By Brandon T. Bisceglia
A group of religious leaders representing different faith traditions from around the region came together at St. Joseph of Arimathea church in Orange on Oct. 19 to mull over a perennial question: to what extent should politics be a part of their message?
The short answer: it’s complicated.
The panel discussion, organized by the Congregations of Orange Collaborative, featured six panelists: Rev. James Simpson of Orange Congregational Church in Orange; Deacon John Hoffman of St. Mary Catholic Church in Milford; Rev. Mother Cheryl Smith of St. Joseph of Arimathea; Rabbi Lindsey Healey-Pollack of Congregation Or Shalom in Orange; Father Peter Orfanakos of St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church in Orange; and Imam Endrit Himaj of the Albanian American Muslim Community in Waterbury. Rabbi Emeritus Alvin Wainhaus of Congregation Or Shalom moderated the discussion and contributed his own perspectives.
All of the panelists agreed that they would avoid endorsing individual candidates or parties. But Healey-Pollack struck a chord with her fellow panelists by distinguishing between partisan politics and what she called “the messy business of figuring out how to live together.”
“I would say it’s impossible to talk about Torah without talking about politics,” she said, explaining that every sentence of the text has been the subject of thousands of years of scholarly debate.
The discussion among faith leaders comes at a time when religion and party politics have become increasingly enmeshed, particularly on the right. The stage appears to be set for even more entanglements between faith and the ballot box after the IRS in July reversed course on a decades-old legal rule called the Johnson Amendment that stripped churches of their tax-exempt status if they endorsed candidates for office.
Separation of church and state is a principle that Simpson said the early Congregationalist Puritans who settled New England found important – in order to protect the church from the government. It was precisely the state-led Church of England that drove these groups to flee to America.
“They wanted to escape from the king, and from the church that was headed by the king,” he said. “They had a favorite phrase…‘No bishop, no king.’”
Wainhaus in his preface to the discussion noted that the same religious texts had often been used to justify opposite stances, such as slavery in the South and emancipation in the North prior to the Civil War.
He said, however, there are a few central sacred values that all religious traditions tend to agree on, such as love, justice, compassion, truth and peace.
“It is these moral values that express the true will of god,” he said, “and I’ve tried to broadcast these values from the pulpit during the 44 years of my career at Congregation Or Shalom.”
Some of the panelists varied in their willingness to touch on hot-button topics of the day. Orfanakos said his tradition was generally apolitical. Himaj said that Islam encouraged social engagement without pushing a particular political ideology. Smith, on the other hand, said her offshoot of Catholicism was explicitly steeped in a call to social justice.
“We don’t tell you who to vote for, but we will share that if someone’s feelings or policies are born of hate, we are not going to adopt those or preach that they’re okay,” she said. “You know where we stand in terms of social justice. And it doesn’t always speak to every person sitting in the pew. But it does speak to our love and our compassion, and the truth that we feel speaks to us through scripture.”
Several of the panelists agreed that there were times when it was very clear which side of an issue religious leaders should fall on, citing such evils as Nazism and Jim Crow laws.
More important than political stances, they said, was the role that houses of worship play in offering comfort. Wainhuas recalled the days after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, when he and Orfanakos got together – not to organize for gun control, but to offer St. Barbara as an open space for discussion and healing to those who needed it.
“If religion is silent after Newtown, then religion is irrelevant,” Wainhaus said.
Please keep Church and State separate it is vital