A Postmortem On Pulpit Malfeasance

Many good things have come from this year's Presidential Primaries. Especially among the Democrats, younger voters got involved early and stayed involved, even if by themselves they could not determine the outcome. At the same time, among the Republicans, early concerns about the winner's age were finally trumped by perceptions of his competence. Now, there are real issues and very divergent perspectives on America's future to be debated, and many special interests along racial, ethnic, gender, age, and economic lines to be reconciled. A likely high voter turn-out in November (assuming in particular that the Democratic Party does not self-destruct before then) should provide just the kind of referendum that politicians typically wait for before actually doing something for the country instead of pandering to their own supporters.

Everyone I know has his and her list of not-so-good things that have come from this same political process. Not surprisingly, no two lists are identical. I would like to think, however, that there is at least one item that all share in common: the utterly disgraceful performances of three pulpiteers in particular, so mind-numbingly reprehensible as to occasion formal statements of dissociation by Senators Obama and McCain. Obama seemed especially cursed by preacher types. Apparently, Jeremiah Wright's black liberationist racism was not enough to turn him completely off, but Michael Pfleger's contemptible one-upsmanship from Wright's former pulpit finally did in the presumptive nominee's well-intentioned, and otherwise admirable, spirit of tolerance and church loyalty. What disturbs me especially about both flaps in Trinity Church is how many dudgeon-filled members may still be there after the Obamas found it necessary to leave the place. (Did you watch the reactions from the pews to Father Pfleger's spiritually obscene performance?)

And then there is Reverend John Hagee, for a time a bane of Senator McCain's existence. In this part of the country, at least, Hagee is well known to thoughtful Christians as one of the least thoughtful around, but also as one of the most effective, especially in rallying large numbers of similarly logic-challenged fundamentalists, creationists, Zionists, apocalypticists, and Catholic-haters from all walks of Christendom. Somehow, the Senator's staff failed to prevent him from expressing a naïve over-appreciativeness of Hagee's support early in the campaign, but finally discovered the handwriting on the wall and helped to extricate the former Episcopalian from what might have been fall-out on an order of magnitude equal to Obama's.

Floating serenely above these controversies was the almost indomitable Hillary Clinton, whose Methodism has never earned her the credit she deserves for trying to live her life in accordance with it. She, too, however, is not above using Sunday Services and pulpits to her own ends, and in this respect she was just as vulnerable as her opponents in both political parties were. Who knows what unseemly associations presently undiscovered might have eventually made the news had she gone on to be the Democratic Party's nominee? (Although the Methodist pulpiteers I know that she knows are pretty trustworthy, even admirable pastors. You know who you are, so take a quiet bow before you leave your offices today.)

As this campaign continues, Barack Obama and John McCain should share openly the ways that their faith and their faith-pilgrimages have informed and are informing how they think (in contrast with what they think) about the issues with which our society must deal in the years ahead. Hopefully, though, they will do the sharing in places other than Christian pulpits, unless their schedules can somehow be engineered to allow them to show up at the same church on the same Sunday morning and have at it, with God and not fawning preachers or frenzied parishioners as their judge. Politically active preachers easily forget that their parishioners, for the most part, constitute captive audiences of people too polite to give them the what-for they deserve when they conscript their pulpits for purposes of ideological wrangling and then dismiss arbitrarily all and sundry whose views differ in the slightest degree from their own.

God's great gift of freedom to every human being is powerfully manifested whenever people who are called to the ministry of preaching and interpretation use their own gift responsibly, especially by helping those to whom they minister understand better the complexities of the human condition, of societal change, and the difficulties of making progress on anything without encouraging and respecting the opinions of everyone who will be affected by anyone's decisions. I am thankful that the irresponsible behavior of three preachers who should know better raised as many hackles as it did. Maybe the reactions will remind other preachers who aim to speak God's truth rather than political ideology to speak that truth gracefully, intelligently, and with love.