God in the Public Arena
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 28, 2003
I indulged myself in a little recreational reading this past week. Recreational reading is what I read for the fun of it and not because it is allegedly "serious stuff" that I'm "supposed" to be perusing. In this case it was a little novella by John Grisham called Bleachers. Unlike many of Grisham's blockbuster send-ups of the legal profession, there is nary a lawyer to be found in this one. Bleachers is set in the fictitious deep South town of Messina (we're not told which state) in the present day. The legendary coach of Messina's high school football team, Eddie Rake, is dying. He was the emperor of a high school football empire for over 30 years in Messina. Many of his former players come back into town to sit in the bleachers of the high school football field - Rake Field, named, of course, for the coach - to hold vigil; and to tell their stories and re-live their glory days as home-town heroes for the Messina Spartans. One returning former player is the star quarterback from fifteen years earlier, Neely Crenshaw. He was headed for the NFL until an injury in a college game ended all prospects of that. Neely has come back to Messina, however, not just to hold vigil for his old coach; but also to try to make amends and offer apologies to the old high school sweetheart he'd jilted during their high school days for a... ah... well, hotter prospect. Her name is Cameron, and Neely now knows she's the woman he should have stayed with and maybe even married. Cameron, however, is already happily married, with two daughters, to a Chicago multi-millionaire. She's never had much use at all for Coach Rake, but has returned to Messina out of her love and respect for his wife Lila, who is now on the brink of widowhood.
Neely and Cameron have their meeting. In a very cool and off-handed manner she accepts Neely's apologies and mea culpa. But Cameron is still bitter; not so much for the shoddy way Neely had treated her - she says she's over that - but rather over the sacred status the game of high school football had held, and still holds, in the town where they'd both grown up. So as the two of them talk she unloads some 15-20 years worth of resentment and anger on Neely: "It was silly. Worshiping seventeen year old boys who quickly became convinced they are truly worthy of being worshiped. The stupid little girls who can't wait to give it up to a Spartan. Grown men crying after a loss. The entire town living and dying with each game. (And) Prayer breakfasts every Friday morning, as if God cares who wins a high school football game."
Just for the record, I happen to be a football fan (although right now I'm pretty focused on the Red Sox). When our son played in his high school band I attended nearly all of his school's home football games and really got into them. Still, as I read that passage from Bleachers I found myself saying, "Alright Cameron! You go girl!" While I did not grow up in the deep South, the town in which I was raised - culturally speaking - wasn't all that far from Messina, especially when it came to high school football. In my sophomore year of high school our football team, the mighty St. Albans Red Dragons, made it clear to the West Virginia State Championship game; and there was very little doubt in the entire town that it was God who had gotten us there - even though we got royally creamed in the championship game itself.
What I've come to see in the ensuing years, and what Grisham's rather poignant little story brought back to me, is that the religiosity that often gets attached to small town sports in America is really but one piece of a much larger cultural mosaic. For while a reader may chuckle in agreement, as I did, with Cameron's caustic dismissal of the idea that God cares about the outcome of a football game in small town America; one only has to take just another step or two up the societal ladder, or gain a more comprehensive view of our larger cultural mosaic, to find the quite seriously held idea or belief that God has somehow granted our country a "most favored nation" status among the community of nations. So even as we may find bemusement in Miss Cameron's put down of such a sophomoric concept of God as being a sports fan, what do we make of a Head of State and Commander-in-Chief who, by any number of indicators, believes he is on a mission from God, and seeks the guidance of God, in ridding the world of evil? It's really not all that many steps from one to the other.
On that note - to which I will return and elaborate - let's get down to business on the subject of "God in the Public Arena." I like being an American. I really do. It doesn't make me a better person than a citizen of any other nation, of course; but being a citizen of this country is one important part of all that has allowed me to live a life about which I have few regrets, and for which I feel very blessed. As I've said on other occasions, the writers and poets to whom I feel most drawn are also the ones who've had and have the best feel for the true essence of this land of ours - for its glories as well as its tragedies and deep flaws. I'm thinking of writers and poets like Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Whitman. One of the biggest challenges I've found in attempting to be a responsible and loving critic of my country is in trying to sort out and come to terms with the critical role that religion, and belief in God, has played and continues to play in our social, cultural, and political history, and in our contemporary life. I've found it way too simplistic to say that such a role is an unmitigated good thing or an unmitigated bad thing. It is neither altogether, because it is some of both.
To back up and get a running start on this, the intermingling of religion and the workings of the state is hardly a new phenomenon in human history. In fact it is as old as human civilization itself. Most of the nations and civilizations that have had their day in the sun on this planet have invoked a Deity - or Deities - of one kind or another to validate their existence and affirm their actions. The use of religion to shape and manipulate public opinion isn't exactly new either. William Shakespeare was onto it some four centuries ago. In his play Richard III, there is a scene where Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, is weaving his deceitful web in order to become Richard, the King of England. He gets into a discussion with one of his conspirators - or political handlers, if you will - Lord Buckingham. Richard asks Buckingham how, in the midst of the confusion and turmoil they're helping to generate over who should ascend to the throne, that he, Richard, might present himself to the populace of London as the one most deserving and able to become King. Buckingham's advice to Richard is, "Look you get a prayer book in your hand and stand between two churchmen good my lord." Shakespeare knew how the game was played when this country was still in its infancy. [And now we've gone from Grisham to Shakespeare. I'm nothing if not versatile!]
What is new, relative to the overall span of human history that is, is recognizing and validating the role religion plays in the societal life of nation (like ours), while at the same time keeping the institutional workings of the State free from undue religious influence. That is what the framers of our Constitution attempted to do, and I think they got it right. They were, most of them, very religious individuals. I do not question at all the contention that their religious convictions informed their moral sensitivities as they shaped the Constitution and the means by which we would govern ourselves as a newly formed nation. But while most of them claimed the Christian faith for themselves, albeit a Christianity with a decidedly Deistic slant to it, they were in no way drawing up a blueprint for a "Christian nation." It was not an accidental oversight on their part that absolutely no references or allusions to a Deity can be found in the U.S. Constitution. That was the way the framers wanted it. They deliberately kept religion out of the workings of the State in order - I've come to believe - that religion might flourish in the workings of the larger society that contains the State. That religion, and belief in God, has the force, visibility, and power that it does in this country is because we have avoided having any one specifically State sanctioned or State facilitated faith. This arrangement has given us a very interesting, and often perplexing, history - as well as in interesting and perplexing present day. For the one thing it has done is to allow for some of the best and some of the worst that is found in religion to be played out in our public, civic life as a nation. Let's go in that direction for a few minutes now.
Even with the Constitutional arrangement we have, our nation was established at least in part on the notion that there was a willful God who had some special purpose for us. (When I say "nation" I mean the country that 17th and 18th century Europeans created here. There was a land, with its own inhabitants here well before then, and their treatment was largely shameful and sometimes criminal - and as crucial matter as that is, it is not where my thread of thought is going today.) We as a nation like to see ourselves as participants in a kind of Divine Progression. Mark Sloulka described this mentality quite well in a Harper's Magazine article one year ago: "History [as Americans like to tell it] moved from East to West. We had escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, reinvented ourselves in the New World wilderness. Chosen for a special covenant with God, we would be 'as a City upon a hill' to recall both John Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 and Ronald Reagan's inaugural address in 1981."
However we may have chosen to govern ourselves, this idea that America is part of some Divine Plan is really a part of our cultural DNA. So, if religion is this much a part of the fabric of our societal life then I think the thing to do is to explore how it can be best put to use and justly applied - by persons of any or no faith or religious affiliation or belief.
I found a good guidepost for doing this in a recently published book by Jessica Stern called Terror in the Name of God. Ms. Stern is a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is currently a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Her book is about how certain kinds of religion, and how certain ways of believing in God, foster and nurture various forms of terrorism. It is pretty heavy going in places. After a chapter or two of something like this I have to go for the recreational reading just to relax my brain a little, which is when I pick up a book like Bleachers. While Dr. Stern does not directly address our subject for today, there is one short sentence in her Introduction I want to lift up: "Religion has two sides - one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other is particularist and sectarian." Her book, essentially, is a series of case studies in what happens when what she calls the "particularist and sectarian" side of religion gets carried to terrible and deadly extremes.
The spiritual, or universalist side of religion, to which Ms. Stern also refers, is the one that has always called humanity to its better self. It has often provided the basis for the broad moral codes by which countries and civilizations have lived. In certain situations this side of religion may have a specific context, and may use the language of a specific faith, but there is always a universal message behind it. I offer two quick examples: For Mahatma Gandhi the context was the situation of the Indian people vis a vis the British Empire, and the religion he invoked, and the religious language he primarily used, was that of a liberalized form of Hinduism. But behind the specific context and the specificity of the language Gandhi invoked was the universal, and I would say spiritual, message of freedom and self-determination for all people. It was the same with Martin Luther King in this country. His context was the racial segregation and the imbedded racism in this country in the 1950s and 60s that had been accumulating for some 350 years; and his language was that of liberal Christianity, and it evoked the spirit of African-American Church. But again, the larger message was universal and spiritual: Freedom, human dignity and respect, and self-determination for all people.
The God that both of these religious leaders invoked as they engaged in the social and political situations and challenges with which they were confronted, was a God who ultimately cared about the fate and well being of all humanity, and about the fate of the earth itself. Theirs was certainly not a God who took the side of one segment of people or of one portion of the earth, against another. It was this understanding of religion, in fact, that it could have an inclusively spiritual and universalistic dimension to it, that kept me on the path to ministry, and in the ministry, once I had discarded the more sectarian and particularistic brand of religion in which I was raised. It is this aspect of religion that I think does have a legitimate and necessary role to play in the public arena of this or any other nation.
It is when God and religion are invoked in the public arena as a way of serving more narrow and partisan interests that they become debased and degenerate into idolatry. Examples abound: Last summer the Supreme Court struck down the Texas anti-sodomy statutes. Some gay and lesbian rights organizations, and individuals have seen this ruling their version of Brown vs. Board of Education, and rightly so. In the wake of this ruling the televangelist Pat Robertson called on God to "strike down" the Supreme Court justices who voted with the majority in that ruling. This prompted pornography king Larry Flynt (and, ah, candidate for Governor of California) to call on God to strike down Pat Robertson. It all led me to conclude that a truly Just God would lock those two in a room until they'd driven each other insane. Seriously though, the disturbing thing about that whole episode is that while Mr. Flynt is something of a sad and sorry buffoon at this point in his life, Rev. Robertson presides over a powerful, evangelistic empire and continues to enjoy access to some of our highest levels of power and government.
Then there was that 5000-pound monument to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building, placed there in the dead of one night by Alabama Justice Roy Moore. The events that led up to its eventual removal provided a means for a summer rally for the Christian Right in that part of the country, and may yet end up furthering the political career of Mr. Moore even if he loses his judgeship. Some of the Ten Commandments do indeed serve that larger, universalistic dimension of religion that I've spoken to: Admonitions against killing, stealing, lying, and cheating form the basis of the moral codes and laws of most countries and civilizations. Others of those Ten, however, reflect certain tribal laws of very ancient Israel. I personally think Mr. Moore was using the whole episode as a way of lobbing a grenade into the cultural wars. While I certainly have no pipeline in the Alabama politics, I would be far from surprised to see him become a candidate for the Governor of, or U.S. Senator from, that state the next time a vacancy for either of those offices comes around. I think that Ten Commandments monument was Mr. Moore's version of Richard III's prayer-book, and an exercise in idolatry as well; idolatry in the sense of using religion, and invoking the name of God, for politically partisan, and highly divisive, ends.
I made reference earlier to the tendency of our President to increasingly frame our nation's foreign policy in terms of good versus evil. I'll begin to close by returning to that since I feel it is a most egregious use - or misuse - of religion and the name of God in the public arena. Neither I, nor any reasonably well-informed person when it comes to world events, would deny that Saddam Hussien inflicted clearly evil deeds upon what were supposed to be "his people." I don't question the results of a recently conducted poll in Iraq showing that the great majority of "his people" are glad to be rid of him. Who wouldn't be? The danger, however, in declaring that one is going forth to "fight evil," whether one is an individual or a nation, is that it then becomes very easy to clothe oneself - again, as an individual or as a nation - in unquestioned and unquestionable virtue. As long as we're "fighting evil" we can go it alone - irrespective of what the rest of the world thinks. And even when we now have to turn to the rest of the world to help us out of our own missteps, miscalculations, and plain lack of common foresight, again since we're the unquestionably virtuous ones, we can still demand that the world help us out on our own terms. This, sadly and tragically, is where we've gotten ourselves a nation when it comes to our involvement in Iraq.
I am not opposed to fighting evil. I recognize the moral necessity of doing just that under certain circumstances, and by various means. But fighting evil, in whatever form such a battle or struggle might take, must be done from a stance of humility rather than one of arrogance. This is a humility that guards against becoming blinded by one's own sense of rightness and righteousness. It is a humility that is open to correction and honest criticism. It is a humility that seeks to avoid the idolatry of assuming Divine sanction for one's actions. It is the humility shown by Abraham Lincoln when, in the throes of the Civil War, a political colleague assured him God was on the side of the Union. Lincoln's well-known reply was "Pray not that God be on our side, but pray instead that we be found on God's side." While I may not fully share Mr. Lincoln's theology, I fully appreciate the spirit of his wisdom. His point, as I take it, was that however right your cause may seem, do not automatically assume the mantle of complete righteousness. Nearly a century and a half later Lincoln still offers a good lesson indeed for all of our Presidents, and for all who would invoke the name of God as they seek to lead this nation.
The intertwining of religion, and belief in God, in the worldly and political dealings of persons and nations is, as already noted then, as old as the history of the human race. And human history, to be sure, is rife with wars that have been fought, destruction that has been wrought, slavery and oppression that have been inflicted, and countless innocent lives lost due to such intertwining. But alongside these terribly tragic realities has been that spiritual and universalistic side to faith and belief that Dr. Stern identifies. There has long been a voice, if you will, continually calling humanity to its better and more wholistic self. It has spoken through what our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles call the "words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love." It is the voice that calls us to engage ourselves in the workings of our wider community and world so that we might at least bring ourselves a little closer to that day when "earth shall be fair and all her people one."
Stephen D. Edington
September 28, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved
