Chuck Currie: Giving a rat's ass

Chuck Currie is frustrated. And rightly so. One of his unchurched liberal friends thinks that any political or social opinion that originates with a church is subject to rude dismissal.

His friend writes:

Sorry, I must have missed something. Why should I give a rat's ass what a bunch of preachers think about when American forces should withdraw from Iraq, any more than I care what Jerry Falwell thinks about sex education or what the Pope thinks about stem cell research?

On Chuck's blog, I observed in the comments:

In most of our churches we have strong social action groups, from the Catholic Charities to the Friends Service Committee. These groups have always acted, often very modestly and quietly, to improve the lives of people around the globe. They may have very strongly worded internal political and social messages, particularly on political issues that avoid partisan politics.

However, all these organizations vary in the amount of demonstrated faith they require of the beneficiaries. A Catholic or Salvation Army shelter may require attendence at services. A Unitarian Universalist soup kitchen or Friends medical service corps may not.

Recently, criticism of "faith based initiatives" getting money from the public sector has somehow made all of these charitable acts suspect, and many liberals in particular look on any statement from the religious left, right, or center as equally suspect. Even more than before.

As that rare creature, the highly faith-motivated Unitarian Universalist, I straddle the divide. For many liberals who are not particularly religious, the idea of faith motivation assumes android-like adherence to some church authority's agenda.

To this putative liberal of little faith, if you are speaking as a person of faith on issues in the public sphere, you are either forcing the will of others into conformance with your ugly authoritarian agenda, or you are the dangerous victim of such an agenda.

There's very little understanding that many of us (duh) draw our liberal values, our progressive values, from our faith.

The American liberal is likely to think that the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh or Gandhi were cool, and that MLK is ok because he's dead and they have never really listened to any of his speeches for more than the 10-second slices played on the second Monday in January.

But western Christian religious leadership is something that scares the living crap out of many of us American liberals. Not me, though. I find that Christian political thought runs the entire spectrums of liberal/conservative and authoritarian/anarchist).

Unfortunately I am still stuck with the hard work of evaluating each person on the content of their character, rather than the color of their hymnbook.

It seems to me important that we make it OK to discuss our values as our motivations for action in the public sphere -- issue or partisan politics, education policy, and so on. And if those values are informed by our religious faith, or our spiritual set if you prefer, we should not feel that it is taboo to be open in that because it is as much of who we are as our family culture, our ethnicity, our gender, our sexual orientation, or any of the other aspects that shape our lives.

Yes, in fact, I think we should all be comfortable discussing sex, religion, and politics in the same paragraph. We must. These topics make us uncomfortable because they are both vital and inescapable. And if we don't take responsibility for them, they will control us utterly.