An article by Patrick Hornbeck for www.faithfuldemocrats.com
Last weeks edition of Florida Baptist Witness, the newspaper of the Florida Baptist State Convention, carried an interview with Republican congresswoman Katherine Harris. Now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, the former Florida Secretary of State (and major player in the 2000 presidential recount) shared some of her views on faith and politics:
"we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers."
"If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if youre not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin."
Apart from the fact that Congresswoman Harris seems to have been taking lessons in grammar from the president she helped elect, her comments might explain why, in a recent poll in my home state of Arizona, 85% of respondents said they dont want "religious and political zealots telling them how to live."
I read Harris comments on the same day that I was teaching my students at Santa Clara University about Father Charles Curran, a Catholic priest censured by the Vatican in 1986 for progressive views on abortion and homosexuality. At first, the two cases seem to have little in common. But in both instances, we find authority figures arguing that there is only one right way to articulate Christian faith in the context of public life. For Harris, to be a Christian is to be pro-life and anti-gay rights, to believe that Terri Schiavo should have been kept in a permanent vegetative state. Disagree on any of those issues, Harris seems implicitly to be arguing, and you no longer deserve the title Christian.
And here, I think, Democrats have a rhetorical "in." We can be the party that makes it clear that Christianity and Christian faith cannot be made the exclusive property of particular ideological positions, no matter how often our opponents attempt to make that link. We can be the party where people can come as they are in their relationships with God, come as they are without the risk of being judged for their ways of being religious.
If Katherine Harris Republican Party is the party of only those Christians who successfully pass litmus test after litmus test, cant we be the party of all those other Christians who struggle with their faith, who sometimes may even doubt their faith, and who express that faith in a host of different ways?
Thats not relativism; its acknowledging that Christ speaks more languages than the sometimes wooden English of the King James Bible.
p.s. And about the "lie" of the separation of church and state? The readers of the Florida Baptist Witness might well consider a passage in their own churchs statement of belief, The Baptist Faith and Message: "Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends."
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