Renewal in the Garden.

So much of American religion today has become so culturally comfortable that one can scarcely find differences between the vision of the good that is preached from the pulpit and the vision of the good that is believed by the culture. If a religion wants to be just like everything else, it needs no guarantee of religious liberty. After all, both breakfast cereal manufacturers and automobile companies manage to transform themselves constantly into images acceptable to the culture without the benefit of a constitutional right to do it.

If the Constitution or the culture or the two in combination do manage to carve out the spaces in which religionists can freely build communities preaching meanings sharply at odds with those that dominate our era, religion must take advantage of that opportunity. In America today, so many traditions are politically identifiable. In the Protestant churches, the problem is especially acute. Denominations that make common cause with the Right have learned to mute the Gospel message about the dangers of wealth. Denominations that make common cause with the Left have learned to cast aside New Testament teachings about sex. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the pull of political involvement, if it is heeded, invariably alters the content of the message....

American religion needs more time in the garden, less in the wilderness, more time for prayer and discernment, more time for renewal, more time for community, more time to discover what it is that God is calling it to be. Prophetic witness, the distant, transcendent voice that calls on the nation to repent and return to righteousness, is impossible if religion is comfortable. The religious voice is destroyed when religion yields to the temptation to be important, to shape the outcome of elections, to fit snugly into the culture, to make filling the seats on the Sabbath day the highest goal. And without the religious voice, our politics will be nothing--which means, in a democracy, that our nation will be nothing.

And religion: Without renewal, without a retreat from the wilderness and a return to the garden, without more time spent listening to the voice of God and less time spent drafting position papers or fighting over who gets to be in charge of what--without these necessities, religion will be nothing too.

From the book God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics. [C] 2000 by Stephen L. Carter. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved.