In my sermon this week I mentioned the presidential election. As I typed up the manuscript I wondered, at what point will the spell check tools in our word processors and web browsers recognize the names “Barack” and “Obama” and stop telling us these are misspellings? Do you think the next generations of Word, Firefox, etc. will automatically have those names in their dictionaries?

From the Los Angeles Times:

More than 82% of Los Angeles County voters—who endured long lines, scattered problems at some polls and even light morning rain—cast ballots in Tuesday’s historic election, shattering records dating back decades, election officials said.

Way to go, fellow citizens.

For the past few weeks as it became more apparent that Barack Obama would win the electoral college, I started taking his election for granted. But tonight, when I turned on the television and saw that Obama had won the presidency, I was struck with the weight of history. The United States of America has (finally) elected an African-American to the presidency. I find myself in awe and drawn to prayer. I hope people will join me.

As November 4 nears, I am going to offer one of my favorite Psalms, a text that has challenged and comforted me through a few election cycles. Psalm 146:

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord! (NRSV)

I share this Psalm as a reminder for Christians that ultimately our hope is not in governments or political leaders, but in the God of Jacob. I do not intend to foster apathy or encourage people to refrain from important democratic processes such as studying the candidates, forming thoughtful positions on the issues, or voting. I do not even want to persuade people from endorsing a candidate if they feel she or he is the best person for the job. I will be voting for a candidate on November 4.

There are generally two ways of engaging democratically. The first is to build coalitions with people who share similar views on certain issues and promise that one will back the other on topics that may not be so important to the other person. This is basically our party system where politicians and different groups have allied together and support each other, even on matters that aren’t obviously relevant to them. The second way of democratic engagement is to form coalitions on a more ad hoc basis, taking the matter issue by issue, and, I believe it is to this form of engagement that the Church in American needs to commit itself.

I have also been fairly clear on my blog about how disappointed I have been with how the Religious Right has engaged American politics. I agree and disagree with them on their positions, but it is not generally their positions on the issues that bother me, so much as the means by which they engage democratically. They offer, in my opinion, a very thin and limited view of democracy because they have, more or less, followed the party system of engagement. Neither major party embodies the Christian ideals, and therefore, I am concerned of Christians baptizing the Republicans or the Democrats. When Christian bodies hitch themselves to a party, they place themselves in a tenuous position because they now have to answer for the decisions that party makes that may go against the gospel. My concern is that as I see a swelling of politically moderate and progressive Christians finding their organized voice, they will fall into the same trap as the Religious Right and opt for a party-type of engagement rather than a more prophetic promise to speak truth to power. I do not want to see these moderate and progressive brothers and sisters hitch themselves to the Democrats and write hagiographies of Barack Obama as the Religious Right has hitched itself to the Republicans and have written their hagiographies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Christians are better suited to say, “No matter who is in office, we will work with or push against them in order to pursue justice for our neighbors and love for our enemies.” We maintain our prophetic voice when we are not known as Democrats or Republicans. If a party resonates with you, by all means join it, but remember, as a Christian, you are called to seek the Kingdom first, not the party’s platform. Leadership is vitally important, and I hope anyone reading this will prayerfully and thoughtfully consider their votes. Please do vote. But as you enter the poll, remember what Psalm 146 tells us: God brings justice, renewal, and grace while political leaders are temporary.

Wow I preached a bit more than I had intended. Maybe I just got a bit juiced up because it’s Reformation Day and I’ve got a list of complaints, a nail, and a hammer. Just trying to find the right door.

My father used to say that he could never argue with his mother because, “Mom had her opinions and she wouldn’t let the facts get in the way.” This article by Robert Burton on Salon.com sheds some fascinating light on the psychology of decision-making and voting. In “My Candidate, Myself,” Burton writes:

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to “their candidate”; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.

Unfortunately, cognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others….

Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one’s decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right….

The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought….

Feelings of absolute certainty and utter conviction are not rational deliberate conclusions; they are involuntary mental sensations generated by the brain. Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments. Just as it’s nearly impossible to reason with someone who’s enraged and combative, refuting or diminishing one’s sense of certainty is extraordinarily difficult. Certainty is neither created by nor dispelled by reason.

To a certain extent, we all engage in individual-groupthink, to coin a new phrase. After we make our conclusions, we discount contrary evidence while overvaluing evidence that affirms our assumptions. In my opinion, last Friday’s presidential debate seemed fairly even in that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama shot himself in the foot. Similarly, neither candidate performed head and shoulders above the other. But in seeing the polls afterward, people generally thought their candidate won the debate. Now, I am leaning a certain direction and have been for months. I will say that I found myself excusing certain errors or disagreements I have with him, while I railed against his opponent when he said something I didn’t like. My mind was made up, which to a large extent is fine, so long as I remain open to new information.

So what does Burton want from a president?

I want a president aware of how his mind works, as well as what he suspects are his inborn biases and intellectual limitations. Ironically, the acknowledgment of intellectual limitations may be the best evidence for superior decision-making skills. Contrary to George Bush’s belief, we do not want certainty in the White House. We want flexibility and an acknowledgment that certainty is often a sign of ignorance.

Unfortunately, sound bites, TV interviews and presidential debates often fail to reveal the candidates’ real thought processes—how each would approach a new or complex problem for which he or she doesn’t already have a pat answer.

Burton’s article is certainly helpful in forcing us to look at our assumptions and decisions and reminding us that it takes hard work to remain open to new information and evidence. He puts a bit too much stock in cold, objective reasoning and empirical evidence as the most basic and most commonly held means of knowing whether something is true or not—I think he tends to discount spiritual phenomena. Those of the more Republican persuasion may not like the tack Burton takes in the last quarter of the piece. But Burton’s article should make us aware of our biases as we enter the home stretch of this election cycle (finally) and as we listen to our candidates and their opponents. Abraham Lincoln described our instincts well when he said, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

This post may be a few months early, but I think it is appropriate that we begin thinking of such things now. When January 20, 2009 rolls around, let us remember that whoever is president won’t have had even twenty-four hours on the job. We may think that either Barack Obama or John McCain would make for a terrible or a great leader now, but when one of them enters office in a few months, our praises and criticisms will need to be tempered by the fact that they won’t have that much of a presidential record to show. I ask, regardless of whomever is the next president, that rather than letting our current opinions of them predetermine how we will see their early decisions, we would let their new record speak for itself. Can we give our new leader a chance in their new role before crowning them a success or condemning them as a failure?

Let us continue to debate which candidate would make for the best president. We must ask hard questions of the candidates and their running mates. We must also ask hard questions of each other, challenging our positions with civility and respect. Let us commit to praying that whoever wins would be wise and just.

Both candidates for U.S. president have now picked their running mates. I won’t comment on the veep nominees except to say Barack Obama and John McCain clearly made their choices only to exploit Joe Biden’s and Sarah Palin’s popularity in their respective home states to rake in the electoral mother lode that Delaware and Alaska represent (both states bring in a whopping three electoral votes).

The Palin and Biden selections, however, should make us think about the vice presidency for a bit. Remember a year ago, as the possible candidates for president started lining up, many people talked about how this was going to be an especially unique election because it was the first time since 1968 that neither an incumbent president nor an incumbent vice president would be one of the major parties’ nominees? The field was wide open in ways we haven’t seen in decades, the pundits said. Some questioned George W. Bush in 2004 for sticking with Dick Cheney—who has always said he had no intention of running for president—and not grooming a successor. It is an interesting point since lots of vice presidents have succeeded their bosses, but when we look at recent history, it is actually rare that a sitting vice president takes over the executive branch via the electoral process. In fact, it happened only once since 1900.

Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush were all vice presidents who later became president. Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, and Johnson all started their first terms as president when their predecessors died while in office—oddly enough, they also all won reelection after finishing out the previous term. Roosevelt took over William McKinley’s term after McKinley succumbed to complications from the gunshot he received in an assassination attempt. Coolidge became president when Warren G. Harding died from either a heart attack or a stroke. Harry Truman succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt when Roosevelt passed away due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Lyndon Johnson became president after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.

Nixon was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president and later won the election to become president, but it was not as Eisenhower’s successor. He actually failed in his attempt to follow Eisenhower by losing to Kennedy in 1960 and did not win a presidential election until 1968. Since 1900, vice presidents who actually ran after their tenure as second in command—the number is actually pretty low—it was more often the case that they lost.

Ford succeeded Nixon after Nixon resigned, but unlike the presidents who began their first term by inheriting the office after the predecessor’s death, Ford did not win reelection.

That means since 1900 only one vice president has actually succeeded their outgoing boss by election. In 1988 George H. W. Bush won the election for president as Ronald Reagan’s sitting vice president.

How much weight then, do presidential nominees and their parties give to trying to create a line of succession when they choose the running mates? It seems that hoping to create legacy via lineage would not play as much of a factor as the other factors do—shoring up weaknesses, trying to gain an electoral advantage in a state or region, etc.

I plan on consulting FactCheck.org several times through the next few months. They’ve already got two corrections for the recent back and forth advertisements from the McCain and Obama campaigns.

Obama’s Celebrity Cred: A new McCain ad calls Obama a celebrity (true) who says he’ll raise taxes on electricity (false).

Obama’s Overstatement: An Obama ad says McCain’s campaign got $2 million from “Big Oil.” The total is actually $1.3 million.

Rosa Brooks, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a reasonable assessment of what to do with Jeremiah Wright, his claims, and the larger issues he has unearthed.

With multiple televised performances, Wright has now definitively proved he shares that most quintessential of all American traits: a profound desire to hog the airwaves and proclaim, “It’s all about me.” Next stop: “American Idol”!...

With a campaign message emphasizing unity and hope, the last thing Obama needs is his former pastor running around espousing views most other Americans find offensive and deluded, such as the conviction that the U.S. government started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy is little different from terrorism….

Something about our collective willingness to throw Wright under the nearest subway train strikes me as a bit too easy….

Let’s turn to Wright, the man with all the answers. Here’s what he said this week: “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and … what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

That’s not a completely unreasonable perspective. The Tuskegee experiment was a 40-year U.S. Public Health Service study on the effects of untreated syphilis. Who were the lucky human guinea pigs who got to experience untreated syphilis? Poor and mostly illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama, that’s who. They were falsely informed that they had “bad blood,” not syphilis, and denied access to the necessary medicine. The study was terminated only in 1972, when an appalled researcher leaked reports to the media.

That could make you a little paranoid. And it’s not a form of paranoia Americans can afford to scoff at. As the 2005 Rand study concludes, African American distrust of the healthcare system—stemming from “well-documented cases of racial discrimination that led to substandard healthcare for African Americans”—may be “one factor contributing to the AIDS epidemic.”

In other words, if we want to score political points, we can dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories as crazy. But if we’re actually interested in ending the AIDS epidemic, we need to understand how rational people can end up believing such theories so we can persuade them to change their minds and their behavior. The same goes for most of Wright’s other seemingly far-fetched assertions….

[E]ven if it makes us queasy, we should take his theories about the world seriously enough to refute them, carefully and thoughtfully. If we truly want to move beyond the politics of division, we can’t afford to do anything less.

This past Friday I watched Bill Moyers’ interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers Journal. I thought Moyers did a more than satisfactory job in taking an appreciative approach to this Chicago clergyman whose heated comments about the United States have become quite controversial in the past few months because he was the pastor of Senator Barak Obama for twenty years. (This video is a fair example of the coverage on Wright.) Moyers let Wright locate himself theologically and explain his positions. There were times I wished Moyers would have pushed harder, but I find it is generally easier to understand someone if you do not take an antagonistic approach. The interview gave a fuller picture of Wright and his ministry. When I watched the interview, I found myself inspired by his discussion of the community development work his church has undertaken.

Bill Moyers Journal also showed longer sections of the sermons that have been most played. Wright has taken a lot of heat for his sermon in which he proclaims, “Not God bless America; God damn America!” In the larger context, we see that Wright argues that we should not put our faith in any government, but in God. “Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change… Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate—the Roman government failed. ” The danger, Wright sees, is that in the Bible God does not favor nations who do not do God’s will. God does bring curse, condemnation, and chastisement, even to God’s promised people. Wright offers a litany of powerful empires and governments that ultimately failed and therefore calls his congregation to trust in God, not in the government. As he tells Moyers in the interview:

If you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn’t bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies.

As I listened to Wright, I could sense that he falls well within the tradition of Black Liberation Theology, especially the theology James H. Cone. There are things I agree with and disagree with that school of theology. While I do not follow all of that school’s conclusions, I am challenged by it and I do think it stands firmly within orthodox Christianity. I think Wright clearly articulated in the interview with Moyers that Black Liberation Theology does not say Christianity is only for African-Americans or Africans—it says that people of African heritage do not have to give up that heritage to be Christian. It challenges my views because when I have read Cone, I wonder how can I relate to this faith as a white person? Where is the Christ that can be universally accepted? Black Liberation Theology, like all Liberation Theology, accurately argues, in my opinion, that there isn’t a “universal Christ” understood apart from our backgrounds. We all come to Christ in a specific context and those contexts have inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Liberation Theologies make the grand claim that God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible are radically and exclusively for the oppressed. While one may argue against the claim that Bible is exclusively for the oppressed, Wright articulately argued that the Bible was written by oppressed peoples. The Bible was written by Israel and the Church. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Selucids, Greeks, and Romans did not write the Bible. Israel and the Church wrote the Bible in the midst of and in response to invasion, captivity, diaspora, and simply dwelling in the midst of foreign superpowers. How does this fact challenge our reading of the texts, especially when America is the superpower?

That the media does not understand the nuance of Black Liberation Theology does not surprise me—I’m not sure I understand it completely either. As Wright says, he has different responsibilities as a pastor than Obama does as a politician. Some have jumped on Wright’s response to Moyers’ question regarding Obama distinguishing himself from Wright in his Philadelphia speech on race. Wright said to Moyers, “And so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.” Larry Mantle said today on Airtalk that he found Wright’s answer dismissive and tantamount to claiming that Obama made his speech solely for political purposes. And though Obama agrees with Mantle’s assessment, I didn’t hear Wright’s statement saying that Obama’s speech was merely “political posturing.” I think Wright made the point that as a politician, one needs to unite as many people as possible to move forward as a nation. A pastor, on the other hand, is more concerned with engendering faithfulness to God than with negotiating all the allegiances and values people bring to the public square. Don Frederick writes in his blog on latimes.com concerning Wright’s press conference at the National Press Club yesterday,

Wright told his audience: “As I said to Barack Obama, if you get elected, Nov. 5 I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”...

As political analyst David Gergen summed up on CNN: “I’m sure Rev. Wright has many virtues. Loyalty to his former parishioner is not one of them.”

Wright may not help Obama get elected, but we must ask, is that his job? Would we be more comfortable if Wright went easier on America with an Obama presidency, or would we immediately call Wright a hypocrite? It seems the media has not paid attention to where Wright says his allegiance lies. Wright has clearly argued his allegiance is with God first, not with any government, or with any politician, even if that politician is a friend and former parishioner. He views his role as one that speaks truth to power. Wright seems to be getting most in trouble because he has not seen America’s sins as merely slip-ups in an otherwise beneficent history. He questions whether those sins actually are isolated incidents or are they more reflective of our character and he wonders if our nation has ever repented from them. These are fair questions, in my opinion, and require thoughtful discussion. (Actually Wright gets most in trouble because of his association with Obama. Wright has engaged in this rhetoric for decades but the national spotlight was never on him before.)

While I do not agree with many of Wright’s political conclusions or historical statements, I think he is an interesting case that Christians need to consider. Namely, he views his allegiance first to God and Christ, over and sometimes against his responsibilities as a citizen of the United States. Wright espouses a faith far from a civil religion that either compartmentalizes church and state or that uses religion to baptize the government. To what extent can the Christian make claims on America and vice versa?