FAITH AND POLITICS—LIKE OIL AND WATER?

 

“Consider a political story told long ago that reminds us that the word ‘Jesus’ and ‘religious’ were not always reflexively associated with the words ‘right’ or ‘conservative.’  It is the story of Mrs. O’Reilly and her son who was dutifully taking her to the polls on Election Day.  Mrs. O’Reilly always voted straight Democratic.  Her son, a successful member of the upper middle class, had become an independent and voted for many Republicans.

 

“As was their routine, the son asked the mother how she would vote and, as always, she answered, ‘Straight Democratic.’  The exasperated son replied, ’Mom, if Jesus came back to earth and ran as a Republican, you would vote against him.’ And she snapped back, ‘Aw, hush, why should He change His party after all these years?’”

 

This bit of humor begins an interesting book I just finished reading.  It is entitled:  SOULED OUT:  Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.  The author, E.J.Dionne, is a former New York Times correspondent to the Vatican, a current political analyst for The Washington Post and a professor at Georgetown University.  He considers himself a “liberal Catholic” and attributes his social progressivism to Sister Genevieve’s views on racial justice in his sixth-grade class.  However, he writes here as a historian as evidenced by his eighteen pages of footnotes!

 

I confess at the outset that much of the following comes from a review of the book in a recent issue of America.  (How can one improve on the experts?)

 

To answer the question: “How has religion intersected with American political life?” the author discerns three phases in American history. The first was defined by “religious liberty and tolerance,” the second by a “wall of separation between church and state,” and the third and present has “moved beyond tolerance and separation to exclusion of religion from public debate.”

 

Dionne’s chapters include the following:  Is Religion Conservative or Progressive or Both?  What are the “Values” Issues?  What Happened to the Seamless Garment?   Of special interest to Catholics will be the chapter entitled: “John Paul, Benedict, and the Catholic Future.” 

 

The author concludes, “Ideally, the Catholic Church’s role in politics is to cause discomfort, to encourage questions, to challenge narrowly ideological views…. If the Church causes discomfort only to one side in the political debate when both sides need repentance, it is not being the Church.”

 

The reviewer (Dennis O’Brien) has his own conclusion:

“SOULED OUT follows this admonition, since it should cause some discomfort across the polarities of Catholic thought: to conservatives who regard liberals as relativist renegades and to liberals who regard conservatives as irredeemably retrograde.  The church, politics and life do not submit to simplistic solutions.” 

 

If you’d like to do some serious thinking about issues prior to our upcoming elections, I highly recommend this book.  I believe it is a well-balanced and objective view of the role of our personal faith in the arena of politics. You may disagree with some of the author’s conclusions but I do not think you will regret having read the book.

 

Sister Marie, O.P.

 

If you’d like to order the book, Agnus Dei (our local Catholic shop for books and religious items) will be happy to order it for you as they did for me.  Their number is 457-2636.