Polls—Ballots—Political Sermons

October 23rd, 2012  |   

How Come Gallup Didn’t Poll Me?

I keep reading about all the various polls being taken to see who is ahead in the presidential race—Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. How come I haven’t been polled? I have received not one phone call asking for my opinion. Mr. Gallup, where are you?

Is it because no self-respecting pollster would get near someone who lives in West Virginia, the state that gave over 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary to an incarcerated felon, leaving Obama to squeak out a victory? Maybe it’s because the subject of coal and environmental regulations has pollsters convinced that all West Virginians are Mitt Romney supporters?  Who knows? I sure don’t.

Actually I am really glad that some curious political bean counter hasn’t called me. That’s because I am no fan of polls. Being basically inner-directed rather than outer-directed, I tend not to be very concerned about majority opinion. On top of that, the fickle, hyperactive nature of polls, reminds me of the guy who changes his mind ten times while in line to place a bet on a horse.

Popular opinion is too giddy for me. Consensus has an uneasy shelf life. What’s considered hot and in fashion one day, more than likely turns cold and worn the very next day. Easy come, easy go.

When you get right down to it, the voting booth where we mark a ballot is private space. The privacy gives us permission to vote our conscience, or make choices for candidates we weren’t altogether certain about during the campaign. Sometimes a voter will even vote for someone he or she didn’t support in front of a family member, friend or pollster.

Maybe I should stop searching for profound psychological reasons to justify my aversion to polls. Perhaps I should lighten up on the subject of polls, let my sense of humor take over, like columnist Erma Bombeck did when she commented on the subject of polls. “I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during the lunch hour. I never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.”  

The Only Poll Worth Trusting

If Erma Bomback were alive today, she might change her opinion about lunch and sex. Remember, she lived BC—before Bill Clinton and oral sex in the White House. She’d see E.L. James’ best selling Grey novels at the top of the bestseller fiction list, graphically depicting Anastasia’s dark fantasies that dominate her every thought. And they’re not about chocolate eclairs. She’d observe a “hookup” culture—sex without commitment, once a male trait—now a growing phenomenon among young women.

I shall leave what goes on in the shady lunch hour to the pollsters, while remembering that poll results last only as long as most diets and wham-bam-thank–you-ma’am quickies. Come to think of it, the only poll I trust these days is one that will confirm that most Americans don’t know where Benghazi is on a map, who is Romney’s advisor on foreign affairs, or how Obamacare will work when it is finally implemented.

In case you’d rather skip that poll, Benghazi, in northeastern Libya, is where U.S.  ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, and where politics now becomes the shroud that covers his death. Romney’s chief foreign policy advisor is Dan Senor, a key advisor to George Bush and the Pentagon in the ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Senor is supportive of Israel’s plan for attacking Iran. As for Obamacare, as my Jewish friends would say, oy vey! It’s 2,700 pages of fertile ground for the devil to find a home in the details.

The Great Pumpkin And The Undecided Voter

Linus, a character in the Peanuts comic strip, is the strip’s philosopher and theologian. He is the only one who believes in the Great Pumpkin, and that it will appear on Halloween. Running for school class president, his faith in the Great Pumpkin causes him to drop in the polls and almost lose the election as the undecided vote wavers.

Who will show up at the polls? Will Obama’s base? How about the GOP conservatives who can’t stand Romney? And then there are the undecided voters. How will they vote? The late, great Ella Fitzgerald comes to mind, with her rendition of “Undecided.” Sing it Ella! “I’ve been sitting on a fence/And it doesn’t make much sense/’Cause you keep me in suspense/And you know it/ You’re undecided now/So what are you gonna do?”

The Great Pumpkin for me is the God who has a mysterious way of being present in history. I stake my faith on that belief. I am not undecided about that. Love is the irreducible essence at the heart of the universe, and it arrives on the scene costumed as justice and mercy. I see suffering and death, for sure, you bet. But I also see those harsh realities transformed in the lives of people who find the courage to be more than the adversities that life doles out to them.

I draw prophetic insight from retired military officer, Andrew Bacevich. Writing in The American Conservative, he bemoans what he calls the “Israelification” of the United States. By that he means the way U.S. national-security policy mirrors “an Israel-like condition of perpetual war, with peace increasingly tied to the unrealistic expectation that adversaries and would-be adversaries will acquiesce to Washington’s will.” It’s visible in the way Israel relates to Palestinians. It’s the military stick we wield whenever the diplomatic carrot fails to protect our national corporate interests.     

The presidential debates were circus cotton candy—no digestible content. Sure, they fed Jon Stewart and late night comics with clips. But interrupting one another just to dominate the 90-minute segments failed to provide solid information about crucial issues.   

I am undecided leaning to unconvinced as to whether either of these men can, as Bacevich says, turn back our nation’s “pursuit of global military dominance, a proclivity for preemption, a growing taste for assassination, all justified as essential to self-defense.” Both of them embrace the myth of America’s indispensability. Can we get the imaginative answers we so desperately need, given Obama’s inability to work with a congress that doesn’t want to work with him? And does Romney have the guts to be his own man, whomever that may be, without caving in to a Tea Party that does not like him and yet whose support is necessary for him to be elected and to govern.    

Voters tend to see the president as someone with imperial power, able to make the changes our nation requires. Obama might indeed lose for not having fulfilled that unrealistic expectation. Presidents do have imperial power when it comes to making war and putting in place policy directives and judicial appointments that make a difference. Even there, policy directives can be reversed and judges, including Supreme Court justices, are capable of unexpected action. Imperial power, however, runs out when it comes to domestic issues. International events and congressional cooperation take over.

The Day When Ten Folks Walked Out On My Sermon

On Sunday, July 27, 2003, ten people stormed out of Christ Church in Greenville, Delaware, during my sermon. I was the guest preacher attempting to deliver a message about Jesus coming into the boat to quell the disciples’ fear during a turbulent storm on the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:45-52).

My return to Delaware from West Virginia, came four months after the start of the Iraq War. “Sitting in the nave of the ship we call the church,” I said, “it seems apparent to me that the good news of Jesus Christ must be preached directly, straightforwardly, boldly, and passionately in order to address the storm through which our nation is passing.”

Connecting politics and religion from the pulpit is risky. Congregations tend to want no part of it, and many preachers are fearful of doing it. From the start of ordained ministry, begun in the turbulent 1960s, I had had to learn how to connect a war in Vietnam, civil rights battles, and poverty with the message of Jesus Christ. Now it was a war in Iraq.

The fact that the country was preparing for a possible second term for George Bush, who had taken us to war in Iraq, spurred me on to preach boldly. “I submit to you this morning that when we allow Jesus back in the boat, we will, I promise you, find the grace and the courage—the will and the voice—the mission and the witness—to sound a political call to arms and a renewed heart to work for the nonviolent Kingdom of God.”

Connecting the churning Galilean Sea, and the frightened disciples in the boat, with our nation’s political leadership may have caused the ten parishioners to bail out of their pews. “The wind and the waves battering our nation and our church are, in my view, the political leadership of our country at this moment in our history and—I emphasize here—the theology undergirding that political leadership which is posing as Christian.”

That leadership in Washington, led by President Bush, “is offering us a bogus, counterfeit, even blasphemous Christian justification for violence, war, and oppressive governmental policies which affect the poor, the vulnerable and forgotten people who live on the other side of U.S. affluence and power.”

When I finished preaching, people stood and applauded. I don’t preach for applause, nor did I get the ushers to take a poll to see how many were on their feet. Christ Church is an affluent parish, but they were receptive to my words. “Jesus didn’t coddle the rich; he challenged them and embraced the poor. A far cry from Bush, who gives huge tax cuts to the rich and drops pennies in the tin cup of the poor.”   

I have no pulpit now, nor do I see an invitation coming my way to preach before the November election. If I had one, I would not hesitate, given how important this election is, to talk about the reasons why I would encourage parishioners to vote for President Obama. I would cite war, poverty, the environment, abortion, sexual orientation and women’s issues as benchmarks for decision-making.

I would not be startled or surprised if some folks got up and headed for the church door. I recall what my homiletics professor at Virginia Seminary said to a classmate when he came to class after a preaching assignment. “Did you convert anyone, or did you make anyone mad with your message?” The student preacher responded, “I hope not.” My wise professor smiled and said, “Well, you mustn’t have preached the Gospel.”  

The Church And The IRS—Ties That Bind

I see where Francis B. Sayre, Jr. died four weeks ago at the age of ninety-three. The former Dean of the Washington Cathedral was a leading voice of conscience for people well beyond the Episcopal Church. He never flinched when it came time to speak to the issues of his day. He once said, “Whoever is appointed the dean of the cathedral has in his hand a marvelous instrument, and he’s a coward if he doesn’t use it.”

From the cathedral pulpit, Sayre denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his crew of “pretended patriots,” and the American public for being intimidated or influenced by this demagogue from Wisconsin.

Sayre got support from various clergy across the country. He fueled their courage to address segregation, the Vietnam War, and a host of other troubling social issues. And don’t you have to chuckle a bit over him allowing Leonard Bernstein to lead a “counter-inaugural” concert in 1973 against the re-elected President Nixon?

At a time when clergy are frightened out of their collars when it comes to speaking up about Israel’s terrorism against Palestinians, the country’s violation of international law, Sayre’s confrontation with Israel is remarkable. He came under great attack, lost friends and supporters for his 1972 Palm Sunday sermon about the “moral tragedy of mankind,” a sharp criticism of Israel for “oppressing” Arab residents in Jerusalem.

As we approach this election, I think of Sayre, and the criticism he received, when just prior to the 1964 election he said in a sermon that the nation was faced with a “sterile choice” between “a man of dangerous ignorance and devastating uncertainty” and “a man whose public house is splendid in its every appearance, but whose private life must inevitably introduce termites at the very foundation.” He was of course talking about Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

At Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, near my seminary, the Rev. William Sydnor went after Goldwater. “When one listens to and reads Senator Goldwater, one finds that respect for God’s law is shockingly absent. Never in the history of our nation have an aspirant for the presidency and his backers espoused principles and practices that so brazenly ignore God’s commands dealing with love, peace, reconciliation, brotherhood, care of the poor, respect for law and constitutional authority.”

Perhaps Sydnor was responding to the justified fear people had that Goldwater would use a nuclear weapon to end the war in Vietnam. As Goldwater once said, “I could have ended the war in a month, I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.”

Bold sermons remind me of how Jesus described prominent leaders he knew. “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean…appear to people as righteous but on the inside are full of hypocrisy.”

Some of my readers, may criticize the way I preached in Delaware, and Dean Sayre’s and William  Sydnor’s use of the pulpit. Even through the applause, I hear that criticism so often, particularly from people in liberal churches. As east is east and west is west, keep religion separate from politics, they say. Often that opinion is justified by our nation’s separation of church and state, a false comparison since the First Amendment deals with the establishment of a particular religion, and not the core faith beliefs that are crucial ingredients in the ethical decisions required in politics and law.

Ah, you say, but how about the IRS 501 (c)(3) regulations that prohibit nonprofit organizations, like the church, from declaring support, financial or by public declaration, for particular candidates?  You preach political endorsement and the church you serve could lose its nonprofit status. All financial contributions to that church would no longer be tax-exempt contributions. The church itself would have to pay taxes just like any business. Clergy would not get tax benefits for monies spent on housing.

A favorite hymn is “Blessed Be the Ties That Bind.” The ties mentioned, of course, are the connections between “kindred minds” connected through their hearts by love. I would submit that Christians who belong to churches are involved with another tie that binds—a tie that binds them to the Internal Revenue Service. It is the tie that needs to be broken in order to allow for the unfettered, prophetic Word of God to be preached and lived.

Conservative Church Sound—Liberal Church Silence

Barry Lynn, an ordained minister and Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argues the case that James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family has no constitutional right to endorse candidates because it violates the IRS code. I abhor Dobson’s stand on a multitude of issues, and I support Lynn’s efforts to protect the separation of church and state. But I have to disagree with Lynn on this one, perhaps to the chagrin of my liberal friends, by agreeing with Dobson, and a host of  conservative preachers, who are defying the IRS regulations at this very moment.   

On the first Sunday in October, more than 1,000 pastors from conservative churches took part in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday.” They defied IRS regulations, calling it free speech, as they recommended that congregants vote for the man who represented their values—George Romney. On a host of issues, churches are supporting candidates, either openly or slyly. Roman Catholic friends will attest to the fact that abortion is a litmus test for presidential candidates, often times openly in church newsletters and in the sanctuary.

I find it interesting that Lyndon Johnson, running for Senate reelection in 1954, sponsored the revision to the IRS code that states churches must not “influence legislation” nor “interfere in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”  Ironically, it was a political effort by Johnson to silence right wing church support for his opponent, who was firing up the anticommunist tirades of Senator Joe McCarthy and attacking Johnson’s liberal agenda.

What better time is there than now, with so much at stake in this important election, for liberal churches to emancipate their pulpits from an IRS code that is past its prime and, like Prohibition, unenforceable, even unwise. The odds are good, and history confirms, that the IRS won’t challenge a violation of the code. But if they do, a church may do the unthinkable, that is, pay the taxes to Caesar and be free to preach a liberated message.

And think what support these liberated pulpits would give to a reelected president whose agenda has been thwarted by conservative religion, pressuring him to reject the pastor in Chicago who attracted and influenced him with a liberating social justice message.

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