Published: June 21, 2008 09:50 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: An inspired idea — Keep religious endorsements out of politics

TERRE HAUTE — Church and State are forever divorced in America. And God forever avert the day when the churches of America shall lapse into the hands of the politicians! Then all will be gone.

— Congregational minister Lyman Abbott, 1864



While Barack Obama and John McCain are working out the ground rules for the next four months, it would be so great if they would agree to a moratorium on religious pandering.

Before they decide about town hall meetings, running mates, which convicted felon pals to defend or jettison — both men should sign a joint promise to lay off of seeking and trumpeting religion-related endorsements.

Given their experiences so far with religious cheerleaders, McCain and Obama ought to be extra-motivated. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Rev. John Hagee revealed themselves to be such liabilities, it should be cause, not just for renunciation, but for a shared vow to go forth and politically sin no more.

Co-humbled, Obama and McCain could use their dispiriting clergy crises to return evangelizing and faith-based policy making to their rightful place: The pulpits and TV studios of America’s tax-exempt churches, temples, synagogues, mosques and strip mall storefronts.

Those who are tempted, like McCain, to draw huge distinctions between Obama’s America-be-damned Wright and McCain’s God-planned-the-Holocaust Hagee, ought to think twice. In some ways, in fact, McCain’s calculated but brief alliance with Hagee was more unseemly than Obama’s long, disintegrating relationship with Wright.

Sermon snippets and his National Press Club meltdown notwithstanding, Wright of southside Chicago modeled a lot of Christian charity and forgiveness over the decades as Obama’s family and thousands of others found a home in his Trinity United Church of Christ. But as Wright became increasingly angry, conspiracy-minded and ego-focused, Obama had to let go of an old friend.

The Hagee-McCain merger, on the other hand, was about as faith-fueled as the money changers Jesus chased from the temple. For the Republican presidential candidate, the Hagee endorsement was, as Don Corleone put it, “not personal, it’s business.” Political business.

National religion reporter Bruce Wilson — whose Talk To Action Web site almost single-handedly outed Hagee’s long-held bizzaro theories — has chronicled McCain’s uneasy embrace of the leader of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas.

In 2000, McCain paid dearly at the polls for a couple of brave acts. He called fundamentalist power brokers Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance,” and said, “I cannot steer the Republican Party if those two individuals have the influence they have on the party today.” He also criticized George W. Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University, which McCain said was “racist and cruel” and stuck in the 16th Century.

But McCain learned he couldn’t afford such opinions. As Wilson wrote: “… John McCain’s personal preferences were irrelevant: his route to the presidency was only viable with the help of the Christian right leaders he’d all too recently attacked.”

McCain apologized to Falwell before Falwell died and gave a commencement address at the minister’s Liberty University. During this presidential primary campaign, Robertson threw his lot in with Rudy Giuliani, but Hagee came through with an endorsement, thanks to more than a year of McCain efforts to woo him.

In a 2007 speech to Hagee’s pro-Israeli expansion organization, Christians United for Israel, McCain said of our nation’s capital, “It’s hard to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan.”

McCain also lauded Hagee for providing “spiritual guidance to politicians like me.” That slightly smudges the distinction he tried to make months later between Obama and himself when he declared, “Rev. Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual adviser.”

The larger point is, whether it’s Jeremiah Wright accusing the U.S. government of spreading HIV through the African American community or John Hagee insisting (as late as 2003, according to Wilson) that large numbers of American children are being sacrificed in satanic cult ceremonies, politics and religion would be better served in separate corners.

That goes for all religion, fringe and mainstream.

Four years ago, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops equated political acceptance of safe, legal abortion to being “guilty of cooperating in evil.” Many Catholic priests further scuffed the line between preaching and political proselytizing. During prayer breakfasts, bingo nights, on TV shows and in informal memos-from-the-pastor, they warned parishioners that a vote for the pro-abortion rights John Kerry would render them as unworthy of Communion as he was pronounced to be.

What a long way from John F. Kennedy’s position during the 1960 presidential campaign.

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy said, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”

In their recent book, “The God Strategy,” David Domke and Kevin Coe document and analyze the turnaround that has taken place since then. The subtitle of their book: “How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.”

As Domke and Coe write in the introduction, “Religion has always been part of the political subtext in the United States, but it is now a defining fault line, with citizens’ religious affinities, regularity of worship, and perceptions of ‘moral values’ among the strongest predictors of presidential voting patterns.

“Political leaders have taken advantage of and contributed to these developments through calculated, deliberate, and partisan use of faith.”

Heaven forbid that instead of being spoon-fed the presidential endorsements of religious leaders, voters of all faiths might actually pay attention to what Obama and McCain say and do. With the crowd of official God experts out of the way, the authentic spiritual lives of both Obama and McCain just might be exposed.

If one candidate walked the walk more authentically, if one guy better modeled Christian values rather than merely proclaimed them, we would know the truth and it would make us free.

Then we could decide — like the adults we are — which candidate’s words and actions match up with our particular religious and cultural values. We could call this process, “The Miracle of an Informed Electorate.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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