Leonard Pitts, Jr. has a most excellent opinion piece in today’s Detroit Free Press in which he calls upon so-called Christians like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O’Reilly to live up to their Christian beliefs and stop telling lies. Even better, they put it on page two, not buried on the Opinion page.
Referring to Beck claiming his daughter would have been aborted under Obamacare, Pitt has this to say:
“That’s for God to decide,” [Beck] is quoted as saying. “Not the government.”
From this, we learn two things. The first is that Beck believes in God. The second is that Beck lies. You’d hope those things would be mutually exclusive.
For the record: No version of health care reform being contemplated by Congress mandates death for the old, the disabled or the infirm. That’s a canard. It is mendacity, prevarication, bald-faced lie.
Much of Pitts’ essay discusses an effort by Sojourners to call these “bald-faced liars” out on their anti-Christian actions.
Sojourners, whose mission “is to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world”, is the largest network of progressive Christians. They currently have an action page which encourages its members to pray for Glenn Beck and to email him, providing an easy link to do so. According to Pitt, Sojourners members “sent out thousands of e-mails to five of the biggest offenders: Beck, his fellow Fox personalities Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O’Reilly, and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Each e-mail said the same thing in essence: Stop lying.”
[Sojourners co-founder, Jim] Wallis, a celebrated theologian and author of “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America,” says Sojourners is trying to redeem things people “really should’ve learned in Sunday school.”
These thing are, as Pitt puts it:
That it’s wrong to lie, wrong to pick on the vulnerable. And that we have a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, the ones Jesus called “the least of these.”
I’m thrilled that Sojourners has linked health care reform to moral, ethical and spiritual teachings. Just as I believe every church, synagogue, temple and other religious group should have come out strongly and loudly against our war in Iraq, I think they should also be on the front lines of the health care reform debate. All modern religions teach caring for our brothers and sisters and helping the least among us and there are few things more fundamental to helping them than to ensure they have access to affordable quality health care.
It’s a big step for the Detroit Free Press to put this on their second page and I give them credit for doing so. And it’s even more gratifying to see religious groups beginning to step up and framing this issue in this way.
It gives me hope.
I’m just sayin’…
