I have a cartoon outside my office door that helps keep things in perspective. A man is ready to enter Heaven. The reader knows this because there is a big sign that says "Welcome to Heaven" with an additional phrase underneath: "Keep your religion to yourself." An angel standing by the sign says to the aspirant: "Ironically, that's what makes it so peaceful here."
I suppose one could exchange the word "religion" with "politics" for this cartoon, and for the same reason, that upon entering "Heaven" (or an ideal co-existence) equality of being and resources would eliminate the need for power plays, coercion, healing brokenness or repairing the world.
Since we are no where near that state of being in the world as a whole, we humans create ways of being together and institutions to address what, exactly, that means. We create institutions of faith to engage the meaning of being and relatedness, while we create political institutions to engage the power dynamics of that relatedness.
The intermingling of these two strains of behaving and believing is so pervasive these days that we've undermined a desire to work together. Faith and politics are either at odds with each other or so co-opted that we cannot see defining lines.
We are diminishing, at the same time, our embrace of the richness of diversity by compartmentalizing our communities and circles of communication. We can choose to hear only the news we want to hear through customized news shows and talk radio. We can create networks of opinion feeding on itself in e-lists and the blogosphere. We can shop online, avoid the public with our cell phones and Ipods. We can text in classrooms and meetings. We are setting up a culture where we don't really have to pay attention to one another, practice civility or exercise our acceptance of difference. That is, until decisions impede our way of life and we are suddenly thrown into the tension of competing interests.
There was a time in the not too distant past, when we advised one another to avoid talk of faith and politics in "polite company." You now have to claim your affiliation to gain entrance into the conversation.
I am not advocating avoiding the topics of faith and politics in social situations, but I am suggesting that we are giving those topics far more power and practice than our natural ability to find common ground. We must practice our ability to find common ground.
When we gloss over the presence of faith and politics in our public life, excesses occur and, often, violation of civil rights as a faith perspective or political agenda creeps into shared space.
Here's a stunning example. In 1949, the State of Pennsylvania introduced a statute compelling school districts to perform Bible readings in the mornings before class. At least ten Bible verses were to be read daily by teachers or students in each public school classroom statewide. Joint recitation of the Lord's Prayer followed the reading in that district's public schools. The law stated that any teacher refusing to conduct or participate in the mandated Bible reading could be fired.
Enter Edward Schempp some years later, a pesky Unitarian who had children attending the public schools. Schempp contended in a suit against the Abington Township School District that the
"religious doctrines purveyed by a literal reading of the Bible [were at the very least] contrary to [his] religious beliefs. . ."
and that the school system had no right to exert religious influence on his children's lives.
A counter argument was the contention that the Bible was non-sectarian and merely an important way to instill morality in the children. This argument did not succeed and the Court found in favor of Edward Schempp. This decision was appealed and pursued all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States when, in February of 1963, the law was finally deemed unconstitutional.1
Edward Schempp, along with some brave testimonies by his teenage son, defied the untested assumption of Christian hegemony. He opened the conversation of faith and politics and their proper place that rippled nationally.
That kind of conversation can go too far, however, as we have witnessed over this past decade, while religious references and coercion continues to seep into political debates and national policy to dangerous proportions. An easy example of this is the trend to claim God on the side of invading a country and marking those who disagree on the side of "evil-doers."
The seeping continues with a project by the Alliance Defense Fund, "a legal alliance of Christian attorneys defending the right of people to freely live out their faith."
Last Sunday, September 28th, was declared to be "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" with the call to action for pastors to specifically endorse political candidates from the pulpit. This is in defiance of a tax law that prohibits partisan speech in church gatherings while maintaining tax-exempt status. According to their website, "31 pastors participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday".2
The reasoning is the claim that pastors should be able to preach Biblical truth from the pulpit without fear of punishment and that the tax law prohibits freedom of speech.
Now, I don't see how voting for a particular politician who was no where near alive when the Bible was canonized can be called "biblical truth," but without going down that lane, what's more disturbing is the claimed ownership of the concept of "freedom."
The idea of "freedom" is becoming an icon, the golden calf in Biblical terms, that is steering the people away from its truth. I felt it the minute the fad for "freedom fries" to erase the word "French" from our eating habits because they disagreed with a national policy. Freedom is what we have and they don't deserve.
Freedom is becoming a concept that is used to describe the desire to have everything go our own way at any time. If the Ten Commandments are not allowed on government property than our "freedom of religion" is violated, with no consideration for taking up shared space, physically and spiritually, from those who disagree. If your cashier does not say "Merry Christmas," you are plotting against our freedom of religion, which somehow includes the shared space of commerce. Again, the concept of freedom becomes getting my own way whenever I want it. Thus, "Pulpit Freedom Sunday", where preachers have the right to coerce their parishioners into partisan allegiance to the point of endorsing a candidate with the authority of God and country on their side. We are forgetting that with freedom comes responsibility and in a thriving a democracy there must be diversity.
"We hold these truths to be self evident," states the Declaration of Independence, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
This is one of many proclamations made at the time of the forming of this nation that bring into debate the intermingling of religion and politics in our culture. The first paragraph of the Declaration reads:
"to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."
The founders claimed their right to freedom from tyranny and freedom to self govern inspired by an authority and power that was larger than themselves, and, certainly, larger than the King.
Whether we like it or not, this nation was founded on faith, a belief in a Creator or Source of all Being whose presence in our lives brings us to the knowledge of freedom and responsibility, of liberty and justice for all ... that we, endowed with this knowledge can form a more perfect union. This same Divine inspiration, however, also guards against abuses and distortions of power, so that freedom is preserved for all. The tyrannies of the mind and possessiveness of spirit that our forebears witnessed in their lives primarily through religious zeal and political power were intentionally guarded against in the framing of this nation through the Bill of Rights. The founders agreed that having faith gives courage and inspires perseverance toward an ideal, but forcing faith on others disables any effort toward liberty and justice for all. And further, Divine inspiration to dwell together as a people is far different than defining the Divine for a people, which is necessarily outside the scope of political rule.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush, a Universalist and co-signer of the Declaration, "I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Jefferson's allegiance to his God and hostility toward tyranny speak to the delicate balance of politics and religion in this nation's development. The tension of religion and politics energizes the soul of this nation, because it is only in the true balance of cherished affirmation of life and resistance to tyranny that freedom lives. And further, freedom exists for us only if we tend to it, only if we contribute to its life amongst us. It is up to us to pay attention to that which prevents the flow of freedom in our lives. It is up to us to pay attention to abuses of power and influence—up to us to defy belittling assumptions of another's worth and identity—up to us to question coercive claims of ownership and belonging.
The Declaration of Independence is the first and only known document to this day that proclaims a government founded on principles: not for the sake of land or of royalty or of any particular religion, but for the sake of principles. These principles were derived from a devotion to the ideals of natural law.
The assumption of Natural Law came from the belief in an ultimate unifying reality, over and above the workings of humanity. It was a belief in an Ultimate Source, an Originator of all things, an organizing principle of life itself that can be described through many different religious systems. It was further believed that humans, through the use of reason, could come to the wisdom of this unifying principle and create a peaceable realm, one that would assure all its members justice and equity. Each citizen, it was believed, is endowed with this unifying principle that can empower the individual to develop into a mature, exemplary citizen. However, it was equally believed, that humans have tendencies to stray from their best selves, that in fact we are prone to distortions, greed, fear, pride and self-delusion. And organized religion has a tendency to tempt its followers to stray from the ideal of liberty and justice for all.
Kenneth D. Wald writes in his book Religion and Politics in the United States "for some of the founders, notably Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, organized religion deserved no government support because among other reasons, it was thought to pervert the true meaning of religion ..."3
Politics is about power and managing that power amongst a people. Faith is about authority, our justification for being and behaving. When we meld the two together, concentrating power and authority, we distort the common good, because the weight of that responsibility—to have all power and all authority—is beyond any individual or system of government.
We all have agendas, personal needs and priorities. We all have our fears, our demons and our projections. We all label now and again and dismiss the other. What is dangerous is when we begin to believe our own labels as truth, the unalienable kind, and we worship our righteousness from that stance of truth, from that dogma. If you doubt, if you feel nuance, if you change your mind or admit a mistake, you are seen as less worthy and therefore dismissed by some label that marks you. What is equally damaging is when we let others do that for us, when we allow the labels to stick because we do not claim ourselves or the dignity of others.
When we think we know what's best for another, we have blocked ourselves from understanding. We no longer see them as independent individuals, we begin to see them as extensions of our own vision and judge them accordingly: in the right or in the wrong. We then want them to be what we assume they "should be." Once that barricade of rigid expectation is formed, we have artificially created enemy territory. And when we throw the will of God into the mix or a prejudice against religious belief, then our potential to authentically dwell with one another is lost. We then govern by juggling "friends" and "foes." We see our enterprise together as fraught with danger and in need of measures of security. We parcel out trust and, eventually, truth, to maintain what we envision as the only way to survive. If a certain phrase or choice signals enemy territory to a person, then no amount of reasoning can work to welcome dialogue. The person feels the other has nothing to teach; the other, in fact, is what's wrong with society; the other needs to be disempowered, dismissed, or denounced. Forgiveness is out the window. Humility, an endangered species. And authentic interchange, full of healthy, challenging dialogue, a distant ideal.
To truly dwell in a community centered on the principle of freedom, it would do us well to spend far more time fighting the enemy within—the distortions of our own mind and spirit—rather than correcting others. To truly have empowering interchanges, we would work on our own wisdom, rather than claim the ignorance of others. The challenge to that is that everyone, or at least a vast majority of the people have to be doing this, else abuses reign unchecked.
Advanced citizenry is rare—for any of us. We do not often find those who claim liberty for themselves just as passionately as they do for others. It is not often that one readily makes decisions for one's own life while considering the good of all. We tend to be possessive and judgmental. We tend to want easy answers and ways to control the world as we see it. We are prone to coercion and self interest. We tend to see scarcity of resources and assume they need to be gained competitively, then protected and preserved, rather than come to realize that abundance comes from shared resources.
Our nation's forebears envisioned government as a force to uphold public good, to prevent us all from sabotaging the ideal. Our government was crafted to serve its citizenry, not master it, and to function by rule of law, not by the whim of particular individuals or religious systems. In the best of all possible worlds, civil law would both steer us away from our baser tendencies and protect us from absolute, arbitrary power. In the best of all possible worlds, faith would empower us to find the wisdom within to dwell together, in the richness of diversity, because all, essentially is One. In this way individuals and networks of individuals could keep each other in check while encouraging our innate potential to manifest the common good.
Faith and politics intermingle just as power and authority inform our lives. We cannot separate one from the other in our personal choices and political tendencies. What we can do—what we must do—is keep clear of tyrannies, even when they have pretty names like "freedom." When we see equal worth and the gift of Creation, when we let that inform our ways and walking, then the freedom that loves peace, equality, shared power and wise compassion will thrive. And when we walk into that heaven, we'll keep our coercive tendencies to ourselves.
So may it be. Amen.
Copyright © 2008 Lisa Ward. All Rights Reserved.