Speech given at
Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, NY
Good
afternoon and thank you for having me. I apologize for missing what
I’m sure was a wonderful program but I’m afraid my Sunday mornings
are pretty much spoken for. We Protestants do not have the wonderful
feast day understanding of the Sabbath that our Jewish and Roman
Catholic brethren do. For us, Saturday night is still for sinning
and Sunday morning for repenting. As well, of course, for worship.
and fellowship so that we can come back out into the world as
prophets, disciples, and citizens. We do not believe that the sacred
and the secular are separate domains and our religious faith is
never purely private or personal. We cannot keep it at home or in
the church. We are called to take it out and into the public square.
I bet
I’m making some of you nervous already and understandably so,
because religious faith, its symbols and its language have taken on
some very negative connotations for many of us. They have been
hijacked by extremists in every one of the world’s great religions,
but particularly in the Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Christianity, and
even Judaism, to become justifications for tyranny, imperialism and
terror. Not only in the Middle East or in nations of the so-called
Third World , but here in the United States as well, where that
effort is led by our president himself, a man who sees himself as
anointed by Almighty God to bring freedom to the world if not by
persuasion, then by force. A president who seeks to impose his
religio-political vision not only on this society, but on the entire
planet, even as he drags us into a worldwide battle of Armageddon
that all of us must ultimately lose. Even those of us, like me,
whose lives are anchored and guided by a fervent evangelical faith
are shamed into silence by the atrocities committed in our name.
No wonder
so many otherwise progressive, open minded people would like in turn
to keep religious voices out of the public square. The prophetic
voice of faith exemplified by such
prophets as Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr, has been usurped by merchants of hate and fear,
the Gerry Falwells, the Pat Robertsons the John Ashcrofts. Those who,
as the Christian Gospel says, “wear their phylacteries long and pray
out loud that others might see.” And yet whose words and deeds reveal
them for the “empty sepulchers” that they really are .
Nonetheless, for better and, unfortunately, for worse,
religious faith remains integral not just to the private lives of
believers but to their public lives and thus to the civil life of this
society and indeed most of the world . Our civic moral values and even
the central principles of our society are rooted to greater or lesser
degree in the struggles of religious refugees to build a society based
on the moral aspiration and hopes that arose from the interaction of
their faiths with the realities of public life in a diverse and
already pluralistic new world. That is also why people of faith,
religious and secular, have a particular responsibility to speak up,
especially now and especially those of us in whose name and tradition
these crimes against our nation, our world and our God are being
committed: a responsibility to reach into the heart of our faith
traditions and to witness to their core principles of compassion,
justice, brotherhood and freedom for all humanity. That is why we must
stand for the separation of church and state that our ancestors
encoded in our constitution to protect not only our rights and the
rights of religious and secular minorities, but just as importantly,
to safeguard the prophetic moral voice and the diversity of tradition
which has made this nation, the most religiously and philosophically
vital society in the west.
The
faith-based initiative is just such a crime. In the guise of
protecting religious freedom, it is destroying it in a thinly
disguised effort to install its own brand of Christian
religio-political fundamentalism as the new American civil religion,
by attempting to co-opt religious leaders with government money, and
using the power and resources of the government to promote the
dominance of that particular religious understanding over all others
as the law of the land. I don’t know about you, but my family did not
come here to be tolerated, they came here to be free and full citizens
with all the rights and privileges afforded therein.
And it is
not only our religious but our national symbols and language that are
being hijacked. It goes far deeper than that. As I speak, our civil
liberties are being systematically eviscerated, religious minorities
and immigrants persecuted and denied due process in the name of
preserving freedom by the USA Patriot Act and its onerous offspring,
the Bureau of Homeland Security. As I speak, hundreds, perhaps
thousands of individuals are languishing on prisons without the rights
to due process, or counsel, without even being charged. As I speak,
our right and duty to dissent are being quashed in the name of
patriotism as the Patriot Act is used to, yes, terrorize potential
dissenters, citizens as well as non-citizens. As I speak, necessary
questions about the wisdom and morality of unilateral military action,
and legitimate concerns about the well- being of our service men and
women are being silenced or simply ignored in the name of supporting
our troops. Even the stars and stripes which, for all our mistakes and
missed opportunities, has remained a symbol of hope and freedom for
oppressed people all over the world, has been twisted by this
administration into a symbol of blind support for imperialism and a
policy of endless apocalyptic war. No wonder so many of us are
reluctant to display it or to even admit our deep love of this country
and reverence for what she has worked so hard and suffered so much to
try to be.
But we
cannot yield to those feelings my friends. It is our flag and our
nation, our faith and our freedom which are at stake. Republican or
democrat, Christian, Jew, Muslim and humanist. Left or right, black,
white, yellow and brown- we must not stand by in silence while the
core principles on which this nation is founded: personal and civil
liberty, equality before the law, the rights to free expression,
association and freedom of religion are torn away, and a
religio-political totalitarianism is installed in their stead. We bear
a special responsibility as Americans to stand up for what American
means: the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to
freedom of speech, association and worship; to due process and
equality before the law, not just for those like us, but especially
for those who are not like us- for citizen and non-citizen alike, and
for a nation that is strong enough, courageous enough and faithful
enough to its core principles to embrace diversity and encourage
dissent. It is up to us to stand up for the rights of the minority
against the tyranny of the majority, to respect what is not shared
among its people even as it affirms what is- those whose views we
abhor as much as those whose views we support. Because it is indeed
true that if we cannot call ourselves free unless all of us are free.
And it is
for those reasons that I so gratefully accepted your offer to speak
with you today and to join with you in affirming our shared belief in
the core principles on which a free society is built: an informed
public, a government which is open, dedicated to the upholding those
core principles, moral in its decision-making and accountable to its
people. More than that, to insist on political leaders who by their
example as well as by their policies point us toward our best selves.
Especially now, when those core principles are under attack,
threatened as perhaps never before in our history by our own
government, by an administration that has chosen to capitalize on the
atrocities committed by Islamic religio-political extremists in order
to implement its own brand of religio-political extremism and
cynically manipulating the very real fear and grief and yes, anger of
the American people after the heinous attacks of September 2001, to
try to install a religio-political fundamentalism as the new American
civil religion as the law of the land.
The Patriot
Act, Patriot II, the so-called faith based initiative, the Houses of
Worship Free Speech Protection Act, immigration reform and the Bush
policy of unilateral militarism are not isolated decisions or
initiatives. They are the children of a single father, part of a
systematic campaign, legislative, political and military, every bit as
heinous and destructive to our nation, as the reprehensible acts that
brought down the twin towers. In some ways, perhaps more so, because
they undermine the very heart and soul of our great country, attack
the very faith that is the father of our freedoms and destroy our
image abroad as a beacon of liberty and hope for all the diverse
peoples of the world.
A free
nation cannot be destroyed from without, it can only be destroyed from
within. When its people no longer have the courage to be free. When
they no longer have the courage to affirm that freedom for others.
When they can no longer offer praises to their God or give voice to
their convictions or raise their children according to their own
lights.
And so we
have to get busy, get informed. We have to spread the word, join the
internet movement, sign the petitions, register to vote and get others
to do the same. We have to be prepared to march in the streets, to
disobey the law when the law is unjust. Call them on the BIG LIE.
Because, if our president and his supporters are right, if the Patriot
Act really is a necessary tool in the war on terror. If the faith
based initiative is the only way to bring morality to our society. If
liberty is possible only if we all agree, if we must slander and
persecute our fellow Americans because their faith or even their
politics are strange or repugnant to us, if we decide we can only make
peace, and affirm those who look like us, act like us, worship like
us, if we can be secure as a nation only if we bow to the domination
of a particular religio-political fundamentalism, whether it is
Christian fundamentalism or Muslim or Jewish or even free-market
fundamentalism over our civil and religious lives. Then we must ask
ourselves, very seriously exactly what it is that we are trying to
defend. Because if we make such a trade off, then our nation, our
America has not been taken from us, we have given it away. And this
country of ours, once a beacon for freedom seeking peoples from every
corner of the world, will have betrayed its very reason for being.
Indeed it will cease to be America at all. My friends, we cannot sit
idly by while the hope of this nation and indeed the world is stolen
from us. We must pledge to each other, as I pledge to you today, as an
American and especially as a Christian, to not stand by while your
rights are stolen from you or from anyone in my name.
Now is the
time, while we are still able to dissent. We must to stand up and we
must act. Insist on being heard, support legislation like the SAFE act
which will repeal the most heinous provisions of the Patriot Act while
still allowing the security services the tools they need to fight
terror. Demand that the wall of separation of church and state remain
intact that all of our faiths can have equal aspects to the rights and
the largesse of our government and society. Insist that this nation
end its policy or pre-emptive war and re-assert itself as a moral
leader, even handed toward all, relying on the moral stature of its
commitment to peace, freedom and the right of self-determination of
all peoples all over the world. This administration and those who
share its bleak and hopeless world view have created a nation and a
world based on fear, and that points to the heart of task that is set
before us, as Americans, and as people of faith, whether that faith be
in God, in Allah or in the irrepressible goodness of the human spirit,
to teach our people to hope again, trust again, believe again.
