It Doesn't Matter If They Have "Faith"

I am worried.

About our country. About our society. About the growing reality that it appears we have forgotten how to think, how to disagree and challenge ideas, ideals and beliefs.

Why do we care if our presidential candidates have a “faith life”?  This article from the National Cathedral magazine has generated a lot of conversation and hype about which candidate is the "better religious". Who cares?

Why, in 2012, do we insist on tenaciously holding to old doctrines without equally insisting these same doctrines be questioned, challenged and debated for relevance?

When our current President states that it is our “faith” that has provided a “moral framework and vocabulary” for our nation, I wonder what he means? Who’s faith? In what? The scientific method? The stock market? Democracy? Equality?

When Obama then uses that idea of “faith” to automatically refer to a divine transcendent being, it reduces all other theories and approaches to morality, ethics, and good actions as null and void. More offensive, it affirms the wrongheaded idea that if you or I are not religious, or don’t have a “faith” we are unable to be good.

The discernment of right and wrong, the questions of how one ought to live (morality & ethics), has been discussed and debated since humans have recorded thought. The ancient Greeks were some of our most prolific thinkers in this area. It has not been limited to religion or a divine being, and it needs to not be now.

Unless our nation wants to embrace the belief that without religion or a divine transcendent being, one cannot be or do good, then what does it matter if our President is religious?

It doesn’t and shouldn’t. If we claim that any human being can do good, think wisely and live virtuously, with or without religion, then it does not matter. (Certainly we have witnessed many “men of faith” who have not lived up to those qualities).

When the Republican nominee for President states that “there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action”, I think about all the people who are agnostic, atheist, humanist, and non-Christian religious and wonder what they are worth? What a terrific statement of division. Thanks Mitt.

Claiming a faith life should not automatically license someone as “good and moral”. What it means is simply that someone either was taught, brought up or otherwise chose to believe in and trust a particular idea or way of engaging the world. Fine. Keep it out of policy making and politics.

Finally, that Obama says in the article that he is comforted at the end of the day because his faith teaches him that ultimately God is control is okay. I guess.

But wait a minute. If God is in control, why are there so many out-of-control situations? Why so many killed in suicide attacks? Why so many people dying of hunger, much of it caused by conflict, war and hate? Why are so many people without health care or employment? Why is there still prejudice and hate between races, genders, sexual orientations and religions? Why, why why?

To say that in the end God is in control is to open the door to the likes of Bryan Fischer and Pat Robinson who claim 9/11, Tsunami’s, earthquakes, and most recently the shooting in Aurora, CO, is because God is ticked at our waywardness.

We can’t have it both ways. Either, God is in control and we then need to check-in with our God-barometers every time we make a decision or respond to an event, or God isn’t and we don’t.

Who would be those God-barometer-interpreters? What happens if one persons hearing of God-directed politics and policies is different from another? Which one is right? How do we know?

This is a slippery-slope-of-a-religious-mud-slide that has the potential of careening down the side of our democratic foundation and smothering our right to think, choose, and challenge.

We need to stop it now.