Chapter Excerpt

Now, more than ever before, we Americans are finding faith. We are improving our lives—learning through faith to be kind to ourselves, to our spouses and children, to our neighbors. We are giving charity through our churches. We are speaking about morality and values in a way we haven’t done in a generation. If the great anxiety of moral folks since the 1960s was that America was in danger of becoming a country of empty values—an amusement park illuminated by self-interest, consumerism, and Hollywood-inspired ambition—they should no longer fear. The Passion of the Christ was one of the most popular films of 2004. Twenty-two percent of Americans said “moral values” was the most important issue for them in the 2004 presidential election—yes, a minority, but a huge number when you consider that we were also a country at war in a failing economy. This is not the 1990s decade of stock market bubbles and rampant materialism. This is the decade of faith.

And yet I wonder. In my lifetime, even while faith has expanded its reach, it has become narrower. When I was a child, we learned that to be religious was to be part of a community, and that the purpose of our faith was to improve the world, not just our own lives. In this theology, the individual prayer was a droplet in a global lake, rippling its effects out to the farthest edges of the pool. I was a teenager and young adult in the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s, when America was riven by cultural change. This turbulence touched my family daily. How did we respond? In our Catholic church and in our home we prayed to be good and virtuous. We prayed for my uncle John Kennedy, and my father, Robert Kennedy, to be the best public servants that they could be. We prayed that our leaders would have the strength to go forth and help those starving children in Mississippi or West Virginia. (And yes, there are children in America whose lives are just as desperate today as they were when my father toured the country and told us, his blue eyes dark with outrage and his hands shaking, what he had found, hidden, in this great country.) And finally, we prayed that our government would have the good sense and good grace to put into place policies that would help not only us but also every person in America to live with dignity.

Today, that is not what I see. Don’t get me wrong: You may pray and give money to your church, and give support through your church to all sorts of good causes, as do I. But fear and intolerance have taken hold. Instead of emphasizing the fact that we are all children of God, faith in America now divides communities. Virtue is something that takes place in your own home, in your church, and perhaps in your neighborhood if you are very lucky. The fastest-growing churches in the country—evangelical churches—tend to emphasize personal salvation over the creation of a more just nation. And many of those churches, along with my own Catholic Church, are using “moral values” as a code with which to attack those who don’t believe as we do. Most of the millions of dollars congregants give to churches every year go not to help the needy outside of the church community, but for infrastructure and expansion of their own churches. Our priests and ministers send us out into the world to find others whose faith most resembles our own, not to work every day for those who need us most, regardless of their faith. Today faith builds walls to keep the threatening, encroaching world out, rather than moving us in ever-widening ways into the world that so desperately needs our help.

And our culture supports this inward turn. In the 1990s I was the lieutenant governor of Maryland, where I tried to make my drop of prayer ripple out. I spent my days pushing—pushing government officials, community leaders, businesspeople, schoolchildren—to support initiatives that promoted justice to the widest possible community: fighting drug use, reducing gun violence, putting into place character education, providing health care to children, protecting the Chesapeake Bay. These programs worked. When I ran for governor in 2002, the Washington Post praised me as a politician with a “moral compass.” Nonetheless, I saw that these values did not turn people on. As I campaigned across the state, voters would shake my hand and then, as soon as I began to tell them what we had achieved and what needed to be done, I could see their eyes glaze over; they were simply not as excited about these results as I was.

I’m still asking myself, Why? Why did a majority not feel, personally, the suffering and the need of their neighbors and the commitment to make communities stronger? I don’t have all the answers, but I know that we have gotten out of the habit of thinking of ourselves as part of the wider world. We no longer hear in our churches, or in our homes, the daily reminder that to walk in God’s path is not just to pray or give charity, but also to work for justice for every creature on His earth.

This book is a reveille in which I hope to share the spiritual awakening that shaped my life and I hope will enlighten yours—giving us the courage to renew our country’s great promise.

To some, spiritual awakenings come in a sudden flash of recognition and revelation. But my spiritual awakening, as I suspect is true for many others’, has steadily unfolded over the course of my life as I gained a deeper understanding of the truths I learned as a youth. I knew as a young girl that God created me, loved me, and wanted what was best for me as He did all his creatures. With the passing of years, and the tragedies and challenges that I have had to face, I have had to struggle to reclaim my faith, and the strength to fight for justice that goes hand in hand with it. Many times I have had to find hope even in terrible loss, and I have had to learn to immerse myself in life’s challenges rather than to run away in fear. But these tests have only deepened my understanding of the power of God’s love and the obligations that come along with it. Now, I’m struck with how it has given me the ability to look at the world with new eyes and see how truly blessed I and, indeed, all humanity is. I have seen how good the world can be and the responsibility we share to make it better for everyone.

Not so long ago, our churches helped engage their congregations in the fight for social justice in the world. But today I am unhappy and dissatisfied with my Church and its failure to honor its best traditions. It is time for all of us to do what we can to reclaim those traditions, and to reclaim our churches.

When I was twelve years old, I lost my uncle John Kennedy, who was one of America’s most beloved presidents, in a brutal murder that to this day remains one of our nation’s pivotal moments. The memory is etched forever in the minds of those old enough to remember where they were when they heard President Kennedy had been shot.

I was in my music class at my school, Stone Ridge, Convent of the Sacred Heart, when Mother Mahaney came to tell me the news. I immediately went home, where already many friends of my parents had gathered. I was too young to understand it fully, but I did realize that we had been struck by enormous loss. My normally loud and laughing home was now hushed.

I went upstairs to my parents’ room and discussed what had happened with a great friend of my father, Dave Hackett. How could this have happened? Wasn’t my uncle fighting the good fights—against communism and for civil rights, against poverty and for a more peaceful world? He’d inspired millions of young people across the globe with his call to service. How could his own public service not have been protected? Where was the God we prayed to every day to guide and protect Uncle Jack in his leadership? Did He know this had happened? Did He care?

On the day President Kennedy was buried, my father, Robert Kennedy, gave me a note he had handwritten that day. He was devastated. He had spent most of the time trying to comfort Aunt Jackie, and working out the vast logistics, protocol, and transition in the wake of his brother’s death. But what he wrote to me did not convey fear, anger, or bitterness. He focused on the future and my duty to family and to our country. “Dear Kathleen, You seemed to understand that Jack died and was buried today. As the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren—you have a particular responsibility now—a special responsibility to John [my cousin] and Joe [my brother]. Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy.”

Can you imagine, in your own moment of unimaginable loss, reminding your child—and reminding yourself, really—to turn outward, not inward, to perform works of kindness and not of anger or revenge? It still stops my breath to think of him stealing away on that chaotic, dreadful day, for a quiet half-minute at his desk to make sure I would have this message with me always.

My father’s message was very clear as he entrusted me with his sense of duty to family and to country. This duty was built on a foundation of Christian teachings about service to others and social justice. The promoters of that tradition, our priests and nuns, taught us weekly of the need to do good works in the world. And supporting them there was the entire Christian iconography, as interpreted by the Catholic Church, teaching us that the good life did not come just from following the rules and resisting temptations—after all, Jesus did not follow the rules—but from taking our faith out of our houses of worship and putting it into practice. And the more resources God had granted us, the more we were responsible to help those to whom less had been given. As Christians, we hold the suffering and agony of the Passion, death, and Resurrection of the Son of God at the very center of our faith. We reenact them every time we participate in the sacrifice of the Mass. These were miracles, but they are also guides for our own lives. The spirit in which we live will endure in the work we have done, and in the friends and foes we have made.

Even when I was twelve, the iconography and transcendent power of faith was as much a part of me as my lungs or my heart, and it provided me with a story to help me make sense of my uncle’s death. In those immediate days and weeks after the assassination, I could not look at the image of Jesus without thinking of my uncle. No, he wasn’t a saint, or the Son of God. But I could remember him sitting on the presidential yacht, named for his grandfather Honey Fitz, who had been a member of Congress and Boston’s mayor, surrounded by family and friends, as he discussed the latest challenges in Washington—what to do about the segregationist Southern senators, or how to handle Soviet aggression in Berlin. My uncle’s death had made me wonder why we should work for justice if justice was not to be given in return. But in thinking of the model of Jesus’ life, I also was forced to embrace the model of Jesus’ death. And in that, the tragedy of my uncle’s death became bearable.

During the five years following Uncle John’s assassination I watched my father carefully. In his immense sadness, he, too, wondered how and why this loss could have happened. How did God allow this? He wondered what he should do, what his public role should be. Could one’s sense of duty be present if the universe made no sense? Through his years of searching for answers, my father resisted the temptation to despair, to be vengeful, to give in to bitterness. This was difficult for him. He was home much more than before, much more quiet and less energetic. He spent many hours in his room alone. But he prayed, read Greek poets and Shakespeare, looking first to understand fate, and only later to accept faith. He reminded himself that the ways of God are inscrutable, and that our mission from Him is earthbound, and focused on helping one another.

My uncle and my father had always been a team. Over time I witnessed my father emerging from his shattering loss to reengage in public life, this time alone. As he found his way through his grief, he grew in sympathy and sensitivity to the loss and pain he found in the lives of others. He became more tender in his actions and feelings for Americans who were caught up in the throes of the wrenching reckoning of the civil rights movement. Filled with a new awareness of emotional pain, he reached out to those who suffered—to the hungry and the exploited, to the neglected and the ill, and to the weakest and most vulnerable among us—the elderly and the children. Often he would quote the French philosopher Albert Camus, “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this.”

My father emerged from his private turmoil with a public purpose, which as he said was “to seek a newer world.” He had taken to heart the notion that we are here to help others, and he challenged his children to take this to heart as well. Each of us, he believed, has a moral obligation to pursue justice—not just putting the bad guys in jail, but also making sure that the least among us are treated with fairness.

My father became a voice for America’s outrage at the injustice of millions of citizens of the wealthiest country on earth going hungry. He experienced his anger when he saw migrant families who pick our crops living in intolerably squalid conditions, working incessantly and still unable to earn even a living wage. He greeted the rage of African-Americans with empathy and understanding. He saw lives wasted in idleness and isolation and was determined to rouse the fortunate and self-satisfied to moral action. He expressed frustration that Americans lacked decent housing, effective public schools, and accessible health care and in doing so awakened many Americans to the poverty and hopelessness that had been invisible for so long. Finally, he was unable to bear that a good and decent country persisted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, women, and children in a war that was being waged without wisdom in Southeast Asia. Americans needed leadership to lift them out of the despair and helplessness into which they’d sunk after the death of President Kennedy. In 1968, he ran for president.

In the midst of that campaign, when I was still in high school, my father was brutally murdered. Again, but this time even more personally and painfully, I grieved a death that instantly became part of the fabric of America’s life and lore. I could not have imagined that the lessons in faith, hope, and love I’d so painfully absorbed after my uncle’s death five years earlier would now be put to a harsher and even more agonizing test. And this time I’d bear this burden without my father at my side. Thankfully the power of my faith—and the central Christian experience of the death of innocence in the Passion and death of Jesus—came to me in a new and deeper way, emblazoned in my heart and soul. As a nation struggled with the loss, and in time sang songs portraying visions of my father walking the hills with “Abraham, Martin, and John,” I prayed that I could find strength and hope in my faith, and love for myself and my country. “You have a particular responsibility now,” my father had written to me on my uncle’s death. “Be kind to others and work for your country.” I needed to do that now, more than ever. But how?

Three weeks after my father died, I went to work on a Navajo Indian reservation in Rough Rock, Arizona. I had planned to go there in response to the challenge that my father had laid down in a speech at my high school earlier that year. He had pointed out that the unemployment rate was horrific on the reservation, that the teen suicide rate was the highest in the country, and that we in that high school were the lucky ones and had a responsibility to contribute.

My mother was wary of my leaving. She wanted me to stay at home in the comfort of my family. That might have been easier. I cried a lot that summer. But I wanted to be connected to my father’s work, to his mission, and to his understanding that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. That meant caring for others, especially those whose lives offered them less opportunity than mine. It also meant bearing in mind constantly what was fair and just in society, and finding ways to speak out against apathy and indifference. It meant knowing not only that conditions in which some people live and work are unacceptable, but that I had a duty to get involved in making those conditions better. By his example, my father’s life made clear that for any life to have meaning, it must include trying to improve the lot of our fellow human beings.

Sometimes I am nearly knocked over by the magnitude of my losses and the weight of the responsibility that was left to the next generation—to me. My uncle and my father were not saints, and neither am I. But their lives demonstrated the truths of Christian teachings—that in the paths we walk we should try to reduce the suffering and sadness of those whom we meet and, wherever we are given the opportunity, work for justice.

Churches could be the place to encourage, nurture, and promote this moral action. Except for sporting events, more people attend church than any other communal event in this country. About nine out of ten American adults claim that they believe in God. That’s good news.

What’s more, this passion has reached a remarkable height in our country today. Throughout history, faith has gone underground, only to emerge again in Great Awakenings, readying people for spiritual exploration. There are moments in history where people are ready and able to see the connection between the rituals of prayer and worship and the larger effort of improving God’s world—and I believe we are now approaching just such a time. As a result, our churches and other centers of faith stand poised to provide a setting for genuine discussion of what a just society could look like, what we want our communities to be about, and what would make us worthy in our commitments to one another.

Yet there are also forces working against achieving our full potential. Are religious leaders sufficiently emphasizing the obligation engendered in faith to work for justice? Are they insisting that our nation could do a better job caring for the hungry and homeless—and showing the way to do so? Of course there are traditions that claim we are saved through faith alone; but even in those traditions, faith has translated into good works here on earth that, in the doing, help us understand why we are on earth, how we can live a good life, how we can make something meaningful of our days, and what is the best way to find happiness. In so doing, faith offers us the ability to resist temptation, to go beyond selfishness and empty materialism, and to find something that grips our souls. As in the Prophet Micah’s words, our belief helps us “To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

But these are fearful times. Few church leaders today connect religious teachings with a critique of the moral consequences of corporate greed, environmental degradation, failing schools, or lack of health care. Instead they preach—and Americans accept—a different and more privatized religion.

The term “privatized” might seem odd in this context, but it is a term for our times. I mean this in several ways. I mean that faith has become something you do personally, with eyes not toward earth but toward heaven, seeking a one-on-one experience with the divine. How many times have we talked about our “personal relationship with God”? Yes, everyone of faith strives for a connection to the divine. But too often we forget that this personal relationship can occur only through our connection to each person we meet. For it is they who carry the divinity within them.

Two interviews show just how far down this path the country has gone. In 1968, the British journalist David Frost interviewed my father and asked him, “What do you think we are on earth for?” My father answered,

I think you have to break it down to people who have some advantages, and those who are just trying to survive and have their family survive. If you have enough to eat, for instance, I think basically it’s to make a contribution to those who are less well off. “I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” You can always find someone that has a more difficult time than you do, has suffered more, and has faced some more difficult time one way or the other. If you’ve made some contribution to someone else, to improve their life, and make their life a bit more livable, a little bit more happy, I think that’s what you should be doing.

My father was speaking from his perspective—a Catholic one to be sure, but one that would be easily understandable to those who practiced the Social Gospel.

That same year, when Frost asked then California governor Ronald Reagan the very same question, he answered,

Well, of course, the biologist I suppose would say that like all breeds of animals, the basic instinct is to reproduce our kind, but I believe it’s inherent in the concept that created our country—and in the Judeo-Christian religion—that man is for individual fulfillment; for our religion is based on the idea not of any mass movement but of individual salvation. Each man must find his own salvation; I would think that our national purpose in this country—and we have lost sight of it too much in the last three decades—is to be free—to the limit possible with law and order, every man to be what God intended him to be.

Ronald Reagan’s words speak to many of us who understand the great value of a personal relationship with God. Feeling deeply that God loves you can help give you a sense that your life has purpose. That feeling can also give meaning to the toughest, darkest moments as God, all powerful and caring, holds you in His hands. It can give you a sense of inner peace, steadfastness, and confidence. But there are darker repercussions to Reagan’s emphasis on the idea—central to conservative thought—that individual freedom is the root purpose of man (and, as it happens, of the American experiment as well). Out of this notion has grown an entire multimillion-dollar industry that treats God as little more than a self-help guru who helps you be all you can be. It smacks of Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees, “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness.”

This instantly gratifying salvation can be mighty convenient. You can use your personal relation to give up drink, lose weight, and make money. It is a stunning and depressing reversal of the lesson I learned about our duty to God and country: As Charlie Peters, editor emeritus of The Washington Monthly, quipped, “Ask not what you can do for God, but what can God do for you?”

A darker side of this focus on private godliness is the right’s total neglect of communal responsibility. Time after time, conservative policies, promoted in Washington with the language of “opportunity” and individual freedoms, have translated into disaster for the poor, the immigrant, and other disempowered groups, abandoned by the very government that should be protecting them. “Compassionate conservatism,” it turned out, was just another way to put the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Thirty-six million people are living in households where they do not know where their next meals are coming from. Poverty is on the rise.

But to blame politicians is too easy. Where have the churches been? What have they been teaching? If 81 percent of Americans call themselves Christian, what kind of Christianity blinds us to the needs of the homeless, the hungry, the stranger—the least among us?

Religion has also become privatized in its message: Today the moral lessons we hear—and the moral values we pursue in our politics—have everything to do with personal behavior. Living the moral life has come to mean something like: Don’t have too much sex, gay sex, extramarital sex, premarital sex; don’t have abortions; don’t look at porn; don’t demean marriage. (Not that many of us follow all these rules; there are more than a million abortions in this country each year, the highest divorce rates are in the most conservative parts of the country, and plenty of people of faith, including clergy, use pornography.)

Privatizing is a central theme of our times. Every day we hear public policy proposals for privatizing education through school vouchers and initiatives for privatizing Social Security, health care, and public lands and forests. Even “public” utilities such as water are being widely privatized. And our religious institutions have jumped on board, promoting a kind of privatized ambition and morality that works against the sense of communal good. The message seems to be, If it’s good enough for me—or my family, or my tax bracket—then it’s good enough.

My own Catholic Church has allowed its social agenda to be trumped by an all-consuming focus on contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research—none of which are mentioned in the Gospels. Mainline Protestant churches have been losing members and power, and no longer serve as the voice for radical change—fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War—that they did only a generation ago. And evangelical Protestants—who have been fabulously successful in recruiting members—have focused their attention primarily on private matters: who has sex with whom, where, and how.

The Catholic Church of my youth dealt with issues at the core of the Gospel—suffering, injustice, sickness, and poverty. It provided me with a loving welcome when my father was killed. Its rituals, songs, stories of saints, and the Rosary led me out of my despair—just as they have helped countless others for two thousand years. My Church created a sense of community for family and friends that stretched back in time. The nuns who taught me had also taught my mother and the mothers of my friends and shared with us stories from times when they were as young as we. In many churches parishioners met regularly over bingo games, Sons of Italy dinners, and Christmas collections for the needy of the parish. The Church gave shape to our lives. It taught us how we should act at home, school, and work. And it taught us that how we acted locally was all part of God’s larger plan for alleviating the suffering of humanity globally.

The very fact that the Church has endured for millennia across continents and cultures, under a variety of political systems, indicates that it has touched on something profound in the human spirit. This strength endures. Yet today, sadly, my Church seems focused primarily on protecting itself from the fallout of the pederasty scandal and publicizing its involvement in abortion politics. The first is a shame from which the Church will take a long time recovering. The second is an indication of its narrowing concerns. Here you have a group of men making decisions to ban contraception, and then turning around to demand that women must not have an abortion. These decisions do not affect them directly—they simply do not suffer the personal consequences. At least not yet. But this male hierarchy will eventually suffer from a female following that resents its decisions. Similarly it will suffer from its decision to keep women out of the hierarchy, to reject gays and lesbians, and to abandon its historic mission to the greater good of humanity.

My Church is building walls to keep the evil world out. This is not how it should be. I want my Church to be the embracing place that healed our souls while insisting that we live courageously and meaningfully in a world in which people near and far need our help. I want to return to the loving, caring Church that focused on helping people make sense of their lives by making a contribution to their larger community. If it is going to serve as Christ’s voice in the twenty-first century, its theology must be able to handle the issues of today, including contraception, family planning, and the role of laity and of women both in the Church and society. People in the United States and throughout the world are looking for spiritual renewal. I want the Catholic Church to play its part.

Similarly I want the mainline Protestant churches to be able to speak to their congregations out of their proud history of personal and social engagement. The First Great Awakening, in the eighteenth century, led to the American Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening to the abolition of slavery and the granting of women’s suffrage. Throughout our history determined Protestant congregations have made their mark by outlawing dueling, by supporting the temperance movement, the nineteenth-century women’s movement, and the civil rights movement, by working to end child labor and to create the forty-hour workweek, by recognizing labor unions, and by speaking out against the war in Vietnam.

The leaders of these churches suffered the consequences of their bravery. For their actions on behalf of civil rights for blacks, and against the Vietnam War, they began to lose members and money, and they became afraid and cautious. But caution has not helped them either. Today, mainline churches are still losing members and money, and their political voice at the national level is weak. Worse yet, they simply are not speaking to the spiritual hunger in the country today. These churches must be able to reach into their rich history, back to a time when they were able to connect a personal relation to God with their congregants’ efforts to improve the communities and nation in which they live. The strong communities of belief that once existed need to be revived.

The evangelical churches in some ways have the opposite problem: They touch people personally so they are growing by leaps and bounds; they have helped many people turn their lives around; they have created communities where members feel a great sense of connectedness and spirituality, and where they are given help with real-life issues—child care, schooling, marital counseling, aid for addictive behavior, and a safe place to meet a mate. And yet they, too, are building up walls of fear, protecting these “sacred” communities from the more profane influences of modern-day America. The debate over the teaching of evolution in schools, for instance, reflects the understandable fear of some religious people that morality cannot survive without a belief in God. I suspect, however, that it is yet another example of the right’s determination to change the subject away from a discussion of our religious obligation to correct the inequities of our society.

Evangelical leaders have embraced a set of political priorities that is depressingly familiar and private: making abortion illegal, promoting anti-gay discrimination, fighting comprehensive sex education in favor of abstinence-only information—which has not proven to be an effective prevention against pregnancy—eliminating the teaching of evolution in schools, and reducing taxes. A slew of evangelical organizations promote themselves as “pro-family,” which essentially begins and ends with trying to legislate in the arenas of personal and private morality. This is particularly ironic since evangelicals tend to also have a strong libertarian streak as well.

Among the most prominent evangelical leaders, personal morality is basically the alpha and omega of their concerns. Are they also concerned for social justice? Overseas, American evangelicals are a key force against human trafficking, slavery, and other human rights abuses. But here at home engagement in public issues like poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination—issues that the Gospels clearly tell us Jesus cared about—are a low priority. Evangelical leaders would rather tick off a list of “thou shall nots” than work for progressive policies. Why are they fighting so hard against abortion instead of fighting to protect teenagers from the conditions that lead to unwanted pregnancy? Why are they promoting a message of hate and fear, rather than one of love and help? My faith teaches “Judge not, lest you be judged.” And yet these churches seem satisfied to condemn others without offering help to solve the problem.

As a backdrop to all these sorry turns in our churches, political conservatives and liberals are engaged in an unholy—if inadvertent—alliance that has had the effect of further privatizing religion. For their own reasons, neither the left nor the right want churches to deal with public issues that revolve around economic unfairness and are reluctant to ask people of faith to call upon government to help shape a more just society. The right pretends that virtuous activity occurs only in the sphere of private behavior, not through governmental intervention. In fact they seem to think governmental intervention is appropriate only for overturning previous government decisions that they disagree with—e.g., the ban on school prayer—or in virtually anything having to do with what they consider improper sexual conduct, including homosexuality and abortion. The well-organized and politically attuned Religious Right pointedly ignores Christ’s admonition that we should care for the “least among us” when it withdraws from those arenas where government has had a traditional role, such as enforcing civil rights, adjusting tax policy, and supporting social programs that can improve the daily lives of the poor.

Among leaders of the left, we find a different malady. They are obsessed with keeping religion out of the public sphere, demanding a perfect purging of faith from public life far beyond what our Founding Fathers meant by “separation of church and state.” This obsession with secularism weakens their moral authority in mobilizing the national will to take on ingrained problems that stem from poverty and deprivation of civil rights. It makes the leaders of the left sound intellectual but without passion. The danger of not engaging religious teachings in the drive for social reform might be worse than condemning them. Reason and rationality alone will not usher in a new era of honesty, social justice, protection of the earth, and respect for women. It just won’t happen. Like addiction to drugs or alcohol, one cannot eliminate a behavior simply by arguing that it is destructive. The successful fight against addiction requires a deep hope and faith in something greater than oneself.

For the left, making judgments about personal behavior may be uncomfortable. But it is necessary if we are to have a moral leg to stand on. It means acknowledging that conservatives are correct on some issues: that welfare reform was not the disaster that was predicted and in fact had some good results, that pornography in the age of an Internet so easily accessed by our children is more than a personal option, that promiscuity on today’s college campuses is a problem for the young people who are engaging in it. And it means pushing further than the right on some issues: for instance, insisting that no one of any political or religious stripe has given sufficient attention and voice to the problems of drug abuse and underage drinking. Would it be so wrong to draw some moral lines in the liberal sand?

Neither the left nor the right seems willing to acknowledge that there is an appropriate role for religious teachings in illuminating what would be required, as expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution, to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” On the complicated questions of how best to care for the least among us—the poor, the immigrant, the disabled veteran—religious teachings appear to be about the last place we look for wisdom. Yet these are questions on which we desperately need such guidance.

Finding the proper relationship between religion and politics has always been among the most divisive of debates in America. And for good reason. At times, religion and politics have been mixed in a way that debases both. When explicit or implicit religious tests are used to determine whether someone is fit to hold office; when theological differences are cast into public policy; or when voters are told that one party is godly while another is not, we are belittling both faith and public life.

But on a broader scale, we must not miss the essential connection between religion and politics. Both religion and politics aspire to create a better world, and both emphasize the importance of realizing our connection to one another. In faith, we are bound to one another through our Creator, whose image we reflect. In politics, we are bound to one another through our shared faith that all “are created equal.” There can be no doubt that our greatest moments have come when we were able to overcome division and work together to build a more just society.

Faith’s essential contribution to our political life must be to offer an enduring vision of connection to one another. Jesus asked us to love our neighbor as ourselves and to see His face in the face of strangers. By working to improve the lives of others, we not only move closer to God, but we move our country closer toward the vision of our Founding Fathers.

I believe many Americans yearn for a public ethic, one that reconciles the wisdom contained in the First Amendment of the Constitution with the values of religious faith. The First Amendment prohibits the state establishment of religion and protects one’s ability to practice one’s religion, and both these rights must be respected and preserved. Whereas we often talk about the wall separating religion and government, my sense is that a wall is the wrong metaphor; a window would be more appropriate. Religion stands on one side of the window, but it can provide the understanding and motivation to act on the other side. The question is how to achieve this. To find the answer, we must examine what we have lost and try to recover the community spirit that has been at the heart of religious observance in this country.

We must learn to treat all people as our neighbors, and love them as ourselves. We share so much. We share in God’s creation and in His blessings. We all have hopes and dreams. All yearn for a life of purpose. And each of us at different times is confronted with the death of loved ones, with disappointment, with sadness. Still, we can each know the courage of our fellow human beings who deal bravely with sickness, find satisfaction in some success, in finding love, in serving others, in leaving the world better.

It is up to us to be a good neighbor in the literal and biblical sense, in acts of compassion both large and small, and to try to improve those public places and services so that the public welfare can be served and neighbors we don’t see can enjoy the liberty that comes from knowing that the schools are good, health care is available, the environment safe and healthy.

We can certainly all agree that we are called to protect the earth for future generations; that we should not elect a government that favors the rich over the poor with tax breaks and other benefits; that we cannot allow ourselves to fear our neighbor and therefore that we must fight violence, gangs, and drug use; that discrimination against and oppression of any group—be they minorities, gays, women, or anyone else—is an un-American conduct we cannot abide. There are so many routes in the pursuit to justice, and my hope is that you will choose one of them. I promise that if you do, you will begin to transform the world. I found that to be true for my father, for Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, César Chávez, Philip and Daniel Berrigan. And I’ve seen its transformative power with so many around the world—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov, and the comadres in El Salvador. These are heroes on a superhuman scale. We may not match their efforts, and we may become discouraged along the way, just as they did, but these are not reasons for us not to try.

I write this book as a way of sharing what my faith has meant to me, but more important, as a way of reminding us how the United States has been shaped by progressive religious traditions. At its best, this tradition has made America a more inclusive, just, and fair nation. Christians and non-Christians alike can learn from this tradition to understand how faith can serve to unify our country, rather than divide it. Our history is rich with inspiring stories. In thinking about the barriers to living out those traditions today, I offer suggestions on how the churches in this era can link the most profound of their teachings to the unsolved problems of our time. I write about how women’s lives intersect with the church and with its teachings, and I focus on individuals—many of whom are personal heroes of mine due to the extraordinary moral example of their lives—who can also help point the way. My hope is that each of us is able to see our best selves reflected in those who have gone before us and will decide to take action in ways that are most needed, whether in our families, churches, communities, or in politics.

When I was young I thought of becoming a nun, but by the time I was twelve years old, I knew that wasn’t going to be my path. Yet I also was sure that I would always ask myself if I was doing God’s work here on earth. This is the message the Bible offers us. The Scriptures remind us not only that we must love God and that God loves us, but that we must love our neighbor. The Scriptures insist not only that we have a responsibility to create a better spiritual self, but that the spiritual self is inextricably combined with the mission of creating a more just community, society, and world.

The teachings of all religious traditions have always emphasized sacrifice, duty, caring for the least among us, and loving our neighbor. Once we feel connected to those who share our world, we cannot be truly free so long as there are those who are hungry, sick, and living under oppression. Improving our own lives with goods, power, publicity—even with a spiritual connection to God—is not enough. Each of us wants to know whether what we’ve done has made life better for others. This aspiration is part of the human condition, as is underscored in my Catholic tradition. We all suffer, and our suffering can take us into ourselves, our family, our group, or our suffering can open us to the suffering of others outside our immediate circle. Greater love hath no man than he who gives up his life for his friends, but the fact is that Jesus gave up His life for generations unknown to Him. If we aspire to give as Jesus did, we will find that our hearts are opened to others, so that we are moved to render goodness unto our fellow human beings.

This is hard work, but it is also work that brings untold joy in the effort. I have often thought how fortunate I am to be in a position to make a difference, to feel part of a cause greater than myself, and to be doing worthy work. There may be a sportslike competitive aspect to all of this. Certainly in the heat of the fight, I feel my own blood rising in the effort to win. But if part of human nature is to improve, better ourselves, and develop our skills—so much the better. Battling the forces of evil and working for social justice can be the ultimate self-help. Action in service to others can be the path to satisfaction and salvation. Let us begin the journey.

Copyright © 2007 by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend