No Sanctuary from Politics

Neil Gorsuch (Denver Post)

Your humble blogger has something in common with President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch; we usher for our local Episcopal church:

Gorsuch serves as an usher at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, and his wife gives the sermon and leads intercessory prayer on occasion.

(I can one-up him, though, because I also read the intercessory prayer.)

As Episcopalians he and I have another thing in common: we are faithful members of an organization whose leaders hold very different political views from ours (I'm just guessing about Judge Gorsuch's).

the rector (head pastor) of his church, Susan Woodward Springer, attended the Women's March in Washington, D.C., and praised the march (which excluded pro-life women and reportedly mistreated them when they showed up anyway) as a "glorious, unified, peaceful, friendly law-abiding crowd."

It's not the political views of the clergy that bother me, but the fact that we must often listen to these views, unchallenged, from the pulpit. As I've written before, the church as a whole envisions itself as a "social justice" organization, one which advocates the redistribution of wealth by the State, if necessary, to those who are purportedly victimized by the current power structure.

Sanctuary cities are all the rage, but I suppose it's too much to ask for the church, which is the original sanctuary (sanctus = holy), to be a safe space from politics. Last Sunday someone got up to talk about how he joined the demonstrations at SFO to protest the "Muslim ban" and another talked about how she was joining a protest group down in Palo Alto. C'mon people, you can turn off your cellphones for an hour, can't you turn off politics, and especially angry politics?

Good luck to Judge Gorsuch. From one suffering non-progressive Episcopalian to another, he has my sympathy.