COMMENTARY: Impeachment warning: Holy wars are never holy

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.) UNDATED _ This Sunday, in houses of worship across the land, people will pray for the nation and its leaders. Some do so every week out of long tradition. Some see special need for prayer as a […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ This Sunday, in houses of worship across the land, people will pray for the nation and its leaders.


Some do so every week out of long tradition. Some see special need for prayer as a bitterly partisan impeachment trial gets under way in Washington.

As always, when events swirl around us in shades of gray, we hardly know how to pray. We could pray, simply,”Your will be done, O Lord.”But that would prove less than satisfying to many, because in God’s most sustained dealing with an offense such as President Clinton’s, God punished David but retained him as king. Such a chastening wouldn’t advance the religious right’s political agenda.

When Jesus dealt with such an offense, he sent the accusers scurrying to hide from their own hypocrisy, and then he loved the sinner and bade her straighten up. Where is the definitive showdown in such compassion?

Scouring Scripture for examples of leadership won’t satisfy, either.

One of the profound messages of Scripture is that leaders are fallible, sometimes extraordinarily fallible. Even the greatest of Israel’s leaders were weak and vain, whiners and cowards.

In the Old Covenant, God never seemed to count on political leaders for much that mattered. His”chosen one”wasn’t a king or specific leader; his”servant”was the nation itself. Somehow, in its hesitant walk with God, Israel would be a”beacon to the nations,”a bearer of justice, not by being perfect, but by remembering itself as a people whom God freed from bondage.

In the New Covenant, Jesus did entrust much to his disciples, but then he chose men and women who were weak, prideful, arrogant and blind. He didn’t expect them to become moral exemplars, but to become one and to demonstrate the grace that begins when we know our need of God.

Jesus said his Holy Spirit would work through them _ an action plan that has frustrated many self-righteous rulers who wanted the venture to depend on them, not on some spiritual force to which they didn’t have special access.

As the Senate takes its turn in the impeachment drama, I figure the nation and its Constitution will survive. We have been through worse. But I am offended _ and frightened _ when this partisan process gets labeled as high morality, as saving the nation from sin, as a defending of family values and national righteousness. It is nothing of the sort.


Hyper-moralizing is a frightening force. Over the years, true believers have committed unspeakable crimes in the Name of Jesus. They do so utterly convinced that they have God’s blessing, indeed God’s demand, on their side.

True believers have enslaved entire populations, slaughtered entire populations, burned witches, cheated native peoples, lynched blacks, ignored the Jewish Holocaust, black-listed the divergent, burned books, stolen vast fortunes _ all in the Name of Jesus.

Because they presented themselves as doing God’s will, they saw no need for negotiation, compromise or compassion.

I don’t fear a weak or morally challenged President. Bill Clinton is a paragon of virtue compared to some who have occupied the Oval Office, and a rascal compared to others. We will be analyzing the Clinton presidency for decades, whenever it expires, because it is such a complex psychosocial drama, not only in the man himself, but in the responses he seems to stir, in the social forces that swirl around him and his era, and in the shifting sands of Washington politics.

What I do fear is the hyper-moralizing that is poisoning America’s well of trust and mutual respect. One narrow slice of personal morality is presenting itself as possessing ultimate truth, as expressing the revealed will of God, as being beyond compromise, as being the very definition of righteousness.

Out of such Big Lies come reigns of terror.

Whatever political outcome emerges from this messy process, we must _ for the sake of the nation, as well as the integrity of our souls _ stand down from these self-serving righteous ramparts and say No to the meanness and narrowness that hyper-moralizing has unleashed in our land.


Holy wars are never holy.

DEA END EHRICH

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