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.

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Albert Einstein said it best, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Einstein understood what today’s “leading” scientists (at least those who write anti-religion best sellers) and today’s “leading” public religious figures (at least those who proclaim to know precisely what God wants with regard to public policy) sadly prove in their dismissal, denial, and rejection of each others truths. It seems like the responses to the question of the relationship between science and religion, that take up the most oxygen these days, are either fundamentalist scientific views (Dawkins and Hitchens and co.) that claim religion is a superstitious relic from the past or a survival trick that nature uses to reproduce the species or the religious fundamentalist view (Dobson and Perkins and co.) that science is part of the fallen world and has no access to the Real truth. As entertaining as the fight between these two fundamentalisms is it has led to an impoverishment of public conversation – a disenchanted, flattened experience of the world on the one side and an anti-science literalism that claims dogma and mythic beliefs as truth on the other.

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Can religion cure the world’s biggest social problems?! Who are we kidding? The major
challenge to religion, in this next period of human history, at least at this moment, is not whether religion can cure the world’s biggest social problems but whether it will make things incredibly worse and I say this as a religious person (an observant Jew) with a disciplined spiritual practice. After the past three hundred years of modernity in which, for good reason, religion was minimized, privatized, and dismissed, religion has reemerged as a central force. This is not surprising, for at the same time that modernity radically questioned religion’s truth claims and thankfully liberated human reason from the superstition, literalness, and overextending of religion, which led to miraculous and revolutionary achievements in our ability to master the material world, e.g., the cure of diseases and the amazing increase in life span, it also resulted in a world disenchanted and disqualified - a wasteland (in T.S. Eliot’s apt description) that left human beings bereft of a sense of meaning, depth, and wholeness – precisely the purview of religion and spirituality and so we have a reawakening. But it sure does seem that in this initial period of the reincarnation of religion, that religion world wide has done more damage than good – whether by inspiring suicide bombers, leading and inflaming culture wars, stopping scientific advances, or promulgating nasty moral judgments about fellow citizens especially in the area of sexuality.

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Ah…the recently invented liberal war on Christmas, a war created and nurtured by a few conservative media folks like O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Malkin, with the support of religious or is it political leaders like Dobson, Robertson, and Bauer, who seem to like nothing more than to exacerbate the animosity between Americans and exacerbate a culture war that itself is a product of a minority of ideologues on both sides. What a shame that a season that should be about Light and Love and Life has become one more place for our religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists to play out their insecurities and fears, and their inability to even imagine that there is some partial truth in the opinions of those with whom they disagree. It seems that the only way those inflaming our culture wars can be right is if those with whom they disagree are not only completely wrong but iare seen, in some paroxysm of paranoia, as out to destroy them and so need to be destroyed. Of course, the fierceness of their absolutism simply masks their own repressed uncertainty about their own views.

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How extremely sad that there are Christians in this country who feel so insecure about their own faith and so under attack that they need a group of politicians (and specifically a group that collectively has the lowest approval rating in recent history) to affirm the importance of their religion. People who confidently subscribe to their religion no doubt already know and appreciate the significance of their faith and don’t need a congressional resolution to affirm its importance. So this resolution reflects at best a deep lack of faith and at worst a nasty attempt (symbolic of course because this resolution has no legal or practical effect) to make non-Christians feel that this is a Christian country. Contrary to this resolution, Christianity, surely in the form observed by the lobbyists for this resolution, played little role in the founding of this great nation.

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Sadly, in every cultural war issue in this country religion is used by people in low level obnoxious ways to legitimate and affirm their already existing political, moral, and psychological positions.

So if we are politically liberal then not surprisingly we seem to cite precisely those religious texts, principles, and values that support our liberal views and if we are conservative then not surprisingly we seem to cite precisely those religious texts, principles, and values that support our conservative views. (And this is especially so with regard to issues of sexuality.) And what is worse is how each side believes that legitimating their already existing view with religious sources is some sort of trump card rather than seeing how it is simply using religion as bad apologetics, making religion irrelevant and insuring that religion contributes no added and desperately needed wisdom or insight to the public conversation.

Just once it would be refreshing for a religious person to say, “In wrestling with my religious tradition, which reminds me that every human being is an Image of God, my preexisting view of things has been shaken and I see a bit more clearly that I need to find and include the partial truth in the view of my fellow human beings who I have always thought were dead wrong.”

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