The Heart of the Debate

Palmer reminded me why I care about faith and politics.

I’ve written about how, as a small child, the first two names I knew outside those of my own family were Jesus and John Kennedy (with due apologies to my friend, Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne — my Jesus and “John” were different!). Faith and politics have always been part of my life — with stories, aspirations, and heroes from both filling my imagination and strengthening me to live compassionately in the world.

Both made me think about my neighbors. Both compelled me to look beyond myself and my preferences toward bigger goals.. Both have taught me about equality and liberty. Both inspired me to understand freedom and human rights. Both opened my eyes to global concerns. Both pressed me to care about the poor and the causes of poverty. Both insisted that peace was better than war. Both educated me in history and tradition. And both remind me to look toward the future with hope for a better world.

Both are about right — and wrong — uses of power. Both insist on truth, even when both too often fail at it. Both can be contentious, argumentative, and self-righteous.

In many ways, faith and politics are alike in good ways and troublesome ones. Ideally, however, they are both grounded in love for others. I’ve always hoped that to be true.

At their best, religion and politics are twinned matters of the heart — directing us toward both ultimate and earthly concerns that serve a greater good.

The heart is, of course, what is forgotten on social media and in the media flood. Mostly forgotten by politicians themselves. Woefully forgotten in our churches and synagogues. Politics is presented to us, in Palmer’s words, as technical, strategic, partisan, and polarizing.

The horse race. The game. The polls. Us versus them. A culture war. Even a civil war. Keep upping the ante. Heartless, really. Cold and calculating.

Just writing that causes me to sweat.

No wonder my heart is racing with fear. That’s exactly what this soul-less sort of reporting on and practice of politics creates — panic.

There are things about which we should be concerned, worried, or even enraged. We face difficult, entangled, and complicated problems — as well as internal stresses brought about by a combination of economic failures, political cowardice, structural manipulation, and bad external actors. Many of the policies proposed will hurt people, will hurt the environment, and will hurt economic wellbeing. But fear and panic won’t help. Fear and panic do motivate us, but rarely for the good and never for the long term.

What we need are sturdy hearts and courage. Persistent, insistent love.

The opposite of love is not, as we many times or almost always think, hatred, but the fear to love, and fear to love is the fear of being free.

— Paulo Reglus Neves Freire

That’s why churches, synagogues, and congregations of all sort must talk about faith and politics. We must engage religion and democracy — because they are about compassion, empathy, neighbors, community, and the future. They occupy overlapping territory of the heart and hold forth soulful possibilities for our life together.

We can’t afford to buy into the definition of politics on social media, cable, and in the news. We can’t give into thin renderings of the political game. This isn’t Monday Night Football. And it isn’t the World Series.

“Rightly understood, politics is no game at all,” claimed Parker Palmer. “It is the ancient and honorable human endeavor of creating a community in which the weak as well as the strong can flourish, love and power can collaborate, and justice and mercy can have their day.”

Creating community. Love your neighbor. May we all know justice and mercy.

Politics? Really? Yes.

And it is also the work of faith — the work of heart.

I find myself dreaming of a debate in which the candidates outdo one another in their plans to expand a community of neighborly love.

That makes my heart beat faster in the right way.

---

‘We the People’ must build a political life rooted in the commonwealth of compassion and creativity still found among us, becoming a civic community sufficiently united to know our own will and hold those who govern accountable to it.

— Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy