In last week’s Spotlight, Kramer Lawson called himself “deeply religious,” and says that is why he votes Republican. I also consider myself a deeply religious Christian (that’s why I am studying to be a biblical scholar), but my commitment to Christianity is the reason why I would never vote Republican. Well-meaning people like Kramer all over America have been misled by conservative Christian leaders who promote the myth that Christian morals somehow correspond to the Republican Party’s agenda, an idea that logically fails completely if you consider what the Bible actually says.

I don’t blame young Christians who vote Republican for doing so. They have been told from a young age that it is the right thing to do. However, if these voters really considered the question “What would Jesus do?” when faced with political choices, I believe they could no longer vote Republican with a good conscience. I consider the Bible to be a much higher authority than any church, and that’s why I will use it to defend my argument.

The only reasons I can see for Christians to vote Republican are banning abortion and gay marriage. But nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus say anything about either of these things. Rather, he spends the majority of his time talking about the plight of the poor and the evil of wealth. George Bush and the Republican Party like rich people; Jesus doesn’t. See Mark 10:21-25, where Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The man he refers to is righteous and Jesus is said to have “loved him,” yet Jesus still cannot forgive the man’s possession of so much wealth when he sees poor people suffering daily under imperial rule. In contrast, he praises a poor widow for giving an offering “out of her poverty” over all the rich people who contribute large amounts (Mark 12:41-44). Jesus also condemns the pursuit and maintenance of wealth in Matthew 6:19-34 and Luke 12:14-34. Jesus taught that the poor were real, valuable people, in the midst of a political system that gave them no value.

Why doesn’t Jesus say anything against abortion? The answer is not that it didn’t exist, because there were forms of abortion during his time, and Jewish people did occasionally use them. Probably the most horrific manner was called “exposing,” or leaving a newborn outside to die. This was a common Roman practice, but Jews (Jesus’ audience) did it too. If such terrible practices occurred, why didn’t Jesus explicitly condemn them? The answer is that they didn’t affect as many people as negatively as poverty. Jesus saw the horrors of Roman rule inflicted on innocent peasants everyday, and consequently that is what he was concerned about.

The same is true today; poverty and its consequences are more of a problem in America than abortion. And many people resort to abortion because of poverty (In the newspaper of Wheaton College—one of the most conservative Christian school in the nation—I read that the number of abortions went up during Bush’s presidency, possibly in relation to unemployment). It is less likely that leaders of the Republican Party and conservative Christians make abortion seem like such an important issue because they want to save babies than because they want to keep women in their place, which is not an ideal that Jesus espoused, as we can see from the Gospels and some of Paul’s more reliable letters.

Using the Constitution to ban gay marriage, as George Bush wants to do, makes even less sense from a Christian point of view. The Biblical evidence for God’s dislike of homosexuality is inconclusive, and Jesus never mentions the subject. The Sodomites in Genesis 19 are destroyed not because they wanted to have sex with other men, but because they wanted to gang rape two divine messengers. Leviticus says something against men lying with men (18:22), but it also says that after giving birth, a women must complete 35 or 66 days of “blood purification” and then give a burnt offering. When was the last time a conservative Christian gave a burnt offering? In fact, the book of Leviticus spends much more time on how to give offerings and become ritually clean than on homosexuality, which only takes up a single verse. Many of the laws in Leviticus are dependent on context: the Israelites were told that pig meat was unclean, which worked out well for them, because it was more likely to carry diseases. Likewise, in a minority monotheistic group constantly surrounded by the threat of large, polytheistic nations, reproduction was of the utmost importance; thus sleeping with others of the same sex could have been seen as wasting sexual energy on encounters that couldn’t produce children. Furthermore, the translation of the Hebrew as “abomination” is not accurate.

However you interpret Leviticus, it doesn’t really matter for Christians anyway, unless they want to use it to oppress groups of people like slaves and homosexuals. According to common Christian conceptions, this is because Jesus was supposed to have been the new law to replace the old, and Jesus never says anything about homosexuality. The authors of the Gospels contrast the so-called ‘Pharisees’’ strict legal interpretations with little room for practical concerns against Jesus’ more compassionate behavior that sometimes violates the law. I do not mean to say that the Pharisees actually said and did everything the Gospels report, because they actually were not in power until after Jesus’ death, when the Gospel writers lived. The point is that this belief was present in early Christianity and could very likely go back to Jesus himself.

While Jesus says nothing against homosexual relations, Paul does appear to condemn them in Romans 1:26-27. He is really talking about the gentiles’ wicked behavior, however. One Pauline scholar, Neill Elliott (who taught at Macalester for a semester), writes in the Oxford Annotated Bible that Paul is probably referring to acts committed by Nero and Caligula, which involved raping their male generals to humiliate them. Rape, of course, has nothing to do with consensual homosexual relations. So this evidence, like all of the above, is inconclusive. Would Jesus want you to judge someone based on inconclusive evidence? He would probably say “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1; Luke 6:37). While Republicans distract Christians by judging people, they continue to keep poor people poor and make middle-class people poorer, contributing to rising levels of crime due to desperation. Would Jesus vote for someone who gives tax breaks to rich people and neglects the basic right to obtain decent healthcare and a job?

I would like to mention one last example of incongruence between the Republican Party and Christianity. Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40, Luke 9:50). George Bush, a supposed born-again Christian, said the direct opposite to the world; “Whoever is not for us is against us.” Maybe he should take a break from judging everyone else long enough to read his Bible, if he has one.

The reason Jesus died is for his actions against the Temple, and the reason Jesus disliked the Temple was that it created an elite who lived off taxes from the poor and made God inaccessible to ordinary people. Jesus died so people like us could read his words and interpret them ourselves, not uncritically accept whatever rich people tell us is the right thing to do. So the next time you vote, if you consider yourself a Christian, maybe you should ask yourself, “Who would Jesus vote for?”