Politics and the Pulpit

As the priest told the 9am Mass of the inefficacy of violence and the necessity of creating peace schools rather than war colleges and military academies – “Haven’t you heard of ‘peace studies’ and other such ninny programs?” I raged in my head – I began to roll my eyes and squirm in my seat. My wife, in tune to my body language, knew I was annoyed and patted my knee, as if to say “now, now.”

But it seemed so out-of-place, so naïve, so devoid of any historical understanding or context, and, chief of all, so totally inappropriate to the pulpit. “No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, of pro-Revolution ministers. “Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.” My priest indeed had “quit his proper character” to adopt that of the prognosticator, taking Biblical passages from Jeremiah and St. Paul and opining on modern political realities. Donning this new responsibility, the priest became a preacher, in the worst sense of that word, informing the congregation how they ought to think about politics if they were real Christians. One had the feeling of being “read out” of the Church unless you realized the pacifistic foundations of modern Catholicism.

Yet it was not only the confusion of duties that annoyed me. A rigid doctrinaire application of biblical morality to daily life, devoid of circumstance or context strikes me as totally irrelevant without reflections on the actual condition of man, the current political climate, and 2000 years of Christian history. The great Anglican scholar Richard Hooker made that observation 500 years ago, facing down British Calvinists bent on subjecting England to a reign of “sola scriptura,” faith by the literal Word alone, history and circumstance be damned. Indeed, my priest seemed dangerously close to slipping into a Calvinist Catholicism, a Roman “sola scriptura,” if you will. Men are a diabolical combination of good and evil, giving that character to their world, and must be dealt with based on who and where they are. Moral institutions and systems that cease to recognize this flux of unpredictable individuality, to see men acting in time, are brittle from their stiffness. They see theoretical men, not actual men.

Further, they run the danger of becoming irrelevant. The perceptive nineteenth century legal scholar James Fitzjames Stephen warned, “As a matter of historical fact, no really considerable body of men is, or ever has been, or ever has professed to be Christian in the sense of taking the philanthropic passages of the four Gospels as the sole, exclusive, and complete guide of their lives. If they did, they would in sober earnest turn the world upside down … Nothing can be more monstrous than a sweeping condemnation of mankind for not conforming their conduct to an ideal which they do not really acknowledge.” Stephen was not carving out an anti-Christian argument, but sought to make Christianity relevant by dealing with men as they are, rather than as many would like them to be. Pacifism and peace suit situations where pacifism and peace can be expected to work; when not, they are a destructive waste of life, time, and treasure. Only vigilance, patriotism, and service can preserve the peace and liberty we have carved out of this world.

In the end, the priest stepped back, as if sensing the discomfort of his flock, and said “but this is not an anti-war speech.” The silly disclaimer left me unconvinced and frowning, tapping my fingers on the pew. Save my soul, Father, “restore all things in Christ” and leave the rest alone.