Does that drive some people away from the church when they hear it?
TP: I have found the majority did not know that it was like that for Black people because it's not their reality and they will say that. So the goal is to dispel the myths. Do some people get upset knowing that? Yes, absolutely. Will I still speak it? Yes.
Pastor Feldmeir, talk about the politics of compassion.
MF: At the heart of it, the word compassion of course means to suffer with in Latin. In Greek, it comes from this wonderful little word. It Splankna, which literally refers to the gut and the ancients believed that the source of human emotion was not in the mind. It wasn't in the heart even, but it was in the gut. So that when you see an injustice, when you see something that you would consider evil or an accident, for example, that could be preventable. We might even say today, “My stomach turned when I saw that,” or “I felt that deeply in my gut” or “I'm nervous and I have butterflies.” So compassion literally is to feel in your gut what you see before you, and then to be so moved as to act on that emotion in ways that care for the other, that see the need and the pain or the suffering of the other.
We apply that politics of compassion to a context that we're all living in, which is more like a politics of contempt. So the starting place for most conversations are adversarial rather than trying to find that common ground that says, “We all agree that this particular event or issue needs to be addressed, not from a partisan perspective, but from a shared consensus about what is good and right in the world.”
Why should political conversations come up in places like churches or mosques or synagogues? These are sacred spaces where people come together to find community or peace, not a debate.
AH: This is one of the reasons why I think that religious communities are so important. At this moment, there aren't many spaces where we are able to really truly dig into that place of compassion, to really truly hear one another's stories like Pastor Perry shared, to really hear one another's experiences. And too often, our churches have either given over these conversations to the political realm and said, “We don't talk about politics in the church.” And I feel like that is really abdicating our responsibility as people who are called to lead and to love and to care for one another and to build connections. It takes digging into those difficult spaces.
A lot of times we talk about our role as faithful leaders is to have one arm that's comforting and one arm that's pushing. I think of this like you're lighting a fire and challenging people. It's this dance of comfort and challenge and comfort and challenge. And if you're doing too much of one and not enough of the other, then you are losing that balance to move people toward those deeper connections with God and with one another. And that means diving into the most important topics of our time and our lifetime, like, racism and understanding what our role is as religious people in maintaining the institutions of racism.
TP: When it comes to politics and people, you see the warm, fuzzy Jesus. Beatitudes. But you serve a very political Jesus. You serve a Jesus who stood against the Pharisees and called them hypocrites in the synagogue because they were more so concerned with religion versus a true faith in God. About money. And I'll even say filling the pews, making sure that people would follow them to the point that our savior actually went into the temple, flipped over the tables and I love the verse: He went and made a whip because there were money changes in people disrespecting the house of God and he whipped them out of the temple.
So when people say, “If Jesus was here, he would absolutely stand beside and be peaceful.” Jesus would come here and be like, “I need to clean out just about every church here because I need you to preach and teach the truth. My people can only be informed if you tell the truth.”
What about politicians who say Jesus is on their side?
MF: I think that's the danger of conflating ultimate concerns with sort of local proximate concerns that we've suddenly assumed that if somebody doesn't agree with us on this issue, and we see this issue as being an ultimate issue rather than a political issue. So if we can sort of diffuse those conversations and understand that any solution to a political issue still has its finite limitations and the broader context of what we might call God's infinite possibilities. When we start to make ultimate or these things in our lives that are problems and then become ultimate concerns, that gives way to religious extremism. It gives way to what we might call like a functional atheism that says, unless we vote this way, or unless the election turns this way, all things are lost, right?
AH: When someone is claiming religious authority, especially a politician claiming religious authority, we need to ask ourselves, how are they using that authority? Are they using that to oppress or hold power over another person, or move into a greater position of power, or are they using that to move us closer to God, to one another, to assure thriving for all people to build systems of justice that allow people to thrive? This is one of the things that's most troubling to me. When people claim religious authority that has been gifted them to harm other people and to oppress people, that is the number one flag that we need to be challenging this.
TP: When we look at our times right now, the Bible is not a prop and it has been used as that. I think that when you look at religion and muddying it at times with politics, and that's what happens is it becomes muddied. Anything will be said, people running for president, vice president, whatever, will sometimes pander to the Evangelicals or the Christian group to try to get those people to be part of their constituency and will say just about anything. God tells us, “You'll know them by the fruits. Test and try the spirit.” So if you're not living into it, when there's division in the land, racism in the land, social injustice in the land, but then you purport to be a person of peace, something's wrong.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
Are issues like immigration, climate change or health care all or nothing?
MF: These are issues that are profoundly important to God that God has profoundly concerned about, but they are not ultimate concerns. America was founded on this concept of the rigorous debate of ideas. And yet the Christian faith also understands that we have to apply a prophetic spirit to the world, and this creates this awkward, but absolutely necessary dance. And the role that we play in that as faith leaders, and as churches is to model what it looks like to dance in civilized, in humble, and in generative ways.
How do you broach the issue of immigration in your congregation and how was it received?
MF: When I preached that sermon on immigration, it was the very week that the borders were blowing up in our country and over the current administration's immigration policy. So we had an increase of 24 percent attendance on that particular Sunday. I had some people who said, “I'm not coming.” I had others who showed up specifically because they heard about this sermon series and wanted to hear what we had to say.
I had lunch with one of my members just a few weeks ago, who specifically mentioned that sermon on immigration and said that she had come to church mostly in agreement with Trump's policies. And she left the church feeling like she had a better biblical grasp of the concept of how to treat the immigrant or the stranger in our midst. And she is a decided Republican in every way. But that for me was affirmation that we spoke fairly and theologically and not based on partisan soundbites.
Coloradans are voting on Proposition 115, which would ban abortion after 22 weeks with very few exceptions. This issue is also front and center in the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett. How would you start that conversation at family dinner?
MF: In the book, I use axioms to build out some common ground where people can start having conversations. So with respect to the topic of abortion, I might approach that with a very simple and non-theological axiom, but more of a legal and practical axiom that would say something like, could we agree that to be truly free human beings implies that we have the right to exercise freedom over our own bodies? That applies not only to the issue of abortion but as Pastor Perry mentioned earlier, the right for a person with a Black body to move through this world safely. It would also apply to the issue of medical aid and dying, which Colorado addressed a few years ago in an election that the patient, under the right conditions, has the right to end their life if they so choose.
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We Asked Colorado Faith Leaders About Religion And Politics. They Talked About Abortion, Racism And More - Colorado Public Radio
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