The votes are not in yet, but one clear winner has emerged during the final turn and early stretch run of this presidential election. You know who I'm talking about. The big guy. God. What a comeback. Remember, in 1969, God was declared dead by Newsweek magazine. Back then, he'd probably rather have been in Philadelphia. This summer he was all over Philadelphia, and then Los Angeles, and now, he or she is all around the country. God is on the rebound.
Is this good news or bad news? It is probably both. Frankly, if I know anything at all about this-which neither I nor anyone else does-I would still wager that God doesn't play sides in presidential elections. My favorite political aside on this subject came from Abraham Lincoln. During a bad patch just after the Civil war began, Secretary Seward told him that "At least God is on our side." Lincoln's response: "I'd far rather be on God's side."
Now, that is great. Humility. Humor. And yet a bit of religious torque. Lincoln carried a Bible everywhere he went. A little pocket Bible. But he never joined a church. His simple point, and one that got him into lots of political trouble, was that most Christian churches were not Christian. Near the end of his life, Lincoln said that if he ever found a Christian church he would join it in a minute.
Half of me loves that. The other half cringes. There will never be a perfect church. By definition, churches are flawed institutions. At our best we try to do our best but we never come anywhere close to perfection. I love Lincoln's disdain for Christian hypocrisy, and I love his humility in the exchange with Seward about God, but I mistrust his demand for an institution that will never compromise him. The United States of America compromised him. The White House compromised him. He was our greatest president. And our most theologically grounded. Read his second Inaugural Address. Both nationally and spiritually it just doesn't get any better. But he couldn't join a church, and that was a weakness not a strength.
Religion has always been a part of our politics. In God we Trust is even on our coins. Do you know what Benjamin Franklin suggested instead of In God We Trust? "Mind your own business." During the same month, George Washington suggested that people refer to their president, whom he happened to be, as "Your Mightiness." "In God We Trust" and "Mr. President" were good calls.
I am not that worried about the nature of religion and politics in this year's election campaign-in part because of historical precedent.
Form the outset, the American experiment was a religious venture, inspired by a search for freedom of belief and founded according to covenant, a religious agreement based on mutual trust, and not (like a contract) on law. The Protestants who first settled this country invested individuals with direct spiritual authority, to be supplemented but not supplanted by church law. Even before the pilgrims shared their newfound religious freedom with settlers of differing theological views, the covenant principle, central to Puritan theology, established a basis for participation that led naturally to democracy and mitigated against hierarchy. Children of the Reformation, the Puritans emphasized the principle of private judgement.
Casting into question the exclusive authority of religious hierarchies, they replaced it with a new and far more democratic principle: the priesthood and prophethood of all believers. By stressing the autonomy of the individual conscience, this opened one door to liberalism.
The Enlightenment thinkers who fashioned our government opened the other door. It too had a religious key, shaped according to the law of nature and nature's God. In addition, underscoring the primacy of private judgement and conscience, our founders' insistence on separation of church and state complemented their Puritan forebears' spiritual aspirations.
Throughout our country's history these two streams, secular and religious, flow in and out of one another's channels. Abraham Lincoln regarded the Declaration of Independence as spiritually regenerative. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew both real and rhetorical inspiration from the "American proposition" that all people are created equal. Declaration signer Benjamin Rush, a Universalist from Pennsylvania, claimed that democracy "is a part of truth of Christianity. It derives power from its true source. It teaches us to view our rulers in their true light. It abolishes the false glare which surrounds kingly government, and tends to promote the true happiness of all its members as well as the whole world, for peace with everybody is the true interest of all republics." As described by American church historian Sidney Mead, "the theology of the republic" reverberates profoundly throughout our history.
This said, I do have a few problems with God's rebound in this year's election. I have no problem with Senator Lieberman's piety. He is a happy religious and political warrior. I even heard him on Imus in the Morning, which I ought to hate but actually enjoy. He was funny, faithful, and humble. The last is the key. Humble religious public people almost always make this country better. Arrogant religious public people divide us in their attempt to conquer.
The real problem I have with God's rebound in this election doesn't have to do with Senator Lieberman. It has a bit more to do with George Bush and Al Gore. Gore occasionally wears an armband that reads "WWJD?" What would Jesus do? Next month in a sermon I will tell you what I think Jesus might do if he were president. It wouldn't be pretty. I'm not saying that it would be wrong, but it surely wouldn't be pretty.
As for Governor Bush, Jesus is his favorite philosopher. The irony is, Jesus prided himself as anything but a philosopher. Pride is probably the wrong word here. Jesus emptied himself to be filled. He lost himself to be found. Jesus fits about as well into this year's election contest as St. Francis would have fit into the Roman army.
I actually like both of the presidential candidates. I grew up with Al Gore as a child and liked him then; though I have met with him only rarely in more recent years, I like him now. He is a good human being. And so, it appears, is George W. Bush. He strikes me as tremendously likeable. Both candidates clearly have the potential to be, if not great, good or fair and certainly not bad presidents.
God will not weigh in to the outcome, but he is certainly in play on the sidelines. When George W. Bush told Oprah this week that the Government ought to "tap the soul of America by encouraging faith-based institutions," he wasn't merely indulging in pious rhetoric. Obscured by the debate over Senator Joseph Lieberman's public expressions of his personal faith is a Republican plan (and one that the Democrats too are toying with) that actually does threaten the long standing separation of church and state in America.
And this I am concerned about.
According to his aides, one of five central planks in Governor Bush's platform (together with health, defense, social security, and tax cuts) will be direct governmental funding of religious institutions as the next step in welfare reform. To keynote this emphasis, vice-presidential candidate Richard Chaney recently visited a soup kitchen sponsored by Sunshine Ministries in St. Louis to announce that if Bush were elected church-based social service groups would benefit from expanded government aid.
Many people, I among them, welcome the open-faced infusion of religious values into the political arena. Proposals that compromise the separation of church and state are a different matter entirely. To be faithful to our founders and ourselves, we must tread very carefully when it comes to government subsidies for religiously based programs, however noble their goals.
Sixteen years ago, All Souls Church and eleven other churches in Manhattan each received a $10,000 "member item" gift from New York State Senator Roy Goodman to support our outreach efforts. Each state senator and assemblyman is allotted a certain slice of pork pie to distribute as he or she sees fit. When I received this Manna from Albany, I immediately turned it back.
I gave that money back for a very good reason. I would have been tempted by and gotten away with misspending it. In the same spirit I tried to organize my fellow clergy from the eleven other religious institutions to join All Souls in returning the money. Here my idealism was overshadowed by my naivete. It seems that they all wanted to give the money back but had no controlling mechanism by which to do so.
Hence my concern today. The growing political fascination with direct governmental subsidies to religious institutions to augment federal and state social welfare efforts may under-gird their platform of "compassionate conservatism," but it undermines the separation of church and state
All Souls has some twenty social service programs. Our congregation supports these to the tune of about $200,000 a year. Having witnessed their success, I completely agree with Secretary Chaney that "government doesn't have a monopoly on the wisdom of how to deal with society's problems. One young boy who joined the scout troop we created expressly for homeless children went on to be a top-ten finalist in the Westinghouse Science Contest. Over the past two decades we have helped thousands of children, people with AIDS, and our homeless neighbors to build a better life.
So why not augment our services with a little governmental largess? The most obvious reason is that even religious institutions who place a high value on serving the poor almost always place a higher value on saving souls. They should. That is why they exist in the first place. Government support for church-based housing and welfare programs can be well spent if the line between these two missions (helping the poor and saving souls) is clearly drawn. Often it will not be.
The second problem is one I confronted a decade and a half ago. Had I received $10,000 for our soup kitchen, that would have freed up $10,000 for other purposes. We could have dedicated the money to the program for which it was intended, and still have utilized $10,000 of newly liberated funds for sectarian not humanitarian uses.
Public/private partnerships are vital to the commonweal. The late Jim Rouse's Enterprise Foundation has sponsored the construction of hundreds of thousands of low cost housing units, in several instances with the help of neighborhood religious groups. Chase Bank recently invested millions of dollars in its "Faith-based Initiative," creatively infusing religious projects with corporate money. Never in our history have more individual citizens, religious and neighborhood-based communities, and corporations joined forces to serve those in need.
For our political leaders to encourage this is wonderful. But when they suggest that the government should shift its own social welfare dollars toward religious institutions to do what since the New Deal has been an important part of the government's business is folly.
Who is going to do the church/state due diligence on thousands of tiny projects? Who is going to keep my church or any other from slipping government funds from one pocket to another?
This said, in closing I repeat that I am not deeply concerned by the invocation of God in this election. In the sixties conservatives were complaining about liberal religious political activism; in the eighties and ninety's liberals were complaining about conservative religious political activism. I have a real problem with the blurring of church and state, but I don't really have a problem with the blurring of religion and politics. Our religious views should be at least as important as our political views and undoubtedly will therefore inform them. This country is both the most pluralistic and the most devout country in the developed world. Blessedly, for us, the two go together. With the above stated exception of any temptation to blur the separation of church and state, I am glad that our candidates are instructed by their religious principles. If these principles help them to rise to the better angels of their nature, whoever wins the country will be better for it. Copyright AllSouls, 2000.