“I side with those theologians who suggest that when creating the universe, God left one small part of creation undone.”—Rabbi David Saperstein, yesterday morning at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, in his address “Racing With God: The Use and Abuse of Religion in American Politics and Public Life,” explaining that God left us “a blueprint for how to finish creation” as we pursue justice and peace.
(Rabbi Saperstein has spoken in the amphitheater at Chautauqua several times over the last two decades, and with his forceful delivery, frequent touches of humor, and enormous erudition, it’s easy to see why he’s a big favorite here. As a Catholic, I found it welcome that at the beginning of his lecture, he likened the Catholic and Jewish approaches to addressing issues of public life.
The Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters over the last several decades—on nuclear arms, poverty, and the environment, among others—refer to two sources of authority, he explained: Catholic sacred text and doctrine, which is not binding on non-believers, and natural law, or the moral principles accessible to all.
As someone interested in the Presidency, I also found it fascinating that William Howard Taft had been attacked in the 2008 Presidential campaign by followers of William Jennings Bryan because, as president of the National Conference of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Churches, he was attacked as “an infidel or, even worse, a Catholic.” Taft’s wife was similarly smeared for consorting with Catholics. While Bryan did not endorse the attacks, neither did he repudiate them. Perhaps this was one reason why Al Smith, among others, admitted in his autobiography to having such a low opinion of this three-time Presidential electoral loser who might have been the most radical major candidate for the Oval Office until Jesse Jackson.
I agreed with plenty of points on Saperstein’s talk, including a number of his 10 commandments for the “right use of religion” in election. I also think it is helpful that for once, a progressive/liberal (pick the term you like) admits that the use of religion in presidential campaigns began to rise markedly with Jimmy Carter, not just George W. Bush or even Ronald Reagan, and that Democratic candidates have spoken from the pulpits of African-American churches just as Republican candidates have looked to evangelical platforms.
I part company with him when he castigates the religious right for opposing gay rights and abortion—what he called, earning vast applause from the audience, “morality reduced to pelvic politics.” Do I think that elections should be solely decided by single issues such as these, or that Catholic bishops, for instance, should be telling their flock which candidate to vote for based on these? No.
Nevertheless, these two issues are far more fraught than Saperstein’s clever one-liner might lead one to believe—particularly in the case of abortion, where much of the Catholic Church’s opposition, for instance, springs from the very concept of natural law that the rabbi praises. There is a reason why abortion continues to divide and bedevil American politics 35 years after Roe v. Wade, and it’s because millions of Americans are correctly concerned about where the right to privacy crosses over into the right to life and dignity.
If the term “rabbi” refers to a ministerial teaching function, then Saperstein richly deserves the term. But abortion is not an issue of church vs. state but of when life begins. Dismissing it as an obsession of the religious right without addressing the substance of those concerns—and, I might add, caricaturing opponents as unconcerned with poverty or the environment--is not in the spirit of dialogue and engagement that Saperstein and so many other speakers and their audience have been advocating this week at Chautauqua.)
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