A member of Trinity United Church of Christ, the church once led by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and where Senator Obama is a member, told me there are “spies” among them in the pews, strangers who take notes during the service and try to record the message.
Check it out for yourself. Go to the Trinity UCC website, select "Why The Black Church Won't Shut Up!", and listen to Rev. Otis Moss politely ask that there be "no recording equipment." He repeats over and over, "We are in worship. We are in worship." When visitors are asked to stand, you can see those with paper and pencil in hand. Are these folks members of the press or political operatives? Impossible to know if they don't, as Rev. Moss requests, sign in.
This is what happens when politics intrudes into the sanctuary of the church, a sacred space.
Another church member told me that before worship last week, he told his pastor, “Don’t say anything I’ll have to answer for if I run for public office!” No, this church was not Trinity, but a large, predominantly white church on the north side of Chicago.
The freedom of the pulpit, the freedom of religion itself is imperiled in this feeding frenzy about Senator Obama’s pastor and his church. As a fellow member of the United Church of Christ and a UCC pastor, I am concerned about what this is doing to this church of our denomination, but the issue is also much wider.
Challenging your pastor’s freedom in the pulpit is bad. Spying on people at prayer is reprehensible.
Is this what the assaults of the past decades on the wall of separation between church and state has led us to? Is there no such thing as sacred space anymore?
“Obama isn’t running for God,” was the title of a well-written letter to the editor in this morning’s Chicago Tribune. Exactly. These attacks on a candidate’s church and pastoral leadership are way, way out of bounds for a country founded on the principle that there is “no religious test for office.”
The liberty of which we are so justly proud as Americans is itself in peril in these vicious attacks. The “founding fathers,” on the other hand, were fierce in their demand for freedom of religion, because they knew what happened when religion is used as a political weapon. They had seen it happen in Europe and in Europe’s endless religious wars. Samuel Adams wrote “Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation and amidst the noise and violence of faction.”
“The noise and violence of faction” that results from mixing religion and politics was evident to Adams in the late 18th century and he didn’t even have to contend with YouTube, the ceaseless drone of talk radio and the 24-hour news cycle. I said to a reporter earlier this week that I thought it was fortunate there was no YouTube during the first century CE. A clip of Jesus overturning the tables in the temple and driving out the moneychangers would have played over and over and over on the Internet, and nobody would have paid any attention to the Sermon on the Mount.
A church is sacred space and to violate that space by engaging in “Swift-boat” type distortions and even spying is un-American. This is not us, this is not the bedrock principle of our founders and those leaders we have most respected. Our churches and our faith commitments are out of bounds in the tumult of political contests.
There is a wonderful story told of Abraham Lincoln when he was campaigning for a seat in the House of Representatives in Illinois. Lincoln was running against the Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by Cartwright. At a dramatic moment, the Reverend thundered, “All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.” Only Lincoln kept his seat. “May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?” the minister asked, frowning. “I am going to Congress” was Lincoln’s reply.
That’s what it looks like when the sacred space of worship and the secular space of politics are each respected.
Let us pull back from this disastrous course of mixing religion and politics before we destroy something so unique and precious it has been the envy of the whole world.
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