Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - Saturday September 08th
What are some things that it is not polite to talk about? I wager politics ranks up there in most people’s minds.
You may have heard in the news that the United Church took a stand on the whole Israel/Palestine thing lately. To narrow it down to the way it gets reported, the church agreed to boycott products made in Israeli Settlements in Palestine.
This made national and international news and managed to bring cries of anti-Semitism, of stepping over boundaries, of all sorts of things.
Whether right or wrong, the most interesting complaint I heard was that the church had no right being political; which is a statement that has nothing to do with the specifics of this debate, but rather about the role of the church.
Really, the church should not be political? Have we not “always” been political from Jesus on up? Jesus complained bitterly about social conditions in the Middle East. He always talked about how we needed to treat widows and orphans better. Before Jesus the Old Testament is full of statutes and capitulations about how to run countries and how to treat slaves. We are nothing if not firmly embedded in a tradition that sees no difference between politics and faith.
Skip ahead to the modern era… it was Jesuit priests who first made inroads in colonizing North America and dealing with native populations, albeit not often with the best intentions. The churches built the hospitals; we founded all the universities; and we created the social safety net.
What was the organization that started the movement to end slavery? The Methodist church. Who were most of the people behind the civil rights movement in the United States? Baptist ministers. Who worked for child labour laws, alcohol moderation, welfare and universal health care? The church.
It is not like these sentiments are out of the blue. Christians have always worked for social change; so have Muslims in their own worlds, so have the Buddhists; who, I might add, were on the forefront of the protest movement for Vietnam.
So why all of a sudden should the church have nothing to say to the world?
I adhere to the idea that the world, according to religious tradition, is supposed to be good; and that all people, according to religious tradition, are supposed to be equal. Until such a time as that seems to be the way the world is working, I am going to stand up and complain.
And churches rarely take naïve stands – just unpopular ones because we are looking at things like environment, or equality, or justice over some of the more popular things like nation building or economics.
But my real point in the end is this – everyone should be political. Whether it is getting involved in the local school board, figuring out what Fracking is and why we should care, or voting in a new regime… the earth and all that is in it are our responsibility, each and every one of us.
And the real sadness is that most of us coast through life unaware and uncaring about what is going on around us. How else do you explain that only about 60% of us even bother to vote?
Saying “don’t be political” is the same as saying, do not care about anything around you and how it is working and why. Everything in the world is in some way or another political; because we all belong to systems and those systems are all run by someone.
The United Church might take some stands that garner bad press. We might seem like we are stepping on toes; but at least we are taking stands. So, I would argue are other churches. The real issue is not that a church can and should be political; it is why we are not more political.
