An election day story

Gertrude Baines voted for Barack Obama yesterday, just like more than 63 million other Americans. No big deal, right?

Well, it's no big deal except that Gertrude is 114 years old.

She's the third-oldest person in the world, born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. An African-American, Gertrude is actually the daughter of freed slaves. The significance of her vote, perhaps more than any other cast in the nation yesterday, should not escape us.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of Gertrude's vote in this story. Check it out. Great stuff.

Hey, Arkansas: Just Say No

Say no to the lottery amendment today, that is!

This is my one piece of direct political advocacy for the election today, largely because for Christians I think this is a completely unambiguous issue.

Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has been pushing for this amendment as a way to fund education. Halter has been trying to dupe Arkansans in the same way that lotteries do: telling them that it is possible to get rich quickly and painlessly, solving all your problems. For Halter, the issue is state-funded education. For lotteries, the issue is life in general.

But lotteries are a bad, bad idea. Here are some reasons why:

1) Lotteries are equivalent to a regressive tax on the poor, who buy them in inordinate quantities relative to the wealthy. I see this everyday in gas stations in North Carolina, and it is depressing.

2) Lotteries hold out a false sense of hope and teach a poor work ethic. It is a terrible lesson for the children of our society, and it teaches the foolishness that you can 'get something for nothing.'

3) Lotteries crack the door open for other types of legalized gambling. And with expanded legalized gambling comes organized drime, drug trafficking, alcoholism, and other social problems.

4) The United Methodist Church holds a sensible anti-gambling position. Here it is from Paragraph 163G of The United Methodist Book of Discipline:

"Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unneccessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling - including public lotteries - as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government."

Ultimately, lotteries are ways for cowardly politicians to try to solve difficult problems that they don't want to solve through either a)tax increases or b)budget cuts. So their answer is to introduce a societal practice that has been shown to have ill effects on many different levels while often not solving the very problems they were designed to solve in the first place. Politicians like Halter need to be rewarded for their poor leadership by being voted out of office at the next opportunity. But first, their bad ideas have to be voted down.

If you are a resident of the state of Arkansas, please vote 'no' to the lottery measure and encourage others to do the same.

My Obama problem

The presidential election is less than two weeks away, and I still don't know who I am voting for - or even whether I'll be voting. I've struggled with whether to bring this up in a public way on my blog. But a civic forum at Duke Divinity School a couple of nights ago convinced me that I should, and so I am asking for your help.

Please read the following with an open mind (even if you don't agree with me on the issue in question). And if you can help me to reason through this, I would greatly appreciate it. Let me also say that I am revealing a lot more of my political views than I would normally do in so public a setting, so please take that into account if you choose to respond.

My Obama problem is with the issue of abortion. I am a pro-vita Christian, which means that I am ardently pro-life in all of the social/moral issues that tend to confront us. (In this blog post last year, I proposed the term 'pro-vita' as a way to identify those Christians who are both anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, issues that typically divide liberals and conservatives. I would also add an extreme reluctance to engage in war, which I understand to be the very minimum in Jesus' admonition, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Maybe that just makes me Catholic. Whatever.)

During my time as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was converted to the anti-death penalty position and demonstrated publicly against it in Nashville. I have been generally pro-life on the abortion issue for many years, but during my time at Duke, this fairly passive pro-life position has been transformed so that I view the abortion issue as indicative of the whole Christian view on the sanctity of life (That is, I tend to think that Christians who rather blithely describe themselves as pro-choice are either: a) unreflective regarding the doctrine of creation; or b) simply inconsistent in their Christian self-understanding due usually to an idolatrous loyalty to the radical privatization of American individualism and the consumerist commodification of all things, including babies).

For what it's worth, I am grateful to both Vanderbilt and Duke for the impacts they have had on me regarding issues of life, and I think it the particular ways they influenced me are a testament to those schools' particular strengths.

Here's how I understand my Obama problem. As a Christian, I see one of the greatest duties of politics as the amelioration of suffering for the citizens of the body politic. (A more optimistic view might say that politics should promote the flourishing of life, but my understanding of the pervasiveness of sin is too great to allow me to make such a statement.) At this point in history, it seems like the Democrats are poised to be much more effective than the Republicans at this task. For one, I think the legacy of the Bush administration (and the complicity of the pre-2006 Republican Congress in its policies) discredits the Republican Party generally. And secondly, I find the McCain/Palin campaign's proposals to help us recover (from war, from economic disaster, from environmental degradation) to be fairly unconvincing.

On the contrary, I think the Democrats are more in touch with some of our pressing problems, including healthcare, the environment, the economy, and U.S. relationships with other nations. Plus, I like Obama. True, I wish he had more national political experience. But I think he reasons well (one of the greatest political skills required of a president), and I think he will surround himself with those who can help make up for some of his areas of inexperience (e.g., his selection of Joe Biden to bolster his understanding of foreign policy). You can go down the list of issues, and in this election at least, I will check off with the Democrats on just about every issue - save one.

But that one is a big one. Depending on whether you go with the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute figures, there are between 850,000 and 1.3 million abortions in the United States each year. And if you regard each one of those abortions as the taking of human life in a way that transgresses the law of love as given to us by Christ, then the issue of abortion looms at least as large as any other single political issue. At the civic forum at Duke earlier this week, one of the professors present said that the interaction between secular politics and the church should work to make both spheres more aware of the outcast and marginalized among us, to the end that they are seen as human beings. I tend to agree with that statement, especially as it relates to the most marginalized persons among us - those in the womb, who are so defenseless that they cannot even cry out in anguish.

The reason this becomes a very pressing issue in this election has everything to do with the Supreme Court. The Court's two oldest members are among its most liberal - John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If they retire in the next four years (and it seems almost certain that Stevens will), and they are replaced with conservatives, it could be mean the end of Roe v. Wade and the return of the moral debate around abortion to state legislatures, where it belongs. There the witness of Christians can actually make a difference in the fight for life (in the legal realm).

[On the likelihood of the next president having the opportunity to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court, see this NY Times editorial. The Times is clearly not where I am on the issue of Roe v. Wade, but I agree with it on the point that the next president may have a significant impact on the direction of the court for years to come. For the record, the attitude of the most conservative justices on the Court on the issue habeas corpus has been extremely troubling to me, as we have seen in the legal twilight zone surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In June, the Court upheld habeas corpus for enemy combatants, indicating that it viewed the right to habeas corpus to be universal rather than just confined to U.S. citizens. I agree with that opinion, the passage of which - admittedly - was dependent upon the Court's liberal members.]

In the prospect of judicial appointments lies the real issue, for me, because Obama would probably be the most ardently pro-choice president we have ever had. (For a general op-ed piece on Obama's extreme pro-choice position, see this Michael Gerson column.) Obama's role opposing the Born-Alive Act in the Illinois State Legislature in 2002 and 2003 is generally well-known, but if you aren't aware of it, read this good article written by Robert George and Yuval Levin. It is a shocking story, told with factual detail.

George and Levin explain Obama's opposition to the proposed Born-Alive Act while he was a state senator in Illinois:

"As his original 2002 statements [in the Illinois State Legislature] make clear, [Obama] sought to defeat the Born-Alive Act because he recognized that it bears at least implicitly on the larger question of abortion in America. He seemed to realize that the logical implication of protecting the child born alive after an attempted abortion is that abortion involves taking the life of a child in the womb, and that acknowledging that, even at the extreme margins of the practice of abortion, could put the legitimacy of abortion itself in question. Therefore, Obama chose to defend the widest possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even if that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left to die without even being afforded basic comfort care."

John McCain might well replace Justices Stevens and Ginsburg with judges who would rightly see Roe v. Wade as a perversion of the U.S. Constitution (though I admit that is not a foregone conclusion). Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly replace them with justices at least as liberal as they are. That means that the 2008-2012 period stands as particularly monumental in the history of the abortion issue in this country. And if you think the saving of so many human lives is of paramount importance, that has to impact how you view this election.

And that's what has got me in a quandry. I welcome your comments (and advice).

Civility in political dialogue

In a recent interview with Christianity Today where he talked about his global PEACE Plan, Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren commented on the recent Saddleback Civil Forum that brought Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain together to discuss issues of faith and politics. In the interview, Warren says that he was happy for the way that the two candidates were able to come together to demonstrate their potential leadership. And he says he was interested in trying to "out-think and out-love unbelievers."

This evening I watched almost all of the vice-presidential debate between Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden. I watched the debate with an eye to how each v.p. candidate would characterize the other (and the other's running mate). Of course, the two pointed out the differences with their opponent's ticket - as they should have. But I also noticed that Biden complemented John McCain on a number of issues; it seemed clear that he respected McCain as his long-time Senate colleague. And I noticed that Palin complemented Biden personally on a number of issues, some of them for her own political points but others for seemingly altruistic reasons.

The current campaign - by both parties - has not won high marks for basic political civility. Do you think the debate tonight continued that, or do you think the two veep candidates showed restraint? Is this a superficial concern I'm raising, or does the tone of political discourse in the campaign have real importance for larger national politics?

[Postscript: The post-debate analysis amongst pundits last night seemed to suggest two main things: First, that Biden won the debate and demonstrated a greater knowledge of the policy issues at hand. And secondly, that Palin did a better job than expected, particularly in the wake of her less-than-stellar recent interviews. I agree with both those points, as does David Brooks of the NY Times in his column today.]

What (or who) is driving history?

The presidential campaign season has become an all-consuming affair for many in this country (and particularly for the national media). We were distracted by the Beijing Olympics for awhile, but now that those have passed and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions have redirected our attention, it seems that all eyes are trained on the issue of who our next president will be.

I have friends who are wholehearted Obama supporters and friends who are wholehearted McCain supporters. My own column work and blogging makes me interested in the genre of op-ed writing, so I read a lot of columnists from both the liberal and conservative persuasions as well. (Come to think of it, that would make for an interesting blog post in and of itself: Who are the best op-ed columnists out there?). Inevitably, as we draw closer to the election, the extremist tendency in everyone's views seems to get dialed up.

And here's what gets me about the points of view that I hear in person and read in print -- in the polarized atmosphere of the campaign season, people on both the left and the right tend to view their own party's candidate through rose-colored glasses while seeing the other's side's guy as a laughable, almost-inconceivably bad choice for president. In the process, the Democrats think a President Obama would restore dignity to the Oval Office, repair our damaged reputation overseas, bring in universal healthcare, balance the budget, end the war, and rewrite the tax code to be more just. Meanwhile, Republicans thing a President McCain would reform the damaged Republican party, enable true bipartisan legislative work, protect us from Islamic extremism, face down a resurgent Russia, keep spending low and taxes lower, and make government less intrusive. As the expectations of each side for its candidate get higher, the demonization of the other side gets more intense.

I had a conversation with a good friend today who reminded me of a frequent refrain in the work of John Howard Yoder: The real force driving the world is not the United States of America; it is not freedom & democracy; it is not capitalism; and it is certainly not Barack Obama or John McCain. It is, rather, Jesus Christ. And the body politic that Jesus leads is no nation-state. It is the church.

I don't want to suggest that your vote is not important. And I don't think it is inconsequential that Obama might make a serious difference in the healthcare crisis in this country, or that a McCain appointment to the Supreme Court might bring us one step closer to ending the abortion holocaust in this country. But it is vitally necessary that Christians put this presidential campaign into the proper perspective.

In He Came Preaching Peace (1985), Yoder writes,

"[T]he primacy of Christians' loyalty will show in our sense of ultimate values. In the minds of many serious people, what really matters about human history is the creation of institutions which will create and distribute material abundance, and will guarantee human rights. This is what we read about in the history books. These things do matter. And generally Christians do much to help achieve them. But what matters most, the real reason that God lets time go on, is his calling together of his own people through the witness of the gospel. Not buildlng and protecting a bigger and better democracy, but building the church is God's purpose; not the defeat of communism, or of hunger, but the proclamation of his kingdom and the welding of all kinds of men and women into one new body is what we are here for. Kings and empires have come and gone in times past and shall continue to come and go until the day of Christ's appearing. For Christians to seek any government's interest - even the security and power of peaceable and freedom-loving democracy - at the cost of the lives and security of our brothers and sisters around the world, would be selfishness and idolatry, however much glorified by patriotic preachers and poets.

"Not only in Abraham's time was it a testing of faith to be called by God to abandon all else out of loyalty to that 'city whose builder and maker is God' (Hebrews 11:10). Even more today, when nationalism has become a religion for millions, will the true depth and reality of the Christian profession of church people be tested when they must choose between their earthly and their eternal loyalties.

"What is our allegiance? It is to that people 'elect from every nation, yet one o'er all the earth.' Our nationality? Christian."

We're in for an interesting ride

Today John McCain picked his vice-presidential running mate. Sarah Palin is the 44-year old governor of Alaska, who has strong conservative credentials and has been particularly noted in Alaska for trying to clean up the wasteful spending of her predecessor. A couple of interesting facts: Palin is a former runner-up in the Miss Alaska pageant and her main experience in government prior to her 2006 election as governor was serving as the mayor of tiny Wasilla, AK (pop. 5,470). I've speculated on this blog about whether we should consider Barack Obama to be the first Gen-X presidential candidate; needless to say, if he is, then Palin is certainly the first Gen-X'er to run for veep!

I know nothing about Gov. Palin, but on the surface at least it seems like a brilliant pick. Obama's own relative inexperience in government will keep his campaign from attacking Palin on her scant two years in statewide politics. Her youth and freshness will balance McCain's age (much like Biden's age and gravitas balances Obama's youth). And of course, she gives all those disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters a reason not to vote for Obama/Biden.

Of all the interesting wrinkles that this promises for the campaign, I think the most interesting might be the vice-presidential debate. Whoever would have thought Joe Biden against Sarah Palin??

My, my, we are in for an interesting election season.

Obama: Gen X or not?

In some ways, it's an interesting question. Obama was born in 1961, which by most calculations is at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation.

Susan Ferrechio wrote an article in the Washington D.C. Examiner presenting the point of view that Obama is, indeed, the first Generation X presidential candidate. I actually have a neat connection to this article - I was interviewed for it! And while I'm not 100% sold on the idea that Obama is an X'er, I do find some of Ferrechio's points to be persuasive.

In my own writing on the parameters and characteristics of Generation X (which you can read here, for example), I have suggested that Gen-X really starts at about 1965 and goes until 1982. That allows its beginning to match up with the end of the baby boom (which is, in some sense, a measurable demographic characteristic). But Generation X itself is really more of a cultural concept than a statistical category, so any parameters of its beginning and ending are going to be inexact (Ferrechio, for instance, defines Gen-X as those born between 1961 and 1981, which allows her to include Obama in it).

One way of thinking about Obama's place in Generation X it is to look at his two chief rivals for the presidency - Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and now John McCain in the general election. In some ways, those two are quintessential Baby Boomers from the political left and political right. Clinton swung left after her mid-1960s flirtation with Barry Goldwater; together with husband Bill, she epitomizes the New Democrat of the Baby Boom generation, who consolidated the political and cultural gains of the 1960s and 70s and then moved to the center (particularly on economics) as a strategy to get elected.

McCain, on the other hand, was one of the young men who marched off to Vietnam and had his life determinatively shaped in the process. Regardless of his reputation as a maverick (and his advocacy for such non-conservative policies as campaign finance reform), McCain is more or less a Baby Boomer Republican whose career was largely influenced by Reagan conservatism (i.e., free market economics and a hawkish foreign policy).

As I point out in an earlier blog post, Obama has the distinction of growing up too late to be affected by Vietnam in his formative years. And he was too young for his personality to be forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights struggle as well. His rhetoric is heavy on the language of 'change', even if it's not always clear what he means by that. And he places emphasis on wanting to get past the very partisan divisiveness that the Boomer left and right have been embroiled in for the past several years. So in many ways, Obama's candidacy signals a cultural shift, even if he belongs chronologically to the last few years of the Baby Boomer generation.

A lot of this is just a matter of interpretation. As with all cultural notions, there aren't really any statistics to employ. I'll admit that, if Obama wins in November, his very presidency will undoubtedly have a big impact on how Generation X is defined. At any rate, it's good food for thought during while the Democratic National Convention is going on.

Obama as the Democratic nominee

As the results come in for the final Democratic primaries of the season, CNN is projecting that Barack Obama is going to have enough delegates to push him over the top in the race for the Democratic nomination. That means that Senator Obama is, in fact, the presumptive nominee from the Democratic Party for president of the United States. That, in and of itself, is a hugely historic moment. Whether you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, or something else, the fact that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee for president in the general election is (as Wolf Blitzer just mentioned) an example of "history unfolding" in our nation's long political story.

This blog is called Gen-X Rising, and it purports to comment on issues concerning Gen-X'ers and their connections to faith, church, and community. One of the CNN commentators made a really interesting comment just a few minutes ago when he compared Sen. Obama to recent presidential candidates like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush. He identified all those guys as 'Baby Boomers' and he said something to the effect that "Obama is something different. He comes after all those guys." The commentator pointed to all the questions about the Vietnam war that have followed those other candidates throughout the years, and he suggested that, because such a question does not apply to Obama (who was too young for Vietnam), he is in another category. This commentator did not mention Generation X, but that is the group he was presumably talking about.

That leads to a question: Is Barack Obama a Baby Boomer or a Gen-X'er?

Most estimates of the years that encompass the Baby Boomers look at those people born from around 1946 to 1964/1965. Unlike the difference between Generation X and the Millennial Generation (which is purely based on a distinction of perceived cultural separation and the standard measure of 18 to 20 years for a generation), the Baby Boomer generation is actually based on demographics. When American G.I.'s returned from World War II, there was a sharp increase in the number of births in this country (a trend that probably had as much to do with the end of the Great Depression as it did with the end of World War II). And that trend continued until the mid-1960s (when divorce rates increased and widespread contraception had an impact on the birth rate).

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. That means that, by any measure I've ever seen of the generational boundaries, he is a Baby Boomer. He's a very late Baby Boomer, and he is certainly a Boomer who was too young to be affected by the military draft or by Vietnam. But he's still clearly a Boomer.

Then again, there's something that seems really Gen-X about him. I think this is what the commentator on CNN was picking up on. There is something about Obama that doesn't seem to fit with the Clintons, Bushes, and Gores of the political world. Whether it's his race, his personal history, the crowds he attracts, or his "Change we can believe in" message, there's just something that just seems to identify Sen. Obama with Gen-X'ers (and even Millennials).

In exactly this way, I think this quality of Obama marks him as a transitional figure in the history of the United States. It is, in some ways, similar to the role that Bill Clinton played in 1992. At that time, you had a Greatest Generation figure (and World War II veteran) - George Bush the elder - as the sitting president. He had followed a generationally similar figure in Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was not from the Greatest Generation; he was clearly a Baby Boomer. And the country's choice of him over Bush was a sign of the passing of the torch, in a generational sense. When Clinton was elected over Bush, the leadership of the country had passed from the generation that won World War II to the Boomers.

Now here is Obama. Like I said, he is still a Baby Boomer. But look at the clear cultural differences between he and Hillary Clinton (and especially John McCain). Chronologically, he is a Baby Boomer. But influentially, he is Gen-X'er and Millennial through and through. And so I think this night marks something significant in the history of the country. In terms of presidential politics, the Baby Boomers didn't even last a generation (just 16 years, assuming Obama can beat McCain in November). Now it is time for the Generation X'ers to lead.

(God help us.)

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[Update: If you'd like to read CNN's next day report on Obama capturing enough delegates to secure the nomination, you can read it here.]

A brother in Christ

In an earlier post, I commented on various ways in which religion intersects with the lives and candidacies of various Democrats and Republicans running for president. There, I mentioned a particular e-mail getting passed around about Sen. Barack Obama. My understanding is that there are actually various versions of this e-mail, but the gist of it is that Sen. Obama may be a closet Muslim and that his church in Chicago advocates a dangerous version of black power.

This all seemed to me like it must be a bunch of hooey, so I started trying to do a little investigating. And I was helped by the fact that my brother - an Episcopal priest - actually attended Sen. Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, last summer. When I mentioned the scurrilous e-mail to him, my brother told me that he had actually used his visit in a sermon. If you'd like to read it, the sermon can be accessed here.

Sen. Obama also did an interview with Christianity Today recently, in which he addresses the e-mail slanders and speaks frankly about his Christian faith. For anyone who believes that one's faith relates to one's character in a deep way (and I do), it is a helpful interview.

This is not an endorsement of Obama's candidacy. I just think that the type of attacks that go on in high-stakes national politics are ugly, and the attacks Obama has been receiving are probably the ugliest of this campaign so far. (If you'd like a good analysis of those attacks, including some recent comments by Bill Clinton, check out Bob Herbert's NY Times column here.) When you see people saying things designed to appeal to our most base nature, it calls for people of good will to speak out.

Plus, Sen. Obama is our brother in Christ. Just like Gov. Mike Huckabee is our brother in Christ, and Sen. Hillary Clinton is our sister in Christ, and so on. We can and should criticize these people for the policy positions we think are wrong, but we should not abide accusations of secret heretical belief that have no basis. It's cruel, and it's wrong. And it is exactly what the e-mail campaign against Obama amounts to.

I don't want to sound too overboard here, but I think this issue boils down to the following: No Christian should accuse another of heresy or apostasy without a solid reason for doing so. And if accusation is made, it should be done publicly and through appropriate ecclesiastical channels. Now the originator(s) of the religious slanders on Obama may not be Christians, but there have been plenty of Christians passing them around as a way to sow doubt in other voters' minds. That's just as wrong as making the accusations in the first place. We should take care to treat one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Intersection of faith and politics

In a recent column, Charles Krauthammer writes, "The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual."

That's a fine statement, for a Deistic view of the Creator of the universe. As Krauthammer rightly notes, it has indeed been held by many politicians since the 18th century as a way to unite diverse populations into one body politic. But it contains an insidious underside, because what it really attempts to do is to convince people to give up their confessional belief in a God with particular attributes in favor of another god - that of the nation-state.

Liberal democracy instinctively insists that accepting the lordship of nation is a necessity if the population in question is extremely diverse (i.e., comprised of a large variety of ethnicities and confessional traditions). But what of the confessional traditions themselves? For instance, are Christians to accept that the way of life called for by the triune God can be simply circumscribed so that it fits neatly into the cultural and political expectations of a secular state?

This is a troubling problem, and it cannot be solved by the insistence on the part of many in the church that "this is a Christian nation" or that anything the state calls on us to do is simply to be accepted. I write more about this in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. I would welcome your thoughts.

Religion in Politics #2

President George W. Bush has been touring the Middle East recently, attempting to bring peace to one of the most troubled regions in the world. He seems particularly interested in helping to broker some type of breakthrough deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, admitting that he would particularly like to get something substantive done in his last 12 months in office. That comment in the media made me perk up my ears; if Bush does, indeed, make a concerted effort to broker a peace, it will mirror exactly what President Bill Clinton attempted to do during his own waning months in office. Time will tell whether Bush the Younger is able to accomplish anything longer-lasting than Clinton the Husband did.

There was one ironic moment in President Bush's visit to Israel that seemed so bizarrely out-of-step with the philosophy that his entire administration has been built upon that it has to be mentioned. As a backdrop it is important to remember that the Bush administration is absolutely against a partitioning of Iraq that would give the north of the country to Kurds, a central region to Sunnis, and the rest to Shiites. In that instance, his administration seems to view Iraq the way they (and the rest of America) view the good ol' U.S.A. That view, of course, is that a liberal democracy should be based on an agreed-upon constitution - a political compact that ensures the rule of law, where all individuals have certain rights that are universal across the body politic, and in which political principles serve as the glue that holds all the parts together. It is a political notion that arises straight out of the Enlightenment, and it is absolutely opposed to the notion that nations should be constituted as tribes-writ-large. Seeing one's primary allegiance as to a racial, ethnic, or (heaven forbid) religious group is not just wrong; it is dangerous to the cohesion of the democracy.

But then, of course, there was President Bush, meeting with both Israeli and Palestinian officials and singing the praises of the two-state solution. In a memorable comment that was picked up by every major news outlet (including the NY Times here and CNN here), President Bush said that any peace agreement "must establish a Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people."

So much for liberal democracy.

The story caused me to reflect on an issue that I often do when the country's political conversation gets ramped up (like, oh, I don't know, during a presidential campaign?). And that is the issue of allegiance. Every person on earth is the member of some type of larger political body that calls for (and in some sense deserves) allegiance. For many of us, that means belonging to a nation-state that is constituted by, and operates according to, the same liberal democratic principles mentioned above. And a whole bunch of us enjoy that. I pay taxes and vote, which I take to be the baseline obligations that a citizen of a nation-state owes to the larger political community. But I also have a dad who was a local politician for 20 years, and a brother who is an active politician right now. I was raised in a political family, and I love chewing the fat about politics over supper. Heck, I even showed up at a Durham County Board of Commissioners meeting earlier this week in an attempt to keep the commissioners from criminalizing homeless people's begging for alms (not surprisingly, the homeless people lost).

But then, Christians also have to face up to another allegiance they have - the one to Jesus Christ and his Church. And it is inevitable that many times in our lives our allegiance to Christ is going to come into conflict with our allegiance to our nation-state, wherever we happen to live. Interestingly enough, Christians embody a peoplehood that is both like liberal democracy and like the Palestinians and Israelis. We are like the latter because we are a tribe, of sorts. As 1 Peter 2 says, we are a "chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation," and although once we were no people, now we are God's people. We are bound by ties of kinship - the brotherhood and sisterhood brought about through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we have a very specific place we belong (the church) and a vision of what the future will hold when our people's destiny comes into fulfillment (the Kingdom of God).

Of course, we are a bit like a liberal democracy as well, in the sense that anyone can become a part of this people. (Of course, it might better be said that liberal democracy is a bit like the church, since that's the way the historical progression came about.) There is no requirement of pedigree, no racial litmus test, no necessary language that must be known. There is only the desire to be a part of this people and to believe in and embody the truths to which they witness. Christians are a tribe, but they want everyone to join them.

All that is just to say that I think it is important, when we watch our leaders globetrotting around and making philosophically muddled statements about the direction our world should take, that we remember that no nation on earth can lay the same claims on us that the Kingdom of God lays on us. If we want to be faithful to God's calling on our lives, which we accepted and responded to through our baptisms, we will remember that and orient our lives accordingly.

Religion in politics #1

I'm gonna break with tradition a little bit in the next couple o' posts.

I like to follow politics, and I particularly like to read the columns of a few national columnists that I find to have good insight into issues both foreign and domestic. But I rarely comment on politics in either this blog or my UM Reporter column, because I think it can obscure my real purpose in writing in each of those forums, which is to discuss issues of importance to Generation X and the church. It's not that politics isn't of importance to Christians; of course we should be concerned (and we are affected) by the political happenings of our local, state, and national communities. But our country is in such a divided state right now, with people embracing so many knee-jerk liberal or conservative positions, that commenting on any one issue is to run the risk of getting labeled.

It's difficult to resist in a season such as this one, though, when the presidential campaign is heating up and seems to be dominating the headlines everyday. I admit, I find it all really exciting! And what's more, the intersection of religion and politics has been particularly central to this campaign. Just think about so many of the story lines we've seen connected to the major presidential candidates:

-- Rudy Giuliani - Should the disconnect between his social positions and those of the Roman Catholic Church make a difference to voters? How do the GOP's conservative Christian voters view the fact that Giuliani is on his third wife? Giuliani's candidacy is fading faster than Britney Spears' celebrity, but it's unclear whether that's because of religious issues or because his terrorism-related fear mongering seems so monotone.

-- Barack Obama - Why do these bizarre rumors about Islam keep surfacing? (Gotten one over e-mail?) Is this some kind of crypto-racism designed to sow doubts in the minds of voters? For the record, Obama is a baptized Christian and a member of a UCC church in Chicago.

-- Mike Huckabee - The former Baptist preacher (and former governor of my home state of Arkansas) excites opinion among everybody in the Republican party, from those who think he is the only candidate with legitimate social conservative credentials to those who think his faith-influenced concern for the poor and the incarcerated is downright irresponsible.

-- Mitt Romney - The only Mormon candidate in either party's field faces steep skepticism by evangelical Republicans, who aren't willing to vote for a candidate they regard as a member of a growing, non-Christian faith that threatens the church. And so many of the talking heads simply misunderstand this point; in a recent column, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post hypothetically compared objection to Romney with possible objection to a figure like Joe Lieberman, who is Jewish. Krauthammer rightly observes that the kind of veiled criticisms that Huckabee lobs at Romney would be regarded as outright bigotry if lobbed at a figure like Liberman. That may be true, but the point for evangelical voters, I am almost positive, is not the fact that Romney is not an evangelical Christian. Mormons, after all, are every bit as socially conservative as Southern Baptists. But evangelicals look at the entrepenuerial, expanding faith of the LDS Church and see it as a threat to Christian orthodoxy (in a way they do not when it comes to Judaism). It is not about Mormonism being "cultic" which is the word that keeps coming up in the national news. It is rather that evangelicals don't want a president who represents what they see as a very real threat to orthodox Christianity. And if you don't think that is a legitimate Christian concern, go read any of the early church fathers' writings against Judaizers, Gnostics, Marcionites, Arians, etc.

-- Hilary Clinton - Okay, so I've already written a post that touched on Hilary Clinton and faith, although it was really more about the public perception of Methodism. But Hilary's faith is an interesting issue, because so many people seem to want to view her as areligious. But regardless of what you think about her political views, she is a lifelong Christian (much more religious than some of the other candidates. See: Thompson, Fred). I think many evangelicals view liberal political convictions as incompatible with Christian faith (predominantly on the issue of abortion), and that has more than anything to do with Hilary's perceived religiosity (or lack thereof).

Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a political blog. But it may take another post or two to get the political bug out of my system!

God and Hillary Clinton

In its current issue, Christianity Today has an interview with Paul Kengor, the author of God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life (read the article here). In it, Kengor says that, beginning in the mid-1960s, Clinton "began following a left-leaning Methodism, and now Hillary Clinton walks step by step with the Methodist leadership into a very liberal Christianity."

I am always curious whenever I read a comment like that. I know that traditional evangelicals consider the mainline United Methodist Church to be quite liberal. But on the other hand, other mainline denominations like the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), and Lutheran Church (ELCA) see us as more conservative than themselves. I have personally studied and worshiped in settings with Methodists who are to the left of the left fringe of the mainline (think United Church of Christ or Christian Church/Disciples of Christ) and Methodists who are as conservative as any Southern Baptist in Texas. And while there is some truth to the generalization about theological and political leanings of Methodists depending on area of the country (think the conservative Southeastern and South Central Jurisdictions or the liberal Western, North Central, and Northeastern Jurisdictions), it is by no means true across the board.

All that is just a way of saying that I don't think statements like the one Kengor makes are very helpful. But Kengor's, like others of the type, are at least predictable. Because when you get on down a little bit in the interview, you see the two big issues he raises to back up the 'liberal' label: abortion and universal healthcare. Of the two, abortion is clearly the litmus test for self-described conservative evangelicals. Support legalized abortion and you're liberal; oppose it and you're one of us.

Let me say first that I am pro-life on the issues of both abortion and the death penalty, as I have explained on this blog in the past. I think we have a good statement on capital punishment in the Book of Discipline, while I think our statement on abortion is morally weak, self-contradictory, and practically useless. That said, any person or group that uses a single issue to define a label, and then uses that label as a litmus test for religious orthodoxy, is advocating for a fairly thin, one-dimensional Christianity. If you wanted to test the UMC's orthodoxy by its actual doctrinal statements, you could go to our Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith in the Book of Discipline and find that we are - at least in Protestant terms - orthodox all the way down.

But of course, religion in the popular discourse is not about theological orthodoxy. It's about social policy orthodoxy. And while one's views on social policy can be derived out of theological propositions, it is also often influenced by philosophical convictions regarding secular politics that has very little to do with one's view of God and God's work in the world. For instance, the other issue Kengor pins on Hillary - that of universal healthcare - would seem on the surface to be a very conservative tenet. After all, what Christian who believes in the sanctity of life would not want every American to have access to healthcare? Heck, I know I do! But for evangelicals influenced more by their political ideology than the Bible, this is not about God's valuation of life. It is about the size of government, its influence in our lives, and taxation. Thus, anyone who wants universal healthcare is a liberal.

Now I get real nervous about government influence and taxation myself. But I also want poor, sick kids to have access to a physician. And that comes directly out of my faith convictions. If we don't want nationalized medicine, fine. But we still need to talk about how every citizen of this country is going to be able to get affordable healthcare, 'cause right now our system is a mess. I don't consider my view on healthcare to be conventionally conservative or liberal. But I do view it as arising out of an orthodox understanding of God and God's valuation of human life.

Going back to the issue of abortion, I am curious as to how folks like Kengor would respond to the idea that outlawing abortion would necessitate a more expansive governmental role in healthcare and foster care. For instance, doesn't forcing mothers to carry babies to term - babies who would otherwise be aborted - morally obligate the government to provide a much greater degree of medical care, foster care, and adoption services than it currently does? I think it does, and I would be willing to support some type of legislation that would work toward outlawing abortion while providing the resources necessary to care for both the mothers and children who would be most directly affected by the change. But then, that is also the kind of move that Kengor and others view as liberal - an expanding of government services that interferes with individual choice, enlarges the federal bureaucracy, and requires greater taxation.

So all this is just a way of saying that it is dangerous to start throwing religious labels around that are dependent on a one or two issue litmus test - especially when those issues can be as much dependent on secular political views as they are on theological convictions. In fact, I think it is dangerous to throw the 'conservative' and 'liberal' labels around in general when it comes to the church. There's just too much of a tendency to view faith through the lens of secular politics to make the labels themselves very meaningful.

My questions for Kengor are these: What do you mean by Methodism as a "very liberal Christianity"? Who are the "Methodist leadership" to which you are referring? How does your view of the proper role of the federal government influence your view of an issue as either religiously liberal or religiously conservative? Is there a problem in assigning such labels to people based on their views of social policy, when social policy is so often tied to political interests that have little to do with theological doctrine?