Introduction

We all have blinders on and are subject to being seduced by the attitudes and values of the greater society. This is part of our humanity. Recognition of our humanness, especially those parts that are less than we expect of ourselves, is always painful and difficult to acknowledge.  I remember when I realized that I was becoming a racist. I had grown up in a small town in New England with three Black families. Interracial dating was the norm, I played high school football and baseball with a Black student in my class, and we were guests in each other’s homes.

Yet after five years in Florida attending segregated colleges much of it spent living in dormitories with men who grew up in the “Deep South,” I slowly realized that I was beginning to think and talk like them in reference to “Negros and the Negro Problem.”  However, what finally woke me up to the fact that I had become prejudiced was nothing I can take credit for. It was listening to my mother, who had retired to Florida, who had also succumbed to the same prejudicial attitudes. It was hearing my mother, a woman who had instilled in me that all people regardless of race, color, or creed, were created equally in the image of God speaking in racially derogatory terms that informed me that none of us are immune to becoming someone we do not want to become.

The point of this sharing is that this part of our humanity does not make us bad people. Rather, it tells us loud and clear that as Jesus warned, us we must always be vigilant for we do not know the day or hour of either our death or when God will break into human history ushering in the salvation of the world.  However, is being vigilant enough to satisfy Jesus’ expectation of us?  Is it enough just to know without doing?

The Bible says that as Christians we all share in Jesus’ priesthood, kingship, and prophet nature.  I had never given much thought to what sharing in Jesus’ prophetic nature means to my own life and found it comfortable to envision prophets as old men in long white beards who lived during the time of the Old Testament. Yes, I was aware that we have had modern day prophets like Phil Berrigan, Martin Luther King, and Dorothy Day, but these were people who chose to be extraordinary and set themselves apart from “ordinary people” like me. However as we are in the seventh year of the Bush presidency and the de facto theocracy of the Radical Religious-Right that has already done so much to destroy the America I love with no end in sight, the Lord has been working on me to embrace what sharing in his prophetic nature means. He has been helping me find my prophetic voice and speak out in his name.

What has been made manifest to me in sharp relief is that as a priest I really am set apart – not only as a matter of theology – but as a matter of fact.  Priesthood means that I am of this world but at the same time not of this world. Being set apart as a priest is liberating because it allows, no it mandates, that I exercise my prophetic oneness with Jesus the Christ.

This is not always easy and it does have risks. Modern day prophets in America will not be stoned, but they may well end up in jail if not by their actions than by what they say that is deemed subversive under the Patriot Act.  More likely those who prophesy in defense of the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised, which by necessity places them in opposition to the Radical Religious-Right and Bush administration, will lose friends and become alienated from members of their own family. Sometimes members of their church family will also turn their backs. I know, all of these have happened to me.

But as Dr. King said, long life has its place. To this I would add other things also have their place including family and friends. But Dr. King went on to say having a long life didn’t matter. He had been to the mountaintop, looked over, and seen the Promised Land.

So to for us there are many things that have their place including family and friends but they are not important now. Our country is in a crisis perpetrated by the Radical Religious-Right that is intent on destroying our Constitutional rights and liberties and making their faith beliefs the law of the land in violation of the Constitutional separation between church and state. As priests we must put our house in order and be not only vigilant but prophetic.  We must embrace our separateness and use its liberating power to do God’s work as his representatives on earth. God made a claim on us when he bestowed the gift of priestly charism and we accepted that gift at our ordination. We are God’s men and women now and that is what matters. We must climb our own mountain and when we look over the mountaintop we will see that doing God’s will, being prophets in today’s America, means enduring whatever privation we experience by living our priesthood with joy in our hearts.

As priests, we are called to love all humanity as God loves us.  Moreover, we are called to act on that love by reaching out to the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised wherever we meet them.  We are called to prophesy in their name. As God whispered in the ear of the ancient prophets of Israel, “Who will speak for me?” and their answer was, “Here I am, Lord,” so he whispered in our ear and we answered, “Here I am Lord.”

What does it mean to speak in the name of the Lord in defense of the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised? In light of the hijacking of America by the Radical Religious- Right who are radical but not particularly religious and certainly not right, it means speaking out in defense of the Constitution as the Funding Father’s meant it to be.  It means speaking out and opposing the social and political agenda of the Radical Religious-Right and Bush administration whenever, wherever, and however possible. It means that individual rights and liberties are God given and are to be exercised pursuant to one’s conscience, in privacy, without having the faith beliefs of conservative Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, and others who support their truncated vision of both faith and government imposed upon us.

The bottom line is there is no freedom of conscience in any religious denomination that is dogmatic and fundamentalist; that is, one that believes only it knows what truth is because God informed only it of its nature.  In such denominations, truth ceases to be based on objective criteria and is made to conform to dogmatic statements and divinely revealed faith beliefs.

In these denominations, the exercise of one’s conscience is compromised and becomes nuanced pursuant to the “revealed” truth of God as proclaimed by the purveyors of orthodoxy.  Decisions reached and acts undertaken as a consequence of one’s conscience that are oppositional to “the truth of orthodoxy” are given labels such as secular humanism, relativism, un-biblical, and against the divine order of humanity as ordained by God.  We see this evidenced by the Radical Religious-Right, both conservative Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, in their fixation on what the Chilean feminist writer Rosario Guzman Bravo calls, “moral values below the waist.”

It is the obsession the Radical Religious-Right has with “moral values below the waist” such as birth control, emergency contraception, abortion, assisted reproduction, fetal stem cell research, and homosexuality to the virtual exclusion of the greater moral issues of poverty, hunger, lack of health care, rape of the environment, our broken educational system, the plight of migrants, oppression of women and other minorities, the lies, lies and more lies that constitute the Bush administration, and the invasion of Iraq that constitutes a greater moral evil than any possible moral evil that occurs below the waist.

In their all out assault against what they perceive as the breaking of “moral values below the waist,” the Radical Religious-Right has instituted a cataclysmic battle in their words “for the soul of America” to strip from the Constitution and eradicate our Constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties exercised pursuant to our conscience that are protected by the Constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy.

As I write this introduction, it is January 15, 2006, the 77^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birth.  I am reminded of the words of Dr. King when he wrote about the separation of church and state:

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.  It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.  If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority." [1]

As a Baptist pastor and conservative Christian, Dr. King would be no supporter of the Radical Religious-Right of today. He did not politick from the pulpit. He did not pass out voting guides predicated on the “rights” and “wrongs” of candidates.  He did not electioneer in church. He was an advocate of family planning and once compared the struggle for civil rights to the battle to legalize artificial forms of birth control. He even supported the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down government sponsored prayer in school.  In defense of the latter, he said in an interview:

"I endorse it.  I think it was correct.  Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right.  I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision. They have been motivated, I think, by little more than the wish to embarrass the Supreme Court. When I saw Brother [George] Wallace going up to Washington to testify against the decision at the congressional hearings, it only strengthened my conviction that the decision was right." [2]

 If Dr. King were alive today, he would also not support the efforts of the Radical Religious-Right to introduce Creationism as “Intelligent Design” into our school’s science curricula. He wrote, “Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism” [3]

America is now in a spiral of self-destruction that gains momentum with each passing day both domestically and internationally. Today’s New York Times had an article that speculated whether India or China would be the world’s superpower in 2,050.  I honestly do not think it will take that long. Given what the Radical Religious Right has already done to destroy America and what they will be able to do unchecked for the foreseeable future with an extremist right-wing Supreme Court will plunge our nation into the lower levels of Dante’s Hell.

The America I grew up in, the idealist 1950s, and the one I helped create through the 1960s, 70s, and into the 80s, is hanging by a thread and that will soon be broken and fade from memory. I am again reminded of Pogo who said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Historians write that the Roman Empire imploded because of corruption, rot, and loss of the vision of the ideals of the State.  I think it is safe to say that although we are not Rome, we are doing exactly as did the Romans.

Such ends the “Nobel Experiment” as the European nations called post-Revolutionary America.  I would add a refrain from the end of T.S. Elliott’s poem, The Wasteland, “Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

The question is, “Does the American story have to end this way?” Absolutely Not! As a nation, we have been seduced by the Siren Song of the Radical Religious-Right. Our ship of state has foundered on the jagged rocks of their promise to give America, “ripe wisdom and a quickening of the spirit” just as the Sirens lured ancient mariners to destruction on the jagged rocks of Sirenum scopuli. [4]

However, the Argonauts escaped destruction as they passed Sirenum scopuli.  How did they do it?  They did it because when Orpheus realized the peril they were in he immediately took out his lyre and sang a song so clear and ringing that it drowned out the sound of those seductive voices.

That is what all rational mainstream Americas must do. We must sing out our song of reason in the clarity of what is right and just in the face of the Radical Religious -Rght’s irrational attempt to impose their faith beliefs on us all as the law of the land.  We must sing out the song that has sustained America for 230 years - the song the Founding Fathers codified in the Constitution of the Untied States of America on July 4, 1776 – a song that has a melody and counterpoint of individual rights and liberties predicated on one’s conscience exercised within the Constitutional principle of privacy under girded by the strong base line of the separation between church and state.

That is what Rights, Liberties, and Social Justice: How the Fight Over Abortion, Homosexuality, Intelligent Design, and Poverty Created Amercian Faschism and Destroyed the Separation Between Church and State is all about. It is a prophetic song calling America back to its true self. It is a clarion call for Americans and America to remove the blinders and see the Radical Religious-Right for what it is: a subversive movement intent on destroying the Constitution and vision of the Founding Fathers.