It was just about a week before Texas Gov. Rick Perry formally announced his candidacy for President of The United States, and he was already the object of much speculation, when Perry pulled together a public event of great moment and purpose.
Purportedly it was not a political event. This was not his official presidential announcement. This was an unofficial pronouncement. He had called together about 15,000 people in the Houston's Reliant Stadium for a day of fasting and prayer on behalf of the nation. He appealed to his fellow citizens that they bow down in humility, he appealed to his lord for a little healing and guidance. I remember hearing it reported that Perry even took a moment to pray on behalf of our current president.
There was a part of me glad to hear those prayers. That part wanted to believe the Texas governor was being sincere in his heart of hearts. But at the same time I had this sinking feeling.
Even before this event, billed as "The Response," had been called together, Perry had been taking some criticism for the perceived political theatre of it all. More than 50 Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders signed a statement complaining that the event sent out "a message of religious exclusion and preference" to those who might not share the Governor's particular beliefs or practice of faith.
I'd heard those criticisms and to be honest I didn't quite know how to feel about them.
We've grown accustomed to hearing politicians tell us they had consulted The Big Guy before making the big decision to run, but generally we've been able to understand that as a very personal moment of deep conscience, some private soul searching. This event, with the Texas governor's ambitions so plainly known, was seen as being right on the ragged edge of some ritual anointing.
But it wasn't Rick Perry's perceived presumptions of divine mission that had me feeling uneasy. Like I said, I've heard this stuff before and this latest from Perry was only different from others by some matter of degree. If I'm not mistaken the Lord did some early consulting work for the Bachmann campaign as well. No, what had me sighing wasn't the sound of prayers, it was the path I was all but certain political discussion would be heading down as a result.
We've seen this movie before. With a few references to the Good Lord, and the ever divisive leverage of our political media, our politics can so quickly become about symbolic issues - what we can take a politician to embody or signify, rather than what he has to say, what he actually proposes in terms of policy. And, just like the narrow fractional percentage margin of difference between different strategies to incrementally reduce deficit spending over the course of a decade can be conflated into the dramatic confrontation between Free Market Capitalism and The Culture of Statist Entitlement, the different way certain of our politicians resort to prayer becomes a literally holy war between God's children and the godless heathens of "the secular socialist machine."
No, the part that had my heart sinking the hardest, as I listened to a radio story on Perry's rally wasn't the fact that some might self-anoint from time to time, but rather the reaction from both "sides" of the debate so likely to ensue. The way discussion was so likely to polarize into the caricatured stance of dismissing those "cling to guns and religion" on the one side versus those who see their candidate as 'The Chosen One' on the other. I've already seen the early signs of this sad syndrome. Among liberal friends of mine there circulate the emails and Facebook postings ridiculing creationists and evangelicals as ignorant hicks. Conservative friends dust off the old ugliness of speculating as to the president's "hidden true Muslim faith." The discourse quickly descends from the sacred to the not even civil.
It does leave me despairing, maybe even looking to some help from above. I don't mind Rick Perry praying in the public square, so long as he doesn't mind me challenging his policies and pronouncements from time to time, especially when they seem at odds with the Christian charity he professes. There will be more of that to come in time. I happen to agree with these comments:
"Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause."
Those are the words of an Illinois State Senator, who I believe, at the time he said them, speaking at a conference on faith in the public square, was running for the U.S. Senate. He'd go on to be elected president.
So I'll not condemn Rick Perry for citing his faith publicly before setting out to seek the presidency. Neither will I cut him any slack when I feel he's reading his Good Book selectively or forgetting his Christian charity. (Threatening to "get rough" with the "treasonous' Fed chairman for example). No one should treat him or anybody he has convinced to support him as stupid or ignorant or blind because of their beliefs. Neither should we accept their politics on blind faith.
I'll leave it there and with this, from Thomas Jefferson: "Say nothing of my religion. It is known to myself and my God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."
Can I get an amen?
Tom Driscoll lives in Holliston.
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