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There is a legend that someone once asked the great Michael Jordan, “Why don’t you make political statements?” He supposedly answered, “Because Republicans buy shoes too.” I guess his reasoning was financially based. Over these past decades Father Tom and I, and now for the past 10 years me myself and I, also have not written political columns but our reason has to do with spiritual shoes.

I am writing before, but my column will appear after Election Day. So this seems to me like a good time to ask you to think with me about what our politics means to our faith. Both Christian and Jewish sacred scriptures come to the same conclusion.

In the Jewish Talmud the rabbis taught,“The law of the state is the law.” (in Aramaic: dina d’malkuta dina). This is from the tractate Gittin 10b. One is also obligated to pray for the welfare of the state (Avot 2:3). This meant that Jews are under a religious obligation to treat the laws of the state as if they had been revealed as part of the Torah … unless of course the laws of the state conflicted with the laws of the Torah in which case the Torah laws prevailed or you had to move to a new country where the conflict was not so severe.

The point is that, basically, obeying the laws of the country in which you live is considered to be a religious as well as a secular obligation. Jesus, coming out of his Jewish environment, took essentially the same position in his famous teaching, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25).

The philosopher Stephen Jay Gould called politics and religion “Non-Overlapping Magesteria”. The state is about how things get done and religion is about why things get done. I agree but the differences go far deeper. Though not always its intention, the effect of politics is to divide people. The effect of religion, though not always its effect, is to unify people. It is obvious by the horrible level of bitterness and acrimony in the public square that politics in this time of our country’s history is an ugly and often acrimonious pursuit. Now I know that many of you are thinking that religion is also a divisive force in our country and in our world and I will admit that the leaders of faith are not always the leaders of unity, but even so I will proudly take my stand with my soul and my life and with the work of our little God Squad that faith is the glue that is holding the people in the world together. As we said, “The ways that we are different are so much less important than the ways we are the same.”

When Tom and I spoke at schools, particularly, we would always ask the kids who had a dim view of religion to name for us the people who had helped the world the most and those who had hurt the world the most in the last hundred years. Their list (not ours, but theirs) was pretty much always the same (except for when they included Taylor Swift). The world helpers were always: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. The list of the world-hurters was also univocal: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden. We then pointed out to them that not some but ALL of the world helpers they had chosen were not only religious but were professionally religious. Then we asked them to name the people and organizations that had hurt their communities the most and those who had helped. Again the local hurters were gangs and drug dealers while the local helpers were the church soup kitchens and rescue centers for abused mothers and children.

Rendering unto God what is God’s is a religious belief that keeps our world safe and loving. Trying to find such help in the political arena is possible but I believe so much more difficult. Politics chops us up into small warring tribes based on race or class while religion offers us a very different story. It is the story of how God made every single human being in God’s image and so each and every one of us has equal dignity and equal sanctity and are loved equally by our single creator God. Therefore our rights come from God and not from the state. That is a story that only a very few politicians like Abraham Lincoln could seamlessly weave into the fabric of our political life.

So after this brutal election cycle let us pray E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one” and let us focus on the unum and let go of the pluribus for a while.

God bless America.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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