making an appeal for great cooperation and unity, the faith leaders end up being just as divisive as the politicians who led us into this mess.