Vote 'Wrong,' Go to Hell?

As a young Baptist trapped in a pew for several hours every Sunday, I spent a lot of time reading the Bible. The dog-eared pages in my brown leather, gold-embossed copy were the historical books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles; the Gospels were also favorites. To be perfectly honest, I usually sped through Leviticus and may have skipped directly from Nahum to Zephaniah, so it's possible that my scriptural education was not quite comprehensive. Even so, I'm fairly certain that there is no verse that reads, "Thou shalt not vote Democratic."

Maybe my Bible was just a different translation from the one used by Pastor Chan Chandler. Chandler was the minister of East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina who told members of his flock that if they voted for John Kerry, they needed to repent their sin or resign from the church.

Calling himself "merely the spokesperson" for "the most high," Chandler charged that Kerry was an unbeliever.

That was last fall; a week ago a number of congregants who supported Kerry were officially voted out of the church in a deacon's meeting. (Chandler now insists that these "actions were not politically motivated," an argument no doubt intended for the IRS, which could take away the church's tax-exempt status.)

The New Republican Standard Version of the Bible has been gaining popularity among evangelicals and Catholics. Just a few weeks ago, conservative political and religious leaders lined up on their so-called "Justice Sunday" to charge that those who oppose the ideologically extreme judicial nominees whom they support cannot be true people of faith.

Some members of the American Catholic clergy told Catholic voters last year that a vote for the pro-choice Democratic nominee would be punishable by exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This is a shift -- however slight -- in conservative rhetoric and tactics.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states!"; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women's suffrage and the civil rights movement.