Response to Yesterday’s Topic
The Action Thursday entry yesterday elicited email responses concerning the mixing of politics and religion. One reader quoted a popular bumper sticker: “The last time we mixed politics and religion, people were burned at the stake!”
Which makes us wonder if they’ve ever heard of Martin Luther King.
Granted, religion was also in the mouths of white supremacists who opposed Dr. King. This fact, however, simply strengthens the argument that the good should not shy away from pressing the politics of justice with religious reasoning.
The real question about mixing politics and religion is not whether you do, but how you do it, and to what end. As with the Divine Right of Kings discussed yesterday, the unjust will mix them whether the just do or not, and if you fail to address religious arguments laid forth in service to injustice, you’ve ceded the contest to evil.
To paraphrase a quote attributed to Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to fail to engage evil where it actually wages war.