Three times in the past week, a prominent liberal has publicly attacked a conservative in an ugly way. Bernie Sanders declared a Trump nominee disqualified for public office because of his religion, and a handful of commentators attacked congressman Steve Scalise, who is in critical condition after being shot for his political views, for being a conservative.
Behind these vile attacks is an odd but telling mindset that is certainly not dominant on the American Left but seems, disturbingly, to be on the rise. It is a mindset that makes one’s political views all-defining, that discounts character and virtue and counts only ideology.
Russ Vought is a longtime Washington policymaker. He spent more than a decade as a hill staffer, serving at high levels. Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, tapped Vought to be deputy director. Despite his lengthy career in policy, Sanders declared Vought “unacceptable.”
The test Vought failed: He had the wrong religious views.
Vought is a Christian. In the Bible, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, & the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Christianity also teaches that God is Three — Father, Son, Holy Ghost — and that rejecting any aspect of the Trinity is rejecting who God truly is.
In this context, consider what Vought once wrote about non-Christians, using Muslims as the example: “They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.”
This isn’t a nice thing to hear, and it’s not the sort of thing to bring up in casual conversation, but these sorts of views are inherent in religion. Jewish people believe Christians are following a false savior. Atheists believe the religiously devout are simply deluded. In a polite and pluralist society, people set these deep and important differences aside for the day-to-day purposes of living together.
Believing someone has bad theology and that someone has failed to secure his path to salvation is a serious thing. But it in no way implies that one should treat that person worse or refuse to work with the person or on their behalf. Believing deeply in something and disagreeing with those who reject that thing don’t require you to hate those on the other side.
Sanders deeply misunderstands the Christian mind, failing to make the distinctions that seem obvious to those who believe as Vought does.
Liberal tweeters Joy Ann Reid (who appears on MSNBC) and George Takei (who also used to go on TV) showed a similar confusion about conservative Christian thinkers when they attacked Scalise, whom they knew to be in the hospital in critical condition after being shot for being a Republican.
“The universe doesn’t joke around” Takei tweeted gleefully. “The officer who saved bigoted, homophobic Rep. Steve Scalise during baseball practice was a black lesbian.” “And yet,” the former actor wrote in a tweet he later deleted, “his website still espouses ‘Family Values’ and protecting the ‘Sanctity of Marriage.'”
Reid wrote on Twitter “Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet … ” She then posted an MSNBC screen grab mentioning that he co-sponsored a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage.
Reid and Takei are standing on plenty of unstated premises. One is that everyone who follows the Catholic teaching on marriage is a bigot. Another is that one’s beliefs on the nature of marriage ought to dictate how one acts toward people. That is, they assume that someone with the traditional view of marriage thus hates those who live according to a different view.
Like Sanders’ assumption, it’s an odd one that leaves no room for human relations outside of shared beliefs. The Sanders, Reid and Takei view of friendship dismisses the importance of character, love, kindness, duty and neighborliness and replaces them all with ideology.
Why do they believe that Christian conservatives’ beliefs lead them to hate those of different beliefs? Maybe it’s because that view is taking hold on the Left.
“There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter,” declared Slate magazine’s chief political correspondent a week after the election. “People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They don’t deserve your empathy.”
Why can campus radicals feel fine shouting down and even assaulting those who disagree? Why was there a spirited debate on liberal twitter about the propriety of sucker-punching racists? Maybe some people think that beliefs determine a person’s value. And maybe some of them project that contemptuous mindset onto others.
A society cannot long survive if we hate those who don’t believe as we do. Scalise understood that, as did Crystal Griner. Sanders and his friends could learn a lesson.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s commentary editor, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
