When Religion and Politics Mix

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I had read somewhere that scouts for major-league baseball teams, when looking for potential star pitchers, look mainly at the speed of pitches thrown by potential high school or college recruits. If they can throw hard, the scouts reason, they can learn ball control.

I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense. And sensible or not, this was the lead paragraph of a guest editorial I wrote for the newspaper where I had been employed back before the 2016 election, when the candidates were Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.

I argued that the minimum requirement of a successful candidate is “good moral character,” that it should be a requirement similar to that of a potential star pitcher, that a sine qua non – the condition that is not negotiable - should be a person who is honest and humane. Though I had written 10-12 guest editorials before, all of which the editorial board accepted, it didn’t do so this time. It was rejected without comment.

Know Them by Their Works

Perhaps it wasn’t clear enough or convincing enough. Or maybe the piece wasn’t precise enough about a key question, “How do you know whether a person has “good moral character?” I think Jesus, in his instructions to his disciples in Matthew’s gospel, answers that question nicely: “You will know them by their works.”

Jesus probably had the Pharisees in mind, but his words apply to just about anybody whose moral character we are trying to assess. Look at their actions to assess their character.

I know that you have to be careful in using this or any other criterion for judging others and that judging others in itself is hazardous for your own moral character. Also, you have to avoid the trap of accepting the stereotype about politicians – that they are all equally corrupt. Like all of us, there are degrees of moral turpitude among them and it’s possible, and desirable, to apply moral norms to our choice of political candidates.

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For me, it wasn’t hard to decide between the two candidates mentioned above. One candidate, who won the election, obviously had a much greater moral deficit than the other. That didn’t seem to bother a majority of voters, and that should concern all of us.

I’m writing this blog, of course, because the mid-term elections across the U.S. will be held on Nov. 3. All voters, it seems to me, but especially those searching for God, should view candidates’ moral character as a non-negotiable criterion for election. A candidate should, at least, be determined to be relatively honest and humane as basic for election. We’ve seen clearly how dishonesty and inhumanity devastates a country.

All this is despite the adage that “religion and politics don’t mix,” as if there is any area of our lives that should be excluded from the demands of our faith or our search for God. Religion shouldn’t dictate which political party we favor, but shouldn’t it play a major part in deciding who the best candidates are?

A Mystery?

So, you might ask, how is it that so many religious people voted for our current president? According to the Pew research firm, 55 percent of all Catholics and 62 percent of all Protestants voted for him. The only honest answer is, I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me.

Maybe they concluded that the other candidate was worse. That’s possible, but I wonder how many failed to even consider “moral character” and simply ignored their religious values.

Another quote from Matthew’s gospel, which Jesus copied from the prophet Isaiah, comes to mind: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”