Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • The Spiritual Importance of Separation of Church and State

    When I’m challenged on historical facts about the separation of church and state, I usually simply tell people that if separation of church and state was not part of our constitutional law (and I believe it is), I would still support it.  At least as strong as my political reasons for supporting the separation are spiritual reasons.

    Ed Brayton has been commenting on Berkley, Michigan where the decision has been made to turn a nativity display over to the city’s churches.  Ed notes:

    And it seems to me that the Christians there should be happy with this as well. Keeping the creche on city property required adding in a bunch of secular symbols as well, watering down the religious significance of the display. I can’t imagine why they would prefer to do that and keep it on city property rather than have it on church property where they have no such restrictions.

    I think it’s very bad for religion to acquire the power of the state for itself.  There is an immediate tendency in two directions.  First, we become lazy, expecting the state to do things for us.  Second, we start to compromise in order to keep everyone on board as we must in order to keep that official support.  The town of Berkley, MI may not have its nativity display on public property, a dubious blessing at best, but it will now have a Christian display.

    But it’s the first point I want to emphasize.  We are instructed in the gospel commission to make disciples.  Disciples don’t happen because somebody makes a law.  They don’t happen because of monuments to the 10 commandments.  They happen because one Christian is an effective witness to another person and then helps that person become a disciple.

    We have the means and the instructions for reducing the rate of abortions, divorces, drug addiction, murder, and other crimes.  It’s reaching out and making disciples, one person at a time.  The money is there in the churches, though often it is spent more to maintain structures than to carry out the gospel commission.  There are people in the churches who could do this, though many, if not most of them are sitting in the pews once a week.

    Christianity, or better being a follower of Christ, should be a voluntary effort, funded by the efforts of followers of Christ, and uncompromising because it is carried out by those same followers.  When we get government funding involved in religion I do believe there is a danger to the state.  There is a danger of people enforcing their religion on others.  There is plenty of evidence of this.

    But there is also the danger to spirituality, when the things that should be our passion–living Christlike lives characterized by the two laws–become simply a matter of custom and law.

    Christians should be concerned about preventing evil deeds.  But they should be more concerned about transforming the people who might commit those deeds.

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  • I Thought this Before it Started

    Henry Kissinger now says that the Iraq war is not winnable, something I thought from the start. talking to the BBS (via MSNBC), he said:

    “If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible.”

    All those factors were there before the war got started. If you combine the fact that Iraq is a nation pieced together from disparate elements that don’t really want to be a country in the first place with neighbors who would be happy to be in control of the same terrirtory you are placing a tall order. Then consider the fact that there never was a united opposition to Saddam’s reign, simply because the various elements of the opposition don’t generally share a vision for the country.

    If we allowed democracy to take it’s course, Iraq would likely become an Islamic republic led by the Shi’ites. Unfortunately what we seem to want to produce is a government that is both democratically elected and does what we want it to do. Bluntly, it’s not going to happen.

    Before the usual culprits accuse me of being pacifist and not wanting to fight terrorism, that is not my point. I believe that military force should sometimes be used. The problem is that there are those who don’t seem to choose wisely between one use of force and another. There might even have been things that could be accomplished militarily in Iraq. But the Iraq war that actually occurred was, in my view, a strategic error. My concern is not that people were killed, or that some feelings were hurt. My concern is that people were killed without any good and lasting result.

    At this point I’m afraid I see no option but to simply declare a set of doable goals–a certain amount of time spent in training, specified equipment levels for the Iraqi forces, and similar things, and then get out. Goals such as a peaceful, secure state are simply not going to happen, and all we’re doing trying to accomplish such goals is wasting time, political capital, money, and most importantly lives.

  • A Consistent and Principled Approach

    In a poll taken before the last election respondents indicated strong disapproval of congress (31% approve/63% disapprove) as a whole, and yet by an almost equal margin (60%/33%), they indicated approval of their own congressman (Fox Poll 10/13/06). This type of result occurs repeatedly in polls. I’m just using those numbers as an example. Similarly polls (and general observation) shows that people disapprove of attorneys as a profession, but like their own attorney, or certainly want a good, hard-hitting attorney on their side if they are in trouble.

    It’s very likely that these differences in perception have something to do with who each of those people are working for. My congressman has to try to serve my district, for example by trying to keep military bases here, get federal road projects here, and so forth. There are 434 other congressmen who don’t share his priorities on those district based items, and thus it is very unlikely that the people in any single district will approve of the whole of congress as much as they approve of their own.

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  • Identifying Moderate Muslims

    Laura has a short post over at Pursuing Holiness on Pakistan and a move toward moderation legislatively. The particular form of moderation involved is preventing women who are raped from being charged with adultery. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of a moderate stoning, so that I could get some idea what that would be like (no, not actuallly!).

    MSNBC has an article on this titled Pakistan lawmakers OK changes to rape law, and it’s subtitle, Death penalty for extramarital sex dropped; Islamic fundamentalists angry is also of interest.

    I think our response to this sort of thing, including both the original problem, the reform, and the response of some other Muslims can be problematic.

    1. We might become hostile to Islam as such. This is an unacceptable option to me, simply because I know from personal experience that there are Muslims who are good people, who make good neighbors, and who would abhor the mistreatment of women (a severe understatement for charging a rape victim with adultery) as much as I do.
    2. We can put our heads in the sand because we don’t want to seem intolerant, so we don’t want to these Muslims, lest we seem to be intolerant of all Muslims. This, in my view, would morally reprehensible. We must, I believe, combat evil, and this is undoubtedly evil.
    3. We can do our best to identify specific people and policies and oppose those. This is what I try, not always successfully, to do.

    This is one of the problems with our “friends” in the Middle East. In many cases it’s a “with friends like these” situation. In order to fight one form of evil, we get tangled with another. When I was in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in that part of the world during the first gulf war, I really thought about this. Who was it that I was defending? In general, my response had to be that they were not people I would want to defend, if I had the choice. This is not about them being Muslims. It’s about them being tyrants and enforcing sadistic laws and policies.

    I’m going to continue to try to distinguish Islam itself from many of its adherents. But I’m not going to let that stop me from making it clear that certain policies are simply evil. The treatment of women in many countries of the Middle East is one of those policies.

  • Tolerance or Homogenization

    I value tolerance. Even more, I value and celebrate diversity. But frequently I see definitions of tolerance that must be considered self-destructive.

    I usually encounter these in the form of straw-man arguments. Someone may ask me if I believe in tolerance. When I acknowledge that I do, they will ask me then whether I will tolerate some form of intolerance or another. The answer to that is, “It depends.” Whereupon I’m informed that I really don’t believe in tolerance because I don’t tolerate everything.

    I believe in tolerance as a value, not as an absolute. I don’t believe in tolerating everything, merely as much as it is possible to tolerate practically. If someone believes in firing a machine gun into a crowd of people, I find it quite appropriate not to tolerate his belief, at least if he has the intention and the means to act on it.

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  • Voter Turnout Higher – Wow

    MSNBC reports that voter turnout is slightly higher than the last midterms and was just a tad over 40%.

    I have to say that I’m less than overwhelmed. Where are the other 60% of registered voters, not to mention all the ones who don’t bother to register. You can’t tell me that there was nothing to vote on this time. At least here in Florida there were a number of significant issues, and I know there were in several other states.

    I believe it is appropriate that those who want to rule do so, but I can’t imagine what the rest of the voters are thinking, if anything.

  • Divided Government Again

    Well, I wanted it to happen, and it did. We have divided government. The good news is that the Republicans lost some ground, the bad news is that the Democrats won. Of course, the second had to happen if the first did.

    What annoys me as an independent voter is hearing Democratic strategists claiming that independent voters “turned to them” and talking about the kind of mandate they get from that. There is only one real mandate–that is that you got elected.

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  • Go Vote!

    News stories are now talking about the drive on both sides to get out the vote today. It amazes me that it takes this much effort to get people to go make some choices about their government. But I know from the times I’ve worked in political campaigns that the results often come down to who managed to do a better job getting their supporters out on election day.

    My wife and I will not make it to the polls until evening, when we may have to stand in line. In fact, I hope we will have to stand in line. That would mean that our precinct has good turnout. I’ll pass by the pollling place several times today, but we like to do this together. We always go over the sample ballot and discuss our votes and the reasons for them in the days before the election, and then we go together. We don’t always vote the same way. Sometimes people, especially couples, find it hard to discuss politics when they disagree strongly on candidates, but while we sometimes disagree passionately, we have never found it so. We just mark one ballot with different colors and we can tell where we’re going to cancel out.

    Some folks out there are telling themselves that their vote doesn’t count and it isn’t important. But just because you can’t cast the deciding vote doesn’t mean what you do isn’t important. In sports we give special mention to the player who drove in the winning run, or scored the winning touchdown. But it’s not like that in politics. Not only do we not know who cast the vote that gave a candidate a lead, even the percentages will become part of the political debate over the next few years.

    If you think this election is less important because it’s not a presidential year, think again. It may be that you think your vote isn’t important because you only worry about the presidential election in which you’re one of many millions. But I’m sure you have local races. Local races are important.

    This is a team activity in which everyone can participate. Get off the bench!

  • What if We’re to Blame?

    Robert J. Samuelson has an excellent article in Newsweek with this title. He comments on the way politicians follow the polls, and how we, as voters, demand contradictory things:

    Americans favor balanced budgets. But in 66 years of surveys, taxpayers have never said their income taxes were too low, reports Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute. A Gallup poll in April found that 48 percent thought their taxes too high and only 2 percent too low. Americans also think government spending is hugely wasteful; 61 percent said so in a 2004 poll by the University of Michigan. But locating that waste is hard. A recent Fox News poll found that only 19 percent favor cuts in Social Security, 21 percent in health care, 19 percent in education and 25 percent for the military.

    Read the whole article. It’s worth it!

  • Hidden Hate – Open Rebuke

    Yesterday I had planned to write a response to the Ted Haggard situation, but other issues got in the way, and then the story developed. I was going to talk some about the meaning of forgiveness combined with accountability and openness. I would have said that we didn’t know yet precisely what had happened, but that he had done the right thing by stepping aside and letting an independent oversight board take a look.

    All of those things are true still. We don’t know precisely what happened, but we do see a bit more fire and less smoke. I would still say that forgiveness involves putting aside our resentments so that we do not poison ourselves with anger, but at the same time that forgiveness doesn’t remove consequences of someone’s bad choices. Accountability is still a key, and simply the fact that there are structures in place that look like accountability doesn’t mean that a person is really being held accountable.

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