I am writing in this post about an issue that has always disturbed me.  It is the very reason that I am so hesitant when the church gets involved in political issues to the extent that we define ourselves by one party affiliation over against all others.  For example, it seems to me in our society that if someone professes to be a Christian and is aligned with the Democratic party; some will look at them and think if not say, “how could you think that way?”  I have met some who are define their “devotion” to Jesus far more politically than they do in the practice of the Christian life.  I know people who will walk the streets to push a Republical platform agenda but would not walk across the street to tell their lost neighbor how they can be saved.  I am pro-life. I am strongly pro-life but I know people who will attend a pro-life rally to wave banners and shout slogans who wouldn’t take a Bible and preach the Gospel in front of Bi-Lo or Walgreens.  I don’t understand it.  I know which of those issues is most important.  There is no doubt in my mind.  And all of these things that I have mentioned till now concern me, and concern me deeply; but they are not the supreme political irony of which I speak.  That one shows up for me in relationship to the issue of the Constitution and the appointment of Justices of the Supreme Court.

The Conservatives want a Conservative as do I and for reasons that I fully support:  The Constitution is not a fluid document.  Two views of the Constitution are held in our culture.  The first is that the Constitution is a fixed document that is to be interpreted based upon what it meant whent it was written with that meaing fixed for all time and adaptable to different cultural circumstances.  But the words of the Contstitution and the construct of the Constitution does not change.  This view is the one held by most conservatives.  The second view which is held by most liberals is that the Constitution is fluid.  We must allow the circumstances and conditions in which we live give direction to how we read the Constitution.  For example, what freedom of speech meant when the words were framed is not what it means now because circumstances have changed.  What marriage was when the Constitution was written does not bind us in defining and determining what marriage is in our day.  This view holds that the Constitution is an ever emerging and ever changing document so that what it meant then simply becomes the first step in our understanding what it means now.

I have not met a card carrying political Republican who would hold the liberal view of the Constitution but I have met a bunch of them who would hold a liberal view of the Bible.  Herein is the supreme irony.  Most card carrying Republicans that I have met are constitutional conservatives who hold that what the Constitution meant is exactly what it means, but I have met a whole host of them who would not apply that same principle to the Bible.  And I would not even hold in the same category the Bible which is the Word of God with the Constitution which isn’t even close to being the Word of God.  Yet, I have met men and women who have a higher view of the Constitution than they do of the Bible.  That is a supreme irony for which I have no explanation. The outcome is a political conservative who is a religious liberal.  He wants the interpretation of the Constitution fixed while he wants what the Bible says to be fluid.

I can give you at least one reason for this in the south.  Many political conservatives in the south are also solid racists.  Many of these people still want blacks and other races to bow to the anglos as the superior race.  They know if they have any sense at all that there is no justification for this sinisterly sinful attitude in the Scripture.  I contend and I think correctly that no person can hold this kind of racist attitude and be saved.  So, these who hold these horrid racist views find succor in the Constitution as it was interpreted and lived out in the segregated society of the South in the fifties.  Can I also say that every time I hear someone speak of that time as the “good ole days” I get sick at my stomach.  Never has a society been as far away from God as we were while packing our churches to the full.  I think it is one reason that so many kids who were in church during those days, went off to school, and came back home but not back to church because they saw rightly the blatant hyporcrisy of so many that even now is without remorse or repentance.

Political conservatism wed to religious liberalism is the religion of the south among many.  But it is not what is found in the Bible.  I am a conservative when it comes to the Constitution.  It means what it meant. I am even more rigidly that when it comes to the Holy and Inerrant Word of God.

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