Thursday, June 07, 2007
Vote for Joe, he says the Ro
I just read the transcripts for the Presidential Forum On Faith, Values & Poverty, organized by Sojourners (Jim Wallis) & broadcast on CNN, & the Paula Zahn followup, & there's a lot of information I don't need to know to choose a candidate. Joe Biden says the Rosary every day (as do millions of Catholics you'd never suspect). Chris Dodd is raising his kids both RC & Mormon (I didn't think either religion approved of that). Faith got Hillary Clinton through her marriage woes (for a less politically-ambitious person, faith AND divorce might've settled it even better).
Since I was raised around moderate & even casual or pro forma (not liberal) religious practices - Methodism & Roman Catholicism - this emphasis on determining if a politician's faith is authentic by expecting them to correlate their religious beliefs with their political views & agendas, disturbs me. The idea that someone's faith - you, me, anyone - could be spotlighted in public & judged inauthentic comes from the American protestant right & nowhere else. I don't like that these kinds of interrogations are now necessary for candidates, much less that Soledad O'Brien & Paula Zahn are somehow qualified to ask the questions, although I suppose they're better than Christian zealots. In good Christian youth education, one is taught to take people at their word regarding personal belief, however doubtful one might be of the sincerity or veracity. There is no uniform yardstick applicable to all for measuring the practical expression of belief. & all major religious traditions caution against ostentatious displays of religiosity. As Sunday school teachers used to warn, "Nobody quotes the Bible better than the Devil."
The most profoundly spiritual of presidents, Abraham Lincoln, belonged to no church or denomination. I'm not even aware of his having referred to himself as "Christian," certainly not in any strongly sectarian sense. His world view was so much in the Old Testament-Prophetic mode, his methods of illustrating points & mediating personal disputes so rabbinical, that he was probably closer to Judaism than anything else. I used to think that if America had a "religion." it was Lincoln's. But as a Republican politician, he'd have a tough time of it going up against the likes of Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, & George W. Bush.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Since I was raised around moderate & even casual or pro forma (not liberal) religious practices - Methodism & Roman Catholicism - this emphasis on determining if a politician's faith is authentic by expecting them to correlate their religious beliefs with their political views & agendas, disturbs me. The idea that someone's faith - you, me, anyone - could be spotlighted in public & judged inauthentic comes from the American protestant right & nowhere else. I don't like that these kinds of interrogations are now necessary for candidates, much less that Soledad O'Brien & Paula Zahn are somehow qualified to ask the questions, although I suppose they're better than Christian zealots. In good Christian youth education, one is taught to take people at their word regarding personal belief, however doubtful one might be of the sincerity or veracity. There is no uniform yardstick applicable to all for measuring the practical expression of belief. & all major religious traditions caution against ostentatious displays of religiosity. As Sunday school teachers used to warn, "Nobody quotes the Bible better than the Devil."
The most profoundly spiritual of presidents, Abraham Lincoln, belonged to no church or denomination. I'm not even aware of his having referred to himself as "Christian," certainly not in any strongly sectarian sense. His world view was so much in the Old Testament-Prophetic mode, his methods of illustrating points & mediating personal disputes so rabbinical, that he was probably closer to Judaism than anything else. I used to think that if America had a "religion." it was Lincoln's. But as a Republican politician, he'd have a tough time of it going up against the likes of Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, & George W. Bush.
Labels: religion
