Memo to Presidential Candidates: Redistribution of Wealth Is a Divine Commandment

by William O’Brien
Huffington Post

Once again, the U.S. presidential election process is marked by the peculiar American interplay of religion and politics. As in the past several campaigns, conservative Christians are a prize voting bloc: Since the beginning of the campaign, we have witnessed the various Republican candidates vigorously vying for their votes, plying their respective pieties and accentuating their evangelical credentials.

Interestingly, the religious vote is highly prized despite the fact that the usual social issues that are the evangelicals’ bread and butter — abortion, traditional marriage — are taking a decidedly backseat to urgent economic issues during these trying times of prolonged recession. (Though the current bizarre controversy over birth control may be shifting the terrain a bit.) That hardly means that those on the religious right aren’t raising their voices. A subtext in much of the political discourse seems to be a kind of “biblical economics.” Conservative Christians are among the most fervent defenders of the free market, which they see as divinely mandated; they are likewise among the most vituperative opponents of any socialist redistribute-the-wealth schemes, which, one might infer from their criticisms, are nothing short of satanic.

President Obama himself stoked the flames of controversy a few weeks back at the National Prayer Breakfast, when he underscored a biblical basis for his policies, including his suggestion that raising taxes on the most affluent Americans “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'” Not surprisingly, his words raised the theological and political ire of many Christian leaders. Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition called the President’s connection of his tax policy to Jesus’s teachings “theologically threadbare and straining credulity.” Columnist Cal Thomas suggested it was Marxist, not biblical. “Abuse and mangling of Scripture” were common critiques from Obama’s religiously minded antagonists.

In fact, the Bible has plenty to say about economics, but it is more radical than what either conservatives or liberals usually assert.
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