If You See Faith as a Weapon Towards Division and Exclusion, Don’t Let the Door Bump You on the Way Out
Among our elected officials, the mayor of New York City always seems to carry attention that spills beyond the region — at least in the minds of the mayors.
So, when Mayor Eric Adams told an interfaith coalition this week that he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, and that God made him the mayor rather than, say, voters who saw his police background as a positive force on crime, the local waves he started were rippling outward.
“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies,” he said, adding, “I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.”
Well, yes, he can – and should – according to the Constitutional oath he took. He may think he is taking a “God-like approach” when he implements policies. But the rest of us call that arrogance.
So far, God or Adams has reduced some guns on the street, but hasn’t eliminated crime, has seemed hesitant about what to do about homelessness, has offered a lot more talk than action about housing, city transportation, even rat policies.
Frankly, prayer in schools hasn’t come up before. Nevertheless, here was Adams suggesting he knew better than the 1962 Supreme Court to ban mandated prayer. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” he said. It would be, um, miraculous if more prayers eliminated the number of gun deaths and shootings we are seeing across the country as compared to, say, gun control laws and crackdowns on illegal weapons.
That’s the kind of talk that could see Adams join Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot in an earlier-than-anticipated departure from City Hall.
Prayer and Politics
Who knows, maybe this is good politics outside of New York.
Around the country, a new turn to religious faith is fueling a lot more than humility, and Adams should be prepared to back up his God talk with what it means in real life in a city like New York.
In Tennessee this week, Republican legislators citing religious morality banned drag shows in the state. In Florida, the state’s Republican leadership is banning books, exorcising class content from kindergarten to university levels. In half the states with Republican legislatures, the ties to religious claims are fueling social policies affecting LGBTQ rights and access to health care and abortion.
Joe Biden, like most of the presidents who preceded him, sees himself as a church-going individual whose basic values emanate from his faith. But he’s not in favor of the increasing number of states that want to spend taxpayer money to support parochial schools, for example, or who choose to espouse their specific religious choices as somehow superior to those of other Americans.
At the same time, the Supreme Court is overturning precedents and acting in a very activist manner to make Freedom of Religion clauses of the Constitution matter more than other rights provisions.
Throughout this religious turmoil, we should remember that voluntary prayer is allowed anytime, anywhere, in school, on football fields, in homeless shelters. The issue is whether mandated prayer is enforced, particularly in pluralistic urban areas.
In that context, Adams has picked an odd time in America to decide to declare public allegiance to a faith-based approach to governing a reputedly sinning city like New York which thrives on its celebration of differences. In addition to this city’s mayor being officially elected in a nonpartisan election, its recent mayors have lived fairly secular lives. Adams grew up attending a storefront church in Queens and identifies as Christian of no denomination.
Do the Job
Mayor Adams, we don’t really care that you feel God in your heart. We care about what you do in office. We elected you to ensure that crime drops, that garbage is picked up and that snow gets plowed.
If you see faith as a driver to help the impoverished and burned among us, great. If you see faith as a weapon towards division and exclusion, don’t let the door bump you on the way out.
One mistake most politicians – and often journalists — seem to make is that we truly care about our leaders’ personal opinions that stray from the job. We know that Mayor Adams sometimes oddly wants to tell us about the plusses of vegetarianism or that cheese is addictive. But we pay more attention when we learn that he is hiring relatives on the city payroll.
I’m praying that our politicians will stop spending so much time burnishing their image and looking for political funds and more time on dealing with real urban problems.
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