Sunday, January 27, 2013

Time and Place

Disclaimer the first: The title of this blog post probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

Disclaimer the second: It is entirely possible that some of you will think I'm a hypocrite by the time you reach the end of this post.  You are justified in so thinking.  I will do my best to keep the hypocrisy limited to the footnotes.  "Hypocrisy" may also be a proxy for "snark."

Among the several Major Life Changes I am going through right now, my girlfriend and I are "church shopping."  Every Sunday, we visit one of several churches in our neighborhood.  Eventually, we will tell all but one of them that we're really just not that into them.  We thought we'd narrowed it down to two finalists.  Then we discovered that both of them are currently led by interim/imminently retiring pastors.  We have not decided if we are going to expand our list.

One of the finalists is a Lutheran church.  One part of Lutheran worship (and maybe the worship of other denominations; I'm not sure) is the Prayers of the People.  The celebrant reads a list of standard petitions to which the congregation replies "Lord, hear our prayer" (or some variant thereof).  These are usually pithy yet general enough to be unequivocally good things (e.g., "We pray for there to be less starvation in the world with a preference for no starvation").  The floor is then opened for members of the congregation to spontaneously offer their own petitions, which are then also given general sanction.  We're all Christians.  We should pray for each other.  Maybe someone's aunt is sick.  How can you know?

Today, one of the spontaneous petitions was "Help return our nation to what our founding father's intended."*  A similar petition was made the Sunday after the election (we were attending the same church that particular Sunday).  Today, the petition was immediately followed by a prayer for a Federal ban on assault weapons.  This particular turn of awkward events has prompted several reflections which I present in no particular order.

1) NOT COOL.  As I said, the way the Prayers of the People work is that someone asks for a prayer and everyone responds "Lord, hear our prayer."  I did not say that everyone has the option of responding "Lord, hear our prayer."  Everyone responds "Lord, hear our prayer."  That places a particular onus on the petitioner to ask himself (both were men in this case) "is what I'm asking for really something that all Christians (or, at least, all Lutherans) agree upon?  Is it a part of Lewis' 'Mere Christianity'?"  I want to believe that the "no assault weapons" advocate only said what he said to counterbalance the "founding fathers" prayer (I also want to believe that God is not in favor of assault weapons as a general rule), but maybe he was going to ask God to ban assault weapons, anyway.  Regardless, these gentlemen should have realized that these were issues that can (and should) be debated without committing heresy and saved their prayers for a time when we wouldn't all look rude for not agreeing (full-disclosure: I did not say "Lord, hear our prayer," to restore the founding fathers' vision; I muttered it to get assault weapons banned).

1b) I guess this is a good stand-in for the school prayer debate (or at least an explanation for why there still is a school prayer debate).  These gentlemen assumed everyone in the room was exactly like them and therefore saw no problem in foisting our approbation upon their views.  If Lutherans (Lutherans!) cannot see how that is problematic when surrounded by other Lutherans (LUTHERANS!), how can we expect Christians writ large to see how it is problematic when they are leading a classroom full of 30 children whom they assume are Christian except that two of them are actually Jews, three are Hindu, and one is an atheist?

2) All of that being said... there has to be a time and place for these conversations.  If churchgoers actually believe what they say they believe, it should probably have a fundamental influence on how they live the rest of their lives.  Does God want us to return to the founding fathers' vision*?  Does He want us to ban assault weapons?  If we're not going to ask these questions, what is the point of faith?  As a friend once said when I was in earshot "church can legally affect the state; it's just that the state cannot legally affect the church."  The problem is less that the gentlemen in question brought their politics to their house of worship.  The problem is that they brought it at a time when we are supposed to give thanks to God, support one another, and not raise any hackles.  We all (most of us) said "Lord, hear our prayer," and moved on.  I'm not a pastor.  I don't know what pastors think about such things, but in my imagination, if I were, I would have stopped the service right there and asked the congregation: "What do we think about that?"

2b) The first two-thirds of episode #456 of "This American Life" examine the "self-deportation" movement: the idea that states can solve the problem** of illegal immigration by making life so miserable for illegal immigrants that they will elect to leave.  Specifically, the episode focuses on an Alabama bill that allows state law enforcement to ask people to produce their immigration papers and arrest them if something is amiss.  It also makes it a crime to employ an illegal immigrant (that part may be redundant). Around the 34 minute mark, they interview State Senator Gerald Dial of Alabama, a self-described "devout Christian" working to amend the bill (which he originally voted for) so that providing charitable help to an illegal immigrant is not, itself, a crime.  The interview culminates in this exchange.

Jack Hick (interviewer): "Once you've amended the bill, do you think Jesus would vote for the bill?"

State Senator Dial: "Gosh... you've asked me a tough question you know, uh... I would hope that He would understand that... I would, I would say that.... would He vote for the bill?  Probably not."

This makes no sense to me.  If you are a lawmaker who believes in God and you are presented with a law that you believe God would not support (and I would say it's pretty safe theology that God does not support making people's lives miserable), how can you, in good conscience, vote for it yourself?  I worry that this is one of the direct consequences of our refusal as a society to discuss "tough issues."  It is impolite to talk about politics.  It is impolite to talk about religion.  We just say "Lord, hear our prayer" and go about our days with all kinds of self-contradictory nonsense living in our brains.  To quote Ray Bradbury (by way of 'The West Wing') "If you hide your ignorance, no one will ever hit you, and you will never learn."

I started out annoyed that politics were injected into the church service I attended.  I have pretty strong views about what my religion says about my politics, but I'm still annoyed.  I'm annoyed because the politics were injected, not by reasoned debate, but by fiat.  "I believe X, and therefore, you're all going to pray for X with me."

No.

I'm really not.

*Never mind that our founding fathers intended to leave slavery legal in half the country.  Also, isn't one of the points of Christianity supposed to be that exactly one infallible person has ever been born?

**I didn't want to overcrowd that sentence with scare quotes, so let me just say that the idea that illegal immigration is a problem (unless you are talking about people dying in the desert trying to get to Arizona, because that is a problem) is... problematic to me.  The people and institutions responsible for the financial crisis all had their papers in order.