Mixing Religion And Politics Badly

Church people usually know right away when their preacher has quit preaching and gone to meddling. Most likely, the Reverend Chan Chandler’s flock clearly saw his own descent into mischief for what it was, and acted accordingly. Pastor Chandler recently resigned the pulpit of the East Waynesville, North Carolina Baptist Church over running off church members for not supporting President Bush, conservatism, and goodness knows what else. And well the good Reverend should have resigned --- only sooner.

If the Roman Catholic Church in America were not already so desperate for priests, it might be fitting to ask that St. Paul, Minnesota priest, who recently denied communion to supporters of gay Catholics, to take the same low road out of town that Mr. Chandler had to take. On second thought, let’s ask it anyway. For one thing, it is offensive to be held captive on pew benches that are already sending congregants’ arthritis into spasms while a demagogue in the pulpit or behind the chancel rail spews out doctrinal as well as political cant in a way that permits neither honest discussion nor conscientious dissent.

If the previous examples of clergy shenanigans are not enough by way of illustrating this column’s major point, let me add another for balance. Remember the recent Presidential election controversy over priests threatening to deny communion to Candidate John Kerry and to all those other liberal-types who were supporting him? I do, but I also remember getting far more worked up over how many liberal-type Protestant preachers, who should have known better, fawned shamelessly over him during their own Sabbath services, and from their pulpits no less. Frankly, the Senator lost points with me for showing up in the first place, as does any political candidate who disrupts church gatherings whose announced purpose is the worship of God.

It bothers me a great deal to see fellow members of the cloth hunkering down tight- fistedly with rabid advocates of one political or social agenda after another, whether conservative or liberal, while showing not the slightest consideration of the possibility that there is truth on the other side of the broad, ugly ideological ditches between themselves and anybody else who might disagree with them. Nevertheless, I have to concede, as all of us must, that people do not give up their rights as citizens when they become members of the clergy, nor should they. Although I cringe a little when Jesse Jackson comes to town, I cringe even more when I hear townspeople say they would like to run him out of it.

It is one thing, however, to see your pastor on the barricades and the Internet, protesting against private Social Security accounts, abortion, trade protections, environmental assault, the filibuster, gays and lesbians, the war in Iraq, or whatever, and quite another to hear him or her tell us from the pulpit exactly what we must think and do about the issue(s) at hand. What we most need from our preachers, priests, rabbis, imams, and gurus is as honest a searching of their respective scriptures and traditions of which they are capable, and an opening of a way to them that will allow all of us to discern for ourselves the guidance they contain, and act accordingly.

What we do not need from religious leaders --- conservative, liberal, and everybody in between --- are promulgations of badly formed ideas such as those that lay strict conditions upon peoples’ access to God’s Word and Real Presence. When declamations from our pulpits serve only to silence and coerce, when Christian fellowship takes place only behind doors slammed in others’ faces, and when the communion table becomes restricted only to those arbitrarily deemed worthy, it is time to do what those Waynesville Baptists did. They reminded their pastor that his way was the highway --- for him.

Hovering quietly but threateningly in the background of ministerial malfeasances like those I have just described is the whole confused business of tax-emption for churches going about their proper work of helping and saving needy souls --- including, thankfully, our own. Wouldn’t it be a kick if the tax people all of a sudden decided to trespass on the politically incendiary terrain of determining which churches’ social involvements are genuinely religious and which are merely political? I still doubt whether anybody in the IRS can do the job better than church people can, but when I see preachers with one arm draped around a politician’s shoulders and the other leaning on a pulpit, I have to confess that for at least a tiny moment, I do begin to wonder.

Abortion

I sometimes wonder whether God quite knew what he was doing when he issued that famous invitation to his people to come and “reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). More accurately translated, the passage is a call to argue things out. Of all the invitations God has tendered us over the millennia, this may be the one with which we have had the least difficulty. Except maybe for the one to be fruitful and multiply.

Arguing, contending, debating, wrangling --- these are all things that most of us have become better at than God surely intended us to become. Back then, he was after a simple obedience to his demands for justice. He proposed the particular argument to which Isaiah referred in order to get his people to quit substituting ritualism for ethicality. By contrast, our arguments are mostly about getting people to give up their beliefs for our own, their consciences be damned. And we wonder why our disputes rarely get anywhere.

Some time ago, a rabbi friend told me about spending an especially disturbing afternoon in a local hospital with a dedicated couple in his synagogue, consoling them and helping them think through whether or not to abort their pregnancy. They had just learned that their baby would come into the world with Tay-Sachs disease (an affliction tragically common in Jewish families of Eastern European origin), and would suffer progressively retarded development, paralysis, dementia, blindness, and death by age 3 or 4. Through their prayers and their tears, my friend’s parishioners decided upon abortion, with his anguished blessing. In the weeks following, he and the couple were mercilessly denounced by others in the congregation.

Every time I have told this story in Christian settings, adding to it that I would have given my own blessing to the rabbi’s couple, I have been both roundly praised and mercilessly denounced. So pile on; I’m used to it. But if you are going to heap hot coals rather than warm hugs, at least consider the following two caveats.

The first: As the author of life, God demands the deepest respect for life --- all life --- of which we are capable. And the second: The willful taking of another life with no larger, good purpose envisioned and served cannot possibly be made consistent with everything else that we know about God’s will for human beings everywhere. About such actions as, for instance, abortion as an alternative to contraception, God has made plain that he intends to argue with us, and we can be certain in advance that we will lose.

But now comes the first problem: what about the taking of life precisely in the interest of an end that we determine to be worthy, and perhaps even noble, in circumstances that may be anything but either? Here is where too many people become too eager to assume the role of God in the “argue it out” scenario. That is, they fulminate just like they think the Almighty would, attacking anyone who disagrees with their own take on abortion with a vehemence like that of a Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mt. Olympus, or a Yahweh flooding the earth from above the clouds. Certainly, my friend’s parishioners played God this way, but so also do a number of my other friends, who say utterly vicious things about all those “ignorant and malicious pro-lifers” that thoughtful people like themselves have to put up with.

Should all Tay-Sachs fetuses be aborted? How could we possibly know in advance? Is a particular abortion under such horrific circumstances worthy of serious consideration? Surely the answer to this question is “Yes.” As it is to the questions of aborting a pregnancy to save a mother’s life, and of abortion as a response to incestuous conception as well as to conception from rape. On these matters at least, let us spare each other any tedious sloganeering: being pro-choice does not commit one to being anti-life, and being pro-life does not require another to deny the sometimes very harsh necessities of death even in the most fervently sought “Culture of Life.”
A second problem that should better dispose us to turn down the volume on the current abortion debate arises from the profligate inconsistencies between thought and action evident throughout so much of it. Here is a pro-lifer who gets angry with delays in carrying out death sentences, and sees no reason why convicted rapists should all of a sudden have the right to DNA testing that was not available at the time they were charged. Up there is a vehement pro-choicer gently plucking a bug out of her salad, walking down three flights of stairs to release the creature into the outside air. A placard-carrying anti-abortionist is just back from hunting game with an assault rifle. A savior of the spotted owl prescribes “morning after” pills as often as he does anti-depressants.
See any problems here?