(RNS) It’s not pleasant to watch America’s religious leaders imitate our politicians when they expropriate political cliches to explain or delay their own difficult policy decisions.
The familiar political cliche of kicking the can down the road has become a convenient “Procrastinators’ Prayer” invoked across all faith communities.
Catholic leaders in the United States often attempt to defer the painful but necessary action of closing underutilized parishes and parochial schools. Kicking the can down the road allows the financially bleak status quo to continue, and enables church authorities to temporarily escape the ire of parishioners who oppose closures of neighborhood churches and schools.
The growing shortage of Catholic priests in America always raises the question of women clergy, a topic so controversial that the hierarchy doesn’t even permit the existence of a can to kick down the road. It totally rejects the idea, and sends such talk into the theological deep freeze.
Mainline Protestant leaders are confronting a continuing hemorrhage as historic denominations lose both members and influence. Mergers on a local and regional level loom, as “tall steeple churches” become increasingly expensive to maintain for smaller and aging congregations.
Some mainline denominations have not yet settled the question of gay clergy, and that issue appears and reappears at many ecclesiastical meetings. Faced with the divisive issue, they kick the can down the road some more and usually refer it to some blue-ribbon panel for further debate and discussion.
Evangelicals were once the “go go” religious community in the U.S., with rapid growth in new churches, members and political clout. But even they are kicking the can down the road as their standard bearers — Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum — were elevated and rejected during the primary. Now they'll have to kick the can down the road to 2016 or later for “their” candidate to win.
The Jewish community is also adept at kicking the can down the road. A recent American Jewish Year Book contains 59 single-spaced printed pages that cover the enormous panoply of national organizations devoted to religious and synagogue life, education and schools, community relations, cultural programs, overseas aid, Israel, social welfare, Holocaust museums and memorials, and youth and women organizations.
Yet that kind of Jewish infrastructure can't be supported by either demographics or economics. Like their Catholic and Protestant counterparts, Jewish leaders and organizations kick the can down the road in hopes of an economic recovery or a resurgence in Jewish philanthropy without recognizing that the current (and future) donor base is tapped out.
Politicians also love the idea of ignoring short-term problem in favor of long-term fixes that often figments of their own imagination. In the long run, they say, it will all get squared away. Just look at our inability to address long-term problems in Medicare, Social Security or federal debt.
The problem is, that doesn't do anything to actually fix the problem, either now or down the road.
Catholics believe a shrinking pool of priests will, in the long run, be filled by seminarians from Asia, Africa and South America. Meanwhile in the short run, American priests are fewer, older and burdened with increased workloads.
Mainline Protestants, buffeted by membership losses, believe a revolution of sorts will, in the long run, correct the current imbalance in funding, new churches, and membership.
American Jewish leaders recognize that short-run economic turbulence may continue, but in the long run a stronger community will emerge that's capable of adding even more pages to the already long list of organizations and charities.
That's all well and good, but the problem with kicking cans down the road is that it changes nothing. The can only gets beat up in the process, and it does nothing to change the road you're on.
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee's senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published “Cushing, Spellman, O'Connor: The Surprising Story of How Three American Cardinals Transformed Catholic-Jewish Relations.”)
LEM/KRE END RUDIN
