False Dichotomy

I get to read a ridiculous amount of commentary on the news while I work. I've really been meaning to pass some things along, but alas, it's been a really busy week. So busy that several times I haven't had a moment to sit still, let alone update this thing. Now that it's Saturday, here's something worth reading:

Every week the Dallas Morning News asks its readers one question on faith. This was their question this past week:

Under what conditions, if any, is it acceptable for someone to vote for a presidential candidate whose social policies the voter finds morally objectionable, but whose economic policies that person favors?

There were many responses, but I thought the one from Cynthia Rigby, a professor from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, was particularly insightful:

A false dichotomy is being assumed in the question. Economic policies are social policies, insofar as they have undeniable social impact. Further: privileging "economic policies" over "social policies" is not equivalent to privileging "Mammon" over "God," as the question implies. Avoiding such simplistic categorizations is especially important in our current political and financial clime, where people of faith who are looking seriously at candidates' economic policies have reason to worry about paying for food, gasoline, medical care, and education. The moral ideal that drives our evaluation of economic policies is that the bread, shelter, and education necessary for human flourishing be both cherished as God's blessing and relentlessly pursued as consistent with the self-evident truths upheld by our Constitution.

In 1990, I spent a year living in the Philippines. I remember meeting a bishop of the United Church of Christ in Mindanao. I asked him what I believed was a pressing question of our day: "What is your position on homosexuality?" He paused for a moment, looked me directly in the eye, and answered: "When there are no more hungry stomachs in my country, then I will worry about homosexuality."

Social policies? Moral ideals? We must cease divorcing them from economic realities. We must stop thinking of the spiritual as something separate from the physical, recognizing that the money necessary for life is not something religious people should be "neutral" about (as though it is more God-like, somehow, to move beyond such thinking). Jesus himself stops his lecture in order to feed the 5,000. Christian believers, every day, demand that God make good on God's promise to "give us this day our daily bread." Bread matters because life matters. People of faith had better take economic policies into serious consideration because they believe God is, first and foremost, a God of stomach-filling, body-healing, debt-forgiving life.

Lots of other good responses can be found here.