Tough Questions 2008: Should Faith Influence Politics?
August 28th, 2008 § 3 Comments
Sermon audio: Should Faith Influence Politics?
I once tried to be a speechwriter for a gubernatorial candidate in Oregon.
The former five-term congressman was fighting to win the Republican nomination, and his staff thought he needed help in the English language department. He began speeches by saying, “You all know I’m a straight shooter. So what you hear tonight is coming straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart.” His researcher winced every time she heard it.
Since I was a recent graduate of the congressman’s alma mater, someone recommended me to the campaign manager as a speechwriter. So, by and by, I showed up at the headquarters wearing chalk stripes and carrying a portfolio of political stuff I’d written, and I got the volunteer position.
At one point during the interview, the manager left me sitting alone in her cubicle. I happened to look up, and was startled to see the congressman, his hand in the trouser pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, chewing gum and staring at me without any intention of saying hello.
He didn’t want a speechwriter.
The first meeting I attended was with the congressman, the manager, and the researcher. The goal was to produce an op-ed about the release of a murderer because, that year, the crime issue was a good bet for mobilizing voters. But we got stuck on the first line. “The first line,” said the congressman, “has to be, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”
Silence. The researcher offered, “We could start by stating what we’re objecting to.” The manager nodded.
“No. Just, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”
The meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He didn’t want to be told what to say.
There were road trips. Several of us would pile into a Lincoln and roar down the I-5 at 90 mph, the radar detector blinking on the dashboard. One would think it was an ideal time to get to know the man whose voice I was supposed to capture in writing. But the candidate took numerous calls, chatted with the driver, and read position papers. I had very pleasant conversations with his wife — number three, very smart.
I watched and listened to the congressman for a day, and returned a week later with a draft. I handed the speech to him, the manager smiling, and without so much as a glance, he handed it to the driver. “I won’t be using it today.” And we were off again.
But a few miles up the freeway, the phone rang. It was the manager. She asked the congressman if he was on the speaker phone, which he was. So he switched to the hand-held. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah.” Click. He reached into the pile of papers his driver had put in the car and read through my speech.
“It’s good. Yeah. I like it. Some good lines in there.”
But he went back to “straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart.”
Evangelicals have savored their few moments of influencing politics. But they haven’t achieved the cultural change they were hoping for. The country hasn’t turned to Christ. Families are not measurably stronger because of any legislation passed. The main evangelical successes have been in opposition to gay marriage and abortion, not in advancing a vision for the country.
The lack of progress boils down to resources.
In politics, you have to influence a five-term congressman. You have to be big enough, mobilizing a large enough constituency or having the money to lobby him. Or, you have to have access to the person who influences how much funding goes to his district. Or, you have to have helped elect him in the first place.
Fundamentally, he must want to listen to you. And even that is not enough. He can think of many reasons to listen to a lot of other people too.
Evangelicals have committed vast resources — not just financially, but in terms of grass roots organization, media time, and depth of experience — to influencing five-term congressmen. They have been successful at becoming big. But now they are experiencing again how hard it is to move a nation from the top.
What would have happened if, for the last twenty years, they had committed the same resources to making disciples for Christ? Imagine the impact on American culture if local churches had been successful at saving marriages, nurturing new generations of Christians, deepening people’s knowledge of the Bible, and developing their capacity to pray. Imagine the impact if local churches had been as passionate about God’s priorities as they’ve been about ballot initiatives.
When confronted with what it really costs to make disciples, most evangelicals for the past twenty years have said the same thing. “We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the time, the money, or the patience. We can barely make disciples of our own kids.”
The sad reality of these two decades is that political parties have been able to attract evangelical resources, but the cause of making disciples has not. We will talk about the political implications of this reality on Sunday morning.
My candidate for governor got the nomination, but went down in flames that November. My effort to influence him didn’t even survive the primaries. He fired the campaign manager.
There is one thing that will make a five-term congressman want to listen. A cultural transformation in his district. The question is, how much do evangelicals really want to influence politics? Are they willing to move a nation from the bottom?
“The Numbered” by Christopher Raley
August 27th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
It’s easy to see sometimes why they hate us,
looking up from the pit to where our mouths
consume without tasting and our eyes
receive without knowing. We build the world
on the floor of our amusement. We watch
tiny players from too great a distance
to see them move. And the props of their lives
far too removed to arouse concern. Shacks perch
on a parched earth hillside where bruised girl
clings the tough guy who’s a boy. Laced tight canopy
covers bone-skin child more tightly than his shirt,
standing in the mouth of a hut. Drawn old city mother
hocks her daughter, toothless come-on, breasts plunging red-shirt. Cathedral relentless
squanders heaven’s citizens inside a wall of some 800 years.
There live the motionless. There live the numbered.
There they soak up storms and feel
the great cloud of the protected.
Have pity on us, so hard to pity.
Arrogance is not the excess but the defense
of a stomach that expands and is never full.
We try and we try, but no hardship we create
makes the having worthwhile.
Children of divine warning
we are sky high as good as on ground.
Ears hear their satisfaction from emotion’s stick.
Eyes see their possession in the screen thought placed it.
Where ever a man goes there he finds with him
the device of his anesthetism
so no comfort is too evasive, no squalor too great
to draw water from the well of empathy.
And the landscape orbits beneath us.
We are not a country called so by contours of earth.
Day by day and night by night she tells of what she knows,
of lights and signs, of chaos waters and those alien to air,
of valleys fragile enough to break
and mountains strong enough to shake.
This before stars were gas,
continents shifts of pressure and the land a prop for slogans,
when no built psyche her space of three dimension evils could hazard,
when gates opened only imagination could walk through
and longings ached only the prophet could speak to.
Do we feel?
The desert is empty, the prophet is gone.
He long since has spoken what long since has come.
Yet even here it vibrates the ground from where it first shook.
So do not be anxious over what we have,
wealth transcends nothing.
No one’s heart can make him a fortress of paper
or a guard of digits.
We are all the black and the frightened
chased down by the huntsman for curse or for blessing.
And yes, the numbered lie here as well.
Even in the palace of our distraction
where castle dreams sparkle so unnaturally grey
and fear is figures of paper mache
and Jamaica and Aruba are but walking distance
by a pink brick path that follows along
the white sand, the thick grass, the man-made lake.
Even here there are clouds above us. They gather and hang
and the suspended air begins to break.
A man and his son hold hands when they realize
they are walking nowhere in the rain.
Fifth Poem On Psalm 1 by Christopher Raley
August 21st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
V.
You have said the righteous is like a tree
planted in a garden by a river.
The world passes by and they wonder:
Who are these that stand like guards of no gold?
They are silent. Then they speak but not words
understandable to natural ears.
They are still. Then they move as if by force.
They are deaf, but silence is like hearing.
The world mocks, the world laughs: the world.
But Your river runs from spring to ocean
and in the slow and deep You are there.
The roots of Your trees emerge from the bank
to take more urgently what nurtures them,
and they lean out over the river, that to revere.
Tough Questions 2008: Should a Christian Question Authority?
August 14th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio: Should a Christian Question Authority?
I’ll tell you about the time I got sent away for counseling.
When I matriculated at Willamette University in 1989, freshlings were herded through a course on world views. That year, the powers assigned readings from Victorian England — Mill, Dickens, Marx, et al. — and we were supposed to discuss them seminar-style. This was intended as a perspective-softener. We would get points of view from other times, other social strata, and other students, and we would come to the breezy but Correct conclusion that the world is not as we assumed.
But what the powers intended as a means of softening my perspective, I took as a means of expressing it. Well, I thought, they said we should discuss. So I did discuss. I discussed what I thought of Darwin’s theory, Mill’s utilitarianism, and the university’s relativistic world view — all of which I’d had the distinct impression was relevant. But I discussed my perspective without the least intention of softening it, which meant I wasn’t really obeying the powers.
My professor took me aside after about two weeks and said, “I want you to go talk to Charlie.” She meant Charles Wallace, the university chaplain. She was nice about it, but she’d clearly had enough. You’re a Christian, she seemed to say. Maybe Charlie the Christian will know what to do with you.
2008 is the third year I’ve collected questions from the community about spiritual and moral issues for a sermon series. (The link to the two previous years is on my blogroll.) The first question that jumped out at me from this year’s batch was, “Should Christians question authority?”
I have to admit my bias.
I have a contentious personality. For me, arguing is fun, and arguing with authority figures is even better. Winning those arguments is so much fun that it’s probably immoral.
So I chose to address the question about authority because it appealed to my baser instincts.
In addition, trouble-making is part of my heritage. My grandfather, my great aunts and uncles, my dad and his sister, have all been contrarian and stubborn. On vacation, I took my family to visit Aunt Jan, who has used her genetic sonar for absurdity well and often. Over breakfast (french toast battered with eggs and whiskey), we sounded off against Mel Gibson’s Passion, the evangelical mania over it, and its theology. We also shared precious moments of confrontation with the film’s devotees.
In the end, however, we had to agree that the underlying reason we hated it was that everybody loved it. Tell me the last time everybody was right.
But personal and familial biases aside, I also chose to address the question about authority because of the questioner’s sensitivity. The woman asked specifically about the virtue of meekness. Can a Christian habitually criticize those in authority without becoming arrogant? Don’t we owe submission to those over us?
I have learned valuable truths by over-exercising my critical faculties. I’ve learned, for example, that the vast majority of people hate arguing. Contention fills them with dread, and they will not voice their opinion if they fear that someone will debate them. This has led me to nurture discussion by shutting my mouth. I’ve also seen that the process of learning must go deeper than mere questioning. If I am really going to learn a subject or a skill, I have do things contrary to my experience and instinct. That means, again, shutting my mouth so that I can submit to my teacher.
These are good arguments for meekness.
But I have learned something else. While critical questioning is a terrible way to discover whether an authority is speaking the truth, it is a great way to discover whether the authority is interested in nourishing, imparting, engaging, and being understood, or whether he is merely interested in conformity. The authority figures I’ve known who nurture life in their students have all embraced criticism as a sign of a living mind.
What we face today is not the authority of a few. We face the authority of the masses, the despotism of the People. We face the unrelenting tyranny of everybody‘s opinion. We used to wear what displayed our place in our culture. Now we wear the latest fad. The legacy of ethics used to teach us how to make decisions. Now, our decisions are dictated by fashion, and our ethics are retrofitted rationalizations.
I think that churches, in this environment, need to focus less on controlling people’s behavior than on educating their consciences. This means using the authority of parents and elders to earn submission and to empower people to question. I believe that the church where this is achieved will continue to make new Christians, generation after generation. That is the theme I will preach on Sunday morning.
At Willamette, I went to the appointment my professor had already scheduled with Charlie. I don’t remember much about our session, except that we ended up trading favorite scenes from Monty Python, and that I continued in class as usual. Charlie the Christian did indeed know what to do with me.
But I wouldn’t have known what to do at Willamette if I hadn’t been given a trained conscience.
Fourth Poem on Psalm 1 by Christopher Raley
August 13th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
IV
There, a shaft of light falls on a gnarled branch
cut down some time ago and left alone.
And, there, the river’s shallows gurgle round
a limb like a claw lifeless on the bed.
A tree stands pained from the loss of its hand
like a man on a corner in a world
of concrete and steel, bewildered by cars
that pass and people who speak without talking
because the things he called his life are gone
and unreachable. Though he grit his teeth
and strain to get them back, still they are gone.
And in the garden the snake rattle curses
for the Gardener comes to shape those He loves.
But the snake will not find one leaf fallen.
