The following is Part 2 of two columns drawn from an interview with Rachel Laser, President of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
I very much appreciated Brian McLaren’s recent column, Thanks Presiding Bishop Curry, and his thoughtful exploration of the bishop’s advice to find a voice that is non-partisan, and why this is easier said than done.
In his speech, Bishop Curry twice emphasized the need to find a voice that is non-partisan (“this is not partisan,” “not a partisan voice”). We all know why he needed to say this.
It has been shown that wealth actually changes the structure of a person’s brain, destroying a sense of empathy for others while at the same time creating a sense of entitlement.
The Bible has a political agenda. Even with all the different writers who contributed to different books, there is a clear biblical bias against the powerful using their places of authority to step on those who are already suffering. That’s political.
From Ezekiel to Jesus to the voices of the gospels, the proclamation is clear: civilization will not, indeed cannot, survive if wealth and power, and therefore food and shelter, are in the possession of but a few. Equally so, democracy will not and cannot survive if the bullies are allowed free reign.
The year 2020 has been a stressful one. With George Floyd’s death as an inflection point about race and racism in America, an unprecedented presidential election, and social unrest during an ongoing pandemic with a rising death toll, something is deeply broken in America’s body politic.
Recently, a half-dozen young people in our small town organized a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration. The march was seen by some as an intrusion of threatening other-worldly politics into our predominantly (99.8%) white town and riled up a lot of emotional responses on social media.
I’m thinking a lot about this moment. Under 70 days until the most important Presidential Election arguably of all time, close to six months into an unprecedented global pandemic, increasing racial uprisings, increasing inequalities, anxieties, looming questions, delayed and potent grief.
In the new normal that we can create together, we can lean into a truth that we are all learning in our bones thanks to this crisis: we are all connected, participants in local, regional, and global societies, living in an ecosystem that requires us to seek the common good with one another and with all our fellow creatures.