Published: May 16, 2008 09:29 pm         

Preachers should stick to the gospel, not candidates

The Back Porch

Much to-do has been made of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory remarks about America and God’s vengeance from the pulpit of Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church.

And much should have been. Wright has been described as an influential person in Obama’s life for the past 20 years. The people with whom a presidential candidate associates are also fair game in the mediacracy in which we live. Yes, that’s a word for those who believe the media control the government, not the people.

A Charleston Daily Mail story reported one in five West Virginia Democrats considered race a factor when they voted Tuesday.

And half of Mountain State Democrats believe Obama shares Wright’s views, according to exit polls conducted by The New York Times.

Then there was that other preacher — that white preacher cozying up to the white male presidential candidate.

John Hagee, a conservative evangelical who heads a big church in Texas, is now apologizing for nasty things he said about Catholics — some of those other Christians. The Washington Post reported Hagee sent an apology to the president of the Catholic League in which he regretted indicating that anti-Jewish violence and the Inquisition are part of the Catholic Church today.

Hagee endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain, who sought the pastor’s support so he could appeal to conservative evangelicals who were backing former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s bid for president.

What’s the lesson here? Don’t go to church?

Lock up the preacher before announcing a presidential campaign? Run perpetual crawls across the news “rejecting and repudiating” whatever a so-called religious leader says in connection with a candidate’s campaign?

Maybe all of the above. The problem is this love-hate relationship Americans have with her leaders and religion. At times, the nation seems bent on becoming a theocracy, only to pull back at the last moment and slap together the mortar and bricks for a hastily built wall between church and state.

This presidential election cycle, more than most, that wall has come down again and again as Republicans scramble to hold the conservative Christian base and Democrats seek to capture it.

It’s a contest of who is the holiest, but the preachers keep messing it up. How ironic is that.

Sunday, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton attended morning worship at First United Methodist Church in Huntington.

A story in The Herald-Dispatch remarked that Hillary Clinton simply sat in the pew; the Democratic candidate for president didn’t speak from the pulpit. The article seemed to suggest that Clinton’s failure to share from the pulpit was unusual.

Maybe that’s the lesson. For too long now, politicians have taken to the pulpit to preach politics in the Lord’s house. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until preachers began to believe they had a right to preach partisan politics disguised as religion from the pulpit.

That’s not to say church people shouldn’t care about social justice, which manifests itself in political ideologies.

That’s not to say church people shouldn’t vote or involve themselves in civic affairs.

But that is to say preachers should not be anointing a candidate as God’s man or woman for the job. Sometimes preachers are the people least tuned in to what God has to say.

The truth is church people are a special interest group. They can make candidates jump as quickly as pharmaceutical companies, the oil industry, trial lawyers and all the other hefty lobbies that make regular church-going folk gag and decry the state of the nation whose politicians are under the influence of big-money corporations.

A special interest is a special interest is a special interest.

If church people really believe the Bible, they know a president isn’t going to save everybody here on earth or in the great beyond.

Trade those campaign buttons for buttons to clothe the naked. Turn in those collection plates for paper plates bearing food for the hungry. Tone down the whoops and hollers for candidates into soft words of encouragement for the discouraged. Pull up the campaign signs and plant signs of hope for the hopeless.

That’s one thing Wright and Hagee should be able to agree upon.

— Young is a Register-Herald columnist. E-mail: ynerissa@verizon.net.

© 2008 by Nerissa Young