I suspect that one of the main reasons folks complain about “political” or “economic” sermons in church is that they don’t want to change their political or economic thinking. They object, “I came to church to hear about God, not about the news of the week!” Their idea of the function of religious worship is that it is to soothe and comfort the listener, seated in the pew. After a long week of work and of enduring the news about the gap between rich and poor, or the latest Mideast uprising, they expect to hear a sermon on how much God loves us good believers. They do not want to hear of reform.
True enough, God loves us all, saints and sinners, whether we are even minimally responsible for the gross maldistribution of his resources given to us all, or for our government’s bothersome habit of backing up foreign dictators who see to our companies’ ability to trade and profit unencumbered by strikes. It matters little if the preacher is able to quote popes or national conferences of bishops on these very secular subjects, since he wants to base his sermon on solid moral leadership, not just on his opinion. If pushed, objectors claim that the pope and bishops themselves should stay out of politics and economics.
This was not the attitude of churchgoers back when church officials started endorsing the union movement, when most congregants were being crushed by greedy and unregulated (I want to come back to that word) factory bosses who saw nothing wrong with things like child labor. Then it was fine to get a helping hand from the powerful pulpit intervention of religious leaders, who spoke up for the worker. No problem there with mixing religion and politics and economics. But then, it always depends on whose ox is gored, to use a biblical expression. Today the shrinking number of people in unions is dismissed as a “special interest.”
We Catholics are a different cohort today. With President Kennedy’s 1961 accession to the Oval Office, we are on an economic par with the Protestant 60 percent of our population. We have arrived. We still donate the 1930s meager 1 percent of our income while Protestants give 2 and Jews give 4. But we are now no longer the ghettoized immigrants of national parishes our grandparents were. Even though we have moved away from those nationality-based parishes, we get indignant if our old one closes because too few people attend it, what with far fewer priests to service the growing number of Catholics. We reject the economic explanation that the weakest parish must close when one must.
“Deregulated” is a word we middle-class have been conned into wanting to be. We claim to be swamped by too many government regulations which so restrict our freedoms. The powerful few who really need government policing via legislated rules to govern cut-throat conduct have tricked us into an adolescent mindframe of wanting to cast off parental restrictions and rules. The trick is, they seldom specify which ones. They appeal to our frontier sense of self-determination, as though nothing had changed once we began living in densely populated, internet-linked society. But when these moguls create an atmosphere of deregulation, legislators trying to protect the common good find it harder to do their work which benefits everyone.
Do we want to be deregulated so that we can drive down the left side of the road if it so pleases us? Do we want the banks where we keep our money to be free to do with it whatever they want? Do we want amoral Wall Street magnates to devise ruinous derivative mechanisms that can bring down the economy? When the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, created to keep investing houses and banks separate for the protection of investors, was repealed in 1999 in the name of deregulation, the door was open for the cataclysm economists saw coming.
We reap what we sow. If we clamor for deregulation, it will come back to bite us. But if we are warned in church by a socially conscious sermon to beware of such thinking, it is at our own peril that we complain of too much secular and too little sacred in church. Preaching this to a general congregation of liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats takes courage for a preacher. But then, it was that radical Jesus who taught that what we do to the least of his people, we do to him.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”