Once upon a time I thought that being a Republican was essential to being a Christian. Then one day in 2010 my pastor (a Ronald Reagan Republican) challenged me to start researching the guys I am voting for. I think his intentions were to get me more involved in politics which is what happened. But the secondary result was that I could no longer honestly support the Republican Party.
What led to such a decision?
The first thing I did when I started paying more attention to politics is I started watching the debates and the news. What I discovered pretty quickly was that often the Democrats and the Republicans had very contradictory versions of the truth.
So, I did what any good seminary student would do; I started looking up information from source documents. This was the only way to really know who’s telling the truth. This was also right when fact-checking sites were still in their beginning stages so I tended to rely on source documents more than sites like Politifact.
What I discovered was that Republicans lied way more than Democrats and that often they did so deliberately. One can tell when someone else is misusing information to paint a picture that is false, especially if they have seen the source data.
Since my 2010 conversion I have come to utilize the fact-checking sites more often because they save me some time when looking up source data. One thing I have seen consistently is that Republicans simply cannot tell the truth. This can be observed on Politifact’s website as well as many others.
The real issue
My concern is not about who lies more. That can be a subjective issue, based on who gets checked more often. My real concern is why the party of Christian values is lying at all. Shouldn’t the party that claims to promote the cause of Christ have an impeccable track record of truth telling?
The way I see it, the party that promotes Christian values should be telling the truth so much that fact-checkers would have no need to fact-check them. Furthermore, when they are caught in a lie they should correct themselves, not double-down.
Proverbs 12:22 states: “The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful.”
Furthermore, Paul wrote to the Colossians: “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices.”
If the Republicans cannot keep one of the most basic commandments, which they claim to treasure so much, then they
should not be allowed to call themselves the party of Christian values. It is embarrassing that guys like Ben Carson can claim to lead by Christian values yet have a complete inability to tell the truth.
Of all the GOP candidates Ben Carson may be the top liar of the election. He is also the one who claims to base his life on Christ’s teachings. But why can’t he do something as simple as tell the truth or do honest research? The amount of lies he’s told is simply abysmal. And this is the candidate that us Christians are supposed to stand behind?
Until the GOP can find a candidate that can tell the truth they are going to continue to get hammered by fact-checkers. But more importantly, it’s making christianity look bad. Seriously, I find more and more that as a Christian I have to purposefully create distance between myself and these so-called Christian candidates.