"Personal" Faith and Politics

Here's a good article by George Weigel on the maddeningly inane discussion of religion on the part of so many leftist Catholic politicians. It takes politicos to task for their confusing rants on religion, which more or less go something like this: "My relationship with Christ is the most important thing in my life BUT I won't let that have any influence on my decision-making process as a leader." Right. Weigel puts it better.

That ontological change in baptism (and I swear that’s the last time I’ll use the o-word) incorporates a Catholic into the Church. The Church is not incidental to our identity as new creations in Christ; we don’t “join” the Church the way we join the Rotary, the Kiwanis, the American Association of University Women, the A.M.A., the American Legion, or my beloved Society for the Restoration of Lost Positives (“ept,” “ert,” etc.). Being a Catholic Christian engages who-I-am in a substantively different way than any other aspect of my “identity” — not because I think that’s the case, or because I feel that’s the case, but because that is the case: objectively, not subjectively. Baptism has real effects; it changes us forever.

So when a candidate for public office avers, on the one hand, that his or her “membership in the faith community” is deeply personal, or a matter of “my relationship with Jesus,” and then suggests that being a Catholic Christian is a compartment of life that can be hermetically sealed off from first principles of justice (i.e., the principles involved in abortion, euthanasia, and embryo-destructive stem-cell research), we’re dealing with a confused camper — one might even say, a camper with a severe identity-crisis.

http://www.archden.org/dcr/news.php?e=437&s=3&a=9171