As some of you may know, there has been a big controversy over an IRS investigation of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California; Rev. George Regas preached a sermon there on October 31, 2004 that has been accused of violating the requirements for maintaining nonprofit tax exemption, and, in particular, of endorsing a particular political candidate. The LA Times recently published the sermon. I can see why people thought it was a clear endorsement of Kerry, or at least a clear condemnation of Bush; I can also see why one would think it isn't. I incline to the latter view.
Reading it over, what strikes me most is that Jesus sounds an awful lot like a middle- or upper-class Episcopalian. I was once in Patzcuaro, in Michoacan, Mexico. Patzcuaro has a beautiful and important Basilica, la Basilica de Nuestra Señora de la Salud, the Basilica of Our Lady of Health. And, as often happens around important churches, a sort of bazaar had grown up selling all sorts of tacky religious wares -- insipid prayer cards, plastic glow-in-the-dark rosaries, rather silly-looking figurines. I bet a lot of people who visit that church are put off by the tackiness, and deplore it as a contrast to the church itself. They wouldn't put it this way, but what puts them off is the tackiness of the religious poor -- cheap, badly executed knock-offs of religious paintings, rosaries made out of the same materials you use to make stupid novelty items that are bought at your local dollar store, mass-produced figurines and refrigerator magnets. What they forget is that there are other sorts of religious tackiness, and most of the visitors indulge in religious tackiness themselves; it's just not obviously the same, because it is the religious tackiness of the bourgeois, and it is a mark of us bourgeois that we almost never see how tacky we sometimes are. The picture of Jesus in the sermon is like a picture on a prayer card in a bourgeois bazaar. In it's own way it's a Jesus bobblehead.
But the thing of it is: the judgment that something is tacky is not a spiritual evaluation. Tackiness is a fault of no religious significance. The spirit that makes the little ongoing market outside the Basilica thrive is the same spirit that decks Nuestra Señora in the bright and festive gown and train of blessing. It is the same spirit that attends the Basilica not as a tourist attraction but as an act of devotion. And so it is here, as well. And this is an important thing to keep in mind. For as I look out at the common criticisms of the 'Religious Right' by the 'Religious Left', and of the 'Religious Left' by the 'Religious Right', I am struck by how many of those criticisms are just elaborate ways of saying something that's usually not explicitly said but clearly meant, that those people over there -- whether we call them Right or Left -- are being tacky.
And they certainly are. And it's certainly irrelevant to everything important that we are doing. It most certainly is not a substantive criticism.
