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	Does God Get a Vote?  
	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	UU Church of Wakefield
	October 15, 2000

I need to start this morning's sermon with a warning:  I am going to
be talking about God.  This will make some of you uncomfortable, I
know, and you will probably tell me about it afterward.  But I want to
invite you to suspend your skepticism, and remember that the word God
can be taken in many senses, with a small g and a capital one, and can
simply be used to represent whatever it is that we worship.  As my
colleague Forrest Church is fond of saying, God is not God's real name
anyway.

I think that the discomfort many of you feel is real and needs to be
taken seriously, but I think we can take it seriously in part by
talking about it.  Here is what my colleague Marge Keip said this
summer:

"Faith is a journey, as life is.  Certainly, no matter what we each
believe now, no one of us is still where we started, way back when we
learned of the word "god" for the first time and struggled to attach
it to something familiar.  Our understanding of such intangible ideas
as love or hope or courage or trust or integrity or truth or god grows
and deepens as we engage with them in the journeys of our lives.  Our
Unitarian Universalist way of faith is intentionally creedless, to
enable freedom and diversity and change.  Because we cherish freedom
and value diversity and honor change, and know these to be vital and
real.

Having said that, we can turn to the subject at hand, God and
politics.  In 1993, Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter came out with a
book entitled The culture of disbelief :  how American law and
politics trivialize religious devotion.  Carter's argument was that
the political left in America had become thoroughly hostile to
religious belief, and thus strong public devotion had come to be
viewed as exclusively the province of the right.  Carter took pains to
show how historically progressive movements, such as the Temperance,
Abolitionist, Women's Suffrage, pacifist and Civil Rights movements
had been religiously inspired and fueled by religious sentiments.  Can
we think of the Civil Rights movement, for example without "we Shall
Overcome" or Martin Luther King's stirring invocations of religious
images?

Carter's book caused quite a stir in its day, and the stir was still
echoing when I attended Divinity School two years later, for there was
a considerable amount of talk about whether liberals had driven
religion from the public square, and if so, what should be done about
it.

In this electoral season, the question seems to assert itself again in
new forms.  Back during the primaries, Governor Bush was asked who was
his favorite philosopher, and he replied it was Jesus.  Jesus is, of
course, many things to many people, but it surprised a few of us to
see him identified as a philosopher.  An inspiration for and a subject
of many philosophers, yes, such as Augustine and Aquinas and
Kierkegaard

And then when the two major parties had settled on their candidates,
Vice President Gore surprised everyone by selecting Sen.  Joseph
Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate.  Not only was Sen.
Lieberman the only Jewish candidate ever nominated by a major party
for Vice President, he is an Orthodox Jew and a devout one who doesn't
mind bringing morality into politics.  The most notable example of
this, and the one which probably got him the nod from Al Gore, was his
statement on the Senate Floor that the President's affair with Monica
Lewinsky was immoral.

Lieberman also talks about his faith, and his selection back in August
prompted a lot of speculation that this political season would see God
come back into political discourse.  There was a certain amount of
hand wringing about what this development would do to the wall of
separation between church and state.  There was an uneasiness about
having God discussed in a political campaign.

For example, a cartoon in this week's New Yorker shows a man kneeling
at the side of his bed saying his prayers.  Above the bed hovers a
little angel who looks a bit like Shirley Temple, and she is saying to
the man, "I'm sorry, the line is tied up; he's still exchanging
pleasantries with Senator Lieberman.

By and large the theologization of political discourse has not
materialized yet, though there are still three weeks to go.  I have
accessed the transcript of the first Presidential debate and find that
the word God was not mentioned by either candidate.  I also did a
search of the stump speeches of both Presidential candidates, and the
only mention of God I found was once when Al Gore finished his speech
by saying to the audience "God bless you."

In the vice presidential debate, Lieberman did mention God three
times.  Two of these were in discussing sensitive social issues:  on
abortion, he said that the abortion decision was between a woman and
her conscience and her God, and on same sex marriages he said this:

SEN.  LIEBERMAN:  A very current and difficult question, and I've been
thinking about it, and I want to explain what my thoughts have been.
Maybe I should begin this answer by going back to the beginning of the
country and the Declaration of Independence, which says right there at
the outset that all of us are created equal and that we're endowed not
by any bunch of politicians or philosophers but by our creator with
those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.

At the beginning of our history, that promise, that ideal was not
realized or experienced by all Americans.  But over time since then,
we have extended the orbit of that promise.  And in our time, at the
frontier of that effort is extending those kinds of rights to gay and
lesbian Americans who are citizens of this country and children of the
same awesome God just as much as any of the rest of us are.

Now I can disagree with Lieberman here; he makes the same mistake Pat
Robertson does.  Yes the Founding Fathers were nominally Christians
and yes the Declaration does talk about a creator.  But many of the
Fathers were Deists, and many of them, Jefferson included, ended up as
Unitarians.  Jefferson is often called the fifth of our four Unitarian
presidents.  The Declaration and the Constitution and the American
Revolution were products of Judeo-Christian morality to an extent, but
they were more directly products of the Enlightenment and a belief in
reason.

The third example came when Cheney criticized him for not pouncing on
a comedian's distasteful joke about Bush's religion, Lieberman said:

If anybody has devoted his life to respecting the role of religion in
American life and understands that Americans, from the beginning of
our history, have turned to God for strength and purpose, it's me.

But besides being bad history, does this really scare us?  What are we
scared of?  To get the wide view on this question of God in politics,
I decided to start by looking back at the extreme case of God's
involvement in politics, a theocracy.  Ancient Israel had a theocracy
from the time Moses led them to the Promised Land until the time
Samuel selected Saul to be the first king.  During this period, the
capital-G God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was the direct head of the
state as well as being the object of their worship, and the highest
human rulers were called Judges, but I gather they were clerics
somewhat like the Imams in present-day Iran.

The reading today is from the transition period, when the Israelites
are petitioning God to give them a king just like their neighboring
tribes have.  Samuel doesn't want to do it, but God persuades Samuel
to give them their way, even though it is an unwise course.  What I
find most delightful about this passage is the picture it paints of
what a pestilence it is to have a king.  It makes you kind of think
that life under a theocracy must be kind of ideal, like a utopian
socialist community or Jefferson's never-realized dream of an agrarian
democracy.

Well, the Israelites got a king in the form of Saul, and then David
succeeded him and then Solomon succeeded David and built the temple at
Jerusalem in which it was believed that God resided.  But the idea of
theocracy didn't die.  Our fair commonwealth was founded by people who
believed they were establishing God's kingdom in the new world.  The
Puritans thought they had found in Massachusetts just the territory
they needed to establish God's kingdom free of the interference of the
English ecclesiastical and political hierarchy.

But they soon found out the big problem with theocracy:  God has to
work through people.  And people can have different ideas about how
God is supposed to work.  So there was religious strife within the
Massachusetts Bay Colony almost from day 1.  Boston was supposed to be
a city on a Hill, but soon it had hanged Mary Dyer and expelled Anne
Hutchison and Roger Williams because they sought God in different
ways.  Our neighbor to the south, Rhode Island, was founded on
religious toleration, a principle conspicuously lacking in Puritan
Massachusetts.

It may surprise you to know that my native state of South Carolina
also had religious toleration written in to its first constitution.
This was not, however, a bow to enlightened ideals but a shrewd
business decision.  South Carolina was founded as a for=profit entity,
a payoff by Charles II to eight of his henchmen who had engineered his
ascension to the throne of England in 1660.  The land grant was only
going to be valuable to these gentlemen if colonists could be induced
to settle there, and since many of the people wishing to leave England
at that time were the dispossessed Puritans and other Dissenters, it
made sense to offer them the enticement of religious freedom.

Unlike Massachusetts, Carolina never wanted to be governed by God.
But it did place some religious restrictions on the people that
governed it, and though these were liberalized over the years, there
was still one in place ast late as 1989, a clause in the state
constitution which said that no religious test would be required for
public office, except that anyone who denied the existence of a
supreme being could not hold office.

This provision had lain dormant in the state constitution for 120
years; it was passed by the Reconstruction Convention, the most
radical political body ever assembled in the state, in 1869.  It seems
to have had no effect on the course of law, history or politics in the
state.  But in 1989, Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College
of Charleston who was a militant atheist, walked into my law office
and educated me on the provision.  I was as offended by it as he was,
and resolved to take the case.  Can you imagine how you would feel if
there was a clause in the law that said you couldn't hold office
because you didn't believe in God?  Over the next seven years we had
to run him for governor, file a federal lawsuit, take an appeal to
Richmond, run him for the exalted office of Notary Public and take
depositions of the former Governor, but we finally won in 1997, after
I had already started Divinity School.  The state supreme court ruled
that it violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
to deny public office to those who do not believe in God.  A lot of
UUs applauded.  It was reported that when Silverman heard of the
decision, he said, Thank God, but I don't believe this.

We had struck a blow for religious liberty.  Religious liberty has two
aspects, corresponding to the two religion clauses in the Bill of
Rights:  one prohibiting an Establishment of Religion, which we call
the Establishment clause, and the other prohibiting interference with
the Free Exercise of religion, which we call the Free Exercise Clause.
The Silverman case had been decided under the Establishment clause:
restricting public office to those who believed in God was, in effect,
an establishment of religion.

But the two clauses are interrelated.  The American theory is that the
best way to guarantee free exercise is to be rigid on Establishment.
In other cultures, this theory doesn't necessarily work.  England, for
example, tolerates a wide variety of religious practices, a great deal
of Free Exercise while still maintaining an established church.  The
Anglican church rarely exerts any influence in British politics.

However, we have only to look across the Irish Sea from England to see
a land riven by bitter religious disputes and having, in the Republic
if Ireland, a state-sanctioned church which has thrown its weight
around in the political realm many times.

Having examples like that before us, we have adopted in this country a
metaphor which does not appear in the Constitution - it actually
originated in a letter written by Jefferson - but which is now firmly
enshrined in law and our culture:  the wall of separation between
church and state.  Particularly for those of us who are in the
religious minority, we see that wall as our protection from tyranny of
the majority.

And we know that, as an Orthodox Jew, Joseph Lieberman is very much a
minority in this country, and thus there is no realistic fear that his
devotion is going to translate into policies that impinge on our own
freedoms.

Ellen Good man had an interesting column on Lieberman in which she
pointed out that he went to a synagogue where the women sit separately
from the men, and in a denomination where women cannot be rabbis, yet
on the Senate floor he is vociferous champion of women's rights.  She
said,

"Much has been written in this campaign about bringing God to the
ballot box, about wearing too much faith on too many sleeves.  But the
separation of church and state holds fast for the Catholic who attends
Mass on Sunday and votes for family planning on Monday.  And it holds
for the Orthodox Jew who sits in segregated seating in Georgetown on
Sabbath and votes for women's rights on Capitol Hill on Monday.  In
America, the separation of church and state, religious and secular
life, is not just in the Constitution.  It exists, not always easily,
in hearts and minds."

We as religions people, should not feel threatened by politicians who
say they are motivated by religious morality.  We should be wary of
those who claim that there is only one morality.  We should not fear
those who talk about God, but those who claim God as their exclusive
property.

Whatever your idea of God is, you will agree that if God acts, God
acts through humans and through natural processes.  Perhaps God is
infallible, but humans are certainly fallible.

Abraham Lincoln captured this poignantly in his second inaugural, in
the thick of the greatest internal conflict this country has ever
known:

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained.  Neither anticipated that the cause of
the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease.  Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less
fundamental and astounding.  Both read the same Bible, and pray to the
same God; and each invokes his aid against the other....  The prayers
of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered
fully."

In today's terms, God does not belong exclusively to one political
party or faction.  Yet I think we have more to fear from those who put
all religious conviction aside before acting than from those whose
actions are informed by their religious convictions.  Our own
convictions of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the
right of every vote in a democracy to be counted may lead us to oppose
the Massachusetts referendum on the ballot to deny the vote to those
in prison.  In another referendum issue, the same conviction, and our
familiarity with the casualties of the war on drugs rotting in our
state and federal prisons may lead some of us to vote for more
treatment alternatives and the funding of those alternatives from
forfeited drug proceeds, on the grounds that we affirm the worth of
the drug addict by using the money to try to turn him around rather
than throw him in jail and use the money to buy more helicopters for
the police departments.  Many of us who are passionate about animal
rights as part of the interconnected web of all existence might want
to vote to shut down greyhound racing.

We may disagree on these positions or on what votes are most likely to
advance the religious values we agree on.  The point is not whether we
are right or wrong about these judgments.  The point is that if we
take our religious precepts seriously, we could not make these
judgments without them.

You see, as a constitutional lawyer I was willing to put religion in a
box, and for purposes of public display of religion in the public
square, each person's religion should be confined narrowly to avoid
impinging on the other person's.  But as a minister, I take an
expansive view of religion.  Religion permeates our values and how we
live our lives, and within the confines of our own consciences we
should allow it as free reign as possible.

Yes, God gets a vote.  God gets to vote in the person of the radical
and the conservative and the reactionary and the liberal.  God gets
all the votes.  But, we are governed by people.  As Ellen Goodman
says,

"In America, the separation of church and state, religious and secular
life, is not just in the Constitution.  It exists, not always easily,
in hearts and minds."

Amen.