'Values Voters': cult of exclusion

BY JOEL CONNELLY

A cacaphony of discord and false witness flowed from last weekend's annual "Values Voters" conference in Washington, D.C., augmenting the Christian right's usual message: If you disagree with us, you lack values.

The Rev. Robert Jeffress, megachurch pastor and head of the Southern Baptist Convention, introduced his friend and candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as a fellow believer -- and then faced the press to demean rival Mitt Romney.

"I think the decision for conservative Evangelical Christians right now is going to be, do we prefer somebody who is truly a believer in Jesus Christ or somebody who is a good moral person but is a member of a cult?" said Jeffress. "And it's not politically correct today but it is true -- Mormonism is a cult."

Romney was on a high horse Monday demanding that Perry repudiate -- "refudiate" in Sarah Palin-speak -- the words of his Texas minister friend. "I don't believe that that kind of divisiveness based on religion has a place in this country," said Mitt.

A demagoguery is abroad in our country, an effort to use religious belief to define whether or not we belong in the "true" American community. It's all the more appalling that this 51 years after presidential candidate and Catholic John F. Kennedy appealed to Houston ministers for a faith-inclusive America. Words worth remembering:

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated equal, where every man has the same right to attend or not the church of his choice." The faith of a president, said Kennedy, must be "neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding office."

Principles of which JFK spoke then are under assault now, even from absolutists in his own denomination. On public matters, said Kennedy, he would not speak for his church nor would church speak for him. Yet, new Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput recently declared that Catholic politicians who support legal abortion rights "are not really Catholic" but "a very different kind of creature."

Mitt Romney has argued, in two presidential campaigns, that a candidate should not be elected -- or rejected -- because of his faith. Yet, in a 2007 Texas A&M speech, Romney went out of his way to demonize non-believers, using the usual jargon of "they" and "them."

"They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God," he said. "Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism."

And in a speech that year to the Values Voter Summit, he declared: "The effort to establish an anti-religion in America, the anti-religion of secularism, has got to come to an end."

Is it the president's job to end it? How, when he has taken a vow to uphold the Constitution? Would Romney, as president, see his job as representing only believers?

We saw the politics of exclusion displayed as Alabama's newly elected Gov. Robert Bentley spoke on Martin Luther King Day last January: "Now, I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you -- you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I do want to be your brother."

Sarah Palin has attacked Kennedy for what he said to the Houston ministers, claiming JFK "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are. ... (Kennedy) seemed to run away from his religion."

Our nation's founders kept church separate from state. The decision was to the benefit of both, the more so now that we are an increasingly diverse country. But the separation is under assault -- we actually heard Rick Perry recently voice the wish that the president could pray away the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

And this from Perry, who has signed more execution warrants than any modern American governor: "I think it's time for us to just hand it over to God and say, 'God, you're going to have to fix this.'" Or this promise: "As a nation, we must call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles."

How curious to see such public expressions at home when religious fanaticism and a strain of Islamic fundamentalism have sent our soldiers abroad to fight two of America's longest wars. We are facing enemies so absolutely certain they are right that they can do anything -- and be assured of salvation.

As a believer, I would echo words spoken by ex-President Bill Clinton at New York's Riverside Church in 2004: "Politics and political involvement dictated by faith is not the exclusive province of the right wing in America."

Others among us have values, too. My values leave me unsettled that wealth and power are, increasingly, concentrated in an elite. My values tell me that is wrong when there are no jobs and people are losing income, when ordinary Americans' homes are foreclosed while Vanity Fair showcases the monster houses of hedge-fund billionaires. My values recoil at the despoiling of God's earth, and changing its climate by recklessly burning fossil fuels.

Values of community, so essential to America, get trashed if we shut down homeless shelters, lay off thousands of teachers, and slash social programs for mothers and babies. The value of "life" does not begin at conception and end at birth.

These values must be part of our political debate? After all, didn't an angry Jesus tell money changers in the temple, "Even as you have done it to the least of these you have done to me"?

Ultimately, we should judge those in public life not by their professions of faith -- not by pandering at Values Voter summits -- but from what the prophet says in the Book of James: "I will see your faith through your works."