The bumper sticker read: “God is Pro-life.” 
At first, it struck me as obvious. Yes, of course God is “pro-life.” Fire is hot, water is wet, the Son of Man doesn’t like abortion. Check, check, check. That’s affirmative. Strange that such an obvious observation would make its way onto a bumper. Also, why was it red white and blue? And while we’re at it, why am I growing so uncomfortable?
It hit me and it hurt. The driver of the sedan in front of me probably meant well, but the truth is that God is not pro-life.
If we strip away the assumptive reasoning I don’t find an “obvious truth about God,” but really an ultra-divisive political agenda being placed like a filter on top of God. The terms pro-life and pro-choice are caffeinated and politicized terms used to define a position on abortion. They’re snappy political clothes used to summarize, in one hyphenated phrase, a person’s political affiliation. But God doesn’t have a political position on anything. Our invention of modern politics (or any politics for that matter) are just tools for definition, used to explain or to embolden a group’s collective opinion. A mode of translation used to classify our feelings about creation.
They serve wholly to divide. To make bolder the lines that divide ideology. Politics are about the business of power.
But really, God is not pro-life. God IS life. Our terms are too small.
Really, what the bumper sticker is telling us is that God would not only VOTE pro life, but, more specifically – he would vote for a candidate who is pro-life. Now, here’s the long stretch the bumper sticker wants us to make: “Voting for the candidate sponsoring the “God/Pro-life” campaign is what an approving God would have us do.”
That’s really what that bumper sticker is saying, and honestly, what that bumper sticker (and dozens more like it) is saying, I want nothing to do with.
God is not pro life because he is not ever small enough to fit into yours or my political frame. Sometimes I picture God in some kind of eternal royal garb, shaking his huge powerful head, simultaneously speechless and dumbfounded at how small we can make him. That we would align ourselves with Eternity in order to win an election.
I would argue that one of the greatest and most dangerous heresies in Church is that we are a Christian nation. It’s easy (and tempting) to think that a strong and brazen gladiator-Jesus enters into our political Colosseum fighting the lions of liberalism and ransoming lost and wayward ex-patriots. The truth is, we are not a Christian nation. Too often we objectify the scriptures to punctuate our position: we enslave them, we molest them. We are a people using scripture as a sword and God as a shield when it suits our purposes but we have forgotten that God is the whole of the battle – and it’s us, it’s me, who most needs the cutting.
Jesus asked us to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” but it feels like we’re giving God to Caesar instead.