…or “If I Were to Run for Office.”
Trust me, I’d be branded a right-winger, a neo-con Republican, an ultra-liberal Democrat, an anti-abortion pro-abortionist, and a bigoted anti-Semitic. And all because of the churches I’ve chosen to remain in.
I decline to get involved in the Wright-Hagee thing because 1) it’s eclipsing other important issues, 2) it’s gone on much too long, and 3) it involves two major-party candidates, and I’m an independent. So let me take this partisan dispute and open up the lens a bit. Rod wrote this on why McCain is being held to a different standard than Obama, and I agree with Rod’s conclusion: “McCain isn’t being held responsible for Hagee because McCain didn’t spend 20 years sitting in the pews at Hagee’s church, and didn’t claim Hagee as his spiritual mentor.”
But here’s the thing: At any given time in my church life, if I’d been held to the Obama standard, I would have failed miserably. In one instance, my church was buying land, and my pastor said from the pulpit that the only thing the Jewish seller understood was money. Did I leave the church? No. I loved the people there. My relationship with God was finally uncomplicated and I wasn’t about to mess with that. And this pastor had said so many other offensive things that this one remark was hardly worse than any other. But that one snippet, in the hands of my political enemies, could open me up to a charge of anti-Semitism. And forget what all the other snippets would have said about me.
I’ve attended churches that ran the gamut from ultra fundamental to ultra liberal, but for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the pastor’s sometimes extreme views. Either somebody important to me invited me to attend, or I heard good things about it, or I was new in town and desperate to find a spiritual community. Or whatever. The bottom line for me was seldom the pastor and his or her specific perspective. It was instead the sense of community and the opportunities the church offered in terms of learning and serving.
Back when the infamous Wright sound bite was first aired, I was asked during a radio interview to comment on it. My knee-jerk response was that I could not have remained a member of his church. But later I wondered about that. My answer would be different today. The Wright controversy aside, the reality is that our reasons for associating with a particular group of believers are often complex, and we need to help the unassociated and unchurched understand that.
Many of us stay in bad churches for good reasons. If that keeps us from holding office, that’s a sad commentary on society’s understanding of church life — and on our inability to articulate the fact that a church is much more than its pastor.