Religion and Race – A Potent Mix, and more…
“The Black Church . . .”
We certainly have learned more about that phenomenon in the last few weeks than most of us ever thought we would in the context of a presidential candidacy. Few branches of the church universal more intimately mix their faith and politics, but as this story out of the Examiner points out, not all such churches are willing to go to the extremes of Obama’s former Trinity Church.
The pulpit plays a powerful role in shaping political views in the black community. During the civil rights era, for example, pastors were activists as well as spiritual leaders. Now, with a black candidate one election away from the White House, black churches are trying to balance their support for Obama with their legal obligations as nonprofit institutions. And there’s concern that controversial pastors – already a problem for Obama – could hurt his campaign.
That is actually great to read, but I want to quibble with a couple of points the writer has buried in there. Smart church leaders of any stripe do indeed want to balance political activity with the legalities of non-profit status; however, for really smart church leaders that is far from the primary motivation. What they want to preserve, more than tax-exempt status, is the deep and true nature and mission of their church.
Think about this for just a minute – in all that we have heard form the Trinity pulpit in these weeks, how much have you heard of salvation, atonement, or even Jesus? Somehow, preserving that message (for me the Evangelical version and for Mormons their own understanding) strikes me as a higher priority.
The second quibble I have is the presumption that all black voters want to support Obama. Statistically, of course, he enjoys an overwhelming, even historic, level of support in the black community, but to presume that blacks will vote for Obama, a presumption based on shared race, strikes me as a racist presumption of itself. As it was, and is, wrong to presume all Mormons would vote for Romney because he is Mormon, or all Evangelicals would vote for Huckabee (Lord knows THIS ONE DID NOT!) so it is to presume black votes going to Obama.
The great lesson of the last several election cycles has been identity voting. One is forced to wonder about the chicken-and-egg question there. As there has been more and more media and we are more and more news saturates, and as the easy analysis is always identity based, the question seems legitimate.
And while we are talking about blacks and wondering, one must wonder if this story would have made national press before this primary cycle?
Not At All Helpful . . .
Speaking of the press feeding a fire, consider this piece from PBS’ “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” on the epistle of James from the Bible.
James stresses the theme of faith in action perhaps more than any other single book of the New Testament. Unlike other New Testament letters, many of them attributed to Paul, James plays down dogma in favor of practical ethical guidelines that center on loving one’s neighbor and, in particular, serving the poor.
In 2004, said Coe, “Republicans were really battering Democrats with religious rhetoric. The response offered by Kerry and others was to say, we might not be able to compete with the religious eloquence the Republicans have a handle on, but we can on policies more consistent with the New Testament, like uplifting the poor and fighting disease in Third World countries.”
The analysis of events presented here is somewhat correct, but to try and parse scripture into “Republican” and “Democrat” parts and themes is to violate scripture in horrific ways. Further to place James’ letter in juxtaposition, even opposition, to other parts of scripture is to violate just about every commonly accepted rule of scriptural interpretation we have. I will spare you the lesson in hermeneutics, but this kind of thing cannot just lead a church astray, it can destroy it.
But then would politicians more bent on election than truth let a little thing like that stand in their way? And why would the press let anything stand in the way of what they consider a good story?
Lowell adds: Sadly, the tin-eared PBS piece is typical of what we see from the MSM when they try to discuss religion in a political context. Based on what we’ve seen, the likes of Suzanne Sataline of the Wall Street Journal and Rachel Zoll of the AP, both of whom make a real effort to understand religion and describe it accurately, are relatively rare among the MSM. James “plays down dogma?” We can pick and choose among the books of the New Testament? That’s typical analysis among some strains of Christianity, but it should not be presented as a predominant or mainstream approach.
A Lesson From The UK . . .
Not having an established religion should remove from the table issues like this.
The report, which will be published in full on Monday, says the government has marginalised the Church.
When you have separation, it’s not about favoring or disfavoring a religion, it’s about treating them all equally.
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Lowell Brown on 09 Jun 2008 at 3:18 pm #
Reader MLEH submits the following:
I . . . wanted to know if you had noticed this little bit of Canadian politicization of religious speech.
The good Rev Boissoin is prohibited from making “disparaging comments” about either homosexuals or his attackers for the rest of his life! This in a town whose streets I strolled only last year! Contrasted to the Steyn case, where he is accused of ‘hate speech’ toward a religion, the obvious human rights commission double standard operating just north of us should be a warning. The Establishment clause may someday only protect the politically correct and, thus, favored believers. Comments?
MLEH
coltakashi on 09 Jun 2008 at 3:48 pm #
Let’s see . . . the author of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, the wonderful sermon on the primacy of charity over faith, is supposed to be unconcerned about helping the poor? The apostle who in many of his letters and in Acts is soliciting funds to help the poor in Jerusalem is only focused on “doctrine”? The apostle who writes to his convert and close friend Philemon and pleads with him to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ cares nothing for the lowest strata of society? Give me a break.
This kind of false dichotomy demonstrates the utter lack of familiarity with the scriptures that characterizes so much invocation of the Bible by politicians. It is in the same vein as Obama’s assertion that the Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance of homosexual acts against the “intolerance” of Paul’s letters, when in fact the Sermon of Jesus emphasizes strict accountability for sexual sin–even for thinking about it–while Paul’s plea is for those Christians who had left homosexual acts behind them to not fall back into them, so they do not nullify the mercy and forgiveness that they had already received from Christ.
It is such picking and choosing among passages of scripture that Shakespeare seems to refer to when he says that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
(William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), “The Merchant of Venice”, Act 1 scene 3) As John noted, it dishonors the Bible to think one can use a sentence from it as authority out of the context of all the other paragraphs, chapters, and books. What makes the Bible authoritative is that it comes from God, who is the ultimate author and authority of the whole. One cannot claim authorization from God while intentionally disregarding many of His words that are also relevant to the topic under discussion.
But should we be surprised by this abuse of scripture? Not when we realize that this “pick and choose” approach is also the way that liberal judges approach the constitutions of the US and its states. In the process of finding new “constitutional rights” that limit the choices of legislatures and voters, those judges ignore the fundamental principle that the most important “rights” guarded by any constitution are the rights of democratic self-government, the right to be free from rule by the whims of an oligarchy, such as the class of judges. For liberals, neither the Bible nor constitutions are sacred.
The fundamental problem is that the habit of “lawyering” with biased arguments on behalf of a client, which is inherent to the adversarial system of the common law courts, is being improperly extended to the political arena where we are supposed to be building consensus and unity, not pursuing division and contention and a “win or lose” mindset that allows for no compromise or even a concession that the other side has an honorable purpose in mind. Candidates are afraid that if the voters do not see an election as a life-or-death decision, they will not bother to vote.
The irony is that most lawsuits actually end up being resolved by a settlement in compromise, usually without a trial and its argumentation before a jury, but there is no room for compromise in the political arena, since any concession is viewed as an admission against interest, and a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s own side.
When religion gets coopted into this unduly adversarial process, churches are pushed to take sides, when there is much more to a real church than political positions. (The problem with the church Obama recently resigned from is that it had apparently become more of a political advocate than a means to spiritual salvation for its members.)
coltakashi on 09 Jun 2008 at 4:19 pm #
Concerning the Canadian suppression of religious speech that “denigrates” homosexual acts, it is clear that the people here in the US, and especially in California, who think it cannot happen here are whistling in the dark. The California Supreme Court case has made homosexuals and their sexual actions a constitutionally protected class favored by California law. The people who are strong advocates of punishing “intolerance”, and have no respect for churches that do not teach the politically correct version of religion, believe that they are doing God’s work by punishing the “evil” people who teach intolerance toward sex outside heterosexual marriage. They do not believe that free speech belongs to people who say things that are offensive or defamatory against homosexuals, and they are ready to use laws against defamation, which allow damages and in some cases prior restraint (when there is a repetition of slander), to punish anyone who expresses a religious opinion contrary to the court-appointed “official” doctrine of California, no matter how many centuries the opinion has been taught by billions around the world.
It may reach the point where religious believers have to go to jail in protest before citizens realize that their basic freedoms are being taken away from them. Do not forget that 65 years ago, California’s government was advocating the imprisonment of tens of thousands of its own citizens as enemy agents, leading to the mass evacuations and “internment” in concentration camps of Japanese Americans. The murderous Nazi prejudice against Jews had its counterpart against a different minority in California.
Fortunately, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed that religious teachings about sexual practices are not per se child abuse justifying deprivation of liberty from children and their parents. If the court had gone the other way, and supported prejudice against a minority religion as justifying a finding of “imminent harm,” the California zealots of the homosexual agenda might have used it as precedent to someday take similar actions against parents teaching their children traditional views about sex outside heterosexual marriage.
CarlH on 10 Jun 2008 at 9:16 am #
Wes Pruden at the Washington Times contemplates Obama as “The Faith Healer for Our Time”. It is as withering as it is, hopefully, sobering.