We are not Props (Midweek Message)

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+