Fred,

However I may have stated the three issues: the right to medical care for all, the human rights of illegal immigrants, and threat of harm to the poor from Republican proposed budget cuts, these were all three issues the US Conference of Catholic Bishops spoke out on in ways that were explicitly critical of the Republican Party. I don’t claim to be nonpartisan, but it is simply a fact that the American Bishops have criticisms of both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

It really should go without saying that neither party is so wholly based on Christian principles that it is the natural home for Christian citizens. People may want to argue that one party comes closer to the other in embodying Christian principles than the other, but it would simply be nonsense to claim that either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is the party of Jesus. So I repeat, “I really don’t see how someone who wants to be a good Christian can feel completely at home in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.” You can dispute everything else I have said, but I really don’t see how anyone can disagree with that sentence.

From Wikipedia:

Moral Foundations Theory considers the way morality varies between cultures and identifies five (later revised to six)”foundations” that underlie morality in all societies and individuals. He names them using pairs of opposites to indicate that they provide continua along which judgments can be measured.[8] These are:

• Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
• Fairness/cheating Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their “just deserts”. (He has also referred to this dimension as Proportionality.)
• Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
• Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
• Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
• Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)

Haidt found that the more politically liberal or left-wing people are, the more they tend to value care and fairness (proportionality), and the less they tend to value loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Conversely, the more conservative or right-wing people are, the more they tend to value the latter three. Similar results were found across the political spectrum in other countries.

As a liberal, I would rank the first three items over the second three.

I think it might be fairer to say these are basic attitudes that tend to determine a person’s thinking about politics and religion rather than to say politics tends to determine religion more than religion determines politics. But I have often asked people to take this fill-in-the-blank test, and the results are interesting:

I consider myself a mainstream conservative (or liberal), but because of my religion, I feel obliged to part company with my fellow conservatives (or liberals) on the issue of _________, because my religion teaches something that I find difficult to reconcile with conservatism (liberalism). The issue that has been mentioned by several conservative Catholics has been capital punishment. The obvious issues for liberal Catholics would probably be abortion and same-sex marriage. But in general, it has seemed to me that most Catholics, whether liberal or conservative, believe the teachings of the Church don’t require them to take any liberal positions (if they are conservative) or any conservative positions (if they are liberal).

I think this perhaps true in many cases. It is possible that many people are more certain about their political convictions than about the more abstract moral foundations of them.

Jy,

That’s my basic point. We may not fully agree on what those problems are, and I certainly may be wrong about specific critiques of the Republican policies. But I don’t think I am wrong in saying: “I really don’t see how someone who wants to be a good Christian can feel completely at home in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.”

Fred (and others),

My point was as follows: “I really don’t see how someone who wants to be a good Christian can feel completely at home in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.” We can quarrel over individual issues, and we can quarrel over which party is closest to reflecting Christian teachings, but I simply don’t see how anyone could maintain that all of Christian teaching is supported by one party and none of it is supported by the other.

Any Christian who worships at the altar of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party has seriously mixed up politics with religion.

I do, by the way, think many people’s political views are less influenced by their religious views than their religious views are influenced by their political views. I think many people form their political and economic views and then try to justify them based on religious principles, rather than starting with their religious principles and arriving at a political position.