It is neither a candidate’s religious background nor lack of religious background that makes a difference to me in determining for whom I vote. I care about HOW a candidate uses religion. Religion/Spirituality is one of the most powerful forces in understanding the human experience – specifically our interior life - and it can be used in intellectually, morally, and psychologically destructive ways or ways that profoundly enhance human development. I would hesitate to vote for any one who claims to be religious who uses religion to simply legitimate or justify his or her political views whether on the right or the left. The God I experience and doubt is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, neither a conservative nor a liberal and surely not a partisan ideologue. God is not some larger than life politician in the sky confirming our policy decisions however “perfect” we think those policies are and however religious/spiritual we think we are.
Genuine religious faith and spiritual experience does not simply affirm what we already believe but destabilizes and challenges our inevitably limited human perspectives, whether they be liberal or conservative, that we attach ourselves to as if they are gospel. I am suspect of politicians who know exactly the political positions of the God in whom they believe (and not surprisingly they are always the positions they and their parties already seem to hold) and who use religion to dismiss people with whom they disagree and to divide people from each other. To imagine that one knows precisely what God thinks (or for atheists precisely what the God they do not believe in thinks) about the issues that most divide us as a nation is the classic definition of hubris. And these days, the quality we need least in a president (besides being against cutting edge science, human rights, health care for children and changing one’s mind…) is the arrogance of a person (on the right or the left) who confuses his/her own political views with God’s.
The God I experience – a code word for Reality experienced as seamless, spacious, luminous, and interdependent…demands not that I claim my view as absolutely correct (and the louder and nastier I claim this the more I am just revealing my own insecurity about the very view I am promulgating) rather that I specifically wrestle with those views that are contradictory to mine and discover how somehow they are contained in The One.
I want a candidate whose religious faith or whose atheist proclamations embody humility, affirm limits, admit not knowing, embrace uncertainty and nuance, celebrate our finitude, and recognize that Truth with a capital T is something never found once and for all but is an ever expanding category to be continuously sought, developed, revealed, unveiled and built upon. I am leery of politicians who use God as a trump God or who use God (or the belief in No-God) to judge others rather than to judge themselves. I do not care what religion candidates hold by. I care that the way they do religion reflects the highest, most spiritually evolved stages of whatever religion they hold (religion that transcends and includes all our fragmentary and partial perspectives) rather than the literalist, fear-based, punitive, and absolutist expressions of religion that, while also reflecting a partial truth, have become the dominant religion of the public square.
I would like to hear, just once, a candidate get up and say about a deeply divisive issue, “After much study and conversation with people (in religious language “images of God”) who have views with which I deeply disagree and after listening for and grasping the partial truth in their views, and after serious deliberation about this divisive issue, I have come to the following conclusion and as a sincerely and genuinely religious person it is not that I am certain that this conclusion is what God wants rather I hope and pray that I am on God’s side. I am waiting for some politician to exhibit this kind of religious personality. In the meantime, I will settle for politicians simply not pandering and making God so small that believing in such a god is as futile and impoverished as believing in politicians.
P.S. John McCain ought to be ashamed of himself. In a country that has never elected a woman, Black, Hispanic, or Jew to the Presidency, in its entire history, the chances of a Muslim be elected these days is non-existent. So making this comment seems like a sleazy way to garner votes from a constituency that hates Islam/Muslims. Of course, it may actually just be a sad moment of candor that reflects a complete ignorance of the Constitution (there is no mention of God, Jesus or Christianity in this secular document and it explicitly states that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States) or a genuine expression of discomfort with millions of American citizens - either way alarmingly inappropriate for a presidential candidate. Given that McCain, no doubt, is a decent and moral person his uneasiness about his fellow citizens because they are Muslim is frightening and invites us all to look within and ask whether we have allowed legitimate fear of Islamic terrorism to overwhelm the best of what this country stands for.
One last comment – for those who believe this is a Christian nation the following report about George Washington, the father of this country, should be illuminating.
"George Washington's practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because he was not himself a Christian... He repeatedly declined the church's sacraments. Never did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary... Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative." [New York Press, 1987, pp. 174-175]
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