Great story about a Conservative Christian
Via Religion News Service.
American Christians could take a lesson from Angela Merkel (COMMENTARY)
American Christians could take a lesson from Angela Merkel (COMMENTARY)
(RNS) Time magazine’s
2015 “Person of the Year” is a self-identified conservative Christian, but not
one of the many running for president of the United States. While the dynamics
of faith and politics are different in Europe, German leader Angela Merkel is
an example of a conservative Christian living out her faith in the public
square quite differently than we see in the U.S.
Time, which calls her
“Chancellor of the Free World,” characterizes her strong leadership of
economic and political crises in Europe as “no flair, no flourishes, no
charisma, just a survivor’s sharp sense of power and a scientist’s devotion to
data.” She may be a quantum chemist, but she’s also an Evangelical Lutheran
preacher’s kid with an unwavering faith.
The chancellor has
described her personal faith in several interviews. “The structure of the world
relating to belief is a framework for my life that I consider very important,” she said in one. “I
believe in God, and religion is also my constant companion, and has been for
the whole of my life,” she told a theology student during a video interview in 2012.
She kept her faith mostly quiet up until that point, which is understandable
given the rising secularization of Germany.
She has held firm to
her socially conservative belief that marriage is the sacred union of one man
and one woman. (She has also voted against abortion rights.) But unlike
conservative Christians in America, she has strongly favored anti-discrimination
legislation. “Wherever we still find discrimination, we will continue to
dismantle it,” she told influential YouTube star Florian Mundt.
Merkel’s faith-based
leadership stands in stark contrast to her Christian conservative cousins in
the United States.
Her shift on social
issues has upset the more extremist faction within her Christian Democratic
Union party, according to the New Republic. She
angered right-wing Catholics on issues such as gay rights, abortion, stem cell
research and the family. And in the process, she “opened up the prim party to
other kinds of conservatives, even ones who happened to be single mothers, gay,
or from another country.”
But she wasn’t named
Time’s Person of the Year for her stances on domestic social issues. She
received the honor, according to Time editor Nancy Gibbs, because “Merkel brandished a different set of values —
humanity, generosity, tolerance — to demonstrate how Germany’s great strength
could be used to save, rather than destroy.” That’s been on display nowhere
more than her advocacy for religious tolerance in light of terrorism and the
Syrian refugee crisis.
That advocacy is
rooted in her own faith. “We all have the opportunity and the freedom to have
our religion, to practice it and to believe in it,” she has said. “I would like
to see more people who have the courage to say ‘I am a Christian believer,’ and
more people who have the courage to enter into a dialogue.”
Religious intolerance
can’t be the overwhelming guide to public policy. “Fear was never a good
adviser,” she said. “Cultures
that are marked by fear will not conquer their future.”
And her stance is
unequivocal. “Every exclusion of Muslims in Germany, every general suspicion is
forbidden,” she said recently. “We
will not let ourselves be divided.” That faith sets her apart from Christian
conservative politicians in the United States, where fear dominates and the
worst parts of the American psyche are stoked.
She has good advice
for defensive and fearful Germans who are engaging this topic: Go back to
church. She suggests that in light of the debate about Islam, people return to
the “tradition of attending a church service now and then, and having some
biblical foundations.” She says this debate
“could lead us (to) deal again with our own roots and to know them
better.” That’s good advice for American Christians as well. For Americans,
both constitutional and Christian foundations call for religious freedom. Going
back to church would, in no uncertain terms, undermine the calls for religious
vetting of immigrants.
Time has named a
conservative Christian as Person of the Year, perhaps just the type that the
United States and the world needs.
(Guthrie
Graves-Fitzsimmons writes about faith and public policy. From 2011 to 2015, he
worked at the National Immigration Forum mobilizing Christians to advocate for
the value of immigrants and immigration to America. Follow him at @guthriegf)
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