Middle Church Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right

Introduction One cold February day during my senior year of seminary, I did a controversial and, to some people, even radical thing: I boarded a bus and rode to Washington, D.C., to hear a Baptist preacher deliver a sermon on politics. Like many others, I had read about his views and activities in the newspaper. I knew he preached against the decay of values in public life, and I knew he was often condemned for mixing politics and religion. His critics believed a clergyman had no business preaching about politics from the pulpit. Some feigned concern about the separation of church and state, but I think they were more opposed to the substance of his message than the fact that a minister was delivering it. He never called on the government to impose his Christian views. He simply spoke from his heart, and his heart and his faith were inseparable. He evaluated public policy according to his beliefs about right and wrong, and those beliefs were grounded in his Christianity. Faith led him to the conclusion that America was a morally sick nation that was ignoring Jesus' teachings, and in calling our society to account, in judging the policies of his country according to the principles of his faith, he threatened the familiarity and ease of the status quo. And, like so many messengers of faith who challenge our comfort too closely, he was denounced and vilified. I was not troubled by the idea of a minister preaching politics from the pulpit, any more than I would discourage a rabbi or imam from delivering sermons that connect their religious values to public policy. I believe in the separation of church and state, but not in the separation of people of faith and institutions of government. What is politics, if not the highest expression of our moral feelings as a people? If discussion of morality is banished from the pulpit, then where is it permissible to speak about right and wrong? I had been a pastor of my own church since age nineteen, and I always felt the pulpit marked the beginning, not the boundaries, of ministry. So when a friend called and told me there would be a gathering of religious leaders in Washington who were concerned about the detachment between public policy and moral belief, I was intrigued enough to attend. It was a clear day in Washington, bitterly cold but brilliantly sunny. As I leaned over the balcony rail from the upper level of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the preacher we had come to hear walked up the center aisle. It was one of those profound experiences that imprints itself on one's memory in the form of general feelings rather than specifics. I cannot recall his words, only that his voice seemed to fill every space in the church, that he was earnest and unafraid, and that he was able to challenge America's moral failings without seeming judgmental or alienating. For him, the Gospels formed a seamless tapestry with current events, and he was unafraid to speak of both in terms of right and wrong. It was a scene that might be repeated in many a church today, with a Jerry Falwell railing against homosexuals, a Pat Robertson endorsing tax cuts, or a Franklin Graham denigrating Islam and proclaiming Christianity to be the one, true American faith. But these were not the voices that called me to ministry or inspired me to political activism. The preacher in the pulpit on that cold but clear February day in 1968 was a thirty-nine-year-old Georgia-raised Baptist named Martin Luther King, Jr. The occasion was a meeting of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About the Vietnam War. His topics -- poverty and peace -- may seem somewhat foreign to observers of contemporary politics but should be familiar to any student of scripture. Today those issues have disappeared from too many pulpits, replaced by narrow issues of personal piety. More than thirty-five years after a Baptist preacher from the Deep South first inspired me to polEdgar, Bob is the author of 'Middle Church Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743289504 and ISBN 0743289501.