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ideology.
(This
sermon is also available in audio.)
We
have a political problem that is also a spiritual one. Let me
read from Ephesians, Chapter 6:
10
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.
11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to
stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is
not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this
present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places. New Revised Standard Version
(NRSV)
Or
my favorite translation of that is “against principalities
and powers.” More than flesh and blood, there is a collective
kind of concentration of evil in high places and they’re
called “principalities.”
I
want to suggest this morning, in our short Lenten time, that ideology is a principality.
Ideology polarizes and paralyzes our politics.
I
live in Washington, D.C. Here’s what the politicians do
on both sides. They take a problem and they want to do two things
with it: one, make us afraid of it; second, blame it on the other
side. They never get back around to solving the problem, but
they want to make you afraid and blame the other side. Then they
take a poll to see whose spinning won. An election is just the
last poll.
The
media, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately…they
make it worse. Did you know that all of our problems just have
two sides? Think about it. Youth violence. Oh, it’s just
left and right. Drugs, parenting, overcoming poverty, the environment,
the ethics of war. Well, there’s just left, and there’s
right.
I’ve
been doing a lot of these pre-interviews lately. They’re
auditions to see if the two talking heads have enough conflict
to make good TV.
Ideology
polarizes, paralyzes politics, and prevents our finding solutions. Prevents, obstructs
our finding solutions. And our kids just fall between the
cracks. You think the poor are trapped? I’ll tell you where they’re
trapped: the poor are trapped in the debate about poverty.
That’s
where they’re trapped. And one in five of our children
remain in poverty. One in three children of color. While the
two sides just blame each other for the problem and then go
home to very nice dinners.
Ideology
also seduces religion. It makes religion ideological,
predictable, partisan. It prevents the emergence of prophetic
faith, which could possibly help a nation find what the Catholics
call “common ground.” Could help a nation find
common ground by moving to higher ground--“The common
good” in Catholic social teaching.
But
no, we have a political seduction of religion called “the religious
right.” And, whenever anybody challenges that seduction,
the media right away calls them--as they did my book in the [New
York] Times last week--the religious left! Of course,
you must be one, or the other. Just take your pick.
The
two parties both get it wrong. Religion doesn’t
fit neatly into categories of right and left, liberal or conservative.
The
right side, they are comfortable with the language of religion,
faith…God….they act like they own the territory.
Own God, maybe. Then they narrow all the moral values to just
two: abortion and gay marriage. That’s it, end of conversation.
There are only two religious issues, you know. Just two. Those
are two important ones which we need a fuller, richer, deeper
conversation about on both sides. But my goodness…only
two?
I’m an evangelical Christian. When I find three
thousand verses in my Bible about poor people, I gotta pay
attention. Fighting poverty, therefore, is a moral value. Protecting
God’s creation, the environment, is a moral value. The
ethics of war: when we go to war, how we go to war, whether
we tell the truth about going to war. That’s a moral
value and a religious issue.
This
book I’ve been touring around with is called God’s
Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t
Get It. Cause the right just says two and the left says, "Oh
my goodness, we’re nervous about religion. We’re
uncomfortable. We think the separation of church and state means
the banishing of moral values from public discourse. Any kind
of religious talk."
Where
would we be--I know what city I’m in…I’ve been
to the museum--Where would we be if the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. had kept his faith to himself?
A
party that was linked to the Civil Rights movement led by black
churches
now is successfully portrayed as the “secular” party. Hostile
to religion. “Oh we have faith,” they say, “but
don’t worry, it won’t affect anything.” And
so they cede the territory, concede the whole topic of values
and faith to the other side. And they define it by appealing
to the faith and fears of an important constituency.
And
religion--which has fueled and driven every major social reform
movement in our
history: abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, child
labor law reform and, most famously, civil rights--becomes just
an ideological prop for one side or the other. We can do better.
We have to do better, and a whole generation of young people
are hoping that we do.
I’ve
done a lot of TV shows the last few months and weeks, doing some
more this afternoon. Some are fun, some not-so-fun. The most
fun was one hosted by a guy named Jon Stewart, The Daily
Show. How many of you know it? Your kids know, if you don’t.
Most American young people under 30 get their news from Jon Stewart
more than all the networks. So he came back to the dressing room
and I could tell that he’d read the book cover to cover.
Most of them don’t, to tell you the truth. He did. He asked
smart questions about global
poverty, aid, trade, debt, how in fact we can make a difference
on this big issue.
He
asked smart questions. “I’m an outsider,” he
said, “I may ask silly questions.” So I said, “Just
ask what you want, Jon.” So he did, and we had fun. He
started by saying (we’re on the show now…his youthful
live audience there and I know millions are watching of the same
ilk) and he says “Now, you want to apply religion, like
the teachings of Jesus, like, to politics?” I could feel
millions thinking to themselves “Oh no! He’s got
some wacko right-wing evangelical on that’s gonna ruin
my show! My favorite show!” I could just feel them. And
so I said, “Yeah, Jon, I don’t think Jesus’ first
two priorities would have been a capital gains tax cut and the
occupation of Iraq.”
And
a whole generation whooped and hollered for progressive religion.
They would go on to cheer Matthew 25 before we were done. “My
conversion…” they cheered Matthew 25… “as
you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to
me.” YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!
We
had some good Christian-Jewish banter. I said “Jon, you’re
for moral values, right?” And he hesitated. I said “Well,
maybe not.” He said “Do I get weekends off?” He
asked me something and I said “Good question, Jon,” and
he said “You mean, good question for a Jewish guy?” He
said “I know we’re not going to heaven but could
we have a neighborhood nearby yours? We’ll keep it clean,
I promise!” And I said, I inscribed the book: “Jon,
the Biblical prophets use humor and satirizing political leaders
and truth-telling to make their point. You do those all very
well. Maybe you’re in the tradition of the Biblical prophets.
He goes….ooh….all soft and mushy.
Afterwards
he said…he put his hand on my arm and said “You know,
I’m pretty secular. Pretty secular. But I like this, I…I…I
want to….Can we keep talking? Could I be involved somehow
in this?”
Then
the e-mails came. Hundreds, then thousands, of young people who
said one of two things. “I lost my
faith because of the religious right or what I saw some Christian
TV preacher say or do or…” they named all the names.
You know the names. “But I feel like maybe, maybe, maybe,
I could have some faith again.” Or they said, and this
is amazing, they said this over and over: “I didn’t
know that Christians could care about poverty. And care about
the environment. Or be against the war in Iraq. I didn’t
know.”
They’re
outside the hearing of churches like this and many of our…I
mean, the Pope is hardly a liberal religious leader. He was against
the war in Iraq. They hadn’t even heard it from him. They’re
outside the sound of our voices. They’re in a culture that
says “religion equals right wing.” I would object
to it equaling left wing either but no one says that.
And they
heard for the first time, in a little six-minute segment, that
a progressive religious option was available. And
they said “Maybe there’s some hope for me. Maybe there’s
some hope for me.”
There
has been a monologue on faith in politics for a long time. A
monologue by the religious right. In the past month, I've been
at bookstore signings in Austin, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Over
400 people have shown up at these signings for just a little
book….and they haven’t even read the book. It’s
not about a book. They want to believe there’s another
way to do this.
It’s
taught me that the monologue by the religious right is over
and a new dialogue has finally
begun.
Who’s
coming?:
Evangelical
Christians who
don’t feel represented by Jerry Falwell;
Catholics,
who don’t feel spoken for by a few Catholic bishops who say
there is only one issue on which Catholics can vote or care about…abandon
all the rest of your Catholic social teaching;
Mainline
Protestants,
who feel left out of the conversation entirely
and disrespected in their faith, like they don’t even count;
Black
churches. Black Christians who feel like this
is such a white conversation when they say “the evangelicals think, "Well,
I got kicked out of my little evangelical church in Detroit when
I was 14 years old, over the issue of race, and I got taken in
by black churches and guess what?
They
were the other evangelical church. Loved the same Jesus, read
the same Bible, sang out of
the same hymn book and made it sound so much
better than we did!" They’re
not in the conversation.
Lots
of Jews coming out…rabbis…lots
of Jews. They know Micah and Isaiah and Jeremiah are in the book.
Abraham, Joshua, Heschel, but they’re wanting to be in
this conversation.
Muslims are coming.
A
whole lot of young people, some of whom say, in question times,“Thank you for making
me feel included tonight. I’m an agnostic. I’m
not religiously affiliated but I felt
spiritually inspired by tonight
because I care about moral values!”
We
need a national discourse, a moral discourse, on our public life.
Lincoln was right - you
can’t
claim God’s blessing
for your nation, its policies. You can’t say God is on
your side. That leads to all the bad stuff in
politics: overconfidence, hubris, triumphalism, and always bad
foreign policy.
[Lincoln]
said, we
should pray earnestly, worry if we’re on God’s
side … that
leads to things we miss in politics: like humility,
penitence, reflection, and accountability. Lincoln
had it right, and King did it best - Bible in one hand, Constitution
in the
other hand. He never claimed that religion had a monopoly
on morality.
[King]
just expressed his faith and invited everybody to the party. Whether
Baptist like him, or Catholics, or Jewish like Rabbi
Heschel, or his agnostic supporters who are still agnostic
to this day, but say that was the spiritual highpoint
of their lives.
We
need a new moral conversation about politics. It should
be about values, moral values…that should be the future
of our politics.
Not
the religiosity of candidates; whether they pray, how many
times a day do they pray, how many more
Bible verses does one know than the other. No. But
what the moral compass is.
What
is our moral compass? If faith shapes
that, let’s talk about how it shapes our moral compass.
There’s
a hunger in this country for a new conversation about
politics. A hunger for a politics of solutions. And finally,
a hunger for a politics, not of fear …hunger for
a politics of hope. My
Bible says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.” And my best paraphrase
of that is “Hope is believing in
spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.”
Copyright ©2005
Jim Wallis
Excerpted
from a sermon preached February
14, 2005, for the Lenten
Noonday Preaching Series at Calvary
Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN .
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