Helping churches get involved in social action

Maria Thompson asks a great question of Mary Hinkle: how to work with congregations to help them become informed electorates? Mary offers some great suggestions, and I want to muse about this some, too. There may be less overt hostility to electoral issues in the Catholic church (I’m thinking of all of those voter guides) compared to a lot of Protestant churches, but I think there may be less actual good organizing, too. Somehow I think at root we have to do a better job of helping people sort through how to bring their faith into the public process, in ways that affirm central commitments but don’t step on other people’s beliefs. Part of what I care deeply about in the US is our tradition of separating church and state. Ok, we don’t often do it well, but at least we have some history with the idea, and some desire to be wary of over politicizing communities of faith. I think, however, we may have spent enough time worrying about the over politicization, and ought to spend some new time thinking about how our traditions’ deep reasons for hope could inform our public stances. I wish I could find more of Michael Himes’ work online, because I’d love to point off to it and I think it would be useful in this context.