This week I wrote about the idea that religious leaders calling upon voters to vote solely based on Roe v. Wade and abortion while our economy is in a shambles, Americans are indebted up to their ears, millions of children are without health insurance and care, unemployment rates rise and we’re still in the midst of a war that has killed tens of thousands of people seems not only unethical but immoral and, well, anti-religious as well.

One leader in particular (an American Baptist minister), in the Newsweek and the Washington Post’s "On Faith" series argued that he views single-issue, anti-abortion voters as "immoral", stating that letting the abortion issue determine one’s vote is tantamount to "bad religion."

Now another religious leader, this time an evangelical, is also admonishing these same voters.

Writing on Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge, the founder and editor of an online publication for GLBT Christians, quotes Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals in an interview:

"Party line voting is…unbiblical. It says you don’t think. If you’re simply voting on same sex marriage and abortion, you’re not thinking. What I’m saying is that a lot of evangelicals don’t think, sad to say."

He also, unfortunately, goes on to accuse African-American voters who vote for Barck Obama as engaging in the same kind of voting which, if that’s true, then every white man in America who has ever voted for a white man is likely guilty of "not thinking" as well.

Chellew-Hodge writes that Cizik calls the religious right "foolish" and says that if it’s the war, the economy or the environment that concern you, "then Obama is the one to vote for."

It may be that more evangelical and religious leaders are realizing that the wars that matter most right now are Iraq, the economic war raging between our financial institutions and the average American, and the one waged against our environment daily – not the intangible "culture war."