Yet something something went haywire with this reasonable separation. In some ways, religion has been silenced as a moral voice in America.
Stephen L. Carter is right: “In our sensible zeal to keep religion from
dominating our politics, we have created a culture that presses the religiously
faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and privately as well,
as though their faith does not matter to them.”
Church and state are separate – but we can have a conversation! In 1970, the Supreme Court clarified that “Churches,
as much as secular bodies and private citizens, have the right of vigorous
advocacy of legal and constitutional positions.”
But something else is
even crazier nowadays. In my experience,
when someone chides me for stepping over that line between religion and
politics, it is not so much that I have said something “political.” Rather, I said something that disagrees with
or pits Jesus against my critic’s political ideology. If I say something that agrees with someone
listening, they never rise up and denounce me for stepping over the church/state
line.
You
see, everything that matters in the real world can be labeled “political,”
since we wind up having laws, policies and government programs related to all
those things Christians inevitably care about:
because of Jesus, the prophets and apostles, we harbor strong feelings
about war and peace, or when life begins, or the plight of the poor, or
strangers within our borders, or character, honesty and virtue. As people of faith, how could we
function faithfully as citizens or voters if we had to leave God in a drawer at
home or in the pew at Church?
In my tradition (and as is the law, given
the 1954 Johnson amendment regarding church’s tax exempt status!), clergy don’t
endorse candidates – although conservative evangelicals do, the
African-American churches do, and the Roman Catholics do! What we must
do, during an election year and every year, month and day, is talk about and
labor for the things that most clearly matter to God, the campaigns Jesus, the
prophets and apostles waged.
We need to calm down and not get our back up
if we hear something biblical and it seems to jam up against our political
ideology; we should thank God, and try to see if there is a way to get closer
to God, and more engaged in God’s adventure on earth. We should gravitate toward candidates who
mirror Jesus to us more clearly than others, and to policies that enact
something resembling the kingdom of God – and we are slackers if we don’t
invite others to join us, albeit respectfully, and humbly, and with an open
mind that might be changed at any time.
So if God, and God’s Church, have something
to say to the state, to its leaders and its citizens, what might that be? Next week we will think about how Christians
think and talk, and then what they need to say.
