Faith, Politics, and Society
Given by James Covington on October 22nd, 2006
What would the world look like if it were run by religious parties rather than national ones? This is not the world we live in, but there are signs that it is the one we are moving toward. Among those signs was a public letter sent last May by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, to George W. Bush.
Ahmadinejad’s letter received rather little comment in the American media and as far as I know, President Bush offered no response. What was interesting about it was that it was a letter framed as an address by one believer in God to another and that it appeals to Bush to treat the faith he shares with Ahmadinejad as more important than what divides them.
Ahmadinejad begins the letter by asking whether U.S. foreign policy since 9/11, especially the war in Iraq, can be justified in Christian terms. The same question is applied to other matters: to U.S. support of Israel; to U.S. opposition to the election of Hamas in Palestine; to the history of U.,S. involvement in Iran, and so on. The letter continues with an appeal to Bush to consider how the prophets from Moses to Jesus would judge all this. Ahmadinejad asks Bush to take his Christianity seriously, and to join with himself in seeking to discern the proper application of the teaching of these prophets to current events.
There follows an exhortation to Bush to return to his Christianity by taking the message of the prophets, one of whom is Jesus—seriously. Then, most strikingly, comes the claim that “liberalism and Western-style democracy” have failed and can no longer, if they ever could, serve the will of God as explained by the prophets. The future, says Ahmadinejad, belongs to those who are “flocking towards a main focal point—that is the Almighty God.” The letter ends with a traditional Islamic phrase, “Peace to whoever follows the path”—the path, that is, of belief in and faithful response to the one God.
This letter is a political document, of course, and as such, is no doubt duplicitous and deceptive. We know that Ahmadinejad’s view of government is a theocratic one that follows Allah’s will alone, while our government, a democracy, stands for separation of church and state, a significant difference.
However, as we know, in recent years this view of national life as being in the service of God’s perceived will, has become a growing phenomenon in our own nation. By a series of initiatives, Republicans have attempted to transform, and arguably succeeded , the Republican party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive, after being diagnosed, as you will recall, as being in a persistent vegetative state and kept alive by a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party. I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty.
And of course one of the most powerful movements in our nation’s history, the civil rights movement, was started and led by a Christian minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious affiliation. Interestingly, in those days, in 1965, a young pre-politicized Jerry Falwell rebuked those ministers who marched with martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama: “Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners,” he said. On the heels of that remark, I finally decided to leave the Baptist ministry and ironically, in later years, Rev. Falwell started the political Christian Coalition. So there you are.
The problem, in my view, is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party or government that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement. In the last decade, American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God's side and you are not, that I know God's will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God's kingdom is certain to produce hostility and division.
I also assert that this kind of theocratic rhetoric is one of the reasons the Republican party is in disarray today and why the public in general is so negative and bitter toward our congressional government and turned off to politics. As it turns out, Republicans are no more immune to crime and deceit than anyone else. As it turns out, people are less concerned nowadays about homosexual marriage and stem-cell research than they are about the Iraq war, terrorism and the environment and have the lowest level of confidence in Congress in recent memory. When the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian, became Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, someone asked him, "What do you do, Sir, pray for the members of the Senate?" He answered, "No, I look at the members of the Senate, then pray for the United States of America." I look at the state of politics and the political parties and I have to agree with him.
This is my belief, the note of this sermon: I believe the issues before us today call for greater moral discernment by all parties in terms of our responsibility to one another. Religion will always have a place in politics. Religious values are, or should be, moral values. In my opinion one’s religious faith is useful in ascertaining one’s moral responsibility to the greater good of humanity. But there is a crucial difference between permitting religious dogma to dictate political decisions and allowing moral considerations to inform and guide public policy. Theocracy is the result of the former; democracy of the latter.
The inference I draw from the Bible as a whole and also the Koran and Torah, is that the moral demands on humanity are universal. There is the common ground of the common good, and there are the semi-private domains of our diverse religious traditions. No one should seek to impose his or her religious convictions on society, but we should seek to bring the insights of our respective faiths to the public conversation about the principles for which we stand and the values we share. That would involve, for the religious groups within society, a shift from the politics of interests to the politics of principles. It is when our horizons extend beyond our own faith communities that our separate journeys converge and we become joint builders of a more gracious world.
John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator and an Episcopal minister who has written about these concerns writes:
Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.
Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings.
But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I agree. The love commandment that Danforth points to is upheld in our first principle affirming the worth and dignity of every person.
So, considering Danforth’s comments and mine as well, admitting how combustive the admixture of religion and politics can be, let me now suggest precisely the opposite thought—that there may be too little religion in our politics, not too much. Too little of the religion prescribed by the prophet Micah: "to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God." Too little of the religion taught by Rabbi Jesus, who summed up all the law and the prophets in two great commandments: "to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself." Too little of the religion as defined by the Unitarian, Thomas Jefferson, who said, "It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read."
When Ahmadinejad of Iran calls on President Bush to return to his Christianity by taking the message of the prophets seriously, does he mean by that, the theocratic proclamation of the one true God, or does he mean the moral responsibility that all the prophets have held forth to the nations? The love commandment Danforth speaks of is related to our ethical responsibility to one another as human beings everywhere. Is this the teaching of the prophets Ahmadinejad has in mind or the President Bush might be familiar with? I don’t know.
The core of most religious beliefs, in my opinion, is not that of affirming the one true God or the one true state or nation or religion, but of affirming society. Human beings need a sense of common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbors as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born, that society is not a HOTEL where we receive services in exchange for money, but a HOME to which we feel attached and whose history is literally our own. So human beings need to covenant with one another to nurture the home they have been given. We need a morality that will help us construct a common life. To the degree that my religious faith enables me to do that, then so be it.
So in the days ahead, as we prepare for mid term elections and a presidential race in two years, I will have questions about our nation’s moral responsibilities to the greater good that I will be silently asking of each candidate and each party and discerning their answers:
What is our moral responsibility to the people of Iraq in determining how best to withdraw from that calamitous war without shirking our responsibility to the people whose lives, tortured enough already by a murderous dictator, have only been further fragmented and destroyed by a U.S. occupation? Of course this question does not preclude the Iraqi people from their own responsibility to one another and for resolving their tribal hostilities.
What is our moral responsibility to save our planet from extinction by global warming?
What is our moral responsibility to the people of Darfur who continue to suffer genocide?
What is our moral responsibility to all the millions of people in the world who starve to death each day? The bible had little to say about homosexuality, by the way, but over 2000 verses are related to hunger and poverty.
What is our moral responsibility to the elderly and assuring them of adequate health care?
What is our moral responsibility for strengthening marriages and families and to protect our children from the garbage of the culture?
What is our moral responsibility to all nations in combating terrorism and tyranny?
What is our moral responsibility to the people of N. Korea who live in poverty and isolation and whose leaders are threatening to cast the world into nuclear oblivion?
In an age of proliferating nuclear weapons, what is our moral responsibility, as the most powerful nation with nuclear weapons?
What is our moral responsibility to the people of the Middle-east and working with Palestinians and Israelis to establish a lasting peace? What is their moral responsibility to one another?
These are mere questions and I could go on. They are huge questions fraught with uncertainties and complexities, of course. But they are also urgent human questions that can be informed by one’s religious faith and only resolved by the cooperative efforts of all in our institutional government. You may ask the question: why should we feel morally implicated in the problems of ethnic conflict, mass poverty, famine relief, AIDS, genocide, when these are happening far away to people we have never met with whom we have little in common? Because there is a covenant, innate in our very existence–in the human heart–of human solidarity. John Donne said it memorable long ago:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume. . . No man is an island, entire of itself. . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I agree. It’s why I am a universalist.
I leave you with a story and one that I wonder how it might be received by presidents Ahmadinejad and Bush: The story is about the late Ansell Harris and a comment made at his memorial service. Harris was a British Jew whose parents helped set up a refuge for children fleeing Nazi Germany. He was also honorary treasurer of OXFAM, an agency established to end poverty in the world. He also devoted his energies to UK Jewish Aid and International Development, whose role is to provide medical, educational, social and financial help to people in distress regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Through it he was instrumental in bringing humanitarian aid to Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia.
He was apparently, in spite of his good works, also an obstinate, impossible to argue with individual, but also impossible not to admire. Ansell believed that, being Jewish himself, all Jews have a responsibility to work across the borders of faith and be a blessing to humanity. At the memorial service, one of the speakers was Lord Bhatia, a Muslim whom Ansell had come to know through his work at Oxfam. In the course of his remarks, Lord Bhatia told an amusing story. Ansell, he said, loved music, but only on the condition that he chose it himself. He hated background music in public places.
On one of their trips to India, he tried to get the airport staff to turn off the music coming over the public address system. He failed. He tried it again on the plane, and again he failed. Arriving at the hotel, he heard more music in the lobby and stormed up to the receptionist, insisting that it be turned off. Then Bhatia said aloud: I have no doubt, Ansell, that you are now in heaven with the Lord and his choir of angels, But whatever you do, don’t ask God to turn the music off!
Well, it’s an endearing story and indicative of their warm friendship. What held them together, we might ask. One a passionate Jew, the other a no less committed Muslim? The short answer is that they cared for something larger than their respective faith communities. They cared for humanity. When they saw disease, poverty and despair, they didn’t stop to ask who was suffering. They acted. They saw faith not as a secluded castle but as a window onto a wider world. They saw God’s image in the face of a stranger, and heard his call in the cry of a starving child.
Their respective faiths informed them. Their politics directed them. Their covenant with society united them. So be it!