The Last Page
Phillips, Maxine
THE BIG QUESTION used to be, when did you leave the Communist Party? And the answer was always, too late, because the questioner had either left before you or had never joined. In this campaign...
...Still, there was never talk of leaving the church...
...MAXINE PHILLIPS...
...For a while, it was posed only to Barack Obama, not to other candidates who, over the years, had attended churches or accepted endorsements from pastors who were antigay, did not believe in equal rights for women, or subscribed to theories of Armageddon that required Jews to disappear from the face of the earth...
...These other candidates carried the protective armor of whiteness, which Obama lacked, so their protestations that their faith was personal and that they shouldn't be held responsible for the statements of others were taken at face value...
...In Protestantism, as on the left, protesting is a way of life, so the time to leave may come sooner...
...We didn't have to ask if we should have left in 1967, when our charismatic minister started publicly helping women find safe, albeit illegal, abortions, or in 1970, when we hosted an antiwar art show featuring the American flag and heard a sermon on symbols and idolatry...
...When do these things overshadow your main reason for being there, your own relationship to God and understanding of what that means for how you act in the world...
...In Protestantism the major schisms over race had occurred more than a century before, but during the civil rights years, many pastors lost their pulpits in white churches for being too "militant...
...Nobody at my church (full disclosure, it's affiliated with the same denomination as Obama's former church) thought Obama should have left, and nobody among my secular leftwing friends understood how he could have stayed so long...
...Some on the left treated Hillary Clinton's membership in a conservative prayer group as if she were in a bizarre cult, while the rest of the country, where prayer groups are common, could have cared less...
...In my central Pennsylvania Republican town, our pastor was worried...
...When does it become too much...
...1 12 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 Should we have left when the church started advocating for decriminalization of prostitution...
...A Catholic was running for president...
...the church, with all its imperfections, would still be there...
...No, I thought, my leaving a church would have had to be earlier...
...I can't speak for Catholics, but I think I understand how you can look at a worldwide organization and decide that the tent is big enough for everyone or that a few rotten apples don't have to spoil the barrel...
...After one particularly bitter Sunday diatribe, my family debated whether we should get up and leave the next time it happened...
...Relentless exposure of the anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Islamic beliefs of two of John McCain's supporters finally forced McCain to reject their endorsement weeks after Obama had to distance himself from his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright...
...But sometimes, a church is a church, and we render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's...
...When is your church too white or too black, too straight, too hostile to women, too pro-war or antiwar, too blind to sexual abuse by its clergy...
...I joked on Sundays that I was sure glad none of us were running for office...
...The year was 1960...
...And over the decades, as I've watched friends leave the Catholic church over homosexuality and ordination of women and have watched others be hounded from Protestant denominations for those same reasons, I, too, have wondered about those who stayed...
...In this campaign season, the question is, why didn't you leave your church and disavow your pastor earlier...
...My parents never had any interest in protest, so just the discussion was remarkable to this thirteen-year-old...
...The election would end...
...Only Mormon Mitt Romney took almost as much heat...
...When do you stop thinking you can work within the system...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
