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Sunday, January 20, 2008
Politics and Religion
2nd in a series on Confronting the Controversies
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Micah 6:8
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
We have an impossible task ahead of us. We are tackling two very volatile subjects, politics and religion, subjects we are told not to talk about at social gatherings because they are so volatile, and we have about eighteen minutes to talk!
And they are very timely subjects because we are in the midst of a presidential campaign when the religion of two candidates in particular has gotten a lot of attention. And we are in a time when the influence of more conservative religious leaders is characterized as not as strong as it used to be, and it is a time when other church leaders have said again that if their members do not vote a certain way that they are jeopardizing their welcome at the communion table.
Because the issues are so emotional and complex we have made available some copies of recent articles from USA Today in your bulletin that offer different perspectives and we have one article by evangelical minister Jim Wallis of the Sojourners group on the sermon copy wall.
When I was a pastor in Colorado Springs about 25 years ago, our congregation sponsored a community forum and information night with a couple of candidates who were running for the legislature from our part of town. Both points of view were represented just as we do in the forums we sponsor here that are informational and non partisan. That election year was highly emotional as one of the candidates was proposing that all Colorado school textbooks be subject to approval by a fundamentalist couple in Texas who were looking for references to evolution and other ideas that they disagreed with.
At the end of the debate, one politician who was in the audience that evening told me that he thought we should not have sponsored the information evening because he believes in a separation of church and state.
We will begin with that idea and how it is misunderstood. The phrase is from Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to a Baptist group in Danbury, Massachusetts. He advocated for the same idea that is in the first amendment to the Constitution, that the government should not establish or favor one religion over another. The phrase does not mean that we should separate the values and ethics and principles of religion from our discussion of social policies. Spiritual leaders and political leaders have always applied Biblical principles of justice and fairness to questions of policy—we will look at that shortly—but the state has no right to give preference to one religious faith over others. In fact, that is one reason that the first pilgrims came to the new land—to leave a government sponsored religion and to have freedom of religion.
This is one thing that makes our history unique as a nation and it means that even though most of the founders were church members and had a vital personal faith, they were not trying to establish a “Christian nation”. Their own faith as deists and Christians and as active church members formed and informed that incredibly gifted period in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, but they carefully did not decide to identify us as an exclusively Christian nation. The two best resources for this discussion about church and state in America is the recent book by Jon Meacham, journalist and editor, “American Gospel” and the book titled “The Founders on Religion”. There are quotes from both of these in your quote sheets.
The question of church and state is different from the question of politics and religion. When a church or a minister has taken a controversial stand on a question of ethics, right and wrong, there is usually someone who says that spiritual leaders should not address any policy issue such as abortion, stem cell research, war, capital punishment. This perspective wants to keep Christian ethics separate from political questions and usually is advocated when a church leader has made an application of the gospel that the listener disagrees with or is contrary to a partisan opinion.
It sounds good on the surface—let’s keep religion and politics separate from each other—and I have gotten many letters over my 38 years of ministry like that, one as recent as a few months ago after Dr. Marcus Borg was with us. In fact, that position is shallow and dangerous and has never been followed in our own country from our very beginnings. In fact, the influence of Biblical values and ethics, the notions of justice and mercy and humility have been extremely important in the life of our nation.
The Declaration of Independence was written because after years of abuse by King George, American leaders stood up for justice as they understood justice from a Biblical perspective! And Jefferson says in the Declaration that we have a right to a violent uprising against political tyranny because human beings “are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
We are endowed by our creator. In our founding document is the application of a biblical and theological principle of human dignity and human rights. So much for the division of religion and politics! And in the months leading to the American Revolution there were several preachers who took a radical political stance from their pulpits, urging other men to join the revolution and overthrow the British king in the cause of freedom!
I am sure that one other strand of theology was at work in that discussion—the thinking about when a war is just or unjust—“just war theory”, that has been available to us for 1600 years and was at work when many Christian leaders including the Methodist Bishops opposed the war of choice with Iraq.
The point is that spiritual leaders have through American history applied biblical notions of justice and compassion to highly emotional political questions. It happened in the most divisive and costly war in American history—the War Between the States where 620,000 Americans died and where church leaders were just pivotal in condemning the practice of slavery. It was an issue so important that many churches divided into northern and southern branches including the Methodist and Presbyterian and Baptist denominations.
That practice of churches addressing controversies continued into the early 1900’s when ministers and others spoke in favor of child labor laws that would prevent children from being in the workplace, for fair labor practices, and for women to have the right to vote.
And many of us here lived through the very turbulent times of the sixties and seventies when Dr. Martin Luther King applied the Bible’s notion of justice to the practices of racism and segregation. What some people miss about Dr. King is that his movement was deeply rooted in the Bible’s standards of fairness and equality and justice as well as the American values of liberty and justice for all people. And Dr. King roundly criticized churches that put their heads in the sand and became “taillights instead of headlights” in the movement for equal rights.
The surprising fact for most people who say that we should always keep religion and politics separate from each other is that their shallow idea puts them in the company of tyrants and dictators. Adolf Hitler said that to some of the pastors in Germany who were criticizing the Nazi policies in church. He told them to just keep quiet about what he was doing and concentrate on prayer and heaven. In other words, “don’t mix politics and religion”. They refused just as those early American patriots and preachers did. They continued to speak out for freedom and human rights and they were imprisoned for daring to make the application of spiritual values to social justice.
If you are with me so far, what are the principles and values of our faith and our book that we want to bring to political discussions? If you have listened carefully over the past few years, you would think that the only thing the Bible and some preachers are concerned about is sex and reproduction! Abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research—these got the most attention from some, but they are not major and persistent themes in the Bible!
Let’s see if we can do what writer and theologian C S Lewis asks us—not to take a partisan position first and then look to the Bible, but to start with the foundation of our faith and then let our faith help us determine an ethical approach. This is different from starting with a political party or a pre-set opinion. It says I am a Christian first and THEN a republican or democrat or libertarian or independent. And I am making my judgments about policies based first on my faith and not on my party.
If we do this, what are the biblical starting places?
I want to start with compassion since this is a command from Jesus that his followers are to be compassionate just as God is compassionate (Luke 6). What does it mean to exercise compassion for all persons—not just folks like us, but for those whom Jesus seems most concerned about: the least able, the most vulnerable, the people on the fringes, the poor and those who have health problems but no resources for medical care? People will have different solutions to how we implement that compassion, but the foundation of compassion has to be present or we are untrue to one of the first principles of Christian faith.
What are other Biblical values? Micah asks us to exercise justice. In the Bible that means that the weak and vulnerable get equal concern as the powerful and wealthy. There is a concern in the Bible about having a large gap between haves and have nots. There is recently a concern even among some economists. The ways to deal with that are varied and complex. But in the Bible there is a commitment to the common good—to the notion that we are a community and we are not just to look our for ourselves and let everyone else be on their own. Paul raises that commitment to community well being in I Corinthians when he chastises the church at Corinth for not looking out for each other at the communion meal. The book of Acts has a passage that makes disciples of Ayn Rand’s extreme individualism very nervous: in the early Jesus movement, people were so concerned about each other that they would share what they had and take care of those who were vulnerable and weak.
A commitment to the common good is a Biblical idea and one that we have acted on at our best as a country such as in the leadership of people like Lincoln, and one that we have lost sight of today.
There is a deep Biblical concern for caring for the environment which is recently being discovered by church leaders. That is the point of the professor at Mercer University in the article in your bulletin. He says that people who recently have been called “values voters” have only had a narrow notion of values—sex and reproduction. He asks us to look at all of the Bible and see the Bible’s concerns for the earth, for war and peace, for the poor. It is not enough to be passionate about respecting and protecting life in the womb; we can also create a country where each child has medical care when they get out of the womb as well.
What do you think are some basic Christian values that we need to see in the political arena? I was writing this sermon early Friday morning and took a break and went downstairs to eat my peanut butter toast and read the morning papers that had just arrived and I read about Doug Bruce. The latest article in the Post makes the point for us. Doug Bruce is in hot water again yesterday after kicking a photographer early in the week. Now he is being denounced by his own party for a letter he wrote making accusations against someone who might replace him as an El Paso County commissioner. The leaders of his party in El Paso County have done exactly the right thing that fits with our conversation about applying Biblical principles to politics: they denounced Bruce, the Post said, because what he did “conflicts with the party’s year old ethical campaigning policy that calls for honesty, integrity, and respect.” (The Denver Post, January 18, 2008)
Isn’t that refreshing to hear any major party leadership committing to the Biblical values of honesty, integrity and respect?
And those are some of what I am looking for not only in political discussions but in presidential candidates. Remember the discussion a few weeks ago about whether the faith of a candidate is an appropriate concern? It was based on our belief as Americans that there should be no religious test for the office of president. I have a little different idea. I am concerned about the EFFECT of a candidate’s religion; I want to know what kind of person one is produced by one’s religious faith!
That is the test for me of any religion and it applies to you and me and not just to possible presidents. What kind of persons are we becoming because of our faith, because of following Christ? The El Paso County Republicans give us a good start: do we see honesty and integrity and respect for others—deeply Christian values?
I want to see that in a future president don’t you? What about the biblical value of humility that is given to us in Micah 6? Do we want presidential candidates who are arrogant and cocky or who have humility and are self aware enough to see their limitations and are able to admit mistakes and learn from them?
What do you feel about the politics of attack and smear and sleaze? Is it inevitable? Do we need to just get used to it or can we expect something better? What do we want our leaders to teach our kids—that they should do anything to win or that there are some boundaries that should not be crossed and principles that keep them from winning at any cost? (These are some of the questions Dr. Clark will be addressing in his class on ethics in business life also—what are the principles that might keep us from just winning and making money at any cost?)
I am looking for leaders who believe that sleaze and smear tactics are ethically unacceptable. Let me give you a couple of examples from a news story this week, one from each major party: eight years ago in the South Carolina primary, the smear attack on John McCain was one that attacked McCain’s sexuality. There were also fliers distributed at his final debate accusing him of fathering a “Negro child” out of wedlock and using a photo of his daughter Bridget, an orphan adopted by the McCains from Bangladesh when Cindy McCain was on a relief mission in Bangladesh.
The other sleazy example just recently is the false accusation that Barack Obama was enrolled in a radical Wahabi school when he lived in Indonesia as a child and that he used the Qur’an when he took the oath of office—false accusations, but emotional fodder for those who don’t care about the truth.
I am looking for leaders who not only tell the truth but who denounce and do not allow those sleazy attacks to occur. I am looking for a leader whose faith helps him or her practice integrity, honesty, humility, justice, respect and compassion—and those should be the fruits and results of any healthy and broad minded religion.
A different way to say that is that we need people who do not compartmentalize their faith and the rest of their life and separate them from each other. The statement that John F. Kennedy made when he was running is a bad example of this for me. He said that he would not let his Catholic faith affect anything he did as president. What I want for each of us is the opposite—that we let our faith in God and commitment to principles of compassion and justice and honesty and humility to deeply affect our behavior when we leave the church building every week!!
One of our greatest presidents knew that and practiced that faith in action through humility and compassion. Just as the Civil war ended one of Lincoln’s cabinet members thought Lincoln was being too kind and too compassionate to the Confederate soldiers and officers. He said to the Lincoln, “Don’t you know, Mr. President, that we are supposed to DESTROY our enemies?” Lincoln replied humbly, “Do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?”
Here is good example of Christian principles at work in the volatile world of politics and religion. Amen.