By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
November 2008
[This is Bishop Paul Marshall's November 2008 column for secular newspapers throughout our 14 counties. It is published by The Morning Call, Allentown, on the first Saturday of every month. It usually appears also in ten additional papers. The combined circulation of papers that publish the column regularly is more than 400,000. More than 130 columns have been published over the past 12 years. If your paper does not publish the column and you would consider bringing it to the attention of the editor, please email Bill Lewellis.]
As baseball fans turn their attention to politics, I have no reason not to join them.
It is a no-brainer that religious people have an obligation to love their neighbor. What may not be so obvious is that when we talk about how to love more than one neighbor at a time, we are engaging the world of the political. Not the partisan, but the political.
Political choices are urgent. At no time since the civil rights era are there such important choices in front of us, I believe, and some of them are not popular.
We must decide as a nation whether we shall continue the decades-old policy of privatizing profits while socializing losses.
We must decide whether we shall continue to be the only industrialized country on the planet where health care is not available to all citizens. We must remember that we are signatories to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. That declaration names health care as a right, not a product or a privilege.
We have got to give a clear message that the American electorate finds its intelligence insulted and its core values dishonored by state and national political campaigns that are organized around fear mongering, half-truths, and gross distortions.
We must decide whether decades of de-regulation and following the path of trickle-down economics has helped us, our neighbors, or, especially, the “stranger at our gates.”
We must decide how long we can wink at our state’s reputation as being among the most –– some say the single most –– corrupt states in the nation.
There needs to be limit, accountability, and even sacrifice, because the world has changed. The flutter of the wings of a butterfly in India is said to lead to hurricanes in Honduras. We cannot afford the myth that we can do our own thing in our comfortable communities with no regard to wider implications for our fellow humans. That is true economically, spiritually, and ecologically.
The truth I bow to here means that each of our brains must stretch from what is comfortable to trying to seek what is just, useful, and most fruitful in our time. The present crisis reminds us that the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of citizenship are much, much broader than many of us were taught to believe in the last millennium.
You may be worried about your investments today. I certainly am concerned about mine. There are much larger questions, however, about our social order and our grandchildren’s future, and they are first-order questions that must be addressed. Economists, like members of every academic guild, deal in competing orthodoxies, and our leadership must know how to listen and discern as various wizards offer their solutions. We must elect leadership we believe able to understand the options and look at the long term.
Both presidential candidates agree that the issues I mention are important, each with his own set of solutions, of course. Deep change has to happen. Republicans and Democrats both acknowledge it. The question to us the electorate will be how change is to occur. Regardless of who wins a single election we have the job of keeping public officials’ noses close to the grindstone after administrations change.
As a human being who attempts to follow religious principles and has the job of working with others as they do so too, I have asked my fellow Episcopalians to become as informed as they can about the implications of what each party offers to do if their candidate is given the chance to lead this nation. I have asked them to believe in their hearts and express by their actions that informed citizenship is a religious duty in a democracy. The buck stops with us.
[The Rt. Rev. Paul V. Marshall is bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem, 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania. His recently published book, Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less (Seabury), is a collection of ten years of his monthly columns for newspapers. Additional columns and sermons by Bishop Marshall are available at www.diobeth.org.]
Comments