The Culture Beat

James McCoy, a pastor in nearby Weaverville, N.C., is glad the U.S. Supreme Court is judging methods of execution – no one wants to downplay suffering – but he believes the high court is missing the larger point.

“The key question for me is, is it justice?” he asked during a phone conversation this week. “The killing of murderers – is that the definition of justice in the Scriptures?”

That question wasn’t asked on Monday when the court heard a case from Kentucky that challenged the most common method of execution, a three-step lethal injection. If that process goes well, the prisoner feels little physical pain before he falls asleep, never to wake. But it can easily go wrong, making a prisoner’s last moments torture. The prisoners who brought the suit say that risk violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments.

The court has already declared this case won’t reconsider the legality of the death penalty itself, but McCoy has been raising that issue for almost a decade.

As he points out, plenty of reasons exist to question the value of the death penalty – everything from DNA testing to problems of inconsistency, when race or geography can spell the difference between life and death. Capital punishment isn’t even a deterrent to crime. FBI statistics show that 11 of the 12 states without a death penalty have lower murder rates than the national average.

McCoy, however, shifts from such utilitarian questions to moral ones.

“If the New Testament is really true, it puts this discussion in another dimension beyond the legal one,” McCoy said. “It’s, ‘What is redemptive?’”

The Bible can seem to send mixed signals. The Jewish law clearly defined capital offenses, and the New Testament warns readers about authorities who “do not bear the sword in vain … to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.”

On the other hand, Old Testament prophets like Isaiah called the wicked to “return to the Lord that he may have mercy on them … and abundantly pardon.” Jesus demonstrated that attitude when he pardoned a woman caught in the capital crime of adultery.

McCoy’s views have evolved. Before he started volunteering as a prison chaplain in the early 1990s, he never gave the issue much consideration.

“I thought if the people were there, it was for a good reason,” he said. “It was a sort of an uncritical acceptance of the system.”

But that changed as he got to know prisoners, including a pen-pal friendship with a man who sat on death row for 18 years before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

“These are individual lives, and I’m trying to keep the issue about human beings rather than what you think about this social issue,” he said.

After moving to Weaverville 10 years ago, he joined local candlelight vigils when executions were scheduled. Some members of the congregation started asking questions. A few raised objections.

After a vigil in 2005, McCoy distributed a one-page explanation, six numbered paragraphs titled “Why I Stood Outside on a Cold Thursday Night Holding a Candle.” Most important among them, he wrote: “I believe the death penalty is morally wrong, an act of vengeance more than of justice. … It concedes that some people are beyond God’s capacity to redeem them.”

McCoy, now 56, hoped his actions would “promote genuine conversation” in the congregation, which draws about 150 worshipers “on a good Sunday.” He organized open meetings for discussion. The response was mixed.

“I recall there being some good conversation,” he said. “The aunt of one lady in our church had been murdered, so we were dealing with a firsthand experience. We were just being honest and open with that.”

Still, the discussions were not easy. A few members departed, and some church leaders took him aside to warn him against preaching politics.

“It’s a volatile subject,” he said. “You don’t want to renege on your conviction, yet you don’t want to close off conversation. As a pastor, that is central to my calling – how to help a body of believers cultivate the capacity to talk to each other at the level of conviction, and to do so in the unity of God’s Spirit. That’s hard, but that’s crucial.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 12 Jan 2008.

This week started the one-year countdown to the next election, and so of course religion, values and other spiritual matters are in the air, in some ways expected and in some ways unsettling.

Chief among the expected ways is the national campaign, with presidential candidates in both major parties talking freely about their faith and seeking endorsements from religious leaders.

Religion probably won’t figure as a major issue in local races. That might seem ironic in the old Bible belt, but religion here is a given, as much a part of the landscape as the mountains, and just as often taken for granted. Both major parties are comfortable with that fact.

Candidates must have some kind of faith, according to Sara Sellers, a 12-year veteran of Tennessee’s Republican executive committee, but she is not too concerned about what shape that faith takes. What’s “imperative” is that the “candidate have principles … to say that character counts,” she said.

“It’s appropriate for candidates to talk about where their policy positions come from,” said Matt Gross, chairman of the Washington County Democratic Party. “If it comes from (their) religion, then talk about it.”

Rep. David Davis has talked about religion, particularly his Christian faith, throughout his political career. This week, his list of crucial issues included not only the war on terrorism and illegal immigration, but also keeping “In God We Trust” printed on our money and “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and ensuring that veterans can have religious language included in their funeral ceremonies.

“I don’t think it should matter what (a candidate’s) religion is, personally,” said Davis. “What counts is what they believe and how they will represent those values.”

No surprises here.

But while we’re thinking about values, we should think about another event this week that may say more about the collective American soul than how often a candidate mentions God in stump speeches. It is a disturbing message.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Michael Mukasey as the new U.S. attorney general, after one word almost derailed his nomination: water-boarding.

Water-boarding is a so-called extreme interrogation technique with a long history. A prisoner is tied up, his feet elevated, and gallons of water are poured over his mouth and nose. Within seconds he feels like he is drowning, because he is. As one military expert put it, this is not simulated drowning. This is drowning that is halted before the person dies.

The practice has been outlawed by international treaties signed by the U.S., including the Geneva Conventions. American military and civilian courts have consistently prosecuted it as a crime for 60 years. Late last week, four retired judge adjutant advocate generals, once the military’s highest judicial officials, sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, calling the practice “torture” in no uncertain terms.

“The law … has long been clear: Water boarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances,” they wrote. “To suggest otherwise – or even to give credence to such a suggestion – represents both an affront to the law and to the core values of our nation.”

Yet, when the committee asked Mukasey about the practice, he hedged. By all accounts a fine judge and legal scholar, the nominee called the practice “repugnant,” but he would not label it “torture.”

That response threatened his nomination until Democratic senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein swallowed hard and supported him. Finally the full Senate approved Mukasey as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. CIA interrogators apparently can keep their options open a little longer as they combat terrorism.

With what we know, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the U.S., for the first time in its history, has just ratified the use of torture, as long as we call it something else.

No one wants to suffer more terror attacks. No one should underestimate the threats. But it seems like fear and vengeance are driving our decisions and determining our policies, including our willingness to use torture.

If that isn’t a spiritual matter or a question of values, I don’t know what is.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 10 Nov 2007.

If Tennessee were ever to inaugurate an income tax, Lee Davis, a Johnson City tax attorney, knows he’d pay more to the state than he does now.

But that prospect doesn’t bother him.

“I don’t mind paying my fair share,” he said this week. “Too many laws are written to benefit those of great wealth. I think our system would be better with an income tax.”

It’s a matter of faith, not economics, for Davis, who describes himself as “a lifelong Republican who believes in capitalism and free enterprise.”

Davis, a member of Central Church of Christ in Johnson City, points to a story in the Gospel of Matthew, when two very different groups tried to corner Jesus: the Herodians, who supported the local king, a puppet of the Roman Empire, and the Pharisees, Jewish purists who thought cooperating with secular authorities meant flirting with heresy.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” they asked, figuring that any answer would land Jesus in trouble.

But he frustrated their trap – and confounded future commentators – with a profoundly simple reply: “Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

People have tried to translate those words into good practice ever since. But whatever Jesus meant, Tennessee’s tax system isn’t it.

“There’s a connection with all the social-justice aspects of the Old and New Testaments,” said Bill Howell, the Middle Tennessee organizer for Tennesseans for Fair Taxation, a statewide coalition for tax reform. “There’s a general preference for the poor expressed in the Bible.”

But, as Howell pointed out, the Tennessee tax system works exactly opposite, taking the proportionally biggest bites from its poorest citizens. At 11.7 percent, the total state tax burden on the poorest families, who earn less than $14,000 a year, is nearly four times the rate as for the wealthiest Tennesseans. This is according to a 2003 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C.

The main culprit is the sales tax, among the highest in the nation overall and the highest for groceries. Since a loaf of bread costs the same whether someone earns $14,000 or $140,000, high-income households spend only about four percent of their monthly budgets on groceries. Low-income households spend about 21 percent. In other words, the tax on groceries applies to one-fifth of a poor person’s living expenses, but to less than one-twentieth of a wealthy citizen’s.

The bottom line is simple and stark: In proportion to their income, the poorest citizens get hit hardest while the richest get away easiest.

“We have a regressive tax system,” Davis said. “It isn’t morally fair.” (He thinks the same of the new Washington County wheel tax: $50 whether someone drives a junker or a Jaguar.)

On many issues, Davis would sit on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Rev. Don Beisswenger of Nashville, a Presbyterian minister, retired Vanderbilt Divinity School theologian and left-leaning activist who once spent six months in federal prison for staging a nonviolent protest at an Army base.

But they agree about the inequities of the Tennessee tax system.

“The Bible strongly accents the importance of compassion and care for the poor,” Beisswenger said this week. “The Jewish law had harvesters not take all the grain from the fields, so poor people could get what was left. Jesus identified with the poor, spoke for them. I think he was killed (partly) because he advocated for the poor against the religious and economic powers.”

In his eyes, the tax debates reflect two competing “myths” in American society.

“One is the Horatio Alger myth – work hard and do your own thing,” he said, referring to the 19th-century author whose stories promoted self-reliance as the key to financial success.

The other view emphasizes “community connections” and “a responsibility to care for people who are unable to take care of themselves.” That view is more consistent with biblical teaching, he said.

“That’s what Jesus said his mission was, to bring good news to the poor,” Beisswenger said. “The gap between the wealthy and poor needs to be dealt with. That’s a necessary condition for the celebration of Jubilee, for the reign of God.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 29 Sept. 2007.

Robin Smith would never understate the role of religion in politics. There’s Iraq, for example. To the newly elected chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party, the Mideast struggle is one of biblical proportions, tracing its roots to the story of Isaac and Ishmael in the book of Genesis.

“I think people of faith see this battle completely differently,” she said from her Nashville office this week. “It’s not a battle over resources. This is a war that puts the Christian faith in direct opposition to the Muslim faith.”

So it’s important to note that Smith carefully downplayed the significance of last week’s Republican straw poll in Iowa, where the top three finishers – Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback – came to the table with strong religious bona fides.

If elected, former Massachusetts governor Romney would be the first Mormon president. But his church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, historically has not been considered truly Christian because of its literally unorthodox teaching about the nature of Jesus Christ.

Huckabee, the immediate past governor of Arkansas, is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and his strong showing in Iowa has generated buzz about what had been a lackluster campaign. Pundits are asking if his candidacy is suddenly viable, perhaps the new darling of the so-called religious right, especially among those who are uncomfortable with Romney’s church background.

Brownback, the senior senator from Kansas, grew up Methodist but converted to Roman Catholicism five years ago. That’s a controversial change in a heavily Protestant part of the country, as a brief spat between Brownback and Huckabee campaign workers demonstrated just before the poll.

But religion wasn’t the deciding factor last week. Rather, Smith said, it was “the candidates who spent time on the ground and campaigned.” Answers to candidates’ prayers typically come in the form of donation checks.

“(Iowa) was a quick snapshot,” she said. “Some of the top contenders did not participate, did not invest money and did not labor.” Reading the results is like “walking into a restaurant and basing your entire opinion on a couple of entrees.”

But maybe the winners’ strong religious identities just neutralized each other this time. No one doubts that religion inevitably bubbles to the surface of today’s national campaigns.

“A person’s faith or religion can play an important role in their background,” said Gray Sasser, chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party. “When you think about something as important as electing a president, we need more than Cliff Notes on the issues or on their background.”

That makes Romney a particularly intriguing candidate. American voters might be willing to give him a chance, but they are still curious about his beliefs – and maybe a little suspicious. A Newsweek poll last month reported that 27 percent of voters would not choose a Mormon for president. In February, the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of white evangelical Protestants, most of whom are Republicans, would be “less likely” to support a Mormon for president.

Smith thinks the scrutiny over Romney’s religion is appropriate.

“It’s a fair question,” she said. “The American people need to understand what influences the thought processes, the decision making of the next leader of the free world. I think it’s going to be an issue, and this campaign needs to address that in depth before he makes that request for votes.”

She and Sasser offer similar advice for all the presidential candidates when they turn their attention to Tennessee: When it comes to religion, don’t try to fake it.

“In the state of Tennessee, a large portion of people continue to say their prayers, thank God for the food on the table and believe in something bigger than themselves,” Smith said. “The candidate who resonates with the values of the people will be more successful.”

Tennessee voters can quickly tell if candidates are trying to use religion as a tool rather than an honest expression of beliefs, according to Sasser.

“So be honest and open about it,” he said. “Tennesseans know enough about the faith tradition that if you’re trying to manipulate it, it will never be very effective.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 18 August 2007.