Response to "Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P."

Now, Joe, I’m all for free speech, and I practice the Christian charity I preach, but I do think it would be more seemly of you, as a public intellectual, to know your story before you publish your opinion. (“Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.” by Joseph Loconte. The New York Times Op-Ed, January 2, 2006.)

You decry “attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda” by House Democrats and progressive religious leaders like Jim Wallis. Perhaps you ought to read The Book first. The Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish Prophet of the New Covenant, Jesus himself, did little else but point toward a political agenda. That’s why they were assassinated by the ruling powers. The Roman prefects in Judea didn’t bother to crucify just anybody. Nailing prophets to the cross was a dramatic kind of political execution reserved for those who seriously threatened the imperial status quo.

Jesus, Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al were no friends of the imperial governments that usurped the just prerogatives of their nation, and oppressed the people of Israel. No more are today’s rising voices of the religious left willing to countenance moral outrages perpetrated by the right-wing cabal in our White House and Congress, and their collaborators, the false prophets of the religious right.

“Linking faith with public policy” is the soul of political discourse in a democratic society. Faith without works is dead. Contrary to your disingenuous statement, this is exactly what American politics does need. The political “misdeeds” of so-called Christian conservatives are not being “replicated” by spiritual progressives – indeed, they are being repudiated. You claim there is no difference between anti-homosexual bigots quoting Leviticus, and Jim Wallis proclaiming the prophetic witness of Jesus on behalf of the poor. Excuse me, but I beg to differ.

You say the ethics of Jesus and the Prophets are “no substitute for a coherent political philosophy.” I think most Americans would differ with you on this. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian ethics are the sine qua non of political justice in Western society. I suppose you’d prefer the moral relativism of Hume, or Machiavelli – or Kissinger or Wolfowitz.

In defense of what you call the “war against Islamic terrorism,” you ridicule the supposed “chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.” Methinks you protest too much. I cannot help but note that it is you who frame the discourse in those terms – and there would be none of it, after all, if there were not meaningful comparisons to be made.

You mention with disdain an “event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July,” as though it were somehow linked with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party leadership. I was there, and it was not. It was a convocation of some 1300 religious leaders of many faiths, and some “not religious, but spiritual” community leaders, most of whom are no more sympathetic with the Democratic party than with the G.O.P. – which is to say, not at all.

I was a participant in the Spiritual Activism Conference, organized mostly by energetic members of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, not by Rev. Jim Wallis, although we welcomed him, among many others, as a featured speaker. Our common concerns are grounded in spirituality and religion, and they are very much political, but certainly not partisan. As Rev. Wallis says, our religion is deeply personal, but it is not private. We must be very public about it. We deplore the hypocrisy and depravity with which the G.O.P. has co-opted Biblical religion in America, and the moral diffidence with which the Democratic Party has, until recently, abandoned it.