Faith And Corruption

                  ... and ... keep oneself unstained by the world.
                                    The Letter of James, 1:27
                                                                    NRSV

     Far from today in years and miles and more, my job involved me in planning a town's annual ecumenical prayer breakfast.
     Our whopping, 50-member committee was tasked with choosing a speaker. When we met to do the job, names were plentifully proposed. Some gained no support. Others gradually did. At length one name seemed to be emerging as a front-runner.
     A committee member raised his hand in objection.
     We can't have him, the member said to the chair.
     Why not? said the chair.
     Because he's a Republican. We had a Republican last year.
     Political partisanship had infected the blood and bone of the community.  Party labels were not only  shorthand for concepts of ends and means in governance. They were considered emblematic of character, even morality, in community affairs of every sort. Political screening of faith speech raised not an eyebrow. The Republican's name was tabled, and someone else -- a Democrat -- was chosen as that year's speaker.
     I moved away and  thought for years I'd left such extremes behind. Nowadays, alas, not so. National affairs have brought them back in spades.
     If it were a movie, today's Washington would be The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight as jointly imagined by a fantasist and a Klansman. In it, an amoral president has sought and received  the favor of religious moralists. (See fantasist, above.) This bizarre union produces regular outbreaks of irony. In one of the latest, an American embassy in Israel was opened with prayer by a clergyman who asserts that Jews are condemned to hell by virtue of being Jewish.  The overarching irony is that in coveting political power the religious moralists of the Christian right helped create a morally contemptible administration .
     Supporting actors are playing their part. In the House of Representatives, the president's party has given its highest leadership post to a human weather vane. In the Senate, the party is led by a shameless shill.
     The president can't keep aides for reasons ranging from incompetence to indictment. Congress maintains the demeanor of a soccer riot. National policy is made by partisan squabble or executive tantrum. Minorities are routinely libeled from a White House that is supposed to represent all Americans. And good-hearted people everywhere are praying -- so to speak -- that this movie will have an abbreviated run.
     Good hearts in my orbit worry about aftereffects.  Even when this president is gone, the bigots energized by his hate-mongering may be awhile crawling back under their rocks. For my own part, I also worry about lingering adulteration of politics with fundamentalist religion. An insidious kind of intolerance comes from the notion that some political opinions are divinely approved.
     And what of that adulteration in the obverse -- the break-in of politics upon religion? We should not cherry-pick the Bible to support a point of view, but the letter of James does come to mind. The writer is concerned with the difference between religious values and worldly priorities -- and with the capacity of the latter to corrupt the former.
   Today's mixture of religion and politics has in several particulars grievously corrupted both. I wonder how long a cleansing will take.