Now Playing: "Telling God what to do and the people how to behave"
Topic: God and Politics
Recently, candidate Romney attempted a public declaration of his religious position vis-a-vis church and state. This in the tradition and hopeful replication of the Kennedy speech on the same subject in 1960.
Romney's effort fell far short. Not his fault though because his audience was seriously unwilling to hear the Kennedy concepts of separation of church and state.
This reduced Romney to claiming that his personal Christian priest-hood approach to governing would have a morally judgmental style more in keeping with America's obsession with moral gossip than say candidate Huckabee or those godless types like Giuliani who seem to be hiding from wearing their religious beliefs on their sleeves.
Among Democrats who have a more minor history of dragging God into the policital arena, there are still those willing to proclaim a spirituality that implies that God might be the same political junkie beloved of many republicans and the constituency to which they pander.
Turn on any preacher cable channel and watch for a while - especially when they begin their public praying episodes. Before they start, get out your New Testament, assuming that you have one. If not, google it and get it ready on line.
Watch and listen then as each of them - some even tearfully - step beyond the notion of pleading with God as if he/she were stubborn but still convincable supremicist. Listen that as the braying ... oops, I mean praying ... preachers presume to tell God what to do while third party listeners like as are told by the prayerful phrases who we are to behave.
Then read chapters 5,6 & 7 of Matthew. Read about praying to God in private rather than wearing your big mouth personal morality on your sleeves or your head like a gigantic blood-red fireman's hat.
Read about praying in secret in your closet in hopes of God seeing what you do in private and rewarding you openly - according to the socially redeeming value of your request.
They're -as Watts wrote "telling God what to do and the people how to behave."
Would you want to permanently reside in a kingdom where the boss is a gullible despot subject to the partisan bleating of self-promoting false moralists?
Is that the America toward which many foolishly radical political Christians want to shove us?
Is that the America we want?
Is that the America we need?
Is that the America that would stop imperialising the world?
... or worse, turn America into diety's personal crusader complete with waving banners, blood-red crosses and knights brandishing swords, lances and atomic catapults?
