Provoked to Politic: The Pew Foundation, Clergy, and Public Theology

I believe that people should weigh their political opinions in light of their faith commitments. For those who are Christians, I also think that those faith commitments ought to be decisive. But we craft those views in a pluralistic society in which many will be unsympathetic to what we believe and, where people are sympathetic, they will often agree for completely different reasons than the ones that motivate us. Rightly, our Constitution protects them and us, and I am grateful for that protection.

When I worked at Washington National Cathedral some years ago, I often met representatives from countries in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East who were studying church-state relations under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. Occasionally, Muslims (in particular) would suggest that as a “religious person,” I should want a religious government, and—they argued—”What better religion to guarantee the freedom of everyone than Islam?” I believe that they were sincere and meant well. But their Syrian Christian colleagues vehemently disagreed and, over a decade later, that offer sounds even less attractive than it did in the fall of 2000.

There is something that is deeply unsettling, then, in the new Pew Foundation study that indicates a larger number of Americans than in the past want their clergy to be more explicit about their political views. Even if that is true, what does it mean in practical terms for clergy across the faith traditions?

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