Sunday night’s Compassion Forum at Messiah College was in many ways a breakthrough event. It significantly elevated the level of public conversation about important moral issues and introduced the nation to a large group of religious leaders who are interested in broadening and deepening the conversation about faith and moral values in America.
The event demonstrated the improved competence of leading Democrats in addressing issues arising at the intersection of faith and values, and by implication the apparent discomfort with such issues of the presumed Republican nominee for president. It also raised the profile of one of our nation’s best small Christian colleges and demonstrated the possibility that such heartland institutions can take an enhanced role in American public life—and that they are able to relate warmly to Democrats as well as Republicans in so doing.
The Compassion Forum brought onto the stage a previously little known group called Faith in Public Life, a nonpartisan faith and values organization that proved able to envision, plan, and execute this innovative event and to attract two of the three presidential candidates. The way FPL did this was to assemble such a broad and important coalition of religious leaders that the (Democratic) presidential candidates must have believed they could not afford to pass on the event. This same coalition is now available for future mobilization for other forums or events.
I became involved with the Compassion Forum when FPL contacted me over a year ago with the dream of this event and asked me to be a part of the board of religious leaders. Under the direction of the talented and energetic Katie Barge, FPL began growing its coalition of board members. A Compassion Forum event was tentatively planned for Fall 2007 but proved impossible to arrange with the plethora of presidential candidates then in the running. But the idea survived, and all three presidential candidates still standing by mid-March were invited to the Forum. We were genuinely surprised when Senator McCain chose not to participate, and remain hopeful that he will participate in the fall if we decide to try this kind of event one more time.
The actual event involved an interesting and not totally satisfying blend of questions from CNN’s Campbell Brown and Newsweek’s Jon Meacham together with those of some of the faith leaders on the board. We were truly grateful for CNN’s involvement and thrilled that the event was televised not just nationally but internationally by that leading network. But I personally believe that the policy oriented questions that most of us asked from the floor were more germane than most of the more personal/theological questions asked by Brown and Meacham. It seems to me more important that we know how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will address global poverty, AIDS, and torture than how they explain the existence of evil in the world or what to make of Genesis 1.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a classic book in which he contrasted the moral possibilities of individuals and groups, suggesting that while “men” are immoral, “society” is even more immoral. Our collective moral capacity is weaker than our individual moral capacity.
I think of Niebuhr’s thesis often as I watch the presidential campaign, often substituting the word “maturity” for “morality.” We are a great nation with great responsibilities, but we are awfully immature collectively in the way we select our leaders. It seems that perhaps an individual could have an intelligent conversation with Obama, Clinton, or McCain about their plans and dreams and policies, but collectively we can’t get past “bitter” and “The Fellowship” and Jeremiah Wright and Reverend Hagee.
The religious leaders gathered at Messiah College on Sunday were interested in a substantive conversation about major policy issues. The specific policy issues we wanted to address were those in which our most deeply held religious values motivate moral commitments that demand policy responses. We wanted to talk not so much about theological beliefs per se but about morally driven policy responses to some of the most important life-or-death moral issues that our next president must address.
For example, I was motivated to ask about American policy related to torture because I believe that torture is immoral; and I believe that torture is immoral because I believe that every human being is sacred in God’s sight; and I believe that because the Bible teaches it, my faith tradition at its best affirms it, and I feel it in my heart. While I might dream of a presidential candidate who could smoothly and easily trace out that kind of reasoning, the main thing that I wanted to hear was what the candidate’s policy would be on torture. When I asked Barack Obama that question, I got an answer even better than what I was looking for. And I was so glad that an international audience could hear both the question (from an evangelical, no less), and the answer (no torture, period).
Many evangelical Christians have been fooled into thinking that public affirmations of faith in Jesus and conservative positions on a few issues give us the president we need. The Compassion Forum signifies that many evangelicals, and many, many others, understand that we need much more than this from our political leaders. We need a moral vision, a broad moral agenda, and an intelligent approach to policies that can advance human well-being and the common good.
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David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, where he is based in the McAfee School of Theology. He is also the president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, a columnist for Associated Baptist Press, and a contributing editor for Christianity Today. Dr. Gushee also currently serves as co-chair of the Biblical/Contextual Ethics Consultation of the American Academy of Religion, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and on the Christian Ethics Commission of the Baptist World Alliance.
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