Faith is getting political

Or is it…politics is getting faith?

Well, some politicians are at least looking hard at ‘the religion thing’ all of a sudden for whatever value it may hold in this election season. Have you noticed the onrush of media stories lately about this? What’s up with that, high profile Democrats talking about religion in daily news stories? It’s clear that the so-called ‘values voters’ (so dubbed by the baffled media after the last election) are voters the Democrats value and want to claim in this upcoming election.

So I’m going to parse apart these speeches and declarations and their media coverage here in the weeks to come. But for an exercise in critical thinking (which our universities are not teaching so well anymore, though THAT’s for another post…) let’s just look at a couple of items.

Like this from a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

Interestingly, in response to an important survey question: Do you or do you not need religious faith in order to be a moral human being? Barely a majority of the U.S. population — 51 percent — answers that question in the affirmative; among liberals the answer is 15 percent; among social conservatives it’s 61 percent. And that is, I think, a very important, foundational difference between people who think of themselves as liberals, modernists, progressives, on the one hand, and those who think of themselves as traditionalists, on the other. On social issues, such as gay marriage, the Ten Commandments, flag display, abortion, you can see they expected huge differences. 

That was part of the transcript posted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center folks who participated in the forum.  

And then there’s this opinion piece published by the Chicago Sun-Times July 18, 2006 by Jesse Jackson, warning Democrats to avoid embracing a “false piety” for political purposes. He rightly asserts that “faith is not a political posture.”

But he goes on to say:

Values are not expressed by the paraphernalia of faith. Values are expressed by action. An abolitionist fighting to end slavery expresses faith. A slave owner attending a church that excludes slaves from attendance reflects bad faith.

Exactly, just like a pro-lifer fighting to end abortion and embryonic destruction for stem cell research expresses the faith that all life is from God and therefore sacred from its conception as human life. And an abortion/embryonic stem cell backer attending church — and receiving Communion in the Catholic Church — reflects seriously bad faith and morally flawed views of the ultimate human rights Christ preached and commanded followers to practice.

The Reverend Jackson continues: 

The Bible is clear about this. Faith is substance, not posturing. I was hungry and you fed me. Naked and you clothed me. Imprisoned and you comforted me. The Bible calls us to act, not simply to pray in public…The parable of the Good Samaritan comes to us through the ages because it calls us to express our faith in action. We are judged by how we treat the least of these, not how pious we are in the first pew.

Right. So I have a question. If the very small, underdeveloped and vulnerable unborn humans in the womb are not the least among us, who is?