Amy Goodman and Michael Curry converse on faith, love and what’s at stake in November: video and transcript.
An excerpt:
…if the president had gone across and asked the pastor of the church, “Can I go in and say a prayer for the country? We’ve got some problems,” or if he had gone across and just simply said to the cameras, “I know you all — there are people who disagree with me, and there are people who agree with me, but we’re all Americans, and we need to pray for our country,” I couldn’t object to that. That’s fine. That’s spiritual, moral leadership. But to use the church, the faith of Christianity or anybody’s religion, as far as I’m concerned, for partisan political purposes is inappropriate and wrong.
Now, having said all of that, though, we’ve got to move beyond that. We have got to find a way in this country to work together, to exercise our vote, to go out and vote, and vote your values. I believe that. Vote your values. Somebody said, “Do you mean — what about people who don’t share your values?” That’s their right in this democratic society. Everybody must go out and vote. Vote for your values on propositions, for the candidates of your choice.
But here’s what we must do, more importantly. And this gets back to the importance of the love that I’m talking about. We must find ways to come together and actually acknowledge and get to know each other as people. And don’t think that that’s mere sentiment. Bill Bishop, in that book The Big Sort, talks about how America has basically resegregated itself. People listen to news media that give them reinforcement of the views they already hold. People who watch MSNBC do not watch Fox News, in all likelihood, and vice versa. My point is, we have actually — people who live in various ZIP codes, we know there are blue ZIP codes, and there are red ZIP codes, and there are a couple of purple ones and different ones. But people live together with people they already agree with. We must find a way to come together as people with differences, first on common ground, that we’re all children of God, no matter who we are.