Church and State:
We’re All In This Together

By Rev. Timothy Ebarhardt

Back in the nineties when our church, St. John’s here in Randolph, like many other churches and service agencies, invested ourselves heavily in the summer lunch program of "The Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger," I found myself at one point having to drive out to inspect certain federal standards at our satellite site at the Braintree School. In other words, I, as a parish priest, was working as an agent of "the state" since this was a USDA form I was signing off on.

Over two summers of good trying, it ended up that it was largely the paperwork which did that "ministry" in. I still remember when an inspector sent up from Boston, looking over my shoulder, would not let us register one child’s lunch as "official" because she put her unopened milk container back on the table at our main "Rec Field" lunch site.

Nowadays, I get more than a little nervous when I hear our political candidates describing increased support for "faith-based initiatives" and other service ministries. President Bush started it, and Mr. Obama is stirring it up again. It’s not so much that they are blurring lines of church and state (which they are, with questions of funding and religious promotion which can become toxic), and it’s not that they are courting the "religious right or left." It’s that we grow more and more forgetful and ignorant about just what service is about in America. When we imply that civil authorities like judges or legislators or local police are somehow carrying out secular agendas, and that only churches or other volunteer agencies are faith-based or can be religious. It’s like some of us carry a copy of the constitution in our coat pockets, while others carry a Bible, and we’re working at different ends.

But no! Postmen and nurses and all other professionals as well go to church too, and even I, as a priest, need to stay under the speed limit and pay my taxes.

We forget that many of our hospitals and universities, say, were founded as faith-based institutions, or that here in Randolph, for instance, Hospice, Habitat for Humanity and the food shelf grew out of our churches, although they are largely "secular" organizations now. Or we forget that many of our noblest politicians and civil servants of all stripes have been, and are, persons of deep faith, but who didn’t or don’t need to wear that on their sleeves.

Meanwhile, faith-based institutions often do take the initiative when they see cracks in the system which leave their neighbors in a pinch. A good example now in Randolph is the Randolph Ecumenical Emergency Committee on Housing or "REECH." With purely donated funds we give low-interest loans for first month rents or security deposits or to meet utility bills so that our neighbors can get into, or say in an apartment or home. We do so hand-in-hand with the Central Vermont Community Action Council as our front-line screening partners, technically, a secular state organization. We on the REECH board even start our meetings with a prayer, and we are not about to seek federal funding.

Whether a person in any profession sees his or her work as a ministry of God’s Kingdom or not, or whether he or she chooses to belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque is up to him or her. If REECH, say, like Hospice with the VNA, were to become a state or private agency, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t make the people who work there any less religious, and, as we in our congregations go out individually to practice the ministry of our daily work, we will also as a group manage to find other cracks in the system.

So, too, there will always be professional folks who do volunteer work and we won’t ask them what church they belong to. As confusing as it can get, that’s the American constitutional way. As Steven Waldman puts it so well looking back, in "Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in Amerca," The "Founding Faith" (of those who first drafted our constitution) "was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty—a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone."

And thus the genius of that, I would add, is that each of us is free at least to go out and love our neighbors as ourselves, as we change the oil, or prescribe an antibiotic, or register voters, and to be a little prophetic about what’s right or wrong in our democracy. What motivates us to do so is up to us to choose. That works!

Meanwhile, please, let’s be very careful about how we pit terms like church and state, or religion and politics, or us and them. We’re all in this together. And, as for promoting religion, or secularism, or any other ism, let them (whoever they are) know us (whoever we are) by our love!

(Rev. Timothy Eberhardt is the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Randolph.)

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