I really appreciated this post. Very well done. There were some very excellent quips and turns of phrase, not to mention good arguments and substantive criticisms.

Just last night I was re-reading the part of Lewis’s Mere Christianity entitled “Christian Behavior” and in that part, I think it was chapter 3, he talks about the Christian view of “social relations”, essentially justice issues. He paints what he thinks would be the looks of a Christian society, i.e., one in which individuals became Christians and, by and large, followed its teachings. He makes the point that none of us would like it all, there’d be bits and pieces members of various parties would like, but no one would like all the bits. Nevertheless, we’d all choose to live in such a place!

The two parties here, coming from modern philosophical presuppositions must always err. Coming to the middle of “the” spectrum of right-left is no solution, either. That’s where the flow is with which the world goes. Can I be, sometimes in domestic issues, sometimes fiscal, sometimes so-called ‘moral’ issues, be on the radical left as well as the radical right? Or is that some sort of infringement of logic?

I think the image in the cartoon is far more successful than the text. There are plenty of people we know who are perhaps neither Republican nor Christian in the strictest sense but who believe in the “Jeezus” myth. The caricature on the right (heh) isn’t far off from the pastoral portraits I’ve seen hanging on the walls of some homes I’ve been in (usually of an older generation) and while the flag and rifle aren’t part of the image, those icons are well-represented elsewhere in the home. I’m not quite old enough to know this first hand, but my impression is that the Christian Conservative as a political agent is largely the result of cynical manipulation by politicians to engage those who belong to the Christian tradition in the US. In other words, I believe quite a lot of “Christian Conservatives” themselves probably have a cartoon character view of the “Jeezus” that represents their beliefs that is as based as much on their actual ignorance/cherry-picking of scripture as is the selective view of Jesus represented on the left column that liberals tend to promote.

That said, I’m with you 100% on the way Kreider misrepresents Jesus as apparently liberal (notwithstanding his own commentary linked above) as a poor argument against either Jesus or “Jeezus.”

One factual problem with this line of argument is that the “God hates fags” folks from the Westboro Baptist Church are Democrats. Fred Phelps has run for office as a Democrat, and there’s a great picture of Al and Tipper Gore with Fred.

Perhaps it would be a better plan for the author to research his subject prior to writing/cartooning about it.