When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he campaigned in the wake of President Bill Clinton's impeachment. The former Texas governor and son of a president pledged to restore honor, dignity and virtue to the Oval Office after Clinton fooled around with a White House intern and lied to the nation about it.

Clinton nearly always infuriated conservatives of all stripes, perhaps in part because he encroached on what used to be GOP turf. Crime, welfare, trade – these were Republican bugbears. But Clinton, who won only a plurality in 1992, shifted cannily to the right, thus pushing Republicans further rightward. In doing so, Clinton achieved what Republicans could never have.

The Republican impeachment of Clinton should have been seen as a transparent power grab but wasn't, thanks to the moral authority of Christian conservatives. Instead of a coup, which would have been a more accurate description, impeachment proceedings were characterized as a cleansing of the body politic, a purging of the presidency of desacralization and smut.

Maybe it was. What's certain is Clinton's impeachment was the result of decades of consolidation between Republican and Christian conservative interests. Meanwhile, a generation had come of age imprinted with the idea that Christian values were so aligned with Republican policy goals that to have a debate informed by Christian values was to give credence to Republican policy goals, even if the debate was between liberal and leftist. The last thing you wanted was to sound like a Republican.

As a result, legions of liberals learned to stop talking about politics in terms of religion, especially the Christian faith. This is not to say liberals became amoral. They did not. Liberalism is deeply moral. But it is not necessarily Christian, and that's my point. After the rise of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, liberals (specifically white liberals) surrendered Christianity to the conservatives and in doing so, Christianity became Republican.

In fact, Democrats are more religious than Republicans, according to Pew. From Episcopalians and Jews to African-American Baptists, Democrats outnumber Republicans in their profession of faith. But Democrats don't view politics through the lens of religion. Republicans do. Over time, and in the absence of a healthy counterweight, the Republican view of politics vis-a-vis religion grew dramatically myopic, so much so that in 2016 the same Christian conservatives who agonized over Clinton's besmirching of the presidency chose to unite behind a lying, thieving, philandering sadist in order to achieve a long-coveted and long-denied goal: outlawing abortion.

It's unclear whether Christian conservatives know the price they have paid. By going all-in with Trump, they have seriously undermined, perhaps bankrupted, their moral authority. The movement's big wheels are scrambling to contain dissent bubbling up from their ranks, from young evangelicals appalled by the older generation's attempts to rationalize Trump's corruption, views of immigrants and his endless, breathless lying.

Allowing the Christian right to crash on its own might seem like a victory for liberals, but it's not. The Christian right could limp along for years if allowed to. Liberals need to recognize this moment as an opportunity. The right's former moral authority must be supplanted by a new moral authority, one equally rooted in religion. But how can liberals, especially white liberals with an allergy to Jesus-speak, take a stand on the principles of Jesus?

Jesus was not just a savior. That millions see him that way is incidental to the liberal agenda. What matters is the politics of Jesus. In fact, Christ's politics and the politics of American liberals are eminently, if not entirely, compatible.

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When the rabbis asked Jesus which among Moses' laws were the most important, Jesus did not say laws about food, family or worship – or any law that was distinctly Jewish. He said, in so many words, that the most important laws demanded that you love God with all your heart and soul, and, of equal importance, that you treat your neighbor as yourself.

This is often called the golden rule, but at the time this was a radical departure from the ethical thinking of the ancient world. Back then, morality was tightly bound up with one's group identity. If you were not a friend, you were an enemy. Ethically, there was no middle ground. But the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus preached, was not reserved for the right kind of people who ate the right kind of food and believed the right kind of beliefs.

According to author and historian Antony Black, the Kingdom of Heaven reduced "the moral status of clan and of tribe, as well as nation" (my emphasis). It "detribalized monotheism" by obviating the need for distinctions: between Jew and non-Jew, husband and wife, rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy. "Differences of race, status, and gender are all insignificant," Black writes before quoting, in "A World History of Ancient Political Thought," a verse from Galatians: "There is no such thing as a Jew or Greek, no such thing as slave or free, no such thing as male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."