Blog 3988 – 10.26.26
I Was Once A Republican
When I first moved to Texas in January 1974 I was a Republican. I had voted for Richard Nixon in 1972. It was the first time I ever voted. The first time I voted in Texas, I recall that on the very long ballot there were many Democrats running unopposed. The reason I moved to Texas was to attend Bible College. The fundamentalist Christian church that I had been a part of since I was ten years old was very conservative, but in the nineteen seventies like many evangelical church denominations it was co-opted by the Jerry Fall-well(s), Frank Schaffer(s), Pat Robertson(s) and those who aligned with them becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican party.
I voted for Ronald Reagan twice thinking at the time that America had been founded as a Christian nation and that God had raised up Ronald Reagan to help make America great again.
Sound familiar? Donald Trump borrowed MAGA from Reagan.
First of all America is more than the United Sates of America. Why even in North America alone there is Canada to our north and Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama to our South before you even consider South America.
The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founding Fathers purposely did not want a state church, but sought rather to establish a country where everyone was free to worship or not as they see fit with a clear separation of church and state. They saw all too well the oppression state-sponsored religious can cause.
After two terms of Ronald Reagan’s conservative Republicanism I began to see that his brand of Christian Nationalism was not at all like the compassion that Jesus taught when he said how we treated the stranger, the least of these, was the measure of our love and devotion to him. Jesus taught that we are supposed to treat everyone not just ourselves, our family, and friends as deserving of our love and attention.
I have never voted Republican since Reagan. George Bush’s thousand points of light and his son George W’s claim to being a compassionate conservative did not persuade me to vote for them for their policies and programs always seemed to appeal to the well-off allowing so many to fall through the cracks.
Today’s picture quote sizes up my opinion of the way most Republicans think, not all to be sure. There are good and caring people in the Republican Party, but the overall emphasis is still like the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, that if we give tax breaks to the rich they will use that money to provide jobs and a better life for there rest of us which is Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down theory” repackaged. All that ever really trickles down after the horse devours his food and water is, you guessed it, piss and manure. The stranger, the least of these, and Jesus deserve far more than our leftovers. And we do not need to wait till something happens to us before we give a shit.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
