Reflection This Week
POLITICS AND RELIGION

     One of the people on my “Most Admired” list is Bill Moyers: former Press Secretary to President Johnson, PBS host, prolific author, humanitarian – I could go on – but most of all, faithful Christian and a kind loving human being, which should be redundant, but which, sometimes, sadly, is an oxymoron. I have never come away from reading something by him or about him or an interview with him without being enlightened, educated and enthused.

     In a recent interview in The Christian Century (4/17/07) Moyers is commenting on religion and politics and opines this: “Politics is about settling differences while religion is about maintaining them.” As much as I want to disagree, I cannot. I love politics and I love religion. I am a political junkie and religion is in my bones. I want to believe that religion should always trump politics, that religion should be about settling differences and that politics (Red State vs. Blue State, Liberal vs. Conservative) should be about maintaining, even emphasizing differences.  

     Yet, Moyers is correct, unfortunately. There are so many religions around, certainly more than there are political parties. There may be one faith as far as Christianity is concerned, but there are hundreds, thousands of Christian religions: Episcopal, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Evangelical, and so forth. And in each one of these religions there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of subsets. They exist not to settle differences that arise between the various religions/denominations or within them but precisely to maintain those differences.

      As much as Jesus prayed that we all may be one, we are not, nor do we ever intend to be. If we wanted to be one, we would find ways to settle our differences rather than spend our time and energy fostering, maintaining and defending them. Politics is the art of compromise, finding ways to come together to work together for the benefit of all. Religion is the art of finding that which divides and separates us and making certain that that happens.

     This is not to say that unity is uniformity. There are many right ways to worship, to serve, to preach and teach, to use our resources. There are many wrong ways as well. The issue is that while we have more in common with one another as Christians, even as human beings, we tend to stress our differences often to the exclusion of extending and expanding our commonalties.

     When we expend most or all of our energies justifying our position, that which makes us different and, at least in our own mind, thus better, the real work of living out our faith in the here-and-now, one-on-one, does not get done. It can’t. We’re worn out simply trying to maintain our differences rather than setting them aside to live out Matthew 25, to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals.

     It is a sad indictment of our faith in Jesus when we realize that even though it often takes politicians a very long time to do the right thing, to reach a compromise so that something can be done, it takes an even longer time for us Christians of differing religions to do the same. We are often our own worst enemy, especially in our own denominations. We would rather maintain our differences, create those divisions, rather than set aside those differences to well.  WJP