Serving Bread

A few months ago, I heard Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tell a reporter that it is inappropriate for a politician to wear his or her religion on his or her sleeve. According to Reid, religion is a personal matter between the person and God. I presume Reid is reacting to the marriage between conservative Republicans and conservative Christians that has nearly baptized the Republican party to be the Christian party.

Reid is right in that religion is a personal matter between a person and God, but that is only a small slice of the role that religion should play in our lives. There is an aspect of my relationship with God that is deeply personal, but how I view my God and how I believe my God views me has implications on my decisions and how I live my life.

In this election season, candidates (both on the left and the right) are talking up how important their religion is. I am especially glad that the Democrats (Reid’s party) have rejected Reid’s line of thinking. In fact, it is healthy for politicians to speak of their religious beliefs and to illustrate how their religious convictions drive their policy.

What has been amiss in the last 25 years is that the Democrats (for the most part) shied away from religion by trying to woo the liberal vote, while Republicans found their base in the religious community. While some Democrats who ran for office had faith, they chose to not speak of their faith.

If religion continues to take a more prominent place in the national discourse, it will create several problems for the Church and Christians in general.

First, politics should not replace the role of the Church. When we believe that government and politics have solutions for spiritual problems, we are tempted to put hope in politicians rather than the local church. This does not mean that the answer to all problems is simply “just have faith in Jesus.” However, it does mean that many of the problems we experience are not temporal problems but spiritual problems. Poverty is not simply an economic problem, but it is a spiritual problem. To answer poverty simply with economic solutions would never address the problem of poverty.

Second, faithful people should be able to disagree politically. My concern is that the rhetoric of the left will begin to match the worst that we find on the right—that faithfulness would be to vote for a certain candidate over the other candidates. As a non-partisan (swing) voter, I am not convinced that either party has a market on religion and I will hold candidates to a higher standard if they begin to link religion and politics (especially since there are so few quality examples of people who have been able to practice religion through politics, and because there are so many gross injustices by those who have practiced religion through politics).

Politicians have great power to do good, but it seems that the church has at times ceded it’s authority to politicians. Rather than give to Ceasar what is due to him and to God what is due to him, we seem to believe that all things really belong to Ceasar and therefore Ceasar can fix everything. And we seem to also believe that our hands are tied unless our politicians act.

My ideal would be to be in a place where the local church is “shaming” our politicians and the political system, bringing transformation to communities, educating the young, empowering the poor, and practicing excellent diplomacy. Let us transform our communities in the way that we want our politicians to transform our country. Let us first practice economic reforms in our communities in the way that we want our politicians to influence monetary policy. Let us work on race relations in a way that would be a model that would be fair and right to legislate. Let the politicians take their cues from the Church rather than the other way around.

Religion should absolutely and unequivocally count. The greatest politicians would be the ones who are faithful with the authority given to them, and yet recognize that the greatest authority is not found in the halls of Washington, but in the power of God.

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