A belated opinion

Not last week but the week before, blogger Andrew Sullivan was a guest on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher." (That show is now on hiatus, but will return in August for another season.)

Now, I don't always agree with Sullivan, but I always find him interesting. You may, too. His blog has plenty of interesting things to say, or at least I think so.

Now Maher, whom I really enjoy, is nonetheless anti-religion. And I mean that in the truest sense of the word "anti," the way anti-abortion people liken the practice to infanticide, the way anti-American people burn flags, the way anti-matter annihilates matter when the twain meet. He thinks religion is a mental illness, or at least he agreed when George Carlin said so.

But Sullivan is not, and rose to defend the Catholic church, but more specifically spirituality, in the wake of Maher's rant. The gospel has to be true, he said, for it to have endured more than 2,000 years. And, while flawed, we need the church to be the guardians and proponents of that gospel. "Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you: Love one another, forgive one another," Sullivan summed, one of the best, most succinct, abbreviations of the gospel truth I've heard out there recently.

And I've been thinking about that for the past couple weeks, at odd times. If all faithful believers did just those things -- love one another, forgive one another -- they could change the whole world. But enveloped as they are in the Terri Schiavo case, preoccupied as they are with filibustering judges (enough to devote a whole Sunday to the topic!) and focused as they are on the finer points of theology, the simple truths get lost.

And that's too bad.

Not that I'm against applying one's faith to public policy and seeing how public policy matches up. You can't really be "pro-life," or embrace a "culture of life" while making an unnecessary and unjust war upon other nations, or letting people in your country go hungry or come to harm that could be prevented with medical care. You can't really be a follower of Jesus without, at some point, coming to terms with what he meant when he said, the things you do for the least in society are the things you did for him. You can't get around the necessity of truly forgiving those who've sinned against you when you are constantly confronted with the doctrine that God has forgiven you. Contrary to Maher, I think the country might do with a good dose of religion.

But it shouldn't be injected into the state, or, worse, by the state. That's the job of the church. And so long as the church is trying to do the state's job, or bidding on the state's faith-based contracts, or whatever, the job goes undone.

So I'm going to keep thinking about what Sullivan said, and where he got the idea. I'm going to continue to be grateful that there is a church, and that it calls people to live faithful and good lives. And I'm going to continue to hold people accountable who profess the faith but don't live it. But I'm going to continue to forgive, as well, because the penultimate sentence in this post describes me as much as anybody.