The following is a political conversation between a Christian progressive (“Dorothy”) and a free market Christian conservative (“Jeremiah”) sparked by this year’s election.

DOROTHY: I agree with you that abortion is killing. It’s tragic and wrong, and we as Christians should be doing everything we can to discourage it. But I object when people like you think you can corral our political allegiance to your candidates over that single issue, especially when your party treats opposition to abortion as an ugly stepchild, which it trots out every four years then puts back in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

JEREMIAH: I agree that the pro-life issue is a hill worth dying on. It’s crucial to rid the GOP of pro-choice candidates and public officials. We’ve actually done a pretty good job of doing that; all but one (sub 1% George Pataki) of the GOP presidential contenders in 2016 was pro-life. But your party won’t even let pro-life Democrats speak at its convention — and hasn’t, since 1992 when the Clintons banned Robert Casey. Inside that party, pro-life Democrats barely rise to the level of “cranks.” They’re more like … exotic pets.

DOROTHY: You’re wrong to claim the “pro-life” label. Like me, you’re anti-abortion, but you’re not comprehensively “pro-life.” The rest of your party’s platform makes that obvious.

JEREMIAH: I assume you’re invoking the “Seamless Garment,” a statist ideology that was cooked up to dissipate the pro-life movement in a dozen irrelevant directions while helping the Democrats. It pretends that a million voluntary murders of innocent babies are interchangeable with, say, accidental gun deaths or side-effects of climate change. Hold on, while I email you some articles from The Stream which address that.

[He takes out his phone and sends links.]

Why is it, you think, that conservatives just happen to be right about the abortion issue, on which every prominent, successful, or even vocal liberal politician or organization just happens to be wrong? That’s a coincidence, is it?

DOROTHY: I’ll agree with you that progressives have a blind spot on abortion. They see it as a crucial piece of the feminist agenda, granting equal sexual autonomy to women as to men. We need to wake them up on how it exploits and hurts women. But that would be easier, I think, than converting the whole conservative movement on a long list of subjects where it’s out of sync with Gospel priorities.

JEREMIAH: I think you’re mistaken about “Gospel priorities,” and even on what the words “pro-life” mean. You’re against abortion thanks to some residual trace of good sense and common decency that you’ve clung to. But otherwise you’ve signed on to an ideology that rejects individual responsibility and hence human dignity, which sees us not a citizens with rights and duties but termites in a hive, whose work and wealth and daily activities must be controlled by the Collective. Abortion fits in perfectly with such a worldview, since it’s the ultimate means of dodging responsibility for one’s actions.

You have far more common ground with pro-choice secular leftists such as George Soros than you do with any historic Christian church, the Gospel itself, or any world view that is remotely compatible with orthodox Christianity. You can no more be an authentically Christian leftist than you can be a faithful Catholic Social Darwinist, or a devoutly Muslim Hindu.

DOROTHY: So you think that Donald Trump is a model Christian statesman? Why don’t you explain that to me. This should be good.

JEREMIAH: The Republicans this year chose a flawed candidate, who isn’t completely in sync with the party’s platform, or with most GOP elected officials in the country. If elected, Trump will have tangle with those people, who will moderate his views and water down his proposals. He may have tried to grab control of the party, but as we saw in the GOP primaries, he failed. Every single Trumpian challenger he supported got defeated, so even if he wins, he will be isolated within his own party. In other words, we’ll restrain him.

The Democrats, by contrast, nominated a lockstep left-wing multiculturalist who will have the full backing of their governors, senators and congressmen in promoting the radical policies she endorsed in their party’s platform. The main objections Democrats had to Hillary Clinton were to her appalling personal ethics, autocratic isolation, manifest greed, and habit of doing blatantly illegal things that endanger national security, then bald-face lying about them to the American people and Congress. So I’d say that the “character” problems of the two candidates at least cancel each other out. We’re better off comparing the parties and their platforms.

DOROTHY: Fine. Apart from abortion, the Democrats’ platform is much more closely in accord with Christian values of tolerance, inclusion, social justice, and respect for life.

JEREMIAH: The only way you could support that is by cherry-picking from the Gospels the verses that fit your ideology — ignoring context, Christian history, the examples of the saints, and the thinking of faithful Christians for almost 2,000 years. You’d have to assert that nobody understood Christianity correctly until the mid-nineteenth century, when people who were losing their faith in the church’s supernatural claims replaced them with the “social gospel.”

Whether or not Jesus really rose from the dead or is coming again, we can build an ersatz Kingdom of Heaven on earth by making the State really, really strong, and corralling people at gunpoint to follow our version of Christian ethics. That way the church remains relevant whatever becomes of its creed, because it’s close to the sources of money and levers of power. (See the mainline Protestant churches and too many American Catholic bishops.) But because you are moral superheroes, you will only use your powers for good, instead of evil. Of course you will.

DOROTHY: I challenge you to find in the Gospels any place where Jesus talks about the need to protect private property, maximize economic efficiency, guard national borders, or prepare for war. Those aren’t what he was interested in. He was speaking constantly about the poor and the marginalized — just like the Democrats.

JEREMIAH: Jesus didn’t comment on private property, economics, immigration or war. That’s why the Christian tradition has yielded many different answers on those issues. Yes, Jesus talked about our religious obligation to help the poor, enforcible on pain of hellfire. Even more than that, he talked about our duty to kneel down and worship Him as the Son of God, to avoid the same Gehenna. Both of those things are religious duties, not political programs. Neither one, if done at bayonet point to avoid going to prison, will do a thing to save your soul. So unless you want a theocratic state that will force everyone to be Christian, you can’t use Jesus’ words to advocate the redistribution of wealth by the government, either. Make other arguments, but leave Jesus out of it.

DOROTHY: Jesus was constantly telling people to give up their possessions and distribute them to the poor.

JEREMIAH: Those passages don’t mean what you think they mean. You’re confusing a call to Christian perfection — such as monks, nuns, and missionaries embrace willingly — with a crass political program to buy votes with confiscated money. Let me rewrite the Gospel to read as it would have to, if your program were truly Christian. Imagine if St. Mark had written:

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.” And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.

And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “Go apprehend him.” Peter and John ran after the young man and bound him with ropes, bringing him back to Jesus. Jesus bade Judas to question him about his riches and where they were kept. Once Judas had fully accounted for all of his holdings, Jesus said to his disciples, “Go to his estate, seize all that he owns, sell it, and distribute it to the poor. Blow a trumpet and announce that it is I who have done this, and command them to follow me. Then let us find more rich men and do likewise, that our numbers may be complete before we march on Jerusalem.” [Mark. 10: 17-28, Revised Socialist Version]

I could go through the whole New Testament, rewriting Christ’s words and works to fit your political program. But I don’t have to bother. Leftist pastors across America effectively do that in their sermons every Sunday.