May 21, 2005
Stunted
I’ve no idea who made the following comments. All I know is that I didn’t and sure wish I had.
Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting prisoners are precisely the sort of tasks that the president of the United States continues to reject as budgetary priorities. He apparently ranks them, in terms of governmental commitment, well below tax cuts for the wealthy, militarization of global politics, reliance on foreign fossil fuels, and draining Social Security coffers. Perhaps most insidiously, his description of religion as “a personal matter” insulates his refusal to engage in such charitable acts from the censure of a religious, or any other, community.
If religion truly is “a personal matter,” if the “great thing about America” is the freedom of worship (and not, for example, the freedom to take one’s deepest commitments into the public realm on issues of war and peace, care for the needy, and so on), then we retain only a stunted version of what a robustly religious polity might look like.
Such a truncated religious sensibility runs counter to a deeply American, and deeply religious, tradition of charity, compassion, inclusion, and justice.