Some people pick churches the way they pick clothing: based on personal comfort and style. Other people select their religious home for bad reasons: they hope to gain some personal or political advantage from it.
It is difficult to understand how Senator Obama could attend a church for twenty years, defend it in one of the most eloquent speeches I have heard, and then suddenly have an epiphany, in the heat of a political campaign, about the nature of the place where he trusted his own and his children’s spiritual well being. If God appeared to the Senator on the Road to Denver, then miracles still do happen, but this miracle happened very conveniently for the Senator’s ambitions.
Perhaps Senator Obama is not made of the stuff from which martyrs are made, but if so it is very sad.
None of us can know what we would do if societal pressure, and personal desire, came into conflict with our religious choices. This political season has presented us with such a person, and whatever one’s politics or theology, it was refreshing to see a gentleman refuse to heed the demands of the masses in order to gain Caesar’s prize.
For Mitt Romney vox populi was not vox dei.
Governor Romney would not switch churches despite the political disadvantages it caused his campaign. He persisted at great personal cost, because he believes Mormonism to be true and because a gentleman would never abandon his spiritual home for personal gain. I do not share his theological conclusions, but I admire his character.
A decent man will even persist in his choice when he sees flaws in his beloved, chosen, spiritual home and try to repair them. He will not abandon what he has chosen quickly, but fight to make it better. Romney is a man willing to compromise in politics, where compromise may be admirable, but stick to his core ideals where compromise can be sign of dangerous ambition and a destructive lack of a core.
There are, of course, some who claim that God governs their lives, while in actuality eagerly use religion to become Caesar. For such men, a church can be abandoned when it no longer suits the dreams of power, because some other ideology or idol is at the core of their being.
Charity demands that we do our best to take Senator Obama at his word and believe that what was once worthy of his best defense and of his children is now not fit for even a fight for reclamation from bad ideas. After deep consideration, many of us have had to move on to other church homes and we long to believe that this able man, more skilled than we are in so many ways, has made this important decision for sound reasons and after deep and long spiritual reasoning.
Still it is not wrong to worry and to wonder about it, because what is so important, the spiritual home for one’s soul, what should be most beloved, has been abandoned in circumstances that may point to a weakness not worthy of the man who would be president.