A column in Wednesday’s USA Today trumpeted, “Who Would Jesus Vote For? Bernie.” The sub-headline touted: “Sanders, a secular Jew, is the most Christian candidate in this race.” The piece was authored by liberal author and professor Stephen Prothero. Attacking conservatives, Prothero lectured, “If the Bible is your guide, Jesus said nothing, ever, about abortion.”
Perhaps the author forgot Jeremiah 1:5, which states, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Job 31:15 notes, “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”
Considering that the CNN contributor in 2011 insisted that Catholics don’t think abortion is “much of a sin,” his USA Today column shouldn’t be surprising.
To make his case, Prothero touted Sanders’ embrace of Christian values:
In a speech in September at Liberty University, whose president, Jerry Falwell Jr., recently endorsed Donald Trump, Sanders cited Jesus on the golden rule in Matthew 7:12. He also quoted from an Old Testament passage often quoted by Martin Luther King Jr.: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream” (Amos 5:24). These two texts lent Sanders the bookends of his speech, morality and justice, which he said had to a great extent gone missing in a country that "worships not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but worships the acquisition of money and great wealth.”
That sounds like Pope Francis, whom Sanders has repeatedly lauded. It also sounds like the Christian faith I encountered in my youth in the Episcopal church. In fact, it sounds like the faith of my Republican mother who, after hearing of a homeless man who froze to death just miles from our Cape Cod home, joined forces with her minister and her best friend to establish the region’s first homeless shelter.
Promoting the socialist candidate, Prothero pushed:
He [Jesus] did, however, tell us to love our neighbors, including those Samaritans, the Mexicans and Muslims of his time. And he demonstrated a clear preference for the blessed poor over the filthy rich.
Attacking conservatives, he continued:
It must also be remembered that Jesus was a Jew, and that the historical Jesus bears almost no resemblance to the American Jesus conjured up in the late 1970s by the religious right.
The online version of Prothero’s article had a slightly less definitive headline. It read, “WWJD? Maybe Vote for Bernie.”
