In the view of John Edwards and other Christians on the Left, Jesus would raise taxes, promote single-payer, i.e., socialized, medicine, be pro-choice and advocate same-sex marriage. But most of all, Jesus would be anti-war, opposed to the military and essentially be a pacifist.
This is based largely on one of His most famous statements: "Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."
The flaw in interpreting such statements as policy statements on how a nation should behave is that Jesus was speaking about the life of the individual -- the micro -- not about nations and the macro.
This confusion of micro and macro morality not only afflicts the Left, it also afflicts the Right. One example is when religious conservatives equate public and private cursing. While ideally one should refrain from using expletives in private as well as in public, there is no moral comparison between using such words in private conversations and using them in public. One trusts that if a religious conservative overheard a teacher using an expletive in a quiet conversation with one other person, he would not compare such speech to the teacher's using that expletive while teaching a class. The first may be a personal sin, but the second is destructive of society.
Nevertheless it is the Left that is most oblivious to the distinction between the micro and the macro. Its understanding of Jesus is a good example. The Left would have us as a nation put this admonition of Jesus into practice: "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."
This is a blog, not a monograph, so I just don't have all the time and space I might want to discuss the utter stupidity and lack of understanding in this piece. So, just a few thoughts. First, simply from the point of view of presenting an argument, Prager offers the straw-man fallacy - he puts words in Edwards' mouth, then tells Edwards' how wrong those words are. Anyone can do it, it can even be fun, and occasionally funny; one doesn't do it if one is attempting to construct an allegedly serious argument.
Second, it would seem from what Prager is arguing here that, rather than Jesus, Prager would take as his guide Otto von Bismarck, who famously stated that no nation could be governed by the Beatitudes. At least we now know who Prager's favorite political philosopher is - the great architect of German reunification through war, one man rule, "blood and iron", and all that.
Third, on the specifics of Prager's attempted exegesis, the distinction he makes up here - what does he mean by "micro" and "macro" anyway? - has no meaning whatsoever. Jesus was speaking of our corporate responsibility and the possibilities inherent in the Christian life for us together. His was a communal ethic, first and foremost - an ethic for those living together. It may or may not be true that those sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are poor guides for nation-states (as none have ever applied them, one wonders how one can argue the case), but to create a phony distinction that would have been meaningless to the original hearers (or readers) and is meaningless today does nothing to enlighten the text, the supposed reason we do Biblical interpretation in the first place. This is rhetoric - and really awful, poorly reasoned rhetoric at that - and has little relationship to how one reads the Bible.
Finally, at the end of the piece, Prager writes
Jesus was talking about interpersonal relations and noted that in our relations with people in our lives, it is not generally a good idea to hit back.
Now imagine applying this to nations: Should we have said to the Japanese after they attacked Pearl Harbor, "Now that you have attacked us in the West, please also bomb our cities in the East"?
The idea that a country should offer its other cheek to an aggressor is simply immoral, not to mention suicidal. Such thinking renders Jesus and the Christian Bible foolish.
It also shows how hypocritical are the Left's attacks on religious conservatives for taking the Bible literally. It is the Left that engages in a far more dangerous literalism when it applies Jesus' words to national policy. Those on the religious Right who believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days are engaged in, I believe, a completely unnecessary literalism. But it is hardly dangerous. The Left's biblical literalism, however, applying "turn the other cheek" to millions of its own citizens, is fatally dangerous.
Besides literalism, another point of hypocrisy: The Left attacks the religious Right for threatening to replace our democracy with a theocracy that will impose fundamentalist Christianity on the nation. Yet the people who loathe conservatives for using Scripture have no difficulty with those who cite Jesus' words when arguing their positions -- even when citing them incorrectly.
Jesus was no leftist. He was, among other things, a religious Jew who knew and believed his Hebrew Bible, which contains verses such as this one from Psalms: "Those of you who love God must hate evil." That, not offering another city for terrorists to bomb, is likely what Jesus believed.
So . . . Jesus is OK with wanton death and destruction? I suppose I should refrain from citing a thinker with whom I (largely) disagree, but perhaps Prager should read Stanley Hauerwas, whose absolutist position on pacifism relies quite heavily on a rigorous reading of both the Old and New Testaments, and whose credentials as both a Biblical scholar and public ethicist I would put up against a no-name like Prager any day of the week.
Just a hint, Dennis. Don't try to interpret the Bible when you are both ignorant and stupid. It just doesn't work.
