The Practicing Progressive

Issue 23
May 22, 2007

The death of Jerry Falwell has brought a plethora of punditry surrounding the unique American understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. The late Reverend has been condemned as a demagogue and hallowed as a champion of Christ. He has been lifted up as a paragon of virtue and decried as the personification of evil. He has…well, you get the picture.

All of this frenzy has set me to pondering my own understanding of this complicated connection between the church and state, particularly as it affects the role of the clergy.

Early in my ministry, I was profoundly influenced by a story, now oft-told, of a chance meeting between then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and William Sloan Coffin, the chaplain at Yale. If you know anything of The Rev. Coffin you are very much aware of his willingness to express his passionate beliefs to anyone who would listen…or even those who wouldn’t. Coffin somehow managed to corner Kissinger while both were attending a White House function intended, one would suppose, for cordial conversation and convivial dialogue. What Kissinger got was anything but. Coffin railed at the Secretary over the administrations multitudinous failures on both the domestic and foreign fronts. Coffin was particularly incensed over the continued chaos in Vietnam and Nixon’s reluctance to admit defeat and terminate the U.S.’s involvement.

Once Coffin wound up it was difficult if not impossible to calm him down. Finally, Secretary Kissinger had had enough and interrupted the pastor long enough to say: “OK. Bill! I get your point but what exactly would you have us do?” Whereupon, Coffin replied with these immortal (at least for me) words: “As a Christian minister, my calling is to say to you, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”, and your job, sir, is to figure out the irrigation system!"

The prophetic role of the pastor, priest, rabbi or imam is, at least in the American context, a valuable and desperately needed responsibility. Clergy are called to protect “the least of these” from any attempt to exclude them from full participation in all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Sadly, this needed role has too often been ignored by both the clergy and the religious establishment. This failure often comes when religious figures find themselves in positions of power, either in a localized congregation where fear of unsettling the parishioners precludes the prophetic voice or when proximity to political powers has religious authorities cowed and submissive. In either case, this crucial duty is too often shuffled aside and replaced with less offensive functions.

There isn’t a clergyperson around who hasn’t faced this issue. Some have managed to maintain ethical clarity and vocational integrity even as the rest of us pretty much just muddle through, trying to keep the folk in the pews and the money in the plates. Being at the occupational mercy of a lay-led Church Council may have its benefits but speaking truth to power is probably not one of them.

There is great relief, I can assure you, in retiring from the ministry and no longer being asked to offer pleasant little prayers or inoffensive homilies to the good and gathered folk. Worst of all, were the invitations to do the same before civic groups and community organizations. No, no…worst, worst of all came when I was invited to intone a brief prayer before the Colorado State Senate. I was informed by the smiling sergeant-at-arms that the prayer was to be both short and unobjectionable to those in attendance, qualities that were rarely part of my prayerful consideration. Nevertheless, I performed as expected and left the capital’s occupants pleased, I am sure, with both my brevity and my innocuousness. I also left vowing never to again repeat such a dishonest display of pastoral cowardice. I did, of course…not before state senators but too often before people that mattered much more to me. It was only in the waning years of my career when a modicum of wisdom mixed with the courage that comes with a career’s end that I stopped performing religious tricks and tried instead to speak the truth, at least as I struggled to understand it.

I remember reading of the suicide of a Lutheran pastor who had served for over 20 years as the chaplain for the U.S. House of Representatives. I wondered then as I wonder now if this sad event might have been instigated, in part, by his long participation in a process that was inherently fraught with a conflicted conscience. Could two decades of inoffensive offerings to an inoffensive God eventually have taken its toll? Clergy everywhere struggle with the call to be, at the same time, pastor, priest and prophet. When this triad of professional tension is ignored the result is troubling at the very least and sometimes even tragic.