Public Ministry : : News : : Forrest Church

The Presidential Pulpit and Pulpit Politics

Forrest Church • February 23, 2003

At times of war, or pending war, almost inevitably we witness a marked increase of religious rhetoric from politicians and political rhetoric from preachers. Critics of this practice base their concern on a broad variety of grounds. Some argue that the wall of separation between church and state should extend to a complete separation of religion from politics. Jerry Falwell held this position during the Civil Rights struggle. "Preachers are not called to be politicians but soul winners," Falwell said in 1965, condemning Martin Luther King Jr. and the ministers who marched with him in Selma. He appears to have had a change of heart. In fact, partly due to the effective way in which Jerry Falwell and others on the Religious Right took a leaf from Dr. King’s book and infused their politics with religious rhetoric from the early 70s onward, more recent critics of the admixture of politics and religion have tended to come from the Left, not the Right. Anti-war pundits today are as acrid in their expressed distaste for President Bush’s political piety as were anti-Civil rights preachers scornful of the religious politics in the 1960s.

One conclusion we might draw from this does little to flatter the presumption of human consistency. The rule of thumb appears to be, when we agree with a preacher’s or president’s politics, we have little problem with an admixture of policy and faith; but, when we disagree, sensing that there is something dangerous about the admixture, we cry foul.

There is certainly something dangerous about mixing politics and religion. Simply put, whoever invokes God’s name may appear or even presume to be wearing God’s mantle. This not only trivializes religion by making the almighty a hireling to human ambition, but also threatens to demonize politics. Abraham Lincoln was the first statesman publicly to admit that mortal enemies pray to the same God for support and guidance and march against one another as God’s soldiers, each acting in God’s name. After yet another terrible Union defeat, a visitor to the White House told Lincoln that he could nonetheless rest assured that God was on his side. Lincoln blanched. "I can try to be on God’s side, Madam, but must not presume that God is on mine." On the other hand, whenever he condemned slavery, he did so for explicitly religious reasons. As such times Lincoln spoke more like an Old Testament prophet than an elected representative of a divided people.

If politics and religion form a dangerous mix, they also constitute an inevitable one. To tell a president not to consult his religious beliefs when he acts is to ask him to do something that should be impossible for him. By the same token, to ask a minister to disconnect his or her private faith from matters of public moral policy would be to create a spiritual gelding, whose faith, at best, would be inoffensive. The founders did build a wall of separation between church and state to protect each from thralldom to the other, but they established their rationale for such a separation on an explicitly spiritual pediment. From Washington onward, our greatest leaders have invoked moral and religious ideals to challenge the nation to live up to its own promise.

At times in our history, the admixture of religion and politics has elevated the nation’s sights. At other times, it has clouded them. For both politician and pastor, the question is not whether religion and politics should mix. They do mix and will continue to mix. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech almost guarantee that admixture. The question, now as always, is "How should they mix?"

President George W. Bush is, with Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson, one of three confessed and observably pious presidents in this nation’s history. To them (but in a wholly different category) might be added Abraham Lincoln, a theologically acute, brooding, and deep freethinker. Most of our other presidents held sincere but unobtrusive Christian convictions.

Knowing something of a president’s beliefs and the sincerity with which he holds them is important for any number of reasons. For one thing, we know then whether or not we should take his religious rhetoric seriously. For instance, given that he wasn’t known as a Biblical literalist, when Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed at the outset of one political campaign, "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord," no one, fortunately, was tempted to take him literally. On the other end of the presidential religious spectrum, Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist, ever careful not to impose his faith on the people he was elected to represent, almost completely eschewed Biblical rhetoric in his pronouncements.

Whether religious or not, all of our Presidents have invoked the name God at times of crisis. To invoke God’s name–the usual presidential device–is not in and of itself to claim God’s authority. For instance, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed his Declaration at the outset of our entry into World War II with the word’s "So help us God," his was a prayer of petition, not a theological boast. With only one exception that I know of (when he ensured Allied victory by declaring it God’s will) FDR’s theological language is never arrogant and presumptive. When he employed God language he did so most often to challenge the American people to sacrifice for a noble cause or rise up and live according to their highest values.

It should perhaps not surprise us that the three presidents who invoked God’s name most often in their addresses were all wartime presidents: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt. I’m not speaking here of the formulaic, "God bless you and God bless the United States of America" that Lyndon Johnson first introduced and Ronald Reagan standardized for all future presidents’ use. In their proclamations and even in general conversation, Lincoln and Wilson in particular went on at great length concerning the relationship between American policy and the workings of the Almighty. Lincoln always spoke of God and God’s will with deep humility, Wilson with what might strike an outsider as insufferable arrogance. I’ll give but a single example: "The stage is set," Wilson once proclaimed. "The destiny is disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. . . . America shall in truth show the way. The light streams on the path ahead, and nowhere else."

Wilson saw the United States as God’s instrument to redeem a fallen world. "With malice toward none, with charity toward all," Lincoln recognized himself among the fallen. Franklin Roosevelt took a middle course between the two. He drew his religious script explicitly from the founders’ vision, speaking of liberty and equality as God’s gifts to all, and pledging our nation to defend freedom "everywhere in the world."

Where then does President George W. Bush fall on this spectrum. Many political and religious commentators who oppose President Bush’s new military doctrine of Pre-emptive Deterrence at the same time condemn his ever-more extensive recourse to religious language and statements of faith in his speeches. All I can tell you is that Bush’s religious rhetoric is much closer to Roosevelt’s than it is, say, to Wilson’s. When he said in his most recent state of the Union address that "liberty is not God’s gift to America. Liberty is God’s gift to every human being in the world," he could have been quoting FDR’s "Four Freedoms Address." As FDR did often, Bush was simply paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, written by the skeptical Unitarian Thomas Jefferson.

Given that President Bush is apparently a man of deep faith, we need not be surprised that he often cites that faith, or that he should consult it in times of trial. The thing to keep your eye on is when or whether he moves from invoking God to presumptively acting as God’s proxy. Anchored as it is in a deep conviction of human sinfulness, his almost fundamentalist faith should–if held to sincerely–dissuade such pretense. Beyond this, the president has shown considerable sensitivity to the danger of turning any conflict in the Muslim world into a Holy War. We should be grateful for that. The president could fall far short of Theodore Roosevelt’s bumptious religious rhetoric and nonetheless create an even deeper rift between Islam and the United States than the gulf that already exists.

Wholly apart from whether one supports or opposes the president on Iraq, one can hope that the religious rhetoric coming out of the White House over the weeks ahead will continue to be more personal or sacramental in tone than destiny-laden. Nonetheless, all religious language is charged and even personal religious language can prove hard to parse. President Bush recently said, "Americans should place our confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history." Had Woodrow Wilson uttered that sentence, one could almost certainly translate it: "Not to worry, God is on our side." Had Abraham Lincoln spoken it, the same words would mean something more like "Mindful that the ways of God and History are hidden, and fully acknowledging our human strivings and failings, let us pray that not only will we be judged but also forgiven." Several times recently, President Bush has confessed openly that no human being can know God’s will. I take comfort in hearing such words when he says them. On the other hand, when our president invokes the old gospel hymn and says: "There’s power, wonder-working power in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people," I can’t help but worry about how directly he attributes that wonder-working power in our postulated goodness to the wonder-worker himself.

Which brings me, perforce briefly, to political preaching. My guess is, as with political religion, that how those in the pew receive their preacher’s pronouncements from the pulpit pivots on whether or not they agree with his or her political stands. Even as I would not presume to censor a president’s sincere expressions of faith, however, I also not want to censor a minister’s concerns on public policy. Our lives and thoughts simply do not compartmentalize that easily. Where I do draw the line, with both presidents and pastors, is at the point of presumption–preaching from on high, wrapping one’s rhetoric in God’s mantle, telling people what they must believe if they are to be considered good Americans or good Christians or even good Unitarians. Here Abraham Lincoln has much to teach all of us. We see through a glass darkly. Our knowledge is imperfect. We cannot predict the future. And we are all sinners.

I must tell you, however, that the Bible is packed full of political, prophetic, edgy, preaching from beginning to end. Certainly our own Unitarian Universalist tradition is built on a history what might best be called "public ministry." We are saved in the world and for the world, not from the world. In fact, what is true for ministers is true for all of us. Unitarian ethicist James Luther Adams speaks of the priesthood and prophethood of all believers. There is no presumption of orthodoxy here, either religious or political, only of individual responsibility. As Unitarian Universalists, we celebrate and defend freedom of thought. We facilitate the action of like-minded souls, while at the same time opening our doors to many currents of opinion, remembering that popular opinion often turns out to have been wrong even as opinion held by a courageous voice or two may later be proved right.

Our overarching purpose here is religious, of course–not social, not cultural, not political. There are so many places where social or political views can be expressed unfettered by religious concerns. This is not such a place. Everything we do here is fettered, to the degree we can submit to its yoke, by religious concern.

Whatever authority your ministers have–and you give it to us, we do not claim it as our own–is religious authority. It is spiritual authority. Speaking for myself, when I read the Bible or say my prayers I can’t help but ponder what is happening in the world today. Whatever arrests my most reverent attention becomes a dimension of my office. I preach from where I am to where I think you are, but this has nothing to do with our respective beliefs or opinions. It has to do with entering and advancing the conversation that goes on at times like these–at the dinner table and over the water cooler, in our dreams and deep within our souls. With so many others, I am shaken to my very bones by the threat posed by terrorism and the threat posed by pre-emptive war. According, that is what I must and will continue to preach about.

About Jonah, for instance, after he was saved. After Jonah was saved, he became God’s most loyal lieutenant. God sent him to pronounce judgment on the city of Nineveh for all its transgressions. Then God changed his mind. God did, not Jonah. Jonah would rather die rather than see Nineveh go unpunished. Here history and tragedy threaten to become one and the same. God says to Jonah, "I took mercy on you. Why should I not take mercy on the people of Nineveh, 100,000 strong and cattle without number?" I don’t parse the story to back up my own views with divine mandate. I don’t wiggle all the pieces until they fit. I don’t presume that it was written to instruct our actions in Iraq. I just draw deep as I can from that well. Here is Yahweh, the God of the Jews, saving the people of Nineveh, themselves not Jews and cattle without number. Here is God saving his enemy from his very own prophet. One day soon, I must preach to you on Jonah.

And on Abraham. I must preach on Abraham again. When Abraham takes Isaac up to slay him on the rock–Isaac, his very son, to be slayed at God’s command–I ask myself, "Could Abraham even possibly have been listening. Did he really hear God right: ‘Go and slay your first-born son.’ Is that really what God wanted Abraham to do?" And then I read with wonder, always with wonder, when the ram jumps from the brush and Abraham offers the ram instead of his son. But that’s not how it happens, not most of the time. Not when history becomes tragedy. Not when again and again Abraham–the father of Israel, the father of Christianity, the father of Islam–is so fixed on following what he takes to be as God’s instructions that he doesn’t even notice the Ram. In the name of God, he kills his own son–the son of Israel, the son of Christianity, the son of Islam.

Abraham and Jonah. God’s loyal servants. Acting in God’s name. Getting the message wrong. We don’t mean to. Really we don’t. But so often, we–fathers and presidents and ministers and everyone–get the message wrong. We get it wrong and history becomes tragedy.

And so I go down by the bank of my sorrow, of our sorrow. I go down by the bank to pray. I pray for our president. I pray for all the Jonahs, blinded by self-righteous anger. I pray for all the dutiful Abrahams, preparing their children for slaughter. I pray for all the Issacs, splayed once again on desert rocks. I pray for the gift of a ram.