As mentioned in a previous post, if we want to change the knee-jerk reaction of many in the state to always vote Republican because it's the party of Jesus, we need to spend a lot more time explaining how the Democrats are the party of Jesus. Like it or not, Christianity is a major player (if not THE major player) in state politics, and you can't win elections here without cozying up to it.
The big elephant in the room is and likely always will be abortion. For some, no matter how you spin it, how you show how liberal policies more closely align to the message of Jesus, etc., they will never be able to vote for us based on that issue alone. I've spent a lot of time in this blog talking about abortion, so I'm not going to address it at the moment, other than to say that any time your political opponent tries to drag you into an argument about abortion, you have to walk away. It's not a winnable argument.
That said, there are lots of winnable arguments.
I mentioned before that I'd like to see billboards quoting the Bible posted around town. This would be a great way to change hearts and minds. Why?
Because reading the Bible turns you into a liberal.
As we already know, there's a tendency that the more educated you are, the more liberal you are. This seems logical - liberal means "open to change" at its heart, and we tend to embrace new ideas more strongly when those ideas are backed by sound reasoning and research. The more you accept the scientific method as a rationale for understanding the world, the more you'll accept its findings, and accept that change is necessary to model society around those findings.
The same seems to hold true for the frequency with which you read the Bible. The more you study it, the more you understand how various arguments in the Bible feed into one another, and the more likely you are to catch the deeper meanings that the Bible itself says it has. For instance, the scholars of Jesus' time - the Pharisees and Sadducees - were highly legalistic and, for their time, conservative. Jesus spent a very large part of His time trying to reeducate people about Biblical legalism and about focusing on the deeper point to the Bible - namely, its focus on love of God and love of neighbor - rather than the minutia of the law.
For many Christians, however, the only time they interact with God's Word is in Church or in a Bible Study group - places where their thoughts on various topics are led by spiritual leaders rather than by the Holy Spirit. Though they're taught in church to read their Bibles, life happens. Life happens to all of us, so this should come as no surprise. It's difficult to spend time in deep personal study of the Bible when things are exploding all around you.
So we need to advertise. Gentle advertisements, divorced from any obvious political bent, can make people ask questions that they might be uncomfortable answering. In the presence of a political agenda, those questions get answered in politically-aligned ways - if a liberal sees that an advertisement came from a conservative thinktank, for instance, the liberal might automatically assume that the opposite belief from the one advertised is the correct one. However, divorcing the political agenda from such advertising forces people to confront their own thoughts, rather than jumping into an echo chamber... and this can yield some surprising personal revelations.
Are you on board yet with this idea of advertising a liberal religious agenda? If not, message me so I can talk more about it to address your specific concerns. I'll proceed in this post as if the answer is "yes," however.
So, what kinds of advertisements should help? My thoughts are to do simple black-and-white billboards of the style popularized several years back, attributing quotes to God. They would post simple quotes from the Bible:
"The mouth speaks what the heart is full of." - Jesus
"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." - God
"Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same." - John the Baptist
"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love." - Paul
More to come...
