A megachurch in Texas is offering a course to encourage evangelicals to run for public office. I have a couple of suggestions.
According to the Texas Tribune, Mercy Culture, a megachurch based in Fort Worth, is trying to foster so-called “spirit-led candidates” by offering lessons in how to “stand for spiritual righteousness.”
Nothing wrong with that. But how is “spiritual righteousness” defined?
Turns out “spiritual righteousness” opposes LGBTQ rights and access to abortion. It also entails opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives – the dreaded DEI.
Hmm. Didn’t Jesus beckon everyone to come to him? Didn’t Paul say something about how in Christ there is no male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free?
The course of instruction, called Campaign University, is part of the megachurch’s foray into partisan politics. One of the pastors, Nate Schatzline, is a member of Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board.
The people at Mercy Culture have also apparently been drinking the David Barton Kool-Aid. Barton is the faux historian who claims that the founders were orthodox Christians, that they never intended church and state to be separate, and that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
The First Amendment itself refutes that nonsense: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1797, goes even further. Article 11 of the treaty reads, “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. . . .”
I’m guessing that the Campaign University curriculum doesn’t include a close reading of either document. “There is no separation between church and state,” one graduate, Abraham George, declared. George is the chair of the Republican Party in Texas.
I’d like the Campaign University curriculum to include not only the nation’s charter documents but also a reflection on the effects of the First Amendment, America’s best idea. The separation of church and state is the best friend that religion ever had.
The First Amendment set up a free marketplace for religion, and throughout American history, religious entrepreneurs, to extend the economic metaphor, have competed with one another for popular followings. The list is endless, from George Whitefield to Billy Graham, from Joseph Smith to Joel Osteen.
This competition had ensured a vibrant, healthy religious culture unmatched anywhere in the world. Evangelicals, moreover, with their ability to speak the idiom of the culture, have fared very well in this marketplace.
The graduates of Campaign University should be defending the separation of church and state, not undermining it.
I wonder, too, whether the curriculum includes any references to the New Testament, especially the words of Jesus. How does the command to care for “the least of these” figure into the political agenda at Campaign University?
Jesus and the Hebrew prophets called for justice and instructed the faithful to treat the foreigner as their own. I wonder how that teaching affects policy toward immigrants and refugees.
Finally, I wish that Campaign University would engage in some history beyond the founders and the nation’s charter documents. If they looked carefully at the agenda of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, they’d discover that their evangelical forebears were active in social reform.
They worked for peace, for prison reform, and women’s equality, including voting rights. Evangelicals in the North worked to eliminate the scourge of slavery. Evangelicals helped organize public education, known as common schools, because they recognized it was the best way for children of the less affluent to become upwardly mobile.
Those would be worthwhile lessons for evangelical “spirit-led candidates” seeking to enter the political arena.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
