c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Well, I feel thoroughly manipulated. How about you?

In 2005, we skirmished in supposed controversy over “separation of Church and State.” I realize now that the point wasn’t to separate religion and politics, but to separate liberals and conservatives, with liberals being tagged as religion’s enemy.

Some of us worried about what Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito would do to Roe vs. Wade. Now it seems his abortion stance was mainly a bone to the Christian right; the heart of his candidacy is his determination to expand the power of the executive branch.

Anti-gay preachers got little traction in their attempt to blame Hurricane Katrina on the gay-affirming citizens of New Orleans. But they did affirm the notion that someone must be to blame. If not gays, then a mayor, a governor, federal relief agencies, or a president. What was unmistakably an act of nature became another card in our using misfortune to besmirch someone else.

Proof of why the First Amendment’s Establishment clause exists arose in Kansas and Pennsylvania, taking the guise of an alleged debate within scientific circles about origins. It took a judge in Pennsylvania to name “Intelligent Design” as phony science and as biblical creationism in disguise.

We ended the year amid thundering indignation from Fox News and conservative preachers over an alleged “war on Christmas.” Totally fictional, it turns out, another tactic to embarrass liberals and to paint them into a corner as anti-Christian.

While our attention was diverted, government abandoned any pretense of basic religious ethics _ caring for the poor, mitigating the power of the wealthy, encouraging mutual sacrifice, affirming decency and accountability, opening doors to strangers _ and instead took from the poor, gave to the rich, closed the nation’s borders, spied on citizens, and labeled any dissent from such policies as “unpatriotic” and “liberalism” and therefore contrary to “biblical ethics.”

To their shame, many conservative Christian leaders went along with this manipulation because it promised growth in membership more money, and a short-term boost to their doctrinal agenda.

To their equal shame, many progressive Christian leaders ignored the manipulation, even when it painted them into a corner, and worried instead about ordination entitlements, tax-exemption issues and not offending members whose wealth is needed for parish budgets.

I sure hope we do better in 2006.

We have got to stop letting our faith be shaped by our political views and economic circumstances. It needs to go the other direction, with faith shaping our politics and our use of wealth and power. That won’t mean absence of disagreement, of course, for faith isn’t at all monolithic. We serve our nation poorly, however, when we fall in line with partisan political agendas because we expect some derivative benefit, such as feeling justified in unbridled pursuit of wealth or seeing our ethical preferences written into law. To score on a single issue, we ignore too much that is demonstrably wrong.

Both conservative and liberal Christians need to grapple deeply with scriptural ethics, preferably together, studying both the law and the prophets, both the Gospels and letters of Paul. Conservatives need to stop assuming that they alone are “evangelical” and steeped in Scripture. Liberals need to risk holding up their moral preferences to the light of Scripture. We need to engage each other, not trivialize each other. We are all serious people.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

In pursuing biblical ethics, we need to work harder than we do. It isn’t enough to find a few citations to justify our predispositions. Scripture is complicated, and so are both personal and societal ethics. We need to dwell in that complexity, even if it doesn’t yield simple slogans for shouting.

I, for one, am tired of slogans, labels, assumed viewpoints and party lines. Too much of what we all hold dear _ such as “family values” and “love of country” _ is held hostage by manipulators whose sole concerns are wealth and power.

MO/JL END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

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