Ash & I were listening to “Fresh Air” with Terri Gross last night on NPR. (If we happen to be in the car at 7PM, we used to tune into KFI-AM640 to be blessed by “The Phil Hendrie Show,” which has recently been replaced by the rantings of John Zigler. What a loss. So now it’s Terri Gross.) Terri interviewed former Senator John Danforth (R-MO), who has recently published a couple op-eds in the NYTimes, criticizing his fellow Republicans for transforming “our party into the political arm of conservative Christians.”
Sen. Danforth is also an ordained Episcopal priest, and I think he has some pretty compelling insights into the dangers of any political party aligning itself too closely with a religious viewpoint. You can listen to the interview HERE.
“Justice Sunday” confirmed it for me: the Church has whored itself to the Republican party. Now realize, vote Republican and worked for a Republican Senator, so I generally identify politically with the GOP. What pisses me off is when the Christians (particularly right-of-center ones…) think that somehow the country is going to change from the top down through legislation.
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Ummm…I’m pretty sure Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven (HIS reality) and the power of that kingdom to yeast, something so insignificant and normal and ordinary. But the power unleashed in that very simple, ordinary element brings about a transformation of the flour/dough. The same is true with Love. Love is very normal, simple, ordinary, PLAIN, but when it is unleashed through our actions and the gosepl, lives and the world are transformed.
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I wish the Church would recognize this and begin to be the Church, rather than a particular party…
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be His,
jeremy
Kant drew some interesting distinctions in his writing between duty to something, and adherence to something, particularly in the sense of moral code. Duty is an obligatory relationship, where one thing has a right and authority over the other. Adherence is a volitional relationship, where one thing parallels another not out of duty or obligation, but because of common purposes, or common values, or common systems.
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Believers should be adherents to political organizations only to the extent that those organizations represent the values and purposes of their spiritual convictions, which have prior claim. It must never be a relationship of duty, only of adherence in the pure Kantian sense. When those parallel tracks diverge, it is the political that must be left behind, and the spiritual that must be embraced. This is, of course, true on both sides of the aisle.