American religious leaders oppose the President’s heavy-handed approach to religion and politics .

Long before the immoral and unjustifiable war was prosecuted against the innocent children of Iraq, one Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America did more than simply rant about, and oppose, the disastrous implications of unilateral military engagement. He used his pulpit to warn his congregants about the perilious path chosen by the President, the Congress, John Kerry and nearly 70% of the American people.

Now, just months away from an election that, by all accounts, will mirror the 2000 election morass, the Right Rev. Bennett J. Sims, once a US Naval officer in WWII, former Bishop of the Diocese of Atlanta, and Founding President of the Institute for Servant Leadership, has released a thoughtful, intellectually sound and spiritually guided book condemning the Bush Administration for betraying our democratic values and usurping orthodox rhetoric to cynically transform the language of peace into the bark of war. In “Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop’s Faith-Based Challenge,” the Right Reverend patiently and persistently contends that “the political leadership of [his] country has become a menace to the longevity of the human and environmental odysseys by several reckless moves:

1. unilateral warmaking in a time that calls for international peace-seeking collaboration,

2. lavishly heightened investment in the military,

3. consequent impoverishment of education and health care for American citizens,

4. scorn of environmental constraints and global treaties,

5. preferential economic treatment for the wealthy and select corporations, and

6. the beginning erosion of constitutional guarantees of citizen freedom.”

[NOTE: As Bishop Sims was penning the first draft of his treatise against the current Administration during the Democratic primary season, he had hopes for the Left's ability to counteract the aforementioned six (6) reckless moves. Perhaps the Bishop became less optimistic about our collective desire to right those wrongs when the Democratic Party chose as its presumptive nominee a candidate who, if his voting record is any indication, would have recklessly made moves 3, 5, and 6, by voting for the ill-advised, teacher-attacking "No Child Left Behind Act," the Bush Tax Cut, and the so-called Patriot Act (but, I guess, in our American 'lesser of the evils' duopoly, 3 out of 6 is the best we're going to get).]

For those readers who feel that spiritually minded people should stay home and watch FoxNews, Bishop Sims wants you to consider the following:

“It will be objected to that I am mixing religion and politics. But of course. This mixture has always been the implicit ground of all political action, and it is in high public fashion now. We need only ask the present incumbent of the Oval Office about his blend of politics and religion. He has said that God has called him to be president of the United States. And he is so confident of divine appointment as to hold in scorn the bulk of American and world religious leadership, including Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama, when he refused, without apology, to listen to their ardent opposition to the military invasion of Iraq.”

Such statements probably won’t register much with those of hardened hearts who spin any reference to Jesus as a call to fundamentalist arms. But the Bishop speaks to that as well. Those intellectual light-weights are, unbeknownst to themselves, swept up into a conceptual problem and are simply incapable of thinking outside of the dominant religion-suspicious secular paradigm. According to Rev. Sims,

“the conceptual problem is that there are two antithetical power motifs in the religions of the world: the conventional dominator drive and the visionary collaborative ideal. The first version carries the name fundamentalism. It is locked into an old and ebbing form of human consciousness that urges the use of violence to avenge violence [NOTE: even Catchy believes, as most Americans, there is, to paraphrase, "a time for kicking a little ass]. . . By contrast, at the heart of all the world’s religions there is a voice that knows counterviolence to be counterproductive. In the first version there is a strain of eager attachment to things as they are, along with the impulse to obey unquestioningly the constituted authorities, including punitive and jealous deities of wrath. But this is not the evolving heart of the great religions . . . Fundamentalist religion [NOTE: which Hoolie seems to believe all christians adhere to]is cast in the ancient male-dominant tradition and is preoccupied with an imminent and violent end of the world. [NOTE: This belief is, no doubt, what prompted Bush to answer when asked how he believed history would judge him, "I don't know we'll all be dead."]

Without giving away the ending, the Bush-bashing Bishop builds his argument against the imperialist-fundamentalist quest for cultural and political domination to a clanging crescendo of hope:

“Given these realities [NOTE: candidates who either campaign on a platform of war or flip-floppingly stand by and watch it happen], how can the human future be anything but foreclosed in an apocalyptic nuclear calamity? Still I am hopeful. God is not mocked. My better sense is that a global calamity is only a ‘short-run’ forecast of despair. Beneath the surface of the presently popular ‘cowboy strut’ of American flag waving there moves a rising tide of conflict resolution by the wisdom of nonviolence, a world-preserving use of power in ‘relationships of equality.’ Quiet evidence abounds that humanity is on an incipient spiritual move upward, up from the lower conception of power as unilateral privilege to the more mature conception of power as relational equality.”

There are those who would say, “I don’t need christianity or buddhism or hinduism or taoism or judaism, etc., to advocate for peace.” To them, I gently bow, smile, depart and continue down an evolving journey leaving anger, bitterness, narrowness, and conformity behind in my ever-widening wake.

Bishop Sims’ book is currently available at www.continuumbooks.com.

Peace.