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26 Nov 2008 04:54 pm

Evil And The Right

A reader writes:

I was reading your post about George Weigel's view of Catholics who voted for Obama, and it reminded me of something.  Weigel and people like him seem to think that ideology defines who is good and who is evil in our world.  It would be helpful for people who think this way to remember that the worst spy in American history was a conservative, devout Catholic family man who was a member of Opus Dei (Robert Hanssen) and that one of the heroes of the Cold War was an alcoholic, womanizing, pro-choice, liberal congressman from Texas who was accused of recreational drug use (Charlie Wilson).

History shows us repeatedly that ideology is meaningless when it comes to determining good and evil in the world.

Losing sight of the fact that all men are sinners and seeing the fight between good & evil in purely ideological terms is why I think so few Christians challenged the immorality and incompetence of the Bush administration and the Republican Party were doing. I fear that until more Christians realize this many Christians are going to continue to allow themselves to be used by the Republican Party.

Looking back on the campaign, I recall a seminal moment in the Saddleback Forum in August. Obama and McCain were asked their views of evil. McCain said his duty was to defeat it, whatever that means. Obama insisted that evil can be perpetrated by those who intend to do good, and that the Christian duty was to remember that. Obama lost the debate in political terms, but his answer was, in my judgment, the more authentically Christian one. McCain's was Christianist. There's a difference.

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