Religion and Politics: Better Angels or Demons (lecture)

 

Religion and Politics:

How to Find our better Angels and not our Demons

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Public Lecture sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Of the University of Southern Oregon

As prepared

Camelot Theatre, Talent, Oregon

January 18, 2017

1-3 p.m.

JPR interview on this lecture 

I want to thank OLLI for asking me to give this lecture today.

The subject of the lecture, “Religion and Politics: finding our better angels and not our demons” and its date for today were determined months ago, long before the election.     I aimed for a mid-January date because it worked best for my work schedule: after Christmas and Epiphany and before Lent.  I didn’t really focus on the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was on Monday of this week.  And I had no idea that Friday of this week would see the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45^th President of the United States, or that Saturday would see widespread demonstrations against Trump, his administration, and the new Congress.  So the timing of this topic this week is wholly coincidental, or providential, depending on how you see the universe.    And, as I hope you will see, my recommendations here apply equally to those on the Right and those on the Left, to those who support Trump and those who oppose him

My choice of topic grew out of a course I taught at OLLI last year: Ghosts of the Pilgrims—Puritan political memes in U.S. history and culture.  In the early electoral cycle, many appeals to faith and values in the political debates were couched in images handed on to us from the Puritans.  My own background played a role as well.  I served as a federal official, a U.S. diplomat, for 25 years.  I often was the “religion watcher” at the U.S. Embassy and wrote on the subject regularly in analyses for the Department of State in the foreign countries where I was posted.   And I served the last 5 of those 25 years also as a priest in my private time while living in China.   During that time, I dealt daily with the intricacies of not using my official position to foster religion or even appear to do so while at the same time trying to be faithful and bold in my life as a priest away from the office and my official public role.   It entailed occasional humorous scenes of me surreptitiously changing from the suit and tie of a bureaucrat to the clericals of a priest in the Anglican-catholic tradition, and back again.   One day, as I was leaving the office to assist at Mass during my lunch hour, I was caught by a subordinate who asked me a question that I wonder about to this day, “Which of you is Clark Kent and which is Superman?” 

In Mainland China I worked almost on a daily basis with Chinese officials, and came to recognize early on that appealing to each person’s better values was always a more effective way of seeking good than labeling them and all their fellow communists simply as evil. 

This all has made me acutely aware of the complexities and contradictions in our national legal wall of separation between church and state and our politicians’ nearly continual appeals to God and Right in support of their programs and vision.

The tension is found right in the Constitution.  Article VI §3 says “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Amendment I says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” and then adds, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”   So while the government or its officers cannot sponsor or foster any religious organization, or even boost religion over irreligion, they cannot interfere with people’s free exercise of faith, including those very officials in their private life.

This intentional separation grew out of exasperation and horror at the tyranny of state-sponsored religions and religion-sponsored states in the religious wars and persecutions stemming from the Reformation in Europe, including the English Civil Wars and their aftermath.  These persecutions and horrors worked in both directions:  the Thirty Years War wiped out nearly half of the German population, both Catholic and Lutheran; Roman Catholics suffered bitter martyrdom under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I;  Protestant martyrs likewise suffered under Mary.   The American colonies saw similar persecution in both directions, depending on who happened to control a colony’s government at the time.

The President I consider to be the least religious (but perhaps not the least faithful) of all the Presidents, Thomas Jefferson, sums up the tension well.  In the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1779) he writes:  “Almighty God hath created the mind free; … no [one] shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in … body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of … religious opinions or belief, … all [people] shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, … the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.   

In his January 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury CT Baptist Association, Jefferson writes:    “[R]eligion is a matter which lies solely between Man [and God] … he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, … the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions… the whole American people … declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”  Note: while decrying state sponsoring or fostering of faiths, in both these texts he appeals to his Deist, Enlightenment God. 

The title of today’s lecture comes from the President I believe was the second least religious, but perhaps most spiritually deep, Abraham Lincoln. Trying to keep the nation from splitting up in his first inaugural address (1861) he writes the following: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln’s somewhat ironic take on the civil religion that Jefferson helped establish with his appeals to God to limit the reach of the Church is evident in Lincoln’s second inaugural (1865), as the civil war was ending:  “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.” 

We see the complex interplay of religion and politics in Mr. Trump’s election.  As much as he regularly offended people of faith of nearly all religious and political stripes by his coarse and harassing approach to his opponents, women, and minorities, his election was made possible in large part by the fact that eight in 10 white Evangelical Protestants voted for him, as well as an overwhelming majority of white Roman Catholics and a substantial number of white mainline Protestants.  Throughout the campaign, he insisted that he is a Christian believer who will help bring a stronger presence of religion in our national life as part of “making America great again.”   Many of the criticisms leveled against him by his opponents were rooted in moral and faith-base objections.  But then, many of his supporters’ criticisms of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were claims that under their leadership, America had lost its way and undermined the values that had “made America great.”  I have heard one or two of my parishioners say, “If you can you reject Trump because of his moral failings and yet stand by that abuser of interns Bill Clinton or that man we know is a socialist and suspect is a closet Muslim, Barack Obama, I can dislike Trump’s failings while still standing behind him because of what I think he will be able to do for the country.”

Religion is a powerful agent, for good or ill.  It gives us people like Francis of Assisi, Mohandes K. Ghandi, Mother Teresa, or Martin Luther King, Jr., but also gives us the Inquisition, ISIS, and preachers who at various times and places have said God wants us to keep slaves or practice Apartheit, subjugate women, and persecute gays and lesbians. 

So how do we let our faith help us listen to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” rather than the demons? 

I offer here a few suggestions based on my own understanding and experience of life as a Christian priest and former government official who observed religion and politics in other countries. 

1. Let your faith or deepest beliefs and values form your opinions and actions.  Do not be ashamed of your faith or non-religious values and always try to be explicit in holding political programs or the words and actions of political leaders up to the standards of your values.

Without standards beyond the mere advantage of our separate little interest groups, there can be little holding to account our leadership or ourselves.  This, unfortunately, also applies to the Rule of Law.  Though our wise constitutional processes, checks and balances in power, independent judiciary and press are good hedges against misuse of governmental power, the fact remains that these are not perfect and injustice and abuse have on occasion in our history been fully allowed or even supported by the force of law.  It is our acknowledgement of a higher power and values beyond the merely legal or constitutional that keeps a dynamic for justice and fairness at work in our society.   That said, we must never use the resources of the state to foster our religion or irreligion. 

The important thing here is to be intentional and explicit in letting our faith or deepest values be part of this discussion.  One of the problems with a common-denominator one-size-fits all civil religion is that it blurs the distinction between higher values and the constitutional and legal political process.  God turned into a tool or icon in a public liturgy of “one nation under God” and “God bless the United States” is a God robbed of the power to correct our self-deceptions and holier-than-thou sense of partisan inside track to truth and justice.  If we are honest about how our deepest values condemn certain actions and policies at least there is common ground for a discussion with those who may hold differing values or a different balance of values.  It is not so much a case of freedom of religion or freedom from religion here, but freedom for religion to be religion rather than a tool of the state. 

Silence on our faith or what matters most deeply to us is a recipe for disaster.   The rule in many American households of never talking religion or politics at the Thanksgiving dinner is a case in point:  we try to make nice and not have arguments by simply shutting off any talk of these controversial things.  But often these are the very things that matter most to us.  And never talking about the things that matter most to us is a sure way to slowly but surely empty relationships of any meaning.  The key is in how we do it.  We must be self-aware and acknowledge our differences respectfully and not insist that those with whom we are in community simply follow the same path we have followed.  But we must be honest and talk about it all the same. 

2. Never mistake partisan or other divisions between groups of people for the division between good and evil. 

The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given in Beijing in the late summer of 1989.  It was by a layman in a House Church, and it was on the words of Jesus: “love your enemies and pray for those who despitefully use you.”

During the somewhat liberal period of religious openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 crackdown, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the crackdown, the Chinese security and political control apparatus came down hard on any Chinese person seen to be too closely identified with foreigners.  Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance, rules that are with us still. The pressure brought to bear on our Chinese congregants became almost unbearable. Some of our church members were arrested and physically abused.  Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our congregation would go their own ways and worship separately.  The secular law, previously somewhat murky, had become clear, and we intended to obey it.  It was very hard on all of us, because we had become close friends.       

One of these Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.”  Pulling apart the critical mass of fuel for the fire posed the risk of extinguishing the flame, especially if the individual pieces of fuel were isolated, put aside, and kept alone in the cold, where their flame would die for want of heat. But we had no real choice in the matter, given the pressures that were being brought to bear. 

My friend said he had always thought that “love your enemies” was a little over-dramatic, “for why should Christians have enemies?” But now he understood the passage much better.    “If I could be so bold, I’d like to refer to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.” 

In this book, Solzhenitsyn is in the labor camp system in the Soviet Union.  He becomes more and more dehumanized by his torment, but then, in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even as a political prisoner.  He says that he realized that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say what they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering he endured before giving them what they demanded. 

He also realized that they too were constrained to do what they did, and that they too had a choice in how they did what they were constrained to do.  In a system where all were compromised and all were victims in one degree of another, he realized this great truth: the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another.  The line between good and evil, he says, is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart.  It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be. 

Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin.  This is the reason, I believe, that we must pray for our enemies.  They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them, or how twisted or constrained the options left to them might be.

So we must pray to the creator to help his creatures–not that they be like us, not that they treat us more favorably, not that they choose what we wish they would choose, but that in whatever way God wants, here and now, they might opt for the good in their hearts and not the evil.  We pray that they might become what God created them to be, not what we think that they should be.  We do this because we share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good.  Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who persecute those whom I love and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own heart, and help me to choose the right. 

That sermon changed the way I looked at many things, and is one of the great watershed moments in my life, the moment, I believe, where I started on the journey of cultivating an adult Christian faith shorn of sectarianism. 

This insight—that the line between good and evil is not between groups of people but down the middle of each end every human heart—is what lies behind Ghandi’s teaching and practice of Satyagraha, Truth Force, and Martin Luther King’s statement that he did not seek to defeat his enemies, but rather turn his enemies into friends, to win over even the worst bigot. 
King preached it this way:  “Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt.  … [W]e must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within all of our lives.”

3. Seek the common weal. 

Understanding that we are all in this together means that we should try to seek the common good, the good shared by all of us.  And this is the case even when it means our own interest group or party may have to put aside some of its advantage or privilege.   It means we reject identity politics, including the politics that use our religious identity as if it were a dividing line between good and evil. 

This does not mean tolerating or accommodating injustice or oppression based in identity.  Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and hatred of GLBT people are in fact demons.  In the degree that they are supported by appeals to religious values or beliefs, they are demons invoked in the name of God.  But they are not our better angels. 

One of the most powerful memes Mr. Trump and his supporters have used is the idea that “political correctness” is just a new form of oppression and tyranny.   It has resonance for many people because it connects with their experience of being on the receiving end of an interest group’s condemnation, and the dark side of identity politics.  “Reverse discrimination” they cry, and “black racism.” 

But a person repeatedly kicking someone who is down on the ground is not the same act as that person on the ground kicking to try to get his attacker off.  Both kick, but they are not the same act. 

Those who work for justice in these areas need to be clear in their witness—to be honest and intentional in bringing their values to play—but should remember that it is the actions that are at issue, not the partisans or group of people.  Instead of talking about political correctness, they might find it more effective to talk about simple decency, fairness, and courtesy in not giving hurt to others. 

5. Stand with the marginalized

Precisely because governing and politics is all about power, and religion itself has an appeal to authority and power, the great temptation is to deceive ourselves that our values demand that we punish or damage those who are not with us or part of us.  Seeking the common weal here means taking care to not be blinded by our own position of privilege.  A default position of those in authority should be to listen more carefully to and to promote the interests of the marginalized and the downtrodden, not because they are of more worth than others, but because our position of power tends to blind us to the truth of these very people.  It is easy for this to slop over into identity politics, but the key in not going there is remembering where the line between good and evil truly lies: down the middle of each and every human heart, regardless of identity or interest group.   

6. Learn to listen, empathize, and be compassionate

It goes without saying that we cannot build common ground and move forward together if we do not listen to each other.  This means listening to those on the other side of whatever identity line we are dealing with.  Listening without correction or interruption, respectfully taking responsibility for our own views, and allowing people to express their truth in their own way builds mutual respect and makes room for empathy.  At the heart of all of this is the practice of compassion, especially for those who differ from us. 

And finally,

7. Treat others fairly (as you would wish to be treated, or as you think all should be treated if you didn’t know who or what they were)

The golden rule in one form or another is taught in most religious traditions, and is generally accepted in most non-religious ethical systems.  It is the ethical basis on which solidarity and devotion to the common weal is based.  Applying it can be tricky when we seek to avoid identity politics yet at the same time want to stand with the marginalized.  Very helpful here is Philosopher John Rawls’ idea that we need to take on an intentional veil of ignorance and ignore arbitrary facts about individual members of society when deciding on the division of social goods.  But simply put, if we try to be fair, and try to treat others as we want to be treated, we have taken the first step toward social justice. 

Friends:  we live at a critical moment in our history as a nation.  Religion is losing its attraction for younger people, and now exerts little power over our elites.  It increasingly is reduced to a mere tool of the bitter partisan division and unrestrained identity politics.  Even the concept of factual truth has been undermined in the process:  witness the increasing use of false news and no regard for fact checking.  Though the left loves to point at Mr. Trump’s role in this, fairness demands that we acknowledge that they too have been part of the process.  This nihilism is the greatest threat to our democracy that we have seen in 70 years, and threatens any sense of shared community in the nation.  The nihilism of both sides threatens the viability of our religious institutions.  

As concerned as I am about the nihilism of new administration, its apparent disregard for truth, scientific fact, and ethical standards that we have jointly held in this country for 50 years, I am also concerned about the nihilism of those who resist it, willing automatically to tar with the same brush all people on the Right or in the center. 

And so I return to Lincoln’s words:  “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” I pray with him that “the mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus” of the common good and our shared life, and we will be touched “by the better angels of our nature.”

I make these modest suggestions that we might use our faith—whatever faith we may have—to find these better angels and drive away our demons. 

I am willing to answer questions now.