Fifteen minutes of fame and other lessons from the pulpit

Let’s talk about what’s setting me off this fine Sunday: Evangelical Christian ministers who yearn for their fifteen minutes of fame and are hell bent on getting it. While we’re at it, let’s talk about the politicians who exploit the power of the pulpit in their quest for the prize, and I’m speaking specifically of Barack Obama and John McCain.

The latest un-Christian rant comes from the Reverend Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, who just happened to make a guest speaking appearance at the Trinity United Church of Christ (also known as Barack Obama’s church). Strutting his stuff in front of a congregation that calls itself “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” he proceeded to rip into Hillary Clinton’s ‘whiteness’ without provocation, pandering to his audience and not caring about his contribution to the ever-widening divide between whites and blacks in America. It doesn’t matter. It got him on YouTube and into the search engines. While it’s unusual to see a Roman Catholic Priest advancing a political agenda from the pulpit, there’s a long line of Evangelical Christian ministers who have displayed some very un-Christian attitudes this political season.

Until the visit by Pfleger, Barack Obama had remained a member of the church in spite of the fact that he distanced himself from the racially charged remarks of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his pastor. It was Wright who invited Pfleger to speak and, apparently, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After the Pfleger incident, Obama resigned his family’s twenty-year membership in Trinity United Church of Christ. Why now? It has to make you wonder why Obama didn’t make the break a long time ago if it was a real issue of conscience for him. Are the views of Wright and Pfleger those Obama holds in private, but disdains as part of his public persona?

Obama is not the only candidate with religious issues. The presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, has sought the endorsements of two Evangelical Christian ministers who sound more like terrorists than preachers. In McCain’s case, it was simply a question of politics – the need to win the Christian vote. He accepted and defended nearly to the death the endorsement of the Reverend John Hagee, pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, whose un-Christian beliefs include that Hurricane Katrina happened because the New Orleans Gay Pride Parade was scheduled for the day Katrina came ashore. Hagee has also stated that the United States and Israel must carry out a pre-emptive strike on Iran to fulfill God’s plan, which is a “biblically-prophesized end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.”

McCain refused to denounce Hagee and remained loyally in his camp for quite some time. It wasn’t until McCain heard an audiotape where Hagee preached to his faithful that “Hitler and the Nazis were sent by God, to chase the Jews back to the land of Israel” that he broke with Hagee. Apparently it was okay for Hagee to insult gays and lesbians, second-class citizens. However, McCain had to draw the line when Hagee insulted he Jews.

McCain was also forced to distance himself from the endorsement of another extreme cleric, the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, who calls for eradicating Islam. Parsley also has some choice words for ‘activist judges,’ those who support the separation between church and state, homosexuals, the “abortion industry,” and the entertainment industry.

That these clerics have the temerity to suggest that their attitudes are reflective of God’s is disturbing. Their sentiments are not those of any God I’ve ever been exposed to, and I’ve explored several religions in my lifetime prior to becoming a Buddhist. Equally disturbing is the way political candidates surreptitiously court these clerics in order to gain votes. My father used to say that politics makes strange bedfellows. It also make some dangerous ones. There is absolutely no place for religion in government. As much as our belief system centers on freedom of religion, for some citizens it is rooted in freedom from religion. In spite of the fact that some of our forefathers were spiritual men, our system of government was designed to avoid such an unholy alliance.