[A]s a secular person who thinks there’s a lot of wisdom in traditional Christian ethical thought it always strikes me as very odd that modern-day manifestations of Christian political activism in the United States so often take the form of advocacy for violence, cruelty, and revenge.
Ah, Matt. This is a lament that I frequently hear from other liberals, and I am totally sympathetic to it. How can a religion that primarily consists of enlightened teachings--love your neighbor as yourself, treat others as you would be treated, don't judge others, forgive others when they wrong you--wind up often being so perverse? To some extent, it's pretty telling that both Christianity and Islam teach a lot of similar things in how to treat others, and yet both have some clearly repressive and deranged followers. I suspect in both cases that these form a fairly small percentage of practicing members of the faith in question, every group has its rotten apples, etc.
When it comes to politics, American Christianity has been heavily co-opted by the right, thanks largely to effective outreach by organizations like the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority. Those organizations have Southern roots, which isn't surprising, as the South is probably the most religious region in America, and the most contradictory. There are many stories about the antebellum South and its cultured, hospitable, genteel, religious way of life. Gone With The Wind is one such. All of those people, though, owned slaves. They engaged in one of the most abominable practices known to man, one which might not have been literally forbidden by the Bible (certainly not in the Old Testament, though it envisions the institution differently), but slavery violates nearly every lesson on how to treat others that Jesus ever spoke, as well as every standard of justice in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet the South was predominantly Christian and agricultural, and therefore slave owning. Clearly, this is a group of people that has little trouble compartmentalizing their Christianity.
I would not go so far as to say that all of Christianity supports this sort of agenda, not even all evangelicals or even all politically active conservative evangelicals. But I would say that the sort of evangelicalism that's been on the rise in the past few decades has been of a Southern origin, one that is comfortable with an "us versus them" dynamic (though not necessarily still racist) rather than a "we're all God's children" dynamic that the actual Bible seeks to impart. That the Christian part of the Christian Right has been completely corrupted by the right, to such an extent that they now approve of torture, was predictable. Add in a healthy amount of apocalypticism, in which believers think that these are the last days and that all those Jesus teachings are well and good but this is WAR and we are fighting Satan and we can't let him win--well, you get the picture. Southern evangelicalism has long been rather apocalyptic, but I'd say that since the 1960s it's been quite a bit worse. This is the justification for quite a bit of religious acceptance of the present nastiness, as statements like this seem to belie an apocalyptic, barbarians at the gates worldview among many religious right types. And I don't see it as likely to stop soon: Christians have been waiting for almost two millennia for Christ's reappearance. For almost all of that time there has been some share of apocalyptics out there. We better just get used to it.
All of this is to say that the left needs to do outreach to religious voters. Secular voters are a significant part of the left, true, and they get nervous when Senator Blahblah starts pulling out the Bible verses. This being said, I don't think that most Christians really want to impose a theocracy on America, as many liberals often assert as fact (rather than just an opinion). Lines must be drawn, as I think they can, and there is common ground to be tapped. The intellectual tradition of Catholicism contains a strong strain of social justice that can be tapped to persuade individual voters, for example. For many years, for Christians, it just seemed like the right was the last gang in town, and the left has to be more present in this arena. To his credit, Barack Obama has been doing this, though it hasn't borne much fruit yet. He must continue to do so as a long-term strategy. The nation is getting less religious, but the only hope of Christianity continuing to exist here is if it gets less political, less Southern, and more focused on ideals of justice and spirituality. The left is late getting into this game--thanks no doubt to the Clinton-era preeminence of social liberalism and secularism as the heart of the Democratic Party, and the reticence of Democratic pols to look like they're pandering or to take a hit with the secular left. Things are getting better, but more must be done.
*"The biggest problem with Christianity is Christians." -- G.K. Chesterton
