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A Christian Perspective on Politics and the Religious Right
Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, who authored a very kind introduction to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America (which featured several essays by Talk to Action contributors) is retiring after 14 years as director of the Religion Department at the Chautauqua Institution, which followed 20 years as General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. The Religious Right's Institute on Religion and Democracy marked the occasion with a sneer. But today, let's pay no attention to IRD.
Let's hear instead from Joan Brown Campbell via an excerpt from her introduction to Dispatches, which she opened with a quote from the noted rabbi, Abraham Heschel: "There is a time when silence is betrayal... that time is now."
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"Our respective religious traditions and the responsibilities and opportunities of constitutional democracy require us not to turn away from an engagement with the powers and principalities of our day. The question is not whether there should be interaction between faith and politics; rather the question is how progressive people of faith should engage in public life. The fact that the excesses of the Religious Right have in the eyes of many compromised the integrity of faith in public life should not deter progressive people from responsible citizenship.
The founders of this nation were in the main deeply religious people, and they were the revolutionaries of their day. The values imbedded in our historical documents are the values shared by every major faith... the inalienable rights of every person are to this day life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in the name of religious liberty and the separation of church and state, good people of deep faith have come to believe that politics corrupts the purity of faith. This is a tragic misunderstanding of both faith and politics."
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