God and Politics

There seems to be a lot of discussion in the media today about God and what role, if any, he would take in today's politics. First we have this report from Marty Peretz, a lefty from The New Republic, regarding comments made by John Kerry:

Continuing his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, John F. Kerry addressed (by telephone) a conference convened by that racist hustler and prevaricator Al Sharpton who won, if I'm not mistaken, exactly one delegate at the party convention in 2004. According to The New York Times yesterday, in what appeared to be rather inchoate remarks, Kerry used Iraq as a trope but offered a ten-point plan for the nation from soup to nuts ... well, from getting Osama bin Laden to legislating lobby reform. The Times alluded to Kerry's well-known verbosity. So it wasn't surprising that he also went off and said, "Not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicare." I'd actually go Kerry one further: I doubt that Jesus ever mentioned Medicare at all. Still, it's probably significant that some presidential aspirants--Kerry, for one--want to demonstrate that there are among them some real live Democrats for God.

No Medicare in the Bible? Boy, that's hard to believe. Maybe it's in one of those books that only the Catholics (like John Kerry) recognize.

Secondly, we have a lengthy piece entitled Christ Among the Partisans in the NY Times (you may have to register to read it).

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.

This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.

Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.

I'm not sure I buy all of the author's arguments, but it is interesting reading. I do think that at times religious selfrighteousness has attempted to impose things on the country and the culture that clearly didn't belong in the realm of politics (the whole prayer in school argument, among others). Christians are sometimes our own worst enemy when it comes to mixing religion and politics, and instead of attracting people to our positions, we drive them away (sort of in the same way TV preachers with purple hair and fat-infused lips drive sane people away from religion).

With the coming Da Vinci Code movie (a good series about that is here), and the current noise about the Gospel of Judas (good posts here, here, here and here), I think we'll see a lot more discussion of religion in the media, though most of it will be from the angle that somehow these new "revelations" disprove Christianity as it has been practiced for 2000 years. There won't be as much attention to those who aren't buying into the myths promoted by these new media darlings.