Bad Religion

This article in WaPo comes to me on the morning after a day full of what, for a Unitarian Universalist like myself, passes for religious ecstasy.

CHICAGO -- Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.
The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.
"For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church," ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. "It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It's not for the government to mandate the role of church in society."

Although I could argue the constitutional merits of the separation of church and state all day long, after a day like yesterday, I'm ruminating more on the very negative implications for religion in pursuing the weakening of that wall.

The tax code that the ADF has a problem with is very simple: to maintain tax exempt status, a church cannot engage in partisan political activity. We can, and do, and always have, organize issues-based advocacy. My church, for instance, has "No on 8" signs prominently displayed, because as a denomination we are passionate about marriage equality, which stems from our most basic and essential shared values.

Yesterday afternoon I attended the long-awaited dedication of our new church buildings. One of our former teens came up from college to attend with my family, it was a packed house with some overflow (we set up a simulcast in the social hall). Visitors from all over, including many clergy, UU and others from the local interfaith alliance, resplendent in robes and mantles. Powerful drums and the African Alleluia set hearts on high, and clergy from local and distant congregations congratulated us and charged us to remember who we are.

Tears streamed down my face as a local rabbi recited Hebraic verse and then exclaimed, "You are my people, my people are your people!" The minister from our sister United Church of Christ congregation recalled our long road together, and the battles we've fought and continue to fight, side by side. And then a luminary from Boston rose and gave a 15 minute old fashioned pacing rousing reminder, "We are the people who STAND UP!"

For those who don't do organized religion, it may be hard to understand, but this was one of those experiences that you want to relive over and over again.

We are the People Who Stand Up. This central part of our religious identity is what drew me to UU. Standing up together never fails to inspire in me a sense of what is divine. This means advocating for marriage equality. This means standing with the UCC in the work of the New Sanctuary Movement. This means that last week, Unitarian Universalist clergy and laity held a press conference in St. Paul calling for comprehensive sex education. This means that wherever I have marched or demonstrated, for peace, for women, for farm workers, UU clergy have always, always been at my side.

But we do not stand up beside a party or a candidate. If one polled my congregation, I think the democrats would probably hold a sizable majority, but one would also find republicans and libertarians and independents and greens. And while we are vocal and public on our issues, you will not find an Obama poster on our buildings, nor any other political candidate or partisan push. And that is as it should be.

Liberalism as a political philosophy is not the same as religious liberalism, something we try to remind our youth continually. Conflating the two cheapens religion, belies the depths that may be explored and the meaning that may be found.

The same is true for orthodox religion and conservative political philosophy. The two pollute each other, but religion comes out the big loser.

In religious terms, the larger issues of our world- war and peace and human dignity- must be examined and closely weighed against our stated values. If one is orthodox, one has sacred text and creed, and positions will be weighed against these sources, hopefully with honesty and openness. If one is religiously liberal, issues must be weighed against basic values, and one will examine the weaknesses and potholes carefully before coming to a conclusion.

What religion does not do: it does not give authority to an outside person for these considerations and conclusions.

An orthodox group may heed the word of their clergy, but supporting wholesale a political candidate or party would undermine entirely the authority of sacred text and creed. Wars were fought in Europe for hundreds of years over this: whose authority holds sway, prince's or pope's? The American answer was to give each responsibility for their own spheres, with final authority resting in the conscience (and action) of the individual.

For clergy to advocate support for a specific person or a political party means delegating to a secular body their responsibility to weigh carefully each issue through the lens of God's will. They risk, in other words, what the Hebrew Bible specifically prohibits:

Do not have any other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Understand idols, in this case, to mean princes or presidents or candidates or flags or posters of elephants.

For religious liberals, the responsibility for such judgment lies in each man and woman, and were our leaders exhort us to support a specific candidate or person for any secular office, that leader would be denying each of us the responsibility to think deeply and answer only to our own conscience.

Putting it another way: Clergy should cry loudly from the pulpit on issues of war. War means killing, it means inflicting inhumane conditions on many people, including the soldiers who fight. Taking a position from the pulpit on, say Iraq, and encouraging the congregation to pray for peace, or strength, or encouraging them to make their values known to decision-makers in government, this is what clergy do.

Crying from the pulpit that the flock should elect George Bush, or John McCain, or Barack Obama, because this is the man who knows best about this war: that is delegating moral authority to a single man, one that is responsible not for the conscience of the church, but for issues and actions of the secular world. That is bowing to a false god, that is removing the right of conscience from the faithful.

So, partisan political advocacy cheapens the experience of religion by delegating right and wrong to a secular body, relieving the clergy and laity from the responsibility of examining the world and our issues and how it all relates to what we say we most deeply believe. But there are practical problems for religion, too.

Take, for example, the Office of Faith Based Initiatives- which gave me shudders when Bush first announced his intention to open it. It is no secret now that the power and money of the office was, from its inception, directed to very specific religious organizations, those that would pass the muster of the "Mayberry Machiavellis" and the clerics who supported them. Only certain conservative religious groups got access and funding, liberal religious groups or those considered "weird" by traditionalist protestants did not.

Now consider election time. Is it not possible that a group who gives beds to the homeless and has funding from the office of faith based initiatives would want to keep the party that delivered this funding in power? Is the party's action on other important areas examined? Is it not possible to consider that another small group who houses the homeless but is denied access would want to oust those who run things, whether or not the party's other policies in other areas have been successful for the country?

How is religion strengthened, then, by being beholden to any political party or person?

I think these are problematic outcomes for religion, and they grow rapidly from a movement to mix private and public policy. More than one scholar has noted that the strength of religion in this country is most likely due to the very strong separation of church and state, which allows religion to flourish and deepen without state sponsorship or manipulation.

So I hope this little test case fails, and fails spectacularly. As a religious person, I resent- hugely resent- the framing of American political discourse in religious terms, and I resent the idea that it is in any way responsible for clergy to make their flocks beholden to a partisan body. As a citizen, I am as passionate about my secular government as I am about my freedom to practice my religion. Neither my government nor my religion is well served by the fundamentalist drive to conflate the two, in fact, both are threatened.

Oh, and by the way, congressman Westmoreland? Yeah, that's right, I quoted the 10 commandments, although I don't need to consult them to know how to treat people. Stupid cracker.