Mike Cope opened the floodgates at his blog yesterday by suggesting that there are a lot of people who hate Hillary Clinton and he isn’t one of them.

Good for Mike. It takes a lot of guts for a preacher in our fellowship to state publicly that he respects someone who is vilified as often as HRC.

It goes without saying that hatred has no place in the lives of people who call themselves Christians. Many of us struggle to control our emotions and there is no emotion that needs to be controlled more than an emotion that wishes ill of another human being.

But you just had to know that Mike wasn’t going to slip that one past his readers. But as it turns out, many of the comments that followed his post eventually proved his point for him.

Mike’s observation and the visceral reactions that followed also confirmed my nearly life-long conviction that politics is a minefield when combined with religion. This is particularly true for those believers who view both politics and religion as zero-sum games.

Ironically, this is the one thing that fundamentalist Christians and Muslims seem have in common: both are convinced that there can be no accommodation with non-believers on any level. That’s an unfortunate aspect of organized religion and we all need to do a better job managing it.

It also happens to be one of the qualities of Barack Obama’s campaign for president that has made ME more excited about an election than I’ve been in many years. I’m still convinced that Barack Obama has the potential for uniting people in ways we’ve never been united before and that includes the way we think about our respective faiths.

Mike used Hillary Clinton to make his point so I’ll use the reaction I’ve seen and heard from some Christians about Obama to make my own:

Small Church’s Obama Sign Causes Big Controversy:

Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.

It reads: “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”

Byrd said that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political.

“It’s simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.

When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, “I don’t know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim? I don’t know. He says he’s not. I hope he’s not. But I don’t know. And it’s just something to try to stir people’s minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody.”

I’m not sure where Pastor Byrd’s heart is today but it’s been my experience that one of the characteristics of hate is that it causes you to think an act irrationally. That would include deliberately spreading false statements about someone in the guise of asking a question about them.

At some point, believers need to step back and look at the secular political process as something that doesn’t really have that big an other-worldly effect on any of us in the long-run.

And when we use hate to drive people away from an otherwise loving God it doesn’t help at all either.

h/t: mc & dp

Incidentally: The report above about the sign in front of the Jonesville Church of God is slightly misleading. It reports the sign as asking a question but from what I can see from the photo above, it looks as if the church is actually making a statement or they couldn’t afford a question mark when they purchased their sign kit.

Update (4-21-08 @6:45 pm): The sign has been changed as the result of public outcry.