Selfishness Cancels Out Spirituality : The Christian Coalition would undermine our freedoms and the ethic of tolerance on which America was built.

It is not as a single working mother, a pro-choice advocate or a Jew that I find the Christian Coalition’s so-called contract with the American family so disturbing, but as a spiritual person, taught to equate religion with love. This contract distorts the values it purports to embrace, the ones many of us hold dear.

A political document that takes the Bible as its starting point in restoring and elevating morality in American society would be welcome, indeed. After all, the Christian Coalition is correct when it declares that “the American people are increasingly concerned about the coarsening of the culture, the breakup of the family and a decline in civility.” But the Bible’s wisdom on how to treat others is hardly evident here.

* Doing God’s work: The Bible lists 13 attributes of God and assumes that these are the qualities to be cultivated in men and women as well. “The Lord, the Lord God,” cries out Moses in Exodus 34, “merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” Who is this God that the faithful are seeking to come close to? One who inspires us to compassion, generosity, tolerance and most of all to acts of loving kindness in our treatment of one another, whether we agree or disagree on any particular issue.

Sadly, however, the Christian Coalition’s contract reveals no such largess nor a social-action agenda based on concern for the have-nots. In fact, it rips apart the intricate national safety net that every charity and social-service agency (including those run by religious institutions) depends upon. These religious agencies today are among those most profoundly concerned with the threatened budget cutbacks already in the House bill, which the Christian Coalition would cut back even further. Do not put a stumbling block before the blind, says Leviticus. But if this contract passes, the widowed, orphaned, aging and homeless will find more pain lies ahead.

* Do not separate yourself from the community. Selfishness and the religious spirit cannot easily walk side by side. Every spiritual discipline prescribes responsibility for the common well-being. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” is not a statement of resentment but a reminder to create secular governments that protect the common good. Yet this contract would break down existing safeguards by destroying the public school system through vouchers and lowering the government’s tax base.

* Tolerance. Thirty-three times, the Bible reminds us to “remember the stranger, for you were a stranger in the land of Egypt.” Respect for the stranger leads to a respect for differences and the privacy of religious and personal ideals. Yet with its proposed “religious equality amendment,” opening the public school and square to prayer and ritual, the contract denies the most basic respect and protections, especially the right to be left alone.

* Forgiveness. Religious people in this country have without question been humiliated, stereotyped and oppressed by insensitive school administrators, government officials and arbiters of secular society. Americans, particularly those in big cities, until recently either laughed at or were terrified of religious impulses, and thus worked overtime to have the religious instinct suppressed. But the vengeance toward others and intolerance reflected here is hardly the answer. A new generation of Americans has taken religion as its own. We know it for what it is: a way to open the human heart, not to close off others with whom we don’t agree.

The big job in the United States today is to respect religious and cultural differences and ensure rights even for those who don’t believe. The Founding Fathers’ guidance on this still holds: The greatest reflection of a religious society is the imposition of no religion at all.