(DISCLAIMER:  In the following post, I will refer to Democrats and Republicans in general.  I am not making claims about you, personally, who may not fit into the generalization, and I am only mentioning the categories as part of a story to make a larger point…so stick with me!)

Recently, I heard a radio talk show host cite a study showing a general increase in support for Israel (rather than the Palestinians) in the United States, but with a very large difference between the percentage of support among Republicans and that among Democrats.  The host suggested this may be due to a greater acceptance of relativism on the part of the left (i.e., an inability or unwillingness to make judgments based on moral considerations in distinguishing between acts of terror targeting innocents and acts of military defense).

A woman's call during this segment illustrated this perfectly.  In answer to the question, "Why are Democrats more likely to support the Palestinians than Republicans?" she responded, "I'm a Democrat, and I can tell you why.  We are concerned--and have historically been concerned--with power.  Right now, Israel has the power, and the Palestinians are the oppressed, so we support them."

There it is again!  As I've written before, concern about power comes up over and over as the central reason for why the left (both political and religious) choose their positions.  Power is discussed far more often than right, wrong, and truth.  Some political leaders urge us to support the Palestinians because they have less power; some religious leaders urge us to adopt "humble beliefs" (beliefs that won't cause one to have more power than another) rather than asking us to have a humble attitude about true beliefs.

In the past, I've connected the origins of this increasingly popular view of "might makes wrong" with materialism (the perspective that there is no God or spiritual world).  Materialism is the root of relativism, for one can't know right and wrong in a world where such things are created arbitrarily by societies and don't really exist apart from those societies.  In a materialist, relativist world, one would have to explain situations and develop "moral" opinions based on physical, observable things like power or possessions since nothing else can be judged. 

Though most Christians on the left are not materialists, it seems that many of them, also, have absorbed these materialist-based ideas about the centrality of power.  While this isn't surprising, considering the increasing influence of Marxist ideas in our culture, this does concern me because I think it leads to a perversion of true justice (as I'll explain in my next post) when we, as Christians, ought to be a light of true wisdom and goodness and a reflection of God's character to a struggling world.