The Eucharist and Public Life
Rethinking the Relationship Between Faith and Politics by Professor WILL COHEN
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s Christians and as Americans, we often see the border between faith and politics heavily patrolled to prevent incursions from either side. From the side of politics, there is the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” and the 1954 Johnson Amendment that says religious groups will lose their tax-exempt status if they endorse a political candidate.1 Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual from Germany known for her writings on totalitarianism and the Holocaust, argued in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” that only empirical facts should carry weight in politics. Arendt acknowledges that truth also comes in other forms, but in her mind, ultimate truth has to butt out of political deliberation within a constitutional democracy, or the result will be theocracy. At the same time, we see a parallel line of defense signaling that politics has no place in the realm of faith. There is the First Amendment clause barring Congress from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. There are the various iterations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) advanced at federal and state levels to shore up faith’s perceived vulnerability to unsympathetic interpretations of the “free exercise” clause.2 In these instances, faith paradoxically must use political means to prevent political encroachment. But in other ways, we may say that faith patrols
itself. Parishioners often make their discomfort known when sermons get “too political”; bishops tend to discourage priests from making such forays. Terms like “sanctuary” that apply to a portion of the worship space underscore the sense of church as a place relatively sheltered from the tumult of world events, social tensions, and breaking news.3 By the words of the Cherubic Hymn to “lay aside all earthly cares” and by the stable structure of the Divine Liturgy as a whole, we may find ourselves steadied on Sunday mornings from the buffeting and gusting winds of contemporary society, with all its rapid changes and complexities. Church is where we breathe more deeply, where we encounter the eternal mystery of God. Yet when does the desire to remain in such an atmosphere of exalted beauty go too far? When does our deep human longing for transcendence cross over into escapism? It can be a fine line. We might be encouraged by spiritual texts or the advice of a pastor to get less caught up in politics; perhaps during Lent we “fast” from taking in political news. Certainly, there are moments where such an approach has its place, but as an overall way of thinking about the relationship between faith and politics, it is limiting and incomplete, indeed often damaging both to politics and to faith. The two need each other. Exactly what place our Christian faith should have in our
1. Some today who champion the Johnson Amendment as if it were the logical outgrowth of the Establishment clause do not recall or acknowledge that it arose out of raw partisan political calculation, not constitutional principle. 2. At the federal level, the RFRA was passed in 1993 in response to a Supreme Court decision that gave states broader authority to enforce laws that may turn out to restrict religious freedoms—as long as it was incidental and not by intent. The RFRA sought to challenge such laws if there could be another way of accomplishing the government’s legitimate goals with less restriction on religious freedom. See https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/religious-freedom-restoration-acts-lb.aspx 3. The word “sanctuary” itself can have significant political overtones, as in the concept of “sanctuary cities” in recent tensions around detaining undocumented immigrants. Indeed, churches themselves serving as sanctuaries from political violence has a long history. See Richard H. Feen, “Church Sanctuary: Historical Roots and Contemporary Practice,” in In Defense of the Alien, Vol. 7 (1984), pp. 132-39. jacob's well
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