By Howard Last, Guest Writer
The following article is a response to an opinion piece from last week: “Religious Beliefs Should Stay Out of Politics” by Christian Cullen.
It has recently been written that politics and religious affiliation have no right intersecting, with a caveat added at the end that it is correct for religion and politics to intersect or for the former to “meddle in” the latter.
While I agree with the makeup of the article, the title is misleading. The article posits that politics and religion overlap most on social media posts comparing candidates to religious figures; the author uses the example of Trump and Christ.
On this point, the author and I have no quarrel; we agree. The idolatry in the modern evangelical movement is unfortunate, and for too many, politics consumes the pulpit.
This is entirely true of many Protestant sects, but I am speaking to myself and fellow Catholics. Rather than painting the canvas of Catholicism with the broad brush of Evangelical Christianity, I’d like to examine where this faith can and ought to play a role in politics.
It is impossible to separate church and state, even if the original article’s author suggests otherwise. He states that ensuring a political candidate isn’t associated with a Biblical figure for the sake of church/state separation is “a valid” claim.
I would like to insert my own definition of church and state. I cannot see anywhere that social media posts infringe on any separation of powers, but Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell has a perfectly reasonable definition for us. He says that the founders of America intended that we “not have a system in which the government was able to tell us what to believe” or have institutional control over churches. That is a very agreeable definition, and looking at the Constitution substantiates McConnell’s claim.
If it were the case that a social media post constituted blurring the line between the established church and our government, this would be very clearly unconstitutional and it behooves our governing bodies to remove these posts and censor them.
The government has censored social media before, so why not walk down this road again if these posts really are a threat to our constitution? Ironically enough, the original author is targeting the posting of an individual, rather than any government infringement. Following the Stanford Law professor’s definition, this wouldn’t count as anything more than a silly social media post, let alone illegal.
Seeing a post linking Trump to Christ — blasphemous and enraging though it may be — is not enough to justify yanking the moral rug from underneath our government. There ought to be a link between church and state: members of the church who become governing officials do not abandon their faith at the steps of the Capitol.
Whenever someone writes, votes for or signs legislation, they make a moral choice. How are people affected by this legislation? How is their human dignity uplifted? More crudely, What Would Jesus Do?
God has a plan for us all, and we have the ability to live out that plan, stumbling and confused but always groping for the guiding hand of the Lord. Walking meekly with our fellow humans and reading the new laws of Christ written on our hearts is imperative for any good Catholic, let alone a lawmaker.
To remove religion from politics would be to remove morality, decency and the love for one another that Christ imposes on us. The body of the author’s work is perfectly agreeable, barring the quibble we’ve now thought through, but the title is quite misleading.
There are no politics worth engaging in without the influence of religion — Washington’s cry to providence, Seward’s appeal to higher laws than our own and Lincoln’s fight against slavery. I think religion plays a crucial part in our conscience and ought to continue playing the same role it did in inspiring revolutionaries to defy a tyrannous evil or the soldiers sent to Europe to defend a beautiful civilization and save humanity from its worst impulses.
The church guides the Catholic personal life and tempers our inner evil; why should we withhold that gift from our lawmakers and our country?