A Colorado Bishop has risen to national prominence in the past few days because of a letter he sent out to parishioners telling them how they must vote. Not just elected officials, but voters themselves must not support candidates who support "intrinsically evil": same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and "illicit" stem-cell research, which relies on tissue from aborted fetuses.
While pundits argue over the limits of church and state, let me bring up another question. What should you do if you agree with your church's moral position but think it practices terrible political strategies? For example, imagine that your church decreed that members shouldn't support drug legalization. You concur with your church that people shouldn't do harmful drugs, but firmly believe that drug prohibitions actually encourage drug use, and decriminalization would save lives and limit drug use.
What would you do then? Support a harmful position for the sake of maintaining church membership? Publicly feign support to your church and secretly vote against it at the ballot box?
Such a deep question for a weekend! My cynical answer is that most people compartmentalize their lives so they honestly don't think about the contradictions. Church is Sunday morning. Work is Mon-Friday. Family is in the evenings. Politics -- well who has time for politics?
Most people don't follow/read about/think about politics (yes, these are the people who decide elections!) So they don't think about the contradictions UNLESS the contradictions get so much play in the press they're forced to. So it will be interesting to see how Catholics react to this latest kerfuffle.
Yes, I know I didn't answer what I would do, but I'm a Methodist and Methodists are at the other extreme (i.e., anything goes if you're a Methodist and we're moral relativists, so we'll love you no matter what!). I'm not sure the Methodist seminaries are even teaching the 10 commandments any more (yes, my cynicism continues).
I would ignore any attempts made by a church to insert themselves into political decisions as irrelevant to their purpose.
A church may tell me that abortion is immoral. Fine. But they may not tell me how laws should be passed, because that has nothing to do with morality, but rather specific secular approaches to the issue.
Your drug policy example is an excellent one. The weighing of the practicality of alternative government strategies has nothing to do with religious morality. Another example -- I can follow church teachings that abortion is immoral, yet be pro-choice when it comes to secular law, believing that Christian example and teaching is a better approach to reducing abortion than secular laws).
This Colorado Bishop is living proof that way too much of our society has actually come to believe the lie that legislating morality is a proper activity of government, despite all evidence. But legislating morality NEVER works (outlaw drugs and nobody will use them, outlaw pornography and people won't buy it, outlaw racist words and people will stop being racist, etc., etc., etc.,)
The story is not that the Bishop has made this announcement, but that he believes it.
I had a discussion about this bishop with a very Catholic friend of mine. I am an ex-Catholic with some associated bitterness (thank you 12 years of Catholic school) so I was surprised that she asked for my opinion on this letter. As I fumbled for an inoffensive way to answer, she started ranting about how the letter addressed certain Church tents, but ignored others (such as the death penalty, war, etc). Her beef was the fact that only certain issues were addressed, which in her mind belittled his credibility.
I agree with Pete: "This Colorado Bishop is living proof that way too much of our society has actually come to believe the lie that legislating morality is a proper activity of government, despite all evidence."
This should not be the case. Separation of church and state! To me the comments are emotional blackmail (Guilt-the basic premise of Catholicism)-if you don't vote the way we want you to (i.e.-for the President forcing his beliefs down the collective throat of the world), then you are going to hell. Call it what you want, but in the end it's a guilt trip.
Hi;
I am not sure why people are still whipping a dead horse (church).
I left Roman Catholicism in 1990. There are alternatives that don't try to fit square pegs into round holes.