By Father Jonathan Morris
FOX News Religion Contributor

The growing trend by some secularists of trying to silence all moral voices (with the exception of their own) in relation to social policy is tantamount to a new strand of fascism.

To justify their stance they usually point to the good principle of a proper separation of the jurisdictions of church and state and then suggest—wrongly—that it was meant to keep people of religious motivation from influencing public affairs.

Here’s an e-mail I received recently from a person I will call “Jim”:

“Church happens on Sunday and I invite you to keep it that way. If you keep trying to influence the election process by talking in terms of right and wrong you are no better than Rev. Wright. At least he spoke the truth, something you obviously can’t handle. Have you ever listened to yourself? You talk in terms of absolutes and the only absolutely true thing in all of this is that you and all of the other religious fanatics in our country are tearing us apart. Go away.”

Jim’s argument and tone certainly don’t represent all secularists. Honest and conscientious people, whether politically conservative or liberal, religious or not, know it is simply wrong (there we go again) to divorce politics from moral scrutiny. After all, a government’s responsibility is the ordering of society and this requires differentiating between what is good and bad on many different levels. We call this right ordering the pursuit of the “common good.” Perhaps the best definition of the common good is the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.

This lofty goal is shared by all, but as this next e-mail below from “Jill” demonstrates, things get complicated when we take the necessary step of evaluating policy:

“I just watched you speak on FOX News this morning & I am ashamed of you & the Catholic Church for injecting yourselves in a political arena. I am a Catholic myself. I attended St Francis High School (Catholic School) & I believe in respecting the culture of life. But for you to openly put down Obama for his lack of pro-life stance & for you to praise Bush for his “culture of life” tour when he campaigned, then you encourage McCain to speak more of these values to get more votes is all hypocritical! How can any person, including a church, endorse Bush, McCain or any candidate that supports war? War kills and maims. It destroys people’s spirits and souls. The soldiers who kill are committing a mortal sin, innocent lives are taken in war and they are called collateral loss. How shameful of you representing my church. You talk of pro-life & dignity of life when you clearly support McCain- someone who wants to continue this unjust & horrifying war. Why don’t you visit & preach to our poor veterans living on the streets, hiding in the hills, committing suicide, divorce rates higher than the national average. If you are going on television wearing your uniform & representing the church than I would expect to hear compassion for the victims of war, any & all victims & how the church is trying to help these people & to talk of culture of life including all stages of life, not just a fetus in the womb. You are a hypocrite, but then again you appeared on Fox news which is the most biased, Bush adoring, right leaning, small & narrow minded network in America. God Bless you & all the pro-life hypocrites who support war. What would Jesus do?”

There are too many ideas in this one e-mail message to respond to all of them here, but I would like to offer a few points which I think are relevant to all of us:

1) I don’t think pastors, priests, and churches should endorse any candidate or party. This said, all of us have a tremendous responsibility to critique platforms and policy of our politicians and their parties. Religious leaders and institutions that remain neutral on moral issues are being negligent in their duty to inform our conscience so that we, in turn, can make a free and educated decision when we go into the voting booth.

2) The goal of respecting all human life and dignity, as “Jill” suggests, should be applied to all social policy, including decisions about war. Her implication, however, if I understand it correctly, is that Senator McCain is “pro-war” and Senator Obama is “pro-peace”, therefore a “pro-life” voter can’t in good conscience vote for McCain. This reasoning is overly simplistic. If Senator McCain’s foreign policy platform included the promise to invade this or that country and kill many people in the process, then, yes, I could see more clearly her point. As far as I know, that is not his plan. To take this same point even further, I would question a church’s or any organization’s judgment if, in the name of peace, it called for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. The United States now has special obligations to the Iraqi people, regardless of the decision to invade the country.

3) One of the most common failings I see in the general public’s moral logic is forgetfulness of the principle of the “hierarchy of values”. The reason many pro-life voters will not vote for Obama –even if they like him as a person and agree with some of his plans for the country –is that they understand a person’s right to life cannot be considered just one among many equally important rights. For this reason, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, the fact that Senator Obama has always been a huge supporter of legal abortion and even voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion in Illinois, has great weight. Do some pro-life voters get blinded by the abortion issue and fail to see the importance of other pro-life issues (poverty, health care, immigration policy, etc.)? Yes. It is my experience, however, that a more common mistake is the lumping all of these issues together without noting their relative values.

4) I prefer not to use the mantra “What would Jesus do?” to support my take on social policy because I don’t think the answer is always so clear. Putting Jesus in one’s corner in complicated debates is presumptuous, at best, and in some cases, downright sacrilegious.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on all of this.

God bless,

Father Jonathan

Father Jonathan Morris is author of the new book, “The Promise: God’s Purpose and Plan for when Life Hurts”. For information go to www.fatherjonathan.com