Lately, there has been much gnashing of teeth in
the media and on liberal talk radio about Protestant preachers urging their
megaflocks to get involved in the fight against abortion on demand. There
has also been a good amount of muttering about Republicans using churches to
promote the vote--up or down--on a few of President Bush's nominees to the
federal bench. And of course, there is ever more screaming about what secret
plans the new Pope might have for controlling American Catholics in their
views on abortion and homosexuality.
All of this, it is darkly hinted, is a violation
of the Constitutional bans on the Establishment of a religion, a new and
sinister development in political life, and a threat to the Republic.
What foolishness. Who was was leading the
marchers heading towards the Pettus Bridge in ( or near ) Selma, Alabama
forty years ago during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement? Ministers
and nuns in clerical garb. Who was there in Birmingham? Again, men and women
of the cloth. What was the greatest political/moral figure of the twentieth
century in America? A Protestant minister, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Who was leading us from the pulpit, sounding out fury at the seemingly endless Vietnam war? The Reverend William Sloan Coffin, a minister of the Gospel. Who was at all of the anti-war marches? Ministers and priests and rabbis. No one was complaining about that, for some reason.
Who was leading us from the pulpit, sounding out fury at the seemingly endless Vietnam war? The Reverend William Sloan Coffin, a minister of the Gospel. Who was at all of the anti-war marches? Ministers and priests and rabbis. No one was complaining about that, for some reason.
Who thundered against slavery and urged on the
Civil War? Henry Ward Beecher and other men of faith in the north.
This is what has always been going on in
political life in America. The political is the moral. And the moral is the
political.
Men and women of faith have always been involved in political/moral issues as long as there has been politics and as long as there has been religion. (Think of Moses urging the politically explosive issue of freeing the children of Israel from bondage, or of Jesus telling followers it was fine to pay taxes to Caesar.)
The only new thing is that now it's
conservatives marching for life and preaching for life, not ministers
marching for civil rights or disarmament. But surely men and women of the
cloth are not just allowed but commanded to assert their moral beliefs on
issues of supreme importance. Men and women who wear the cloth do not check
their first amendment rights and their moral duties when they take their
vows. They never have, and they never will. And we are far better for it.