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. Continue >>
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