Left-wing Clergy Vow to Stop the Spread of “Religious Nationalism”

Just in time for the 2024 American election, a group of left-wing clergy members have pledged to preach on the “moral issues” of today, at least as they see them. The “New Haven Declaration of Moral & Spiritual Issues in the 2024 Presidential Election” would see issues of social justice such as living wages, union rights, and ecological justice become the predominant talking points leading up to this November.

Led by Bishop William Barber II of the Yale Divinity School, the New Haven Declaration would appear to be an attack on “religious nationalism,” or the leftist boogeyman known as “Christian nationalism,” which in actuality is the Left’s latest attempt to turn the term “Christian” into a dirty word. Barber appeared frequently in the recent Rob Reiner documentary God & Country, which appeared to make the claim that Bible-believing Christians who support Donald Trump are akin to Germans who supported Hitler.

In an article at The Christian Post, David Closson of the Center for Biblical Worldview at the Family Research Council described Christian nationalism like this: “The phrase seems to simply try to paint those who hold traditional conservative views, informed by the Scripture, as somehow not just outdated or a little odd, but as dangerous subversives who shouldn’t even be allowed to participate in the public square.”

The New Haven Declaration called out those who won’t simply bow to the far-left, globalist agenda.

We love this nation, and for this reason we have gathered to reflect on our public engagement as both an act of love and a pastoral responsibility. We know that a well-funded, coordinated political movement has co-opted our faith tradition and is exploiting so-called “traditional values” to undermine democracy and divide people across this land. This distorted religious nationalism has persuaded many well-meaning Christians to focus on a narrow set of divisive cultural wedge issues while ignoring the real moral issues that are at the heart of our Scriptures and tradition.

What, exactly, are those “moral issues,” according to the declaration’s signers?

“For this reason, upon reflection and prayer, we join our voices as religious leaders to launch a season of preaching the moral issues of living wages and union rights, healthcare and ecological justice, an end to the spilling of innocent blood, a re-imagination of criminal justice, and the protection and expansion of voting rights and equal protection guarantees,” the declaration states.

Does that “spilling of innocent blood” include abortion. Not likely, in Closson’s view: “I could get on board with that, but we need to define that, and something tells me they wouldn’t want … to define that the same way that I would.”

Barber himself has stated that such thinking is heretical — at least in today’s world.

“To suggest that if you’re against abortion, you’re against women’s right to choose, you’re for guns, for prayer in schools, for tax cuts, a Republican, then you have taken the moral position, that is modern-day heresy,” Barber said in 2019. “And we have to challenge it. But we’re not just going to challenge it just emotionally. We’re saying if you want to have a discussion about morality from a Biblical standpoint, then let’s have a real one.”

The declaration appears to suggest that the words of Jesus should be reinterpreted in order to better fit the times we live in. The declaration states that “preachers do have a responsibility to make clear how the tradition of Jesus and the prophets speaks to the world today.”

So, God’s word isn’t perfect unless it mirrors the views of the modern-day far Left?

While paying lip service to the concept “that it is not the job of pastors to tell anyone for whom to vote,” the declaration then espouses the opposite view.

“We must challenge our congregations and the wider public to choose carefully and wisely which candidates for public office best represent our true moral values,” it reads.

It would appear that the issue of Christian nationalism” could be a left-wing talking point in the 2024 election season.

“I think that Christian nationalism, religious nationalism, that phrase is being wielded by the Biden administration, by the Biden campaign as a boogeyman to silence those whose conscience is formed by the Bible,” Closson said. “I think that the phrase and the allegations of Christian nationalism are only going to increase, and I really do think the goal behind that movement is to try to intimidate and silence conservative Evangelicals and Catholics from fully participating in the public square.”