July 2008 Archives

Earlier this week, a group of thirty or so young Jews, Christians, and Muslims came together to participate in a voter registration drive in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.  Working in partnership with the local ACORN branch, the interfaith activists received training on non-partisan voter engagement, participated in conversation about the spiritual underpinnings of their civic commitments, and canvassed in small interfaith teams.

This program was initiated by the Righteous Indignation Project, a progressive Jewish justice program aimed at mobilizing the Jewish community to voice issues of social justice and environmental responsibility as religious and ethical priorities during this historic election season. 

We invited our friends and allies from Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries and the Muslim American Society, Boston Chapter, to join us knowing that they share the conviction that to create a just society, we must work to involve as many people as possible in the democratic process.  We chose to canvass in Dorchester because this urban neighborhood, with its large low-income and minority populations, has had lower voter turnout than other, more affluent areas of Boston, and is in great need of quality government services.  

As Mimi Ramos, State Head Organizer for ACORN commented, "Some people in this neighborhood simply lack the knowledge about the voting process, but many others have given up on the process.  It is hard to believe that your vote matters when you suffer from discrimination and poverty and are trying to be a responsible citizen.  We have to help empower people, reminding them that without their votes we will not break the cycle of injustice and despair."

I was proud to be a part of this program not only because of the voters we were able to register, but also because of the positive relationships we were able to forge among people of different faiths and ethnicities in just two hours.  By coming together for dialogue and action, we bound ourselves to one another through a shared commitment to religion and social justice.  By the end of the afternoon, it was clear to everyone present that we would resume this sacred work in the near future. 

As I reflect on the voter registration experience, I think of Thich Nhat Hanh's wonderful little book Peace is Every Step.  The title encapsulates the spirit of our Dorchester experience, as people from diverse backgrounds came together seeking to advance the cause of justice one step at a time.

When people talk about radical homosexuals, they mean me. When they talk about left-wing, socialist feminists, that would be me. And when they talk about Christian voters, that's  me, too. 

So I'm driving along yesterday with my friend and colleague Paul: he's a gay left-winger, too, and a priest at the church where I'm the director of pastoral care. We're on our way to a funeral; Paul's wearing his collar and I'm in a nice black pastor-lady suit, and we're talking about the elections.

Both of us--full disclosure, we're big Obama supporters--are filled with dread. "It's just August, and already I'm struggling with how to preach in the election season," I say. Most of our members would describe themselves as liberal, but there's a sizeable contingent of Republicans, and more diversity of political views than many churches have. "Really," I say,  "all I want to tell them is to turn off the damn television."

The "p" word has had a tortured history with Muslims, as it does with many other religious communities. Ironically, it tends to work as a better marker to many non-Muslims of the social and political commitments of the Muslims who self-identify as progressive. For too many Muslims, the term progressive has often been a cover for overtly secular approaches, a tendency to operate outside the "tradition", or an insufficient grounding in the legal and spiritual traditions of Islam.

This is part of the difficulty of Muslims, like myself, who simultaneously embrace the terms progressive and religious. This was one reason that many of us came together to put together a volume titled:  Progressive Muslims:  On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism.  For us, our concern for the wellbeing of the whole of humanity, and an unrelenting commitment to emancipatory movements, arises out of our religious tradition. It is the very notions of serving as God's agents (khalifa), being held accountable for our actions, and speaking prophetically to the false gods of Market and Empire, Exclusivism and injustice, that inspire us.  In another age, the false gods were made out of wood and stone.  Today they are market realities and the violence of the military-industrial complex.  Part of our radical monotheism is saying "no" emphatically to these false idols that ask for our ultimate commitment so that we can say "yes" to divine Unity and the oneness of humanity.

On the other hand, there is a hard secular critique from the Left that tends to distrust, fundamentally, (m)any religious voices that identify as progressive.  Quite often, this center around issues of gender and sexuality. I both understand that distrust and sympathize with it, even as I point out to my secular friends the large number of emancipatory movements that have been grounded in religious traditions.   

So I find that we are always moving back and forth:  When speaking with our community, it is the emphasis that in fact we are and continue to be rooted in our tradition (and our community), while in speaking with more secular progressives that we are somehow legit. This going back and forth is draining, yet necessary.   My concern, ultimately, is that the justifying back and forth does not take the place of what needs to be done:  the doing. Ultimately love is a verb, not a sentiment. Justice is a relationship, not an ideal.

I am not a big believer in litmus tests, as ultimately the lists always shrink and expand depending on whom one is speaking with, but here are a few relationships that I always look to in navigating these tricky terrains of being religious and progressive:

·         Is there an unrelenting commitment to the wellbeing and uplifting of the whole of humanity, where the wellbeing of no one community is allowed to come at the expense of another?

·         Are we talking about merely being nice, or are we actually emancipating, liberating?

·         Is there a recognition that one-fifth of God's children live on a dollar a day?   For us, this is not merely an economic or political problem, it is a profound moral and religious crisis.

·         Is there an oppositional stance vis-à-vis colonialism and occupation?  Is there a recognition of the lingering wounds of colonialism, and the fact that for millions of human beings, these wounds are fresh, on-going, and not healed?

·         Are we drawing inspiration from our religious traditions, even as we object to certain practices and interpretations of those same traditions?

·         Do we speak prophetically to/with our communities? 

·         Do we, always, always, speak against the falsest of gods, those of the Market, and the Empire?

·         Do we engage in self-criticism, and listen to the criticism of those who speak out of concern and shared values?

·         Is there more emphasis on doing, and not just thinking/talking/developing new "theologies"?

·         Lastly, for me, there has to be a big dose of humility and compassion in our deals with one another. How we live with each other has to be as lofty and luminous as the ideals we espouse.

Just last week my cousin from Texas, whom I have not heard from for many years, forwarded me one of those emails. You know the ones that so many of us have gotten with the smears and lies about Senator Barack Obama:

"Barack Obama supports infanticide." "Barack Obama was sworn in on the Koran."  "Barack Obama is the anti-Christ"  ...really, the anti-Christ?

You might have heard these rumors them from friends, family, neighbors, others at your church. You might have heard them on your local Christian radio station, or seen them in your hometown paper.  But most likely you have gotten in the in your email inbox. 

That is why the Matthew 25 Network has launched a new website to respond to these smears: PutAwayFalsehood.com. On the site you can see the Falsehoods and the Facts, and even use our online tool to respond directly to the emails you've found in your Inbox. 

Scripture tells us, even when we disagree, to "clothe [our]selves with humility toward one another" (1 Pet. 5:5) and to "put away falsehood" (Eph. 4:25). This website is our best attempt to respond to the distortions and misleading information being circulated within our community about Senator Obama.  

So often the world sees these kinds of misleading attacks coming from the Christian community. It is in part of what has given a Christian witness in politics a bad name.

Can we lift up a better kind of Christian witness in politics?  What do you think?  

Leave me your comments here.

Plainly, no one can confidently predict how large a factor racist attitudes will play in the November presidential election.  In the privacy of the voting booth, people's fears and prejudices may be more powerful than the marked (and widely documented) shifts in both American law and American culture these last 40 years or so.  How can they be persuaded to act on their best instincts and not their basest?

Here, it is well to recall that part of Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview of 1976 that almost derailed his campaign:

The Bible says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.... This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it.

The significance of Carter's words goes well beyond their role in an election.  What Carter was saying, I believe, is that all of us have lust in our hearts.  The only relevant question we are entitled to ask is whether we act on that lust or keep it  in check.  The only demand we are entitled to make of ourselves as of others is that we not behave lustfully.

Any effort to persuade voters who are bigots that they are morally wanting is likely to fail.  If they've not long since gotten that message, the hope that they will at this late date experience attitudinal change is almost surely misplaced.

It will be difficult to refrain from condemnation, but useless to engage in it.  What we can say to such people, quite explicitly, is that they are entitled to their private sentiments - but that they are not permitted to let those sentiments determine their vote.  There's a huge difference between lust in the heart and lust in the public square; there's as great a difference between bigotry in the head and bigotry in the polling place.