Everything's religious

It was a week of tough choices. Suppose you’re the editor-in-chief of USA Today. You’ve already done a couple of stories on the pope’s historic visit to America and several more on the scandal over falsified software at Volkswagen. Your religion editor and your business editor have both done some good work over the last few days—but they’re also both looking for a new angle.

How about this? How about just swapping their assignments? Tell the business editor you want some thoughtfully fresh insights on what the pope really thinks about capitalism. Tell your religion editor you want a similarly insightful piece on what kind of ethical gaps might have led to so profound a moral collapse in one of the world’s biggest manufacturing entities.

And if neither of those stories strikes your fancy, there’s a pretty long list of others where so-called “religion” sneaks out of the corner, demanding to be brought into the conversation.

There’s Ben Carson, the talented and soft-spoken surgeon who’s running for president and who seems fully as comfortable talking about faith and values—and even some aspects of constitutional law—as he does more secular subjects. Just how is that?

The fact is that we are religious beings through and through. … God made us that way.

There’s Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk from Kentucky, where it seemed so obvious at first that she was just a slightly kooky gal who obviously should have expected to have to keep the law. But then it wasn’t so clear, as we learned a bit more about some of her cultish tendencies. And we all were forced to wonder again just who might be our cellmates if down the road we too were jailed for sticking by our consciences.

There’s Donald Trump, waving a big black Bible in his right hand, for all the world prompting viewers to think of him as a television evangelist. He’s said he’s a Presbyterian—but still undefined is what his text is for this evening’s message, or when he’s on the public record using the Bible’s content as a reference for any of his speeches.

There’s the ruckus in Jersey City, N.J., where devout Muslim parents have been calling for an extra vacation day for public schools, so that their families can celebrate just like the Christians and Jews already do. In denying the request—at least for now—the school board argued pragmatically that they simply needed more advance notice before making such a change. Trouble is, the administration says, such concessions will push the school year into late June.

There’s Carly Fiorina, claiming flat out on NBC’s Tonight Show that Ben Carson was out of bounds when he said he couldn’t advocate for a Muslim who might run for president. “That’s wrong,” she said. “You know, it says in our Constitution that religion cannot be a test for office.”

And there’s Hillary Clinton, blasting Marco Rubio—and indeed the whole slate of 15 Republican candidates—for what she says is an inhumane response toward illegal immigrants now living in the United States.

There, in short order and from just one evening’s newscast, are six examples of how this troublesome issue of “religion” intrudes into an average day’s agenda. And all that without so much as mentioning the divisive role of “religion” in the volatile Middle East.

The fact is that we are religious beings through and through. All of us, as R.C. Sproul says, are theologians. God made us that way. Even on a day when everyone concedes that the pope might otherwise dominate the news, half a dozen other “religious” stories crowd their way onto the table of contents.

Our society, to be sure, isn’t too deft at discerning the “religious” aspects of a typical day’s news. But that clumsiness is due in many respects to our own failure as Christian believers to highlight the central role God demands in the drama being played out on every corner of the human stage.

Email jbelz@wng.org