By JOHN McCALLUM
Editor
Los Angeles Times writer Mitchell Landsberg makes the observation in his June 5 piece “Campaign truce on faith issues” that neither President Barack Obama nor his Republican challenger Mitt Romney are saying much these days about their religious beliefs.
Landsberg notes this is a “striking departure” from the Republican primary contests where demonstrations of candidates' faith weren't only worn on their sleeves, but trumpeted from the rafters of each campaign stop. The only thing missing were hosts of angels.
It's a welcome sign and a relief that so far both Obama and Romney have left faith alone. Faith and politics aren't good bedfellows. In fact, they've become toxic when taken together.
The U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from making religion beliefs a litmus test for serving in public office. Unfortunately, especially since 1973, one's religious views have become just that.
In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a woman's right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. The decision ignited a firestorm among religious conservatives and gave birth to the Religious Right movement, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority.
It wasn't a majority, and as for the former, that can be debated.
It was a catastrophic decision. It was catastrophic because it turned Christianity away from being a religion that preached and sought social justice to one of dogmatic resistance ensconced in just two issues – reproductive rights and homosexuality.
That's what we Christians have come to be known for, protecting zygotes from premature disposal while proclaiming that God hates Richard for loving Richard and that neither is more than three-fifths of a human being when it comes to individual rights enjoyed by the rest of us.
It's funny because growing up in the Presbyterian Church of the 1960s and early 1970s, I don't remember any of this focus. I can't remember my father, who converted from Disciples of Christ and became a Presbyterian minister, or my mother ever talking about Leviticus and homosexuality, or sodomy as it was referred to.
Or the good book of Timothy either, at least in that regards. In fact, while we read Leviticus and Timothy we also read Isaiah, the synoptic Gospels, John and others. These books spoke of human relationships, how the rich should look after and help the poor, how we should treat each other in spite of our differences and that wealth was something to be watched carefully and not coveted greedily.
Yet those ideas of a social compact among humans have been tossed aside, replaced by the dual obsession of banning abortion and denial of gay rights. In our pursuit of these goals, Christians have given support to individuals and organizations who have other goals than helping the poor, the sick and the downtrodden and whose motto is “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
Putting on the blinders of abortion and gay rights has also prevented us from seeing the Bible as a whole, especially regarding homosexuality. Conservative Christians recite Leviticus as their reason for denying gays and lesbians the rights of marriage, property ownership, etc.; proclaiming “it's God's Word,” with the less than hidden implication that defying such brings about God's retribution and our demise.
But also in those passages of Moses' third book are admonitions (God's word?) against eating anything in the sea that doesn't have fins or gills, or animals that don't have cloven hooves and chew their cud. In fact the Bible is packed full of things we should be doing if we truly are to follow God's word, and for an insightful, humorous take on this, read Salon writer A.J. Jacob's 2007 book “The Year of Living Biblically.”
Want a hint at the end? In the whole year, he never even gets to the New Testament.
If we are truly living by God's word we should be splashing his name on our doorposts in animal blood, staying away from Ivar's clam chowder and having chicken instead of ham on Easter Sunday. The problem is none of us can do this, as Jacob points out well, which is why holding our political candidates to the fire of Biblical literalism is self defeating and fruitless.
Instead, there's a bigger picture to be realized, one dealing with how we treat each other. And if Obama and Romney have come to an unspoken realization of this fact when it comes to talking about each other's religious beliefs, more power to them.
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