The Faith & Politics Institute has called for religious leaders the country over to join in eighteen days of prayer, urging the religious to pray for civility in politics.
Religion News Service reports:
At a time when the ideals of compromise and collegiality seem like a distant dream in the nation’s capital, an unusually diverse coalition of religious leaders is asking Americans to pray for civility.
“Through daily prayer, we are calling on the ‘better angels of our nature’ needed to sustain our nation and solve problems,” said the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, immediate past president of the National Council of Churches and one of the faith leaders taking part in “18 days of Prayer for the Nation.”
Prayers begin Thursday (Jan. 3), the first day of the new Congress, and end on Jan. 21, the day of President Obama’s second inauguration.
Faith leaders from left, right and center have signed on, including Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Richard Land of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.
The Faith & Politics Institute, a nonpartisan group that nurtures the spiritual life of members of Congress and their staffs, and presses political foes toward civil debate, organized the days of prayer and an online “commitment to prayer” page to document participation.
It lists 27 clergy and others on day one, including Eboo Patel, a Muslim American who founded the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, and Rabbi Steve Gutow, president and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Why eighteen days and not nineteen? Hell, why not simply one? Does the Lord relish in repetition? Moreover, can’t he, in his omnibenevolence, act without first being asked? If God wanted civility in politics, wouldn’t politics simply be civil?
That people who live in an ostensibly democratic society feel compelled to band together to pray for political change is absolutely mind-boggling. Our very political system provides a mechanism for bottom-up political change. It’s called the ballot box, and if citizens spent more time properly evaluating political candidates than they do uselessly pleading to the absentee landlord upstairs, perhaps the national discourse would be less acrimonious.
