We are Not Props
Fr.
Tony’s Midweek Message
June
3, 2020
There
are many ideals taught in seminaries about homiletics: the Word of God, properly
preached, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the
comfortable. A minister must never prostitute the pulpit for
partisan political purposes, but must always make the word of God live and
breathe for people, and this means making sure they know not just what God is
calling us to in our individual lives, but also in our common
life. Sometimes this can sound like partisan politics,
especially to the comfortable who are afflicted by the Word.
In
the last couple of days, I had several of my triggers pulled, many buttons
pushed. Whenever something upsets us, it is useful to ask, not
just “what in this bothers me?” but also “what is it in me that makes
this upset my balance and serenity?”
What
upset me was this: On Monday evening, President Trump had riot
police use tear gas, batons, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to clear
peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park just north of the White House so he could
walk over to St. John’s Episcopal Church and have what he has since called a
“highly symbolic photo” taken of him holding a Bible in front of the church,
whose nursery had been damaged by a fire Sunday evening, clearly set by someone
there because of the demonstrations. (It is not at all clear at
this point who wrought this outrage or why.) All Episcopal
clergy on the scene on Monday agreed that disproportional and excessive force
had been used, injuring many and forcing the clergy, who had been giving out
bottles of water to drink and wash chemically burned eyes of people caught in
the tear gas, to themselves flee the sacred grounds.
Public
reaction was sudden and overwhelming: The Rector of St. John’s
issued a statement of outrage, as did Washington D.C. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, as
well as the Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. They said the
president had abused the church, and not come to it for worship or prayer, but
rather as a scenery backdrop to his call to “get tough” on demonstrators, with
the Holy Bible as a stage prop for his photo-op.
A similar
excursion outside the White House the next day to a Roman Catholic center
triggered similar outrage from the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington
D.C. The unanimous message seemed to be: “Come to Church to
learn about Jesus and how to follow him, fine! Come to Church
to worship and pray, fine! Come to Church to help build reconciliation and
peace, fine! But don’t come to our churches to score political
points with your base and fan the flames of resentment, fear, and racial
distrust instead of trying to deescalate the tension and bring people
together.”
A dear friend of mine, a fellow
member of the Society of Catholic Priests
who serves as rector of St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson,
AZ, captured the affect of this response more succinctly than others.
Fr. Robert Hendrickson, you would do well to remember, was President of
his local chapter of Young Republicans when he was in college. This
is what he wrote in what he later called a somewhat “grumpy social media
posting”:
“This is an awful man, waving a book he
hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t
understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military
he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign
interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to
address a pandemic he was warned about,
and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish
inanity. I have voted for people from all sides —
this is not partisan. It is simply about recognizing the moral vacuum that is
now pretending to lead.”
At
the same time, I heard from many old friends who still support the President,
and were encouraged and emboldened by their Bible-totin’ leader:
One posted a picture of the scene with the words, “God bless this man!”
Another said, “He may not be anyone’s ideal Christian, but he has helped the
cause of faith in America, not the least by working to ban abortions and protect
religious liberty.”
My
own reaction, however, hinged on that one phrase, “the Bible as a
prop.” “Prop” was a trigger word because of something that I
had experienced while working for the Department of State and trying to follow
Jesus at the same time. The experience showed me the
difference between partisan posturing and humbly walking in faith.
I
worked in press relations for much of my career, and became a go-to press center
manager for overseas Presidential trips for Bill Clinton’s White
House. It was heady stuff: always looking for the
right still photo and video framing of the President’s words and actions, always
seeking to cultivate the media reps to try to get as sympathetic coverage as we
might hope for, and planning and arranging the scenarios to put the President’s
work and contributions in their best light. While other
embassy colleagues were trying to arrange working meetings with high level
leaders from the host country, the circles I traveled in saw everything through
the lens of how things might look to the camera. Where my
Embassy political and commercial colleagues always referred to foreign
dignitaries and common people by name, title, and role, my media management
colleagues called them “props” just as we called print media reps “pens,” radio
ones “voices,” and video ones “faces.”
I
remember the moment I decided I could no longer in good conscience work press
for President Clinton. When the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and
Dar es-Salaam were bombed, the air force brought back the bodies of the U.S.
personnel killed. Colleagues at State who knew the deceased and
injured were invited to attend the welcoming ceremony at
Andrews. When we arrived, we were driven to a small hangar off
to the side rather one of the capacious ones in the center of the
base. The small hangar was overcrowded, hot, and
chaotic. I understood: the media team had not wanted the
images of the President talking to a half-filled building, and so they had
insisted on crowding the bereaved, including family members, into a confined
space that while uncomfortable for us “props” provided a proper “cut-away” view
accentuating the President’s importance. At one point, I saw a
White House press officer who I had spent hours, days, and weeks working with in
Dakar Senegal just a few months before there on the other side of the dividing
rope. I passed within a foot of him, called him by name,
smiled, and said, “Hi.” He looked in my direction, eyes
clouding over with puzzlement, and then he turned away without a
word. He could not process me as an acquaintance and
colleague. In this setting, I was just a prop. We
were all, State Department employees, bereaved family members, and all, just
props. And handlers don’t talk to props.
Suddenly,
there President Clinton was, front and center on the dais, 3 1/2 meters away
from us, with the 13 flag-draped coffins in between. It was
the morning after the sordid details about Monica Lewinski’s blue dress had
appeared front page in the Washington Post. Clinton was
peddling as fast as he could to get out of the ditch he had thrown himself
into. The First Lady was late in arriving, so initially
Secretary Albright sat to his side. As we waited for the press
to finish hooking things up and for things to start, the President began to chat
with the Secretary. She must have said some mild witticism,
because there, in full view of the bereaved families on the other side of the
coffins, Mr. Clinton began laughing.
But
then, as part of the white screen balance, the live light on TV Camera One came
on and he knew his image was live. His smile turned down into
a frown, and he reached deftly into his suit pocket and fetched a handkerchief,
with which he wiped imaginary tears from his eyes. I was only
a few feet away and saw it clearly, and was sickened. I never
traveled for him again, or worked with his handlers, despite intense pressure on
my bosses from the White House Travel Office.
I
don’t think I’m telling any secrets here to say that I am pretty left wing, and
agreed with most of Bill Clinton’s policies. But Clinton’s
taking advantage of that intern, his lack of any integrity beyond what showed to
his audience or could be argued by his attorney, all this raised profound
questions for me. To see this in front of the families of
colleagues and friends killed in their service to the nation hurt me
deeply.
Fast
forward a few years: when George W. Bush became President, I assumed he was as
ignorant and misinformed as his mispronounced words and naïve appeals to
evangelical Christianity made him appear. I was doing senior
intelligence analysis work on East Asia at the time, and was privy to many
things that never make it into the media. I was told that his
hail-fellow-well-met image as a West Texas frat boy was an image he had
cultivated after losing two elections run as an Ivy-league scion of the
Kennebunkport Bushes. On one occasion when I prepared a
briefing for the President on a complex and highly sensitive subject, I was
surprised to have him ask the single most astute question only a careful and
informed reader could have formed from the dense and heavily footnoted 15 page
paper. A few months later, an American missionary who had been
held hostage by terrorists in the Philippines was freed in a bloody operation
that left two of his fellow captives dead. He was returned to
the U.S. and was waiting at LAX to change planes to rejoin his
family. The President was headed to East Asia on a long
trip. Air Force One happened to stop at LAX at the same
time. President Bush asked if he could meet privately with the
traumatized missionary, who agreed. They met for a couple of
hours. The President consoled the man, listened to his stories, and
then prayed with him. All in private. The
story was never leaked to the press because the President had given clear orders
that he did not want the story reported. He did it because he
thought it was the right thing, and it would not have been the right thing if he
had tried to make political hay out of it by publicizing what needed to be
private. Here was a President with whom I disagreed on nearly
all major policy issues, but who earned my respect and love by trying to do what
he saw was the right thing.
I
tell these stories not to drop names. I was a very minor,
low-level observer in both. But they formed me, and lie behind
my take on the issue of politics and religion today, and how I understand what
is appropriate or inappropriate to preach. Partisan politics
is by nature a struggle of our side vs. their side. The great
temptation is always to see no redeeming virtues in your opponents and no sins
or abusive behavior in your own people. Partisan advantage is
sown and grown in part by exclusion of others and by lying, whether by silence
of inconvenient truths or by wholesale fabrication. And call
me cynical, but all politicians, leaders and adherents of party—political or
otherwise—suffer from these failings in one degree or another. But
we are still called to transcend these our failings.
The
Church is there to call us beyond ourselves. It is there to
help us transcend our failings. It is not there as a tool to
manipulate others. It is not a backdrop; the Bible is not a
prop. One item of note: the only religious
leaders who have since come out and said they thought the St. John’s scene was
good are fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals or authoritarian Roman Catholics
who wish they could ditch the current Pope and perhaps even go back before
Vatican II. I see this as support from people who use faith and the
Bible to manipulate others, who see nothing wrong with making props of sacred
things. In this scene, unfortunately, I saw the worst of both
worlds: the moral obtuseness of a Bill Clinton, with none of
his policy smarts; the policy weakness (and worse!) of a George W. Bush, with
none of his humble, empathetic faith. President Bush’s faith
has led him in recent weeks to make very helpful and inspiring comments, both on
Covd-19 and on Racial Injustice and Police Brutality.
Anyone
who thinks that they can bully and resolve with violent force this current
turmoil is deceiving themself. The myth of redemptive violence is at the root of
white supremacy and privilege; domination of others is its basic nature. If we are
going to address the causes of our current dismay, we must first drive violence
from the sacred city, not bring it there. To do otherwise is to follow the plan
of the Accuser.
I
pray for the President not because I believe he is on the right
track: I pray for the President—any President—to try to help
them get onto and then persevere on the right track. God knows that with all the
challenges we are facing right now—pandemic illness, economic collapse, a
society on the brink of disintegration because of persistent injustice—all of
us, the President included, need all the help we can get, not to pursue our own
projects and advance our own tribe, nation, or party, but to bring healing to
the universe. Our Christian faith demands we listen to each
other, judge not, and then act to bring God’s light, love, and compassion to
bear on the broken scenes in which we find ourselves.
Grace
and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
