God of This City

I’ll admit I’m a little bit upset about the election. No, unlike many of the Bishops, I’m not in mourning about Obama’s reelection. In case you missed last week’s post, I’m perfectly fine with that outcome.

No. I’m talking about the sentiments I saw on election day and the days following. One facebook post summed up the election as between a “ warmongering, religious homophobe” and an “economically ignorant demagogue. ” Or as I mentioned in last week’s post, Stanley Hauerwas’ called it a “Roman Circus.” I won’t even get into this.

It’s become quite popular nowadays to be a political cynic, whether among the religious who feel their faith not being represented as they understand it, the well-educated who feel the political sound bites and slogans we often hear miss the true complexity of the issues we face, or your average citizen complaining of political hypocrisy.

There’s certainly a lot of hypocrisy in our political system. Take Mike Bowers. Bowers was born in 1942 in Commerce—a small town in rural Georgia, that in 1940 had a population of not quite 3,300. The son of a truck driver, he went on to graduate from West Point in 1963, and served in the air force until 1970, when he attended the University of Georgia Law School. He was elected attorney general of Georgia from 1981-1997, and made a record for himself fighting government corruption.

Sounds like a pretty cool guy, right?

Unfortunately for his legacy in the history books, Bowers is best known as the defendant in two cases: Bowers v. Hardwick, and Shahar v. Bowers. In the first case in 1986, Bowers convinced the Supreme Court to uphold a Georgia anti-sodomy law, and in the second, Bowers convinced the Eleventh Circuit uphold his 1991 rescinding of an employment offer to Robin Shahar, upon his finding that she had recently married another women in a Reformation Jewish marriage ceremony. At first glance, one could argue that Bowers was just doing his job of enforcing statutes the elected legislature had passed. In Shahar, he argued that he was justified firing her because “inaction on my part would constitute tacit approval of this purported marriage and jeopardize the proper functioning of this office,” that she would be unable to enforce the state’s anti-sodomy laws, and he had doubts about the quality of Shahar’s judgment “in general” as seen in her choice to get seek employment in the state attorney's office while getting married to a women, despite the controversy in Georgia following Bowers. However, the lawyers arguing for Shahar knew that Bowers had been having a longtime affair with a member of his staff—as against Georgia’s anti-adultery law (O.C.G.A. §16-6-19). The man who was arguing that a lesbian couldn’t enforce Georgia’s morality statutes on account of her violation of them was himself actively violating them!

So, yes, frustration with our politics is quite valid. At the same time, we, the voters, often make matters worse. We caricaturize the candidates, dehumanize them to be an issue, rather than people in and of themselves. But Romney is not some impersonal robot incapable of feelings and out to oppress 47% of America. Obama is not some demon antichrist with plans to invade the US with UN troops. They have their own thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, (and, yes, even tears).  They are public figures, and so subject their political views to public criticism, as Obama has pointed out. However, in holding ourselves proudly aloof and criticizing a system while not working to change it, we make ourselves no better than those we criticize.

Christianity is a religion of hope, not cynicism. We believe in the best, not worst, of what it is to be human. The beauty of democracy is that if you don’t like something, you can work to change it. If no one represents you to your satisfaction, you can run for office yourself. I admit, you’ll probably have an uphill battle—what with our two party system and all. However, there is no beatitude, “blessed are the cynics.” Jesus didn’t forget to finish the “love your neighbor as yourself” with “…except for that political bozo on the TV.”

Ultimately, there is a lesson in the frustration of politics. A friend of mine posted on facebook perhaps my favorite election-day post: "No matter who wins the election today, they won't be perfect. And that's okay; the position of savior has already been taken."

We are not perfect, and our politics is not perfect. Heaven knows, if it were then we’d have some serious question to ask regarding the Catholic teachings of human fallenness and original sin. However, the Catholic response is not cynicism—not holding ourselves aloof in some fortress of self-righteousness.  When St. Paul writes to the Romans, “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he doesn’t counsel cynicism. He counsels hope, and faith in God.

As Chris Tomlin explains his song, “God of This City,” the Christian band Bluetree was in Pattaya, Thailand—a city known for its sex industry and child prostitution. A bar (more descriptively, a brothel) called “The Climax Club” was desperately looking for a band, to play and asked Bluetree, so long as they would bring their sizable crowd of missionaries with them. In the middle of the set, surrounded by the poles for dancers and looking out over the missionaries--heavily involved with their Cokes, Aaron Boyd, the lead singer for Bluetree, was struck with the notion that God was still present. God was the “God of this city, the King of these peoples.” As he described it, in the middle of the set, he started chanting—started singing—those words. This “minor, downbeat loop,” eventually opened up into the lyrics “the greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done yet in this city.” After all, even a city “vitiated by sin” is a city over which God still is God—still the “light in this darkness…the hope to the hopeless…the peace to the restless.”

Remember Bowers, the Attorney General of Georgia who fired a women for a sexual crime while he was committing one of his own?  In May 1997, he resigned his position as attorney general to run for governor. Just a week after a final decision by the Eleventh Circuit in his favor in Shahar, Bowers admitted to his affair. He lost in the 1998 primary. Bowers was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, which stated “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, [and] is not correct today.”

Our political world is far from perfect, but it has a tendency to work itself out in the long run. But those imperfections are important; they remind us we shouldn’t seek our savior in a politician. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own holiness—there is no miracle politician or law that we must have or cannot do with out. It reminds us that, ultimately, the greatest things are yet to come.

We already have our savior; let’s focus on getting to know Him better, and not on expecting politics to create a new one.