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Sunday, July 05, 2009
WHY FAITH MATTERS
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Deuteronomy 8:11-18 Good News Bible
11 "Make certain that you do not forget the Lord your God; do not fail to obey any of his laws that I am giving you today. 12 When you have all you want to eat and have built good houses to live in 13 and when your cattle and sheep, your silver and gold, and all your other possessions have increased, 14 be sure that you do not become proud and forget the Lord your God who rescued you from Egypt, where you were slaves. 15 He led you through that vast and terrifying desert where there were poisonous snakes and scorpions. In that dry and waterless land he made water flow out of solid rock for you. 16 In the desert he gave you manna to eat, food that your ancestors had never eaten. He sent hardships on you to test you, so that in the end he could bless you with good things. 17 So then, you must never think that you have made yourselves wealthy by your own power and strength. 18 Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to become rich. He does this because he is still faithful today to the covenant that he made with your ancestors.
Some of you have discovered that in each Monday’s edition of USA Today there is a half page commentary on religion by different writers. We have seen editorials there by Stephen Prothero who teaches at Boston University as well as other authors whose books are on our bookshelves.
Last Monday’s commentary, Witch Hunts and Torture, was by Mary Zeiss Strange, Professor of Religion at Skidmore College in New York State. She wrote about the connection between the recent debate on torture by our country and the kinds of torture practiced by the religious inquisitions sponsored by the church in the 15th through 17th centuries in Europe and by Protestant churches in the witch hunt trials in American history. She notes that there are several levels of questions about, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” one of which is whether they actually yield any useful information. One former FBI agent is quoted as saying that he believes torture does not yield useful information and he gives the example of one accused al-Qaeda who stopped producing reliable information once he was water boarded.
The ethical question about whether it is right to employ any and all means of interrogation on prisoners is a different question. Senator John McCain has spoken clearly about and has consistently condemned torture by our government. He is the only recent presidential candidate in many years who has experienced torture first hand and he is very clear about condemning these acts. That debate will continue and one of the arguments has to do with what kind of nation we are and what our national character is. It also has to do with whether there is anything that we would never do because it violates our ethical standards as a country. It is a question that other countries probably do not carefully consider. Part of the complicated argument about torture pivots around character and ethics and about what some spiritual principles tell us about even the way we treat our enemy.
The issue of national character and ethics has been noticed over the centuries of American history. One dramatic example is from the French writer and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. In the first part of the 19th century, while traveling in America and writing about what he saw, he made observations about faith and spirituality in America. He said things like this: “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” He was an astute observer of the influence of faith in American history and American life and offered many other observations about America’s character as well as the strong spirituality he saw. I don’t intend to focus on more of de Tocqueville this morning or to get into a debate about torture, although, I do commend the USA Today opinion piece to you. The point I want to make is that there has been a long and strong emphasis on national character and on the complicated relationship between church and state over the almost 400 years of life since the pilgrims came here in 1621, and began to establish the custom of taking time every fall, when the harvest was in, to pause and give thanks to God for a plentiful harvest.
In fact, it was more than just that. In that first thanksgiving celebration Governor Bradford pronounced a time of worship and thanksgiving even though half the colonists had died between 1620 and the fall of 1621. They were thanking God for just being alive and being able to have new relationships with the natives who saved them by teaching them.
Particularly in those first 150 years or so of history, before we started talking about a national revolution against Britain, the words we heard from Deuteronomy were read from many pulpits because many spiritual leaders saw this country as a new Israel. They saw a people God had brought to a new promised land, a land with huge challenges related to clearing forests for roads and of taming a wilderness. But they also saw a land of opportunity where they could prosper and where they could, as Moses says in Deuteronomy, could forget that it was God who helped them and they could forget God and become proud and arrogant and self absorbed. What is quite distinctive about our history is the relationship between the Judeo Christian principles and beliefs that our ancestors brought and how we applied those to the formation of a nation and to our founding documents. I do not believe that the founders meant to establish “a Christian nation” as some would claim. We are much more complicated than that and I want to remind us of how the faith of those founders mattered and made a difference and still makes a difference.
By the way, the best resource on this period of American history is called American Gospel by Jon Meacham. Meacham is the editor of Newsweek and is, I believe, an active member of his Episcopal congregation. Look at the spiritual influence in our nation. In the year or two preceding July of 1776, there were protestant ministers who would end their sermons by encouraging all the men in the congregation to sign up at the back door to join the insurgency against the British! Think about that. At the end of the service, being motivated to join a violent overthrow of the established government as a spiritual duty, as a religious act! That was, of course, the foundation for Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence whose signing we commemorate today. Those words had a deeply spiritual and theological foundation. We believe that people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and when those rights are threatened, the people have a right to alter or abolish it!
As Meacham points out, the words in the American Constitution are more cautious. God is not mentioned there and the founders were careful to avoid the danger of commingling church and state because the purpose in coming to the new land had been to avoid a government sponsored or government favored established church. So the purpose of the first amendment, about freedom of speech, press, and religion, was to keep churches free and to keep what Jefferson later called, in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, a wall of separation between church and state. This phrase is not in the constitution but it was solidly in Jefferson’s thinking. The place of faith in America has been strong and complicated as some of the quotes on your quote sheet will tell you. What is not there is the belief, by George Washington, that God’s providential hand was at work in some of the coincidences and some of the battles he fought with the British that finally led to our independence.
Our faith was influential in even the formation of our branches of government. The faith of the founders caused them to be suspicious of too much power in any one of the three branches. Half of Americans cannot name the three branches of government! The founders believed that we are all capable of seeking and grabbing too much power so they instituted a system that would provide checks and balances so that ideally, Congress and the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court would be constrained by each other in exercising too much power. Congress was seen to be a co-equal arm of government, along with the Executive, a concept that has been changing some with the advent of what some call an imperial presidency.
The American concept of government with the separation of church and state has served us well so that in our country, in contrast to some places in Europe today, with entanglement between church and state, American churches are not empty museums and art halls but are instead thriving communities of faith where people learn, grow, serve, and exercise influence. The effort to bring spiritual influence to public and personal behavior was present when our nation struggled with the issue of slavery from 1776 to 1865. It was also present with the struggle of child labor laws and the right of women to vote, over issues of war and peace, and over civil rights and voting rights in the 1960’s. Today it is present for questions like that of torture and over equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens. That is, in my mind, whether equal protection under the law, a constitutional provision for all of us, really does apply to all of us regardless of sexual identity and sexual orientation. I believe that equal protection under the law is everyone’s right in our country. Religious faith has thrived in America compared to other nations because of the wisdom of the founders whom we celebrate today. Their concept of freedom of religion and of no establishment or favoritism toward one religion has given us the healthiest of all environments, one that even de Tocqueville remarked on 160 years ago in our early life as a country.
We need to stay committed to those founding principles. I still occasionally get blast emails from groups who want to say that our court decisions have prevented children from praying in public schools but that is a false statement because, as one person says, as long as there are tests in public schools, there will be prayer in school!
What the courts have rightly done is to prohibit someone from mandating prayer, holding a government sponsored prayer in school. The decisions have prevented the establishment of a favorite religion. This also means that we in churches need to do a much better job of inviting and receiving and nurturing/educating. We should not rely on the state to do that for us. That is what the founders intended. And that of course is why this church intends to keep on spreading our perspective as effectively as we can. We believe that faith matters. Faith has mattered immensely in American history and, with God’s help, and our commitment to doing the work that is uniquely ours to do, faith will always matter.