I don't like the 'make a choice' option. There is no choice in Christianity between personal adherence to morality and reaching out to others with help and the Gospel. My experience in Judaism taught me that there's no choice there. We must be for ourselves and for others. We must obey the commandments to the best of our ability, cleave to God and work to make the world a better place. Only the secular (in the modern non-Catholic use of the word) see an either-or choice, and that is of their own making. My personal experience in becoming more religious and avoiding sin did not turn me against government health care reform. I related my experience avoiding sin, and doing teshuvah when I did sin, to the plight of others in situations where the world is not perfect and sinning is an all too easy response to injustice. The God of the Bible demands Biblical social justice. That is why I am a Progressive in the early 20th century sense.

When we 'try' to be Christians on our own strength we come up short every time. To focus on avoiding sin is temptation in the making. We tend to do what we spend time thinking of. Focusing on helping people is good but we have to ask why we doing it? Is it to help others, or is it to be a better Christian? We should spend time each day in prayer and reading scripture. When we do that we find God talking to us, telling us where our help is needed most. In prayer we receive strength and protection from temptation and the Devil. Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer as a guide in asking our Heavenly Father for our daily needs. Follow Jesus' example and the Holy Spirit will make us better Chirstians. Alone we can do nothing, but with God's help all things are possible.

"...researchers forced them to make a choice..." That alone disqualifies the survey and shows how researchers manipulate participants to get the answers they want. Christians should not support nor be a pat of any secular political party for their agenda is different than God's and they use the christian community to gain their own desires not God's. Christians are to be the light unto the world with God's ways but they can't be that light when it is diminished by uniting with secular ideas and proclaiming those over Jesus' words.

h l, you are right, of course. But should I vote for someone whose stated policies are different from my own? Or, whose actions and statements belie his claims to be a Christian? Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself. Everyone in government is my neighbor. Loving them doesn't mean I have to agree with them. It does mean I have to speak the truth in love; it means I have to seek good in each one before con-demning what is evil; it means I have to try to understand where they are coming from and have compassion. I can't do that. I have to look to Jesus' example and yield to His Holy Spirit, who sees what God sees and acts as Jesus acts. I am blessed when I yield. Just writing this helps me see how often I judge self-righteously. May God have mercy on all of us.

This article should be read by the many who seem to think that all Christians are at either extreme of a perceived political/economic/social spectrum, including us Christians who can often be very judgmental about those on the "other side" of the "God gap" mentioned here. If people agree with me about the primacy of the Gospel and the inerrancy of the Bible--or even the evil of abortion for that matter, that does not mean we will also agree about abortion legislation or tax policy or a myriad of other issues of the day. @Joy--one of the problems people sometimes forget about our current political climate: every representative in Congress has hundreds of thousands of constituents that he or she represents, and our senators all (except for the very smallest states) represent millions. Even when counting only those who vote for a particular winning candidate, it is impossible for that person to always express "my belief."