Mark D. Tooley, president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, notes the fervor of Rev. Jim Wallis in denouncing Sarah Palin's comment about Obamacare's "death panels":
“Please don’t invoke your ‘Christian faith’ anymore and embarrass the people of God even further,” he fumed. “May
your efforts to scare Americans during this important debate fail. May
your political future also fail, and may your star fall as fast as it
rose just a few months ago — because we now know who you really are.”
Tooley rightly comments:
Wallis is often likened by his Religious Left admirers to a prophet. But prophets and Pslamists called their audiences back to worship of God, not worship of Big Government. Palin’s
sin, in Wallis’ eyes, is that she will not bend the knee to the alter
of The Welfare State, which has been the object of Wallis’ fervor for
over 40 years.
Tooley points out:
For the statist mindset to which Wallis and the Religious Left passionately subscribe, government is simply a cornucopia of gifts and services, benignly bestowed, as an extension of, or even substitute for, God’s grace. But governments, unlike the private sector against whose “greed” the Religious Left perpetually warns, have coercive powers through taxation and law enforcement. . . .
Understanding the moral limits of state power is foreign to the Religious Left, which imagines that expanding government welfare is always moral, and its critics, always sinister. In the conference call for Religious Left activists that Wallis convened for the President, Obama warned of “some folks out there bearing false witness,” of “divisive and deceptive attacks,” of “extraordinary lies,” and “fabrications.” [more . . ]