Can A Christian Be a Democrat?

     Lester De Koster (1916-2009) was a Calvin Professor and later, the editor of The Banner, the weekly magazine of the Christian Reformed Church.  As a Calvin prof he was sometimes considered liberal because of his politics, but as a Banner editor he was sometimes considered conservative, especially because of his opposition to Kuyperianism as developed by Dooyeweered. It is also worthy of note that De Koster had a deep and profound knowledge of the writings of John Calvin.
     I am interested in his political ideas because of an essay he wrote in 1958 that attempts to answer a question that I am asked to answer from time to time, "Can a Christian be a Democrat?"  For example, when my grand-daughter was told by her Christian School teacher a few years ago that Christians are Republicans, she asked her mother (my daughter) "If Grandpa's a Christian, how can he be a Democrat?" (Or maybe she put it the other way around). I was happy to answer her question; I have had to answer it in some situation or other every time we have an election.
     Here's some of what DeKoster says in his essay:  "Calvin and Calvinism have stood, in the large, for the positive intervention of the state in the social and econmic life of the people for the promotion of the general welfare. . . . This selective and controlled intervention of the state in the social and economic life of the nation . . . has been as I understand and endorse it, the overall program of the Democratic Party."  DeKoster goes on to say that in fact "hardly any legislative enactment designed to promote positively the spread of prosperity under capitalism has been devised, sponsored, and enacted by any other political party, on the national level, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt."
     I think, with a few exceptions, that is still true in 2012, fifty-four years after De Koster's essay. 
     If you need more evidence of Calvin's beliefs about government's social involvement, read what Calvin scholar Dr.H. H. Meeter says:  "Calvin advocated public loans for the poor and refugee, measures relating to public health, statistical inquiries into the income of districts, the fixing of the price of corn and wine and other commodities, the determination of a proper rate of interest. . . . In fact, so much social legislation was enacted by the Genevan government at the time and through the influence of Calvin that his government had been termed Christian socialism."
     Gasp! Did he say socialism?  We all know the socialist credo, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," as expressed by Marx and Lenin.  But do we know that three hundred years before Marx, Calvin said in his commentary on 2 Corinthians 8: 13-15:  "God wills that there be proportion and equality among us, that is, each [person] is to provide for the needy according to the extent of his means so that no [one] has too much and no [one] too little." 
      Remember how the Republicans became absolutely livid when in 2007 Candidate Obama used the phrase redistribution of wealth when answering a question about the haves and the have-nots?  I wonder if he had been reading 2 Corinthians 8 at the time?  Or Calvin?
      Oh, by the way, De Koster's answer in 1958 to the question, "How can you, as a Christian, be a Democrat?":   "How can you, as a Calvinist, be anything else?"
     Next time: Does the abortion issue make all of this Biblical social policy irrelevant?