Bowing down to the beast?

 Robert Schenk on the religious right's Faustian bargain.

Faith on view 

Brad Reed of Salon writes that Evangelical preacher Robert Schenck criticized Christian conservative support of Republicans in testimony to the House Judicial Committee. He argued that the alliance between the religious right and Republicans came at “a great spiritual cost.”

Reverend Schenck was a prominent activist in the pro-life movement before 2019 and cited the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as part of an unequal exchange between Christians and politicians. Schenck later repudiated his anti-abortion position and has preached in more than 40 countries since 1982, including every state in the US.

Reed continues:

The Rev. Robert Schenck, who was once a prominent anti-abortion activist, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that he and his fellow conservative Christians made a Faustian bargain with the Republican Party as part of their quest to overturn Roe v. Wade.

During his testimony, Schenck described a meeting he and his fellow evangelicals had with Republican operatives in which they were told that, in order to get what they wanted with Roe, they would have to accept and promote an entire package of right-wing policies that they otherwise might have found objectionable.

In that meeting that I participated in, the conversation went something like this: ‘You guys want Roe v. Wade overturned, we can do that for you, but you take the whole enchilada, you take the whole thing,”‘ he said. “You take everything else that comes with it. Because if you want Roe gone, you have to work with us.”

“From that point on that community that I had served, and still do, made a deal with them devil,” he said. “That deal was, we would support everything on the conservative agenda, whether or not we had conscientious conflict with them. The means were justified by the ends of that.” 

 Ps. Of course the religious left has long had its own Faustian bargain going with the political left and is (if anything) even less self aware re:the spiritual injury they have been doing themselves thereby.