Guest Editorial for May 26, 2005
By David Gushee
It seems the mixing of conservative politics and religion reached its breaking point in the person of 33-year-old Chan Chandler, the North Carolina Baptist pastor who resigned May 10 after apparently attempting to force out some members who voted Democratic in the last election.
The fact of the matter is that Chandler was inevitable. Given the growing convergence between religion and politics in the South, especially the identification by many conservative Christians of the GOP as God's Own Party, eventually somebody was going to come along and do exactly what Chandler did. It is heartening that his actions have been rejected by some mainstream Baptist leaders. But the forces that led him are not going away.
Three factors are leading to the increasingly bitter and polarized situation in which we now find ourselves.
First, conservative Christians, especially in the South, are now fully invested in the political arena. This is not as horrifying as it sounds to some. The Christian faith is inevitably political in its implications because the message of the Bible deals with the whole of life. Most of the leading social activists in American history have been committed Christians convinced that the Bible required their engagement. Issues have ranged from women's suffrage to temperance to urban poverty to working conditions to civil rights to war. The current conservative concern over moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality is not unprecedented, though it is too narrow a moral agenda (often expressed in much too harsh a tone) to be viewed as fully biblical.
Second, the Republican Party knows it has a major asset in conservative Christians and is working that constituency for all it's worth. We Christians located in the red-state South and Midwest must understand that we are the objects of a whole lot of carefully calculated love and affection from the men and women who know how to win elections. This means that the already latent moral fervor generated by our faith is being whipped up by political operatives who know just how to direct it in order to advance their own purposes.
One would hope thoughtful conservative Christians would resist being used by anyone, even political operatives whose agenda they largely like. The church is not a means to someone else's end. It is an end in itself; that is, it is to be an instrument only in God's hands.
Third, the Democratic Party has lost the language of religion and values. Its members know this, too. They know that in a religiously vital nation such as ours, no party will win elections if it cannot authentically speak about God and morality. The Democrats are hamstrung by a significant constituency of secularists within, and have in recent years essentially ceded the values field to the Republicans. Yet many thoughtful Democrats are committed Christians, whose politics are shaped by moral values. I fully expect the 2008 candidate will work to redress this values-gap problem, but it is certainly a factor at this time.
So there's the formula that produces a Chan Chandler, and the broader environment in which we find ourselves:
• Rightly recognize that the Christian faith has public implications. Wrongly reduce those implications to conservative concerns such as abortion and gay marriage.
• Rightly urge people to vote their convictions. Wrongly assume that the only way a Christian could do so would be to vote Republican.
• Rightly seek political impact. Wrongly allow ourselves to be manipulated by partisan political operatives.
• Rightly see what is consistent with biblical principles in the Republican agenda and inconsistent with such principles in the Democratic agenda. Wrongly fail to see what is inconsistent with biblical principles in the Republican agenda and consistent with such principles in the Democratic agenda.
• Wrongly fail to see that God's agenda will never be fully realized by any political party; indeed, wrongly fail to see that it will never be fully realized until the final redemption of the world.
I counsel a bit of mercy toward Chandler, a young pastor who went too far and paid the price for it, and a whole lot of lesson-taking by the rest of us.
Religion News Service
David P. Gushee is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University, a Baptist-affiliated school in Jackson, Tenn.