Not too many years ago, for decades on end, most Christians, from one end of the Bible Belt to the other, called themselves "liberal" and voted a straight party ticket for the Democrats (but use the word progressive since the word liberal is being phased out due to vast misunderstandings being spread).

Today, many Christians call themselves Republican, but when you sit them down and ask them what they believe about policy issues, polls repeatedly show that their views are liberal.

Liberal approaches are "super majority issues," said Dr. Eric Alterman, a columnist for the Nation Magazine, a professor of English and journalism, at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. I found this when looking at "a series of polling data that goes way back and focuses on the same question," he said.

Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton University and columnist for the New York Times says something similar: "When self proclaimed moderates are questioned about their views on actual policy issues, those views turn out to be indistinguishable from self-proclaimed liberals."

Moreover, Dr. Krugman quotes Adlai Stevenson saying, "The Democrats are the truly conservative party in the country. It's the party dedicated to conserving all that is best and building solidly and safely on these foundations.

"The Republicans, by contrast, are behaving like the radical party -- the party of the reckless and embittered, bent on dismantling institutions which have been built solidly into our social fabric."

Alterman says Chrisitians stopped calling themselves liberal after conservative billionaries spent "an enormous investment of hundreds of millions of dollars ... to devalue and dishonor and delegitimate the term liberal."

Misunderstandings about Democrats are rampant. In one Sunday School class I attended, the teacher said, "The left doesn't understand us. In fact, they don’t even believe in God."

Approximately 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, according to 1999 data from the North American Academic Study Survey which polled 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools.

So what is a liberal? Franklin D. Roosevelt was instrumental in defining its contemporary concept as he carved out his New Deal to counteract staggering unemployment, poverty, stock prices losing their value and other problems during the Great Depression.

At this time there were grotesque inequalities in wealth and power, as we are once again seeing. "In 1929, 70 percent of stock dividends went to 1 percent of Americans," says Krugman. This means the top 1 percent had more stock dividends than the bottom 99 percent.

In a speech, FDR said, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

FDR, who was brought to power by the disgruntled labor movement, took steps to help labor share more equitably in the fruits of their labor by imposing high taxes on the super rich. In his first administration, he imposed a 63 percent tax rate on the wealthy. In his second administration, the tax rate for top incomes rose to 79 percent.

(Later, under Eisenhower, who was much more moderate than today's Republicans, the top tax rate rose to 91 percent due to cold war spending. It was still high -- 70 percent – up until the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Today, the tax rate for the super rich is just 35 percent, but may be raised by the Obama Administration to 40 percent.)

FDR also passed legislation to prevent employers from suppressing labor unions. Union activity surged.

Furthermore, the New Deal brought about Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, regulations of banks, regulation of the securities industry, enormous work relief programs for the unemployed, the Tennessee Valley Authority, housing programs, minimum wages, fair labor standards, insurance on federal deposits and farm price supports and more.

In his book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," Krugman shows how redistributing the wealth "invigorated the economy. ... The era of equality was a time of unprecedented prosperity which we have never been able to recapture."

With his New Deal, FDR created the middle class.

"Middle class societies don't emerge automatically as the economy matures, they have to be created through political action," said Krugman.

In 1940, after eight years in power, the gross domestic product was 60 percent higher than in 1933, while unemployment was reduced from 25.2 percent down to 9.3 percent.

What a difference a president can make! Presidential scholars ranked Franklin D. Roosevelt as the best president five times in the Siena College Research Institute's Survey of U.S. Presidents.

If you are for safeguarding New Deal programs, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, decent minium wages and a strong labor movement, then you can call yourself a liberal (but keep in mind that the word is being phased out and replaced with the word "progressive.") If you want to tear down or weaken these institutions, you are hard right.

Lessons learned from Franklin D. Roosevelt are more valuable than ever, for the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, according to the Gini index.

"In 1998, the top 5 percent owned 59% of the wealth, or to put it another way, the top 5 percent had more wealth than the remaining 95 percent of the population," says New York University economist Dr. Edward N. Wolff, author of the book, "Top Heavy: the increasing Inequity of wealth in America and what can be done."

"Unequal societies have low rates of economic growth."

Dr. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says something similar, "I think incredibly high incomes can have a pernicious effect on the polity and economy."

In these troubled times, we need liberals in power to impose high taxes on the rich and to enact programs to redistribute the wealth in order to stimulate the economy and cushion the blow for the millions of people who have lost their jobs, the millions have lost their homes, the millions more who face foreclosures on their mortgages and the growing numbers who face grinding poverty.

We also need progressive oversight rather than conservative laissez-faire policies of deregulation.

Consider what happened when Republicans refused to regulate the financial markets. Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize- winning economics professor at Columbia University, said, "Our national debt will be trillions of dollars larger as a result of the mismanagement of the economy. ... Allowing banks to engage in unfettered risk taking is reckless. ... The proposition that you can strip away government is reckless."