Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Bernie Sanders imposes a religious test for public office
Bernie Sanders imposes a religious test for public office
Dec 20, 2025 5:43 PM

This week the U.S. Senate held a hearing in which an explosive revelation was made that threatens to undermine the Constitution.

And no, I’m not talking about the Comey hearing (that was rather a dud). I’m referring to the confirmation hearing for the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

You probably didn’t hear much about that hearing, or the nominee, Russel Vought. And you likely wouldn’t have heard about it still if Bernie Sanders hadn’t decided to impose a new religious test on anyone who wants to serve in the government.

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states that, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” But Sen. Sanders and his protégé Sen. Van Hollen, D-Md. have implemented a religious test that requires government officials to espouse universalism, the belief that all humankind will eventually be saved whether they accept or reject Jesus.

The issue came up because Vought, an evangelical Christian who graduated from Wheaton College, wrote a defense of his alma mater’s statement of faith for the conservative website The Resurgent.

“Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” wrote Vought, pushing back against a claim made by theologian John Stackhouse. “They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”

This claim that Muslims who reject Christ “stand condemned” was brought up by Sen. Sanders during the confirmation hearing. “In my view, the statement made by Mr. Vought is indefensible, it is hateful, it is Islamophobic, and it is an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This country, since its inception, has struggled, sometimes with great pain, to e discrimination of all forms … we must not go backwards.”

Then, when he is allowed to question Vought, Sanders reiterates his claim. Watch the exchange in the video below.

A few minutes later, Senator Christopher Van HollenJr. of Maryland quoted from Vought’s article and said,

“I think it is irrefutable that these kinds ments suggest to a whole lot of Americans that, number one . . . you are condemning people of all faiths. I’m a Christian, but part of being a Christian in my view is recognizing that there are lots of ways that people can pursue their God. . . . It’s ments that suggest a violation ofthepublic trust in what will be a very important position.”

What Sanders and Van Hollen do not know is that most Christians throughout history have rejected universalism and subscribed to Jesus’s own claim that no one can go to heaven if they reject him (John 14:6). This isn’t a surprising claim to anyone with a passing familiarity to Christianity.

Just like his economic views, though, Sen. Sanders seems to have gotten his perspective on religion from a bumper sticker. He seems to think the “Coexist” bumper sticker he once saw on a ’96 Volvois a profound summation of world religions. That mustbe why he believesit is “hateful” and “Islamaphobic” for Christians to say that Jesus is the only way to salvation.

The fact that Sanders and Van Hollen are profoundly ignorant about both Christianity and Islam is neither surprising nor all that disconcerting. But for them to imply that anyone who holds a traditional Christian view on salvation is unfit for public office is repugnant and unconstitutional.

Although most of America has been distracted by the Comey hearing, we shouldn’t ignore this threat to our religious freedom. We must send a clear message to Washington: Such displays of anti-Christian bias by politicians like Senator Sanders and Van Hollenhas the potential to set a dangerous precedent and will not be tolerated.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
‘We get Viagra. They get malaria.’
At least, the title of this post is typical of the mantra against the practices of drug panies, according to Peter W. Huber’s “Of Pills and Profits: In Defense of Big Pharma,” in Commentary magazine (HT: Arts & Letters Daily). Huber, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, summarizes in brief the pany argument, and then goes on to examine what truth there is in such claims. He says of the difference between creating and administering drugs, “Getting drug policy...
Yeah, Ohio!
Ohio Court Limits Eminent Domain ...
Krauthammer on Proportionality
“‘Disproportionate’ in What Moral Universe?” asks Charles Krauthammer in today’s Washington Post. He continues: When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel “proportionate” attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal...
Sin and Extreme Sports
You may know that a traditional way of interpreting the Ten Commandments involves articulating both the explicit negative prohibitions as well as the implicit positive duties. So, for example, the mandment prohibiting murder is understood in the Heidelberg Catechism to answer the question, “Is it enough then that we do not kill our neighbor in any such way?” by saying, “No. By condemning envy, hatred, and anger God tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to be patient, peace-loving,...
Will Chicago Mandate the “Everyday Low Price” too?
Chicago’s City Council passed a measure last week that mandates “big box” stores such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Lowe’s to pay workers — regardless of experience — a minimum wage of $13 an hour including benefits by 2010. See the opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. The justification is to help poor people have a better standard of living. Is this another example of good intentions mixed with bad economics? This time I doubt the intentions are to...
A Unitarian, the Pope, and Jeffrey Sachs Walk Into a Bar…
Hunger, disease, the waste of lives that is extreme poverty are an affront to all of us. To Jeff [economist Jeffrey Sachs] it’s a difficult but solvable equation. An equation that crosses human with financial capital, the strategic goals of the rich world with a new kind of planning in the poor world. –Bono, Foreward to The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, italics mine. I am informed by philologists that the “rise to power” of these two words, “problem”...
On Blogging
G. K. Chesterton on Journalists: “…there exists in the modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people whose interest is not in that things should happen well or happen badly, should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advantage of this party or the advantage of that party, but whose interest simply is that things should happen. “It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that...
Gambling Hypocrisy
“All forms of gambling are predatory and immoral in their very essence,” says Rev. Albert Mohler. I don’t agree, at least insofar as his identification of what makes gambling essentially immoral is not necessarily unique to games of chance: the enticement for people to “risk their money for the vain hope of financial gain.” Stock e to mind. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out before, there is no single coherent Christian position regarding gambling per se. For example, the Catechism of...
‘The Aryan clause, the Confessing Church, and the ecumenical movement’
The latest issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology is out, and includes my article, “The Aryan clause, the Confessing Church, and the ecumenical movement: Barth and Bonhoeffer on natural theology, 1933–1935.” Here’s the abstract: In this article I argue that the essential relationship between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth stands in need of reassessment. This argument is based on a survey of literature dealing with Bonhoeffer and Barth in three basic areas between the critically important years of 1933...
Isn’t the Cold War Over?
I’ve got an idea for a new . Titled, Hugo and Vladi, it details the zany adventures of two world leaders, one of whom (played by David Hyde Pierce) struggles to upkeep his image of a friendly, modern European diplomat while his goofball brother-in-law (played by George Lopez) keeps screwing it up for him by spouting off vitriolic Soviet rhetoric and threatening all of Western civilization with his agressive (but loveable) arms sales and seizures of private panies. It is...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved