In this brief time I will zero in on two very good questions the planners of the convocation asked me to reflect about.  The first is how we go about preserving an open public square and ensuring that it is not abused in the name of freedom of religion.  An important sub-part of this question concerns what kind of language folks like us ought to be speaking when we enter the public square.

The Founders and Framers gave us an open public square.  The solution they devised for their New Republic — no establishment of religion, but no limiting of religion’s free exercise — was an elegant one that has served us very well.  Unfortunately, today’s theocrats — and here I mean specifically the Christian Right — can’t seem to live with the idea of a religiously neutral public square. 

To speak briefly of the language we might use in combating this:  I think that it might be time to revive some of the old language about oppression of the individual conscience.  Conscience is a good word and a good concept.  Presumably, everyone has an inviolable conscience.  It comes to us as standard equipment.  Conscience is the inner light that many consider to be a gift from God.  The same goes for moral discernment, another good expression and good concept.  God gives the gift of discernment equally to women and to men.  Remember, from Genesis 1, “male and female [God] created them.”

If I may be allowed a brief theological aside before I move on to the second question:  I am a person of faith — a believer — but it never ceases to amaze me just how insecure ultraconservative Christians must be in order to come up with a God whose prejudices and hatreds match their own prejudices and hatreds to a T.  As the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live used to say, “How convenient!”  And also, if I may say so, how profoundly unbiblical such theological narrowness is.  In the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, the worst human presumption is presuming that you know what God is thinking; the worst form of hubris is imagining that you can get into the mind of God.

Let me turn quickly now to the second provocative question:  Is there a danger that reproductive justice will go on the back burner as moderate religious leaders and moderate political leaders attempt to build bridges and find common ground with religious conservatives? 

I can illustrate the problem vis-à-vis the Christians very easily.  It’s like what the Anglican Communion is demanding of the Episcopal Church of the United States:  You can stay inside our circle, but only if you agree not to deviate from the Anglican party line that homosexuals are bad people who need to be kept out of church leadership. 

Again, what this kind of phony unity involves is binding the conscience, and we should never go along with it.  Some Christian leaders whom I generally admire for their forward positions on issues that matter greatly to me — issues like workplace justice and criminal justice reform — do much the same thing, only their pitch is opportunistic in a different way.  They will say, “We can bring the Archdiocese with us on this living wage bill, or the Evangelicals can help us cap carbon emissions.” But the price for winning these gains is that people like me are expected to keep it zipped tight on abortion and gay rights.  In this way, what “common ground politics” often ends up meaning is the exclusion or disappearance or diminishment of gender and sexual justice.  This is unacceptable.

The late Bill Coffin used to say that it is just as patriotic to keep your country from dying as it is to die for your country.  Keeping our country from dying — keeping it from losing the live-and-let-live spirit and the respect for privacy that still make this place worth defending:  that is our calling at this moment.  It is a high calling indeed, because we know that how well we fare in carrying it out will determine whether those who come after us will enjoy a new birth of freedom or be dragged back into suffering the kinds of theocratic tyrannies that this nation was founded to overthrow.

I hope—and I pray—that we will be up to the job.  Do I hear an Amen?