Clergymen of any and all denominations clearly have the same constitutional rights of political speech and action enjoyed by other Americans. They have the right to speak out on political issues, urge others to follow their counsel, support or oppose any candidate for public office, and even run for office themselves.
Many liberals, however, savagely criticize some clergymen for speaking about politics, calling this a crack in the so-called wall of separation between church and state. We say “some” because that criticism appears to be voiced only against conservative clergymen, never against liberals.
Those who criticize Jerry Falwell or other conservative preachers for publicly supporting the Reagan policies become deaf and mute when the National Council of Churches or the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issues political press releases or spends church funds to oppose the Reagan Administration policies.
If the clergy can blame the politicians in power because there are too many poor, hungry, homeless, or jobless, why can’t the politicians blame the clergy because there is too much promiscuity, illegitimacy, VD, abortion, divorce, domestic violence, neglect and abuse of children, alcohol and drug addiction, rape, pornography, and immorality in popular entertainment?
The newly elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Edmond Lee Browning, seized his newsworthy moment to make a political statement criticizing U.S. deployment of any nuclear weapons, military help for the anti-Communist Freedom Fighters in Central America, and the “scandal of increasing hunger among the poor in our country.” He said he intends to use his new pulpit to battle against racism, the arms race, unemployment, and poverty.
Bishop Browning’s statements articulating the liberal perspective were given respectful and generous coverage by the liberal media. So was the pastoral letter issued last year by the Catholic Bishops on the U.S. Economy, which has been widely interpreted as supporting Mondale-style economics and opposing Reaganomics.
That pastoral letter on the U.S. Economy proclaimed that “society has a moral obligation to take the necessary steps to ensure that no one among us is hungry, homeless, unemployed, or otherwise denied what is necessary to live in dignity.” It criticized our welfare system as “woefully inadequate” and urged greater handouts of U.S. taxpayers’ money to the indigent, the unemployed, and the Third World.
Today’s high rates of all those moral problems are truly a scandal. Why don’t the mainline churches move to the top of their agenda these crucial moral problems, in which the clergy are presumed to have some competence, instead of talking so much about our political, economic and foreign problems in which they have manifested little or no competence?
The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review interviewed individual Catholic Bishops to ascertain their factual knowledge of economic and nuclear issues, on which they issued two much-publicized pastoral letters criticizing the Reagan Administration policies. On both subjects, the results were embarrassing; the bishops know even less about such things as “throw-weight” than Chief of Staff Donald Regan thinks women do.
When the prelates posture about low wages and allegedly stingy taxpayer spending for social benefits, how about publishing the low salaries paid to teachers in parochial schools? What about the clergy who try to avoid paying employment benefits to their own employees which other employers are required to pay?
Some prelates have invented the expression “seamless garment of life” to connect their opposition to abortion with their opposition to our military defense. Why don’t we hear speeches about a “seamless garment of virtue” that connects opposition to abortion with opposition to all sex outside of marriage, and thereby reduce the social ills of illegitimacy, teenage pregnancies, prostitution, homosexuality, VD, and divorce?
Clergymen have tremendous challenges in the area of their own expertise and responsibility: the moral problems that are tearing apart the family today. As a practical matter, the laity have more expertise and experience with political, economic and foreign problems. As the old adage reminds us, “Shoemaker, stick to your last.”
