Religious Conflict

Posted in: News By House Divided on January 25, 2019

We are less than one month into a new year and already some things feel old – like the partial government shut-down, the longest in our nation’s history. What prevents Democrats from reaching a compromise with President Trump to fund a border wall? The answer may surprise you.

On January 3rd – the day she was elected speaker of the House of Representatives, again – Nancy Pelosi (D) explained why those in the moral community of Democrats could not support funding for the wall: “the wall is an immorality; it’s not who we are as a people”. The wall is immoral, that’s Pelosi’s truth. On political matters one can compromise, on matters of ultimate moral truth, one cannot. Pelosi simply cannot support funding the wall, it’s against her religion!

Pelosi’s was not asked by what moral authority she determined the wall is immoral. By moral authority, I mean the basis by which she determines what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust, acceptable or unacceptable. Did she rely on either the Constitution or the Bible? No. The word “immoral” doesn’t appear in our Constitution and while it does appear in the Bible, it’s usually applied to sexual behavior that violates the law of God, not to the building of walls. Indeed, Hebrew Scripture declares the ability to build walls for the security of the people is a blessing: “God has …given us a wall of protection…” (e. g. Ezra 9:9).

What, then, is the moral authority Americans should use to determine what is moral or immoral, just or unjust? That question was answered for Republicans and Democrats on April 16, 1963. From a Birmingham jail cell, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law”. Kings politics were rooted in his theology, not the other way around. He resisted the temptation to diminish political foes with discrediting labels. Why? King’s Theology persuaded him that, “Every man …is significant …because every man is made in the image of God.”

Politics is the struggle for power. Through her use of moral vocabulary, Speaker Pelosi’s words reveal the nature of this struggle involves competing moral visions, with opposing bases of moral authority. The conflict is not merely political, at its core it is a competition for the power to define social reality, including: What is a family? What is marriage? What limits may be placed on reproductive rights? How is one’s gender determined? Today, Democrats tend to answer those questions one way and Republicans another. Why? They tend to decide what is true, what is good, what is right, what is appropriate, the nature of community, the way things should be, what it means to be an American, etc. by reference to fundamentally conflicting and competing sources of moral authority. In context, it feels like a political struggle but in content, this is a religious struggle. This is conflict at the deepest level. A divide this great will not simply go away.

At the end of the day, who among us ought to be able to declare law that ought to be obeyed? “Stated that baldy” said Yale law professor Arthur Leff, “the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a noticeable number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it…Either God exists or he does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take his place…As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling people is depraved…There is such a thing as evil. All together now: Sez Who? God help us.”