Destructive Religious Divide and Political Pastors

Crisscrossing America by plane, train and car during the spring 2008 democratic primary season, reading, listening and watching the multi-million dollar bitter implosive democratic primary campaigns of Senators Clinton and Obama, I couldn’t help exchanging views about it with fellow travelers. It became clear to me after these constructive discussions that America is ready for a change ─ not just in the White House ─ but the role of religion in politics.

The Clinton-Obama political bloodbath is reminiscent of the Democratic Party bloodletting of 1968 in Chicago that I witnessed first hand as a photographer. A badly divided Democratic Party will put Senator McCain in the White House with a foreign policy that will continue to make religion a cornerstone and will make the world shudder even more as it, like the Democratic Party, is further ripped asunder.

America can no longer continue to disregard and disrespect the Founding Fathers admonition and wish to separate church from state. If it does, it will become what the Founding Fathers feared and wanted to avoid ─ a country that is divided and destroyed by religious extremists. When 69 percent of Americans disapprove of the performance of America’s religious Bush, the highest disapproval rating for a president that Gallup has ever recorded, one does have to question the role of religion in American politics today.

America’s religious Founding Fathers were explicit and clear that there is no room for religion in politics for the reasons highlighted and crystallized during the primary season by Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. and Pastor John Hagee. The ranting of Reverend Wright Jr. is well known. Lesser known are those of Pastor Hagee, the San Antonio televangelist who has endorsed Senator John McCain, who has offended Roman Catholics and others. Pastor Hagee, called the Catholic Church, among other things, “the great whore” and “a false cult system.” He also offended many with his 2006 statement to National Public Radio that New Orleans had suffered “the judgment of God” because of its “level of sin.”

America is a sinner if it allows religion to continue playing a central divisive role in its domestic and foreign policy, a sinner whose pain and suffering will only get worse at both the economic and geopolitical altars of capitalism.