The President's Faith

The other day, in a blog discussion about the President's decision not to join a church in Washington, someone commented, "That is because he's more comfortable in a mosque." I hope the President would be comfortable in a mosque, in a synagogue, in a Christian church. But the comment was not about the President's ability to be present in a wide variety of places. It was about the weird notion that this President, an adult convert to the Christan faith, isn't a Christian, and the frightening subtext of the comment appears to be that it is alright to be prejudiced against Muslims, in the same way that it once was, in many places, alright to be prejudiced against Roman Catholics or Jews. I lived as a very young child in a suburban community where it was impossible for a Jew to buy a home. I didn't know that until a half-century later when a Jewish friend told me that the reason she had grown up in a neighboring town was because her family couldn't buy a home in the town where I had lived.

Standing up to prejudice against Muslims, as New York's mayor did in his remarks about the Islamic center controversy, doesn't mean being uncritical about actions of some Muslims. In fact, we need to be honest about our assessments of the actions of all our neighbors, not scapegoating any of them, but holding them to same standard to which we are held. It is, I think, appropriate for New Yorkers to say that they would rather the Islamic center be built somewhere else, but is entirely inappropriate to insist that that point of view trump the desire and the rights of those building the center. There are many things in life that I would rather not have to endure, but it would be childish of me to insist that those things be banned.

The question of the President's faith raises another question: is having a religious faith essential to success in politics? The Constitution, in Article VI, section 3, is clear that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." That's the Constitution, but it seems that having no religious faith would be an almost insurmountable obstacle to political success.

The First Amendment

I sometimes wonder how some people can miss the point entirely. The current controversy over the building on an Islamic center a few blocks from the World Trade Center is one of those times. 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

While the first section of this First Amendment to the Constitution originally only applied to the federal government,  by the middle of the 20th century the Supreme Court had ruled that both the anti-establishment and free exercise guarantees applied to the states as well. Given the free exercise guarantee, why are people trying to block the Islamic center? Because they think that the guarantee only applies to them? Because they don't see that restricting other people's freedom means that their freedom is at risk? Because they think that their being offended by the proximity of the center to the WTC should be reason enough for the center's organizers to scrap their plans?

Near the end of the movie The American President, President Shepherd makes a telling comment about Senator Rumson's attacks on him for belonging to the American Civil Liberties Union. Shepherd said that he realized that he had been wrong to think that Rumson didn't get it. The reality was that Rumson couldn't sell it. I think that maybe that's true about those who oppose the Islamic center. Yes, they understand the First Amendment guarantees, but opposition is so much easier to sell. As President Shepherd said earlier in that scene, America is advanced citizenship. It's hard work, the hard work of defending the rights of  people who are very different from us, people who hold opinions that offend us, even people who do terrible things. It's the hard work of my realizing that those who are speaking out against the plans for the Islamic center have a right to do that and my defending that right. President Shepherd was right that it's advanced citizenship and I worry that we might not pass the course.

The Numbers

In my occasional visits to conservative blogs in the Anglican world, I have found comments about the drops in the average Sunday attendance in the Episcopal Church, comments that assert that these are evidence that the "revisionist" position of the Episcopal Church is wrong. popularity become evidence that one was following Christ?

I think the focus on - perhaps obsession with - numbers is an indicate that we are embracing, not the theology of the Cross, but the theology of glory. Success as the world measures it - in market share, in growth in budgets - is not what Jesus was about. Paul put it succinctly in his letter to Christians in the most powerful city in the world:

Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity. (Romans 12:2, Phillips translation)

While it was comments by conservatives that set me to thinking about the numbers game, I am well aware that revisionists like me are as prone to play the game as anyone. We are being called, I believe, to be communities in the diaspora, communities that are no longer the dominant cultural and religious ones in the United States. We are being called to live faithfully, discerning as best we can God's will for us, and not worrying about whether we are winning any popularity contests.

Incardination

Although the term is from the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, incardination is a good word to use when any Christian moves from one place to another. In my case, it was moving from East Aurora, a village in Western New York, to Danvers, a town in Massachusetts. In East Aurora I had some sense of what it meant to be a Christian, an Episcopalian, and, as the English would say, a Clerk in Holy Orders. Here in Danvers I will have to work that out or, more accurately, discover it, have it shown to me. I will, if I want to preside and preach regularly, have to be licensed by the Bishop of Massachusetts. But preaching and presiding is not all that there is to being a presbyter, and being a Christian, one who is "sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever," is a vocation all by itself. So the work of discerning how to be in this new place, how to be incarnate here may take some time. There will be others involved in the discerning - my wife, our daughter and son-in-law and their eleven-month-old daughter, old and new colleagues and friends, and some perfect strangers. I can trust that God will use all of these people to teach me how to be me in this new place.

Boundaries

There have been on some conservative blogs in Anglican cyberspace assertions that the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop has denied the divinity of Christ and the resurrection. I responded to the challenge to read a very lengthy analysis of some of the Presiding Bishop's statements. The writer of that analysis concluded that while Bishop Jefferts Schori had not actually denied that Jesus is divine or rose from the dead, her statements could lead - by what I saw as a convoluted path - to an implicit denial of the two doctrines.

The assertions raise the question of how much theological diversity is possible within the Episcopal Church.  It seems obvious that there are boundaries, that there are theological positions that are out-of-bounds. However the discerning of exactly where the boundaries are is not simple. Thoughtful and faithful Episcopalians will disagree about whether a way of understanding the atonement or the person of the Christ is beyond the boundaries. I have, for example, been told that my rejection of Anselm's theory of the atonement puts my understanding of the atonement out-of-bounds. 

I recognize that others have in their minds placed the boundary for theological diversity where I wouldn't and that there will always be arguments about boundaries. My hope is that we can recognize these differences, not as matters of bad faith, but as honest disagreements among sisters and brothers in Christ, disagreements that need no lead to separation, but to continued discussion and, perhaps, deeper respect for one another,