But in their platforms and agendas, are any of these candidates truly Christian? Are they really following Jesus’ message to help the poor and the needy? Are they lovers of peace, or flexers of American muscle?

Martha Woodroof posted a great piece over the weekend only tangentially about Newt and his wife’s diamonds:

“As I’ve said before in On Faith, I am a person of faith who is not religious. As I’ve also said before, I am a complete fan of Jesus Christ, largely because, according to the Gospels, the guy was so not a hypocrite. He flat-out lived his faith, putting into practice all those inconvenient rantings about inclusiveness and giving a damn about the poor; gunking things up for the rest of us with bothersome statements about rich men, needle eyes and camels.

At no point did Jesus say thou shalt covet diamonds that cost more than the houses a lot of Americans are losing.Of course, Newt’s not the only politician who exudes the toxic glow of Christian hypocrisy. Almost all American presidential candidates claim to be fans of Jesus. So what are they fans of? The man’s outfits? His hairstyle? His commitment to walking everywhere and thus getting regular exercise?

It’s obviously not his selfless poverty, which, to me, non-Christian admirer of Jesus that I am, appears to be the heart of his message.”

Keep this in mind as the mud flies.

The post Thinking About Candidates first appeared on What He Said: The Words of Jesus Christ.

Here are some snippets from Obama’s 2008 interview with Dan Gilgoff, then of Beliefnet:

“Let me just sort of be as clear as possible in terms of what that the background is.

You know, I was raised basically by my mother, who came from a Christian background – small- town, white, Midwesterner. But, she was not particularly religious. My father, who I did not know – I spent a month of my life in his presence, otherwise he was a stranger to me – was raised in a household where his father had converted to Islam. But my father, for all practical purposes, was agnostic.

My mother remarried an Indonesian and we moved to Indonesia. But for two years I went to a Catholic school in Indonesia, and then for two years went to a secular school in Indonesia. The majority of children there were Muslim. But it wasn’t a religious school.

So almost all the facts that have been presented in the scurrilous emails are wrong. And I’ve been a member of my church now for almost 20 years and have never been a person of the Muslim faith.”

He could have stopped there, but to his credit, Obama continued:

“…I absolutely believe that having lived in a country that was majority Muslim for a time and having distant relatives in Africa who are Muslim, that I’m less likely to demonize the Muslim faith and more likely to understand that they are ordinary folks who are trying to figure out how to live their lives and raise their kids and prosper just like anybody else. And I do think that that cultural understanding is something that could be extremely valuable.”

Sounds pretty rational and reasonable to me. I wish we had What He Said in Bunch of Grapes this past week. We just might have made a sale.

The post One in Three first appeared on What He Said: The Words of Jesus Christ.