“Spies” In Obama’s Church: A Lesson for Us All On Having It Both Ways
We have only one observation for today. It comes from Newsweek’s On Faith, where Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary , notes:
“A member of Trinity United Church of Christ, the church once led by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and where Senator Obama is a member, told me there are “spies” among them in the pews, strangers who take notes during the service and try to record the message.”
She decries the practice, asking, “Is nothing sacred?”
A very provocative question in an election season when the sacred and the political have been confused, combined, and profaned like never before.
There is nothing wrong with taking notes of sermons. John tells me that doing so is very common in the Evangelical world, and if you had attended last weekend’s General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you would have seen a whole lot of note-taking going on.
But note-taking is not spying, and if that is what is going on in Obama’s Chicago church, I don’t like it. I don’t like people going into churches and monitoring what is said, either. I don’t like anything that chills or intimidates free religious expression in its purest form — and what is a sermon, if not that?
Even so, Thistlewaite’s complaint raises a more troubling issue. Arguably, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright invited close scrutiny by mixing politics and religion. Yes, I understand that political-social preaching is traditional in African-American churches. But Wright took such preaching to an entirely different level, it seems to me.
In other words, it is generally fair to expect others (including reporters and opposition researchers from opposing campaigns) to keep their noses out of the candidate’s church.
But it’s not fair for a candidate to talk about that church’s profound influence on his politics, as Obama did with his membership at Trinity, and then expect no one to pay close attention to the church. If you’ve read Dreams from My Father you know that Obama devotes an entire chapter to the Reverend Wright’s impact on him.
Nor is it fair for a preacher to sermonize the way Wright did and then expect no one to question his words.
And it is not fair for Mike Huckabee to run as the “Christian Candidate” and then complain that the news media improperly focuses on his faith. In fact, that complaint is utterly ridiculous.
So Ms. Thistlewaite’s complaint rings a bit hollow. It’s a tired old saying, but never was it more true than it is here: You can’t have it both ways.
John’s brief thought: I am struck by the contrast between what we have the right to do and what common sense dictates that we do. Long ago, we asked Hugh Hewitt, who is among other things a constitutional scholar, why there was no case law on Article VI. He response was that it was so fundamental to our nation, and such an obvious notion that people simply did not ever challenge it. If I recall correctly, “self-regulating” was his term of choice.
A pastor has the right to political statement in the pulpit. A politician has the right to be profoundly shaped by his faith. But the exercise of those rights invites precisely the kind of thing we are discussing here.
But, it is argued, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther exercised his right and look what good came of it. Indeed, but Dr. King never sought office. And, I would argue that Dr. King was a far more effective leader for his cause by virtue of his lack of governmental office, and the same lack on the part of his constituency, than he could possible have been otherwise. Once one enters into the actual business of government, whether by seeking office personally, or by sending disciples to do the same, compromise and cooperation become the order of the day – not ideological purity.
That is why it makes so much sense to maintain the reasonable separation between church and state that we do and have. What happens as a result of “spies?” Well, eventually the pulpit will compromise to avoid controversy; ideological purity dies. The church is an institution designed to preserve ideological purity; this reduces the church to just another arm of policy.
In a diverse America, wrong as I think Jeremiah Wright is, I want him in a pulpit preaching. And if one of his congregants, in the case of Barak Obama, seeks office, and if Mr. Obama has taken the lessons of that pulpit to heart , then those lessons now have an opportunity to become part of American governance. But if Mr. Obama claims those lessons as a part of his qualification for office, then those lessons become subject to the compromising forces of our government, and that which made that church unique and pure dies.
We may have the right to all of this, but exercising our rights can be a bad idea.
Posted in Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry | 4 Comments » | 
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4thnephite on 08 Apr 2008 at 6:33 am #
I find taking notes during any activity is worthy, that is how we communicate with that wee small voice we call the Holy Spirit, right from wrong. When someone wishes to divide this great nation and the children of God, that is when that talk becomes a “hate speech”. Are “they” afraid of the truth.
TVHall on 08 Apr 2008 at 8:04 am #
Having the “right” to do a thing does not automatically make it right to do that thing.
jmh on 08 Apr 2008 at 9:25 am #
This genie needs to be put back in the bag.
The unrestricted Constituional freedom of religious belief and the not quite as unrestricted right to practice those beliefs need to be considered along with the Art. VI prohibition on religous test for office. I don’t see how we, as a country, can say that we have the absolute right to believe in the theology of our choice, then turn around and use that belief as a disqualifier from office. Of course no one is proposing a formalized “test”- at least not that I have seen, but in practice this is what we are seeing.People will of course apply their own standards in the process of choosing a candidate, but to the extent that the press, the media, and groups of influence are feeding this politics of religious identity, it is in my mind very much functioning as a religous test. I would like to see someone of influence speak out strongly, and wish that John McCain would have been the one to encourage putting on the brakes…but I guess he was too busy taking advantage of the situation.I know he made some token noise, but compare his reaction to those who used Sen. Obama’s middle name, with his reaction to those who were attacking Sen. Romney’s religion.
I worry that those who really are anti-religion will use these tactics( monitoring what is said from the pulpit) to limit religion in the public square to an even greater extent than at present. And on the other side, the Evangelical community will use it as a tool to prevent those with whom they have theological discussions from attaining office.
I do recall that attempts were made to find Pastor Huckabee’s old sermons……wonder what tales they would tell? Clearly when it applied to him, he did not want to go there.
texan on 09 Apr 2008 at 10:12 pm #
There was at least one defendant who went to the Supreme Court and tried to use Article VI as part of his defense. He lived in a part of the United States that had enacted a Test Oath Statute that determined the ability to vote or hold office. The statute stated that no citizen who is “a member of any order, organization, or association which teaches, advises, counsels, or encourages its members or devotees, or any other persons, to …”
If you’re guessing this was a statute from the McCarthy era and that the next words in the sentence were “overthrow the government”, you would be half a century off the mark. The Test Oath statute was enacted in 1885 and the next few words in the sentence were actually “… to commit the crime of bigamy or polygamy” (see page 107 and 110). The law was written specifically to deny all Mormons the right to vote or hold office in Idaho, regardless of whether they were polygamists.
In the case of Davis v. Beason part of Samuel Davis’ defense was that the Idaho Test Oath violated article VI of the Constitution. Davis, not himself a polygamist, lost his case before the Supreme Court, which, in a unanimous decision, ruled that the Idaho Test Oath “is not open to any constitutional or legal objection.”
As Stephen L. Carter points out in his book “The Culture of Disbelief”, it’s the religions considered to be outside the mainsteam that generate the Constitutional questions about religion. And so, in a case that removed the right of voting and office holding from an entire religion, we are left with a piece of Article VI jurisprudence which is notable for having completely ignored Article VI.