Religion and Politics – Natural Bed Fellows July 14, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
Back in the good ol days when even state universities had a budget for inviting famous speakers to campus to expose their young audience to influential thinkers, Western Kentucky University hosted William Buckley, the famous conservative host of Firing Line, and the originator of the National Review, to speak to a packed house of teenagers from rural Kentucky.
I was an 18 year old freshman in 1974 and though I had never watched Firing Line nor picked up a copy of the National Review, I was in the audience. He didn’t talk about his recent trip to China with President Nixon when these two global super powers were just starting to talk to one another. He didn’t rail against liberals, gay people, or hippies so much as he just compassionately gave a lot of young people some advice about how to live a meaningful life.
I remember two things he said that evening. One was that he had no respect for anyone who slept more than five hours a night but the other thing I remember was more useful. He said, “You have been warned not to talk about either politics or religion in a polite society. The problem with following that advice is that you will never learn how to have a civil conversation about things that are as important as religion and politics.”
Those were the days when Republican and Democratic members of the congress could publicly debate about the civil rights movement, voters rights, desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion, and at the end of the day they would collect their spouses and children and everyone would get together for an ice cream social.
In the 80’s, Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neil, and conservative icon, President Ronald Regan, had a pact that they were “friends after 6 p.m.”
A correspondent once brought this up to President Obama a decade ago, suggesting that maybe he should get a drink with Mitch McConnel, to which, Obama replied, “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnel?”
I get it. I wouldn’t want to spend Happy Hour with Mitch McConnel, or Donald Trump, or, if it were even possible, Ronald Regan, but I know that somehow we have to get back to a place where we can sit down at a Thanksgiving dinner and have a polite and meaningful conversation about politics and religion, at a table where people don’t agree but where they can come to understand one another better.
Once public discourse becomes laden with angry accusations, name calling, and dismissive characterizations, people tend to become more devoted to their prejudices and rather than being shamed or bullied into changing, they tend to deepen their devotion to increasingly radical viewpoints.
We Unitarians are fond of declaring that “love is my religion,” which would be wonderful if it were true, but I am afraid that all too often the larger truth is that “acquiescence is our religion.” We don’t talk about religion and politics with people who disagree with us, we just avoid potentially controversial conversations to avoid conflict. And I get that. There are times to just walk away to avoid starting an argument for which there is no meaningful end but peace without some mutual understanding isn’t really peace, is it? It is more like surrender, or maybe indifference. Let me suggest a thought exercise.
I’m writing this several days after the first presidential debate in which President Joe Biden, rather than reassuring voters that he is ready and able to serve another term in office, demonstrated an example of every Democrat’s worst fears. He seemed to be very old, confused, and weak.
So, in the aftermath, many were calling for him to back out of the race so that someone in better shape to both win the fall election and succeed in office over the next few years could take his place. Others adamantly defended him saying that he has been an excellent president for almost four years and a weak debate performance should not be made more important than his years of laudable accomplishments.
The stakes in the November election are very high. We see what Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have done to the court and to the country. We have reason to fear the approximate end of Democracy and the onset of a truly weaponized judiciary if Trump is allowed to win this election.
I suspect that all of you have decided in your own minds whether we should all support Biden through the fall election or hurry up and pick a replacement candidate, but could you sit at a table with several people who had an opinion different from your own and discuss the merits and liabilities of either choice?
This matter may have been settled by the time this sermon is posted but it is still up in the air, could you listen to both sides of the argument? There is no guarantee of success in either choice and no matter which way we go, Trump might win, and we will never know that if we had taken the other path, we might have been successful. The stakes could hardly be higher. The outcomes could hardly be more uncertain. Could we discuss our views without demanding that everyone agree with us? Can we defend our view without implying that those who don’t agree with us are unintelligent or uninformed? Could we strive to understand the point of view of those who differ with us and patiently try to make ourselves understood based on discernable facts and readily available information?
If we can, then, I submit, that would be evidence of love. In my estimation, that would be a conversation worth having. Not all conversations are worth having. I’m not going to give much time to anyone who is convinced that the Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor. And, just because you have a civil relationship to offer to someone doesn’t mean that they have one to offer to you but one thing is certain, if we avoid talking about the hard stuff, no one ever learns, no one ever changes, and we all fail.
Let me try another illustration on you: In a plea deal, Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been released from a British prison where he had served nearly 6 years after having spent a decade avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There are those who believe that Assange was a hero of journalism and free speech and others who believe that he was guilty of some of the worst espionage crimes of this century.
I have been conversations where the mere mention of his name divided the room into adamant factions. The relevant question in his case is not whether he is a really great guy or not. I don’t know anyone who really wants to carry his banner in a debate about character but was his release of stolen documents a journalistic coups, exposing war crimes and holding the American government accountable for having hidden and lied about these crimes, or is his dump of thousands of pages of classified documents a crime that placed many secret undercover agents in grave danger?
Well, he did both, didn’t he? Which is more important, exposing the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute soldiers who murdered journalists and first responders on the battlefield in Afghanistan, or leaking information that could expose undercover sources? Chelsea Manning, who provided the information to Wikileaks, and Assange have both served years in prison for this leak but the soldiers who murdered journalists and medics were not punished, and, for that matter, the New York Times and several British and European news sources that published the leaked material were not charged with any crime. How can Manning and Assange be guilty, and the media just gets a pass?
I could argue either side of this issue though, as you might imagine, I lean towards supporting leaking information about war crimes in order to keep our government or any other government honest. To that point, bronze statues of Assange, Manning, along with Edward Snowden have been erected in Berlin in praise of their courage . . . Germans know about the danger of allowing a government to operate in secrecy under the disguise of propaganda.
I have heard a number of people I really like get very mad about this issue but what I have never heard is a civil conversation among people who have honest disagreements about it. That is a conversation I would love to be a part of but to date, any attempt at discussing the facts becomes a partisan condemnation of either the leakers or the government.
I don’t think that there is a rational defense for Trump’s theft of classified documents that have been left in disarray in unsecured storage. I don’t think that there is a honest defense to be mounted in that case, which is, I’ll suggest, why a Trump supporting judicial system is making certain that the case will either never be heard in court or at least it won’t be heard in time to influence this fall’s election. But if I am wrong, more than a thousand of you will hear me saying this this week, so, in a civil manner, please, tell me how I am mistaken.
There is an anonymous modern proverb that I really love that says: We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. The internet will repeatedly tell you that this is a quote from either Socrates or Plato but, because it is a priority in my life to defend the corpus of Greek philosophy, I can assure you that this didn’t come from Socrates or Plato or any other ancient source but whoever said it doesn’t need a false attribution to support it because it is painfully and obviously true. The reason we can’t get some cases to trial is the same as the reason we can’t have a civil conversation about some controversial topics . . . it is because someone is afraid of the light. That, I contend, is shameful.
Over the past several years, I have enjoyed a good deal of attention from listeners of my posted sermons, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. So it should come as no surprise to hear me tell you that from time to time, I would be contacted by the pulpit committee of a church that was searching for a new pastor. I never actually was offered a call from any of those churches because, before we ever got to the point of an actual interview, someone on the committee would be charged with letting me know that if I were to be offered that job I would have to first agree to not talk about at least 90 percent of what I have talked about for the last 15 years.
I cannot claim that I am always right, in fact, I would disagree with a number of things I have said in the past; but I can claim that I have always been honest and if a church is not willing to be exposed to an honest exploration of matters of ethics, well, who would want to work for a church that is afraid of the light?
Folks, I am aware that most of you who generously give me a few minutes of your time every couple of weeks, do so expecting to agree with me. Trust me, when I go to our local Unitarian Church on Sunday mornings, the primary reason that I go is because I want to sit in a room for an hour in this deeply red state, surrounded by people who largely see the world the way that I do. I also need to feel that I am not all alone in the world. But it just might be that the most important messages you hear are the ones in which you had to endure a difference of opinion. Don’t only seek confirmation of your own bias. Remain willing to step into the light and heat of honest disagreement on important topics. The only way out of our current dangerous political and ideological quagmire is to engage one another in the light of honest dialogue.
My favorite British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, left us with this hope, he said:
I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, that it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels, but to people possessed of wisdom and courage.
I suggest that we give ourselves to that hope.
