A Religious Vote

[Peter and Todd Strickland process ceremoniously up the aisle as music plays, Todd carrying the JUC banner. Both are wearing robes and stoles.]

See what can happen if you go to the National Cathedral in Washington and participate in the service. The next thing you know I’ll be wanting one of those fancy pointed hats (they are called miters) that bishops wear. (For the visitors among us this morning, let me say that this robing and processing is not my usual practice. This is intended as a lighthearted and heartfelt tribute to our choir’s participation last week in a service at the National Cathedral.)

I felt a little like a country bumpkin in the big city. I took along this robe that I usually drag out only for ordinations and installations. Yet I felt woefully underdressed next to the Right Reverend Bishop of Colorado and the Very Reverend Dean of the Cathedral as they put on their regalia—white cassocks with brilliant green vestments. The bishop wore a gold miter.

Before the service our choir sang a 25-minute choral prelude. They sounded just terrific. We can all be very proud of them. I can’t wait to get the CD in a couple of weeks.

After the choral prelude, at the beginning of the service proper, there was a procession (more like a small parade, actually) of clergy, other participants in the service, and the Cathedral’s own choir of men and boys. There must have been 40 or 50 people walking down the long central aisle of the nave. Lev Ropes carried the JUC banner. I tried to look dignified.

What a treat it was for me to accompany our choir to Washington. Before the service, while the choir was getting ready, I got to schmooze at a continental breakfast with clergy and other dignitaries, including Robert O’Neill, the Episcopal bishop of Colorado.

This was my first visit to the National Cathedral. I had heard the name before but had never given it any thought.

When I do stop to think about it, the idea of a national cathedral seems a bit strange. After all, we are a country that purports to believe in the separation of church and state. We are country with lots of religious diversity. I doubt that a Jew or Muslim would feel entirely comfortable in such a Christian setting.

Now, it must be said, the National Cathedral is not tax supported. To its credit, the Cathedral makes an honest effort to be open to all faiths. Heck, they even invited a Unitarian Universalist choir and minister to participate. The staff are very gracious. The excellent sermon preached there last Sunday could have been preached in this pulpit. It was a sermon about how we should not arrogantly believe we know God’s will, about how we should be cautious in our opinions and compassionate in our actions, about arguing less about theology and loving each other more. It is a timeless message, and certainly a timely message in today’s contentious environment.

It turns out that the idea for a national cathedral goes back to the birth of the nation. A cathedral was included in the earliest plans for a capital city. In 1893 Congress gave a charter to the Protestant Episcopal Foundation of the District of Columbia to establish a cathedral. Land was purchased and in 1907 a foundation stone, from a field near Bethlehem, no less, was laid by President Theodore Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson is buried there. Just before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his last Sunday sermon from that pulpit. Three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a National Prayer and Remembrance Service was held there.

The National Cathedral is a reminder, a visually stunning, huge, magnificent reminder, that while church and state may be legally separate, religion and American politics are ever united.

Today so many of the most emotional issues in our political life are deeply religious issues—issues like the teaching of evolution versus creationism and the legality of abortion.

While we Unitarian Universalists often decry the mingling of religion and politics, ours is a faith tradition with a long history of involvement in public life. Our statement of principles and purposes explicitly states that we affirm the use of democratic process in society. We say that we affirm justice and equity in human relationships. Our statement of principles even explicitly affirms the goal of world community, with peace, liberty and justice for all. All of these principles have enormous political implications.

In our history, we point with pride to the leadership of Unitarians and Universalists in the anti-slavery movement, in the struggle for women’s suffrage and in the civil rights movement. Today our people are often at the forefront of efforts to extend legal protections to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and to protect the environment. Here in our own congregation we have an active social responsibility council and a minister for social responsibility.

So we, too, are part of the American tradition of mixing politics and religion. Perhaps we have not built a grand cathedral on a hill overlooking the Capitol and the While House, but we have been plenty busy over the years helping to construct our political culture.

This is as it should be. Religion is about our deepest love, our strongest commitments, our highest aspirations. Religion involves our vision of life, about how best to live life, about how to live in harmony with one another. Our religion must not be a way for us to hide from life, to pretend that we are not part of the world all around us. I am a staunch defender of the separation of church and state. And I am a passionate advocate for bringing our religious vision, a vision of compassion, of interdependence, of human dignity, of peace, to politics.

We are approaching an important election in Colorado. More than many elections, our vote on Propositions C and D will shape the future of our communal life for years.

I want to urge all of you to vote. More importantly, I want to urge each of you to vote religiously. Before you and I mark our ballot we need to reflect on how our vote is an expression of what we love, what we worship.

This is a religious service, not a class in political science. However, a bit of review is in order. Colorado has a unique tax provision as a result of the TABOR (taxpayers bill of rights) initiative passed some years ago. That initiative has limited the growth of state spending by applying a formula to the previous year’s expenditures. However, when the initiative was written it included a little understood provision that has become known as the “ratchet effect.” What happened is that expenditures were rising gradually with the growth of the state and its economy. Then when the recession hit in the late 90’s revenues went down. When revenues rebounded, state spending could not also rebound to the previous TABOR limited level, however. That is because the state can now only spend an increment more than it had the previous year. This has the effect of making the artificially low spending of the worst recession year a permanent part of the calculation.

Now, I know that is too brief and can sound a bit arcane. The effects are not abstract. The effects touch the lives of all of us, but especially of the poor and politically powerless.

Here are some of the effects of this tax policy on our neighbors:

• Colorado now ranks last (LAST!) among all states in childhood immunization rates.
• Colorado ranks 48th in the rate of low income children with health insurance.
• Colorado ranks 50th among all states in the percentage of low income high school students who go on to higher education.
• We now rank 48th in per capita funding for higher education.
• We have cut funding for children with disabilities by 35 percent.
• About a third of Colorado Medicaid recipients are elderly. Medicaid spending was cut by $133 million in 2002-03.
• State funding for public libraries has been cut by 79 percent.
• In 2000, less than one-third of Coloradans in need of mental health care received services.

The grisly statistics go on and on. If we do nothing to correct this, the situation will continue to worsen. More cuts will be needed. The Joint Budget Committee of the Colorado legislature has list of potential cuts that has been nicknamed “The Nasty List.” That list includes cuts to people in nursing homes, eliminating support for the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, cuts to help students who are retained at grade level, more cuts to health care for the indigent, and on and on. No wonder it is known as “The Nasty List.”

And for what? So that people like me and like many of you can get some piddling rebate checks. This is shameful.

I have never stood up here and told you how you should vote. I typically talk at the level of our values, of the necessity of taking our deep spiritual value of compassion for all life into the world. I understand that people of good conscience will disagree about public policy. We can and will disagree about what is the best way to accomplish a goal we all share.

Well, this morning I am going to tell you how I think you should vote. I urge you to vote for measures C and D. All the major religious groups in the state are united behind this: Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others. The Interfaith Alliance is working for this. Our governor, a fiscal conservative who is no friend of government spending and a man with whom I often disagree vehemently, backs C and D.

You see, as religious people, as people who seek to live moral, responsible lives, you and I don’t get to vote our narrow economic self interest. Our duty, our religious duty as people who seek to be faithful to something nobler than the god of consumerism, is to vote for the common good. C and D are modest measures that really do nothing more than partially offset the accidental ratchet effect of TABOR.

You and I have a clear religious duty to make our vote an expression of compassion and concern. If you believe that government is inherently evil and that programs that immunize children, provide minimal health care to poor senior citizens, help poor young people get access to higher education or help disabled children are really bad, then I guess you need to vote against C and D. But if you believe this, you are not off the hook. Your duty, your religious, moral duty, is to find a better way to treat the poor and sick with compassion and dignity. As religious people we cannot ethically take our little rebate checks down to the mall.

If C and D fail, Phyllis and I have resolved not to spend any rebate we might receive. If C and D fail we need to give that money away to help serve the common good. I suggest you consider doing the same. We need to remind ourselves that compassion, especially for the poor and the helpless, is the central moral value of all the religious traditions upon which we draw.

I began this sermon with a lighthearted tribute to our choir’s visit to the National Cathedral. It was an honor to be asked to bring our gift of music to the National Cathedral. However, you and I are not the cathedral building sort. That is fine. I don’t know that we really need many more grand cathedrals.

That can be the work of others.

Our religious task is just as difficult and ambitious as building a grand cathedral: our task is to help create a culture, including a political culture, that is an expression of human compassion and mercy. We live in a time that is far too cold hearted, too self absorbed and too greedy for the trinkets of the marketplace. Our task is to help bring our community back to its better self, to help it turn away from a soul destroying orgy of greed.

Every time you and I vote we have the opportunity to help build the common good. We have a chance to show our love of life, our generosity of spirit, our love of justice and mercy.

In this election, and in every election, may you and I make our voices heard by voting religiously.

Amen.