The Jubilee Year of American Politics

This post was originally posted in September on a now defunct Blog. I felt it worth saving.


Today I want to remember a meeting held on the evening of December 5, 1955 at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. This meeting marks the eve of the modern Civil Rights Movement in America, although the overflowing congregation had no way of knowing that. The cause of this meeting was the arrest of a member of their church—Rosa Parks—for the crime of failing to relinquish her seat on the bus to a white man, “which was a much resented customary practice at the time,” as Ms. Parks later wrote. That morning, she had been found guilty of violating the segregation laws of her state.

The purpose of this meeting was to form the Montgomery Improvement Association which would be responsible for organizing their community’s protest of Rasa Parks’ humiliating arrest and subsequent conviction. These were deemed to be a clear violation of her civil rights as described and guaranteed in America’s founding documents. The community had previously decided upon a boycott of the Montgomery bus system and the Reverend Martin Luther King was elected to serve as president of the association.

That evening he delivered an eloquent call-to-arms that deserves to be read by every patriotic American, but my purpose here is to focus upon his definition of justice and to argue for its continual application in our political process. I believe this application to be the particular civic duty of all participating Christians. Whenever we speak of patriotism, his definition of justice should not be far from our thoughts and reflections.

These are the relevant sentences spoken that evening by Dr. King. They should not be overlooked.

“Let us be Christian in all our actions; but I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love—love that is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice, and justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”

Too often we think of justice as mere punishment for wrong doing; something that is opposed to mercy. But Martin Luther King had a more correct and comprehensive view of this matter: justice and mercy are both arms of God’s love. I think this definition offers a particular help to Latter-day Saints as they contemplate the relationship between love and mercy as it is describe in the Book of Mormon.

We find in that book two passages which, on the surface, seem to contradict one another. The first is found in Alma 42:25 wherein this question is asked and answered:

Do you suppose that mercy can rob justice? No, not one bit. If so, God would cease to be God.

Earlier, however, a seemingly different claim is made. In Alma 34:15. There we are taught that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ overpowers justice with mercy. For years, I owned the notion that justice stood aside in awe of such love. This was how a dear friend of mine reconciled those two passages. I see now that that was a partial truth at best. It is better not to separate Mercy and Justice into conflicting entities. Rather, we should say that mercy, while it cannot rob justice any more that we can rob our selves, can nevertheless overpower justice in the same way that we have been overpowered by our own emotions. Love, for instance. How many of us have not been overpowered—smitten, if you like—by love? Justice and mercy, then, are two of the attributes of God and, as the Gospel proclaims, God is love.


By Dr. King’s definition, in harmony with the Book of Mormon, justice is love in correction and mercy is love in preservation. Simply put, justice corrects while mercy saves. This concept, I believe, is of critical importance when Christians consider candidates for political office. It is critical because—as the prophets have shown us—a nation is held accountable for justice in its own society. Our nation will either be corrected or preserved depending on how we as Americans handle the nagging questions of justice and mercy that are still being asked of us.


Here are some of the nagging questions that we face:

Economic Equality. In a wonderfully ignored passage of scripture, the Lord says that it is not given that one man should possess too much above another and that, because of this, the world lies in sin (see Doctrine and Covenants 49:20). This seems to be a nice summation of Old Testament prophetic teaching. In our day, the middle class is being erased and the inequality between the rich and poor is beginning to threaten the fabric of our democratic society.
War. Here I am listing war as an issue of social equality rather than a moral issue in its own right. The question is, shouldn’t the generation that decides to make war pay for it? America is now engaged a war being fought on two fronts, but we are not paying for it. Instead, we are borrowing money from other nations—China, for example—and shouldering our children and grandchildren with a debt that will exceed 1.5 trillion dollars. We went into this war being told by the Administration that the war would pay for itself through oil production; but that hasn’t and was never going to happened. We should also ask if it is right to wage a massive war with an all volunteer army that is filled. The burden of this war is being borne unfairly and this is a concern America must address in this election.

Health Care. It seems clear that Jewish and Christian scripture hold society accountable for the treatment of the sick and afflicted among us. It is simply unjust to insist that all Americans pay their own way to save their own lives while, at the same time, we allow our economy to sweep its middle class into poverty. Is affordable health care a right or a privilege that belongs to fewer and fewer Americans as corporations surrender their health insurance policies to the demands of the new global economy?

Global Warming and Environmental Degradation. It may come as a surprise to most Latter-day Saints to learn that we do not in fact believe in private property, but that is the case. We believe in stewardship and one cannot be an owner and a steward of the same thing at the same time. We hold the earth in trust. It is not ours to do with as we please. And yet, that is what we have done and as a result our planet is in imminent danger of an ecological catastrophe unrecorded in human history. As stewards who hold the land in trust, we have not only been burying our talent but also toxic and radioactive waste. We have been poisoning the earth’s atmosphere for generations and pretending that when the landowner returns he will save us. But that’s not the way the parable goes.

Corporate Power. There was something fundamentally unsound about the concept of incorporation in the beginning; I would almost say antichrist. The sole reason for incorporation is the avoidance of personal responsibility and accountability. Men and women with an idea to make money want to get rich, but should things go wrong, they do not want to lose the money they have garnered. And so they come together and incorporate themselves; in other words, they create under law a fictitious individual who does not exist in reality. They then siphon off corporate profits annually into their individual bank accounts. When children start dying from cancer downwind; when women become infertile because of the side effects of their product; or when a bridge collapses due to faulty materials that were used in its construction, not one of these individuals can be held accountable in a court of law—only the comparatively threadbare corporation. Now, in our lifetimes, corporations have become fantastically global, owing no allegiance to the core principles of anything so old fashioned as a nation state, to say nothing of a community or a neighborhood. The only imperative that is left for many of them is to win and to increase the wealth of their investors. The power of the individual ballot becomes anemic as corporations continue to inject the steroids they demand from our elected officials—the tax breaks and laws of special circumstance.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to bring the scriptures together in an order that will address these concerns—God willing. But I end today’s column grateful for C. S. Lewis, who pointed out to me in his slim but wonderful book, Reflections on the Psalms, that there are those who are anxious for justice in this world; not only those who cower in its face. He points out that the typically Christian image of judgement puts us in the dock as defendant, as is demonstrated in the parable of the sheep and goats. There is another image, however, typically Jewish but also sanctioned by our Lord. Here we are seen not in a criminal case as before, but in a civil trial. Here we are the plaintive, as in the parable of the Unjust Judge. Here the difficulty faced by a widow is not to avoid the courtroom but to get into it. On the Day of Judgment, Lewis assures us, “hundreds and thousands of people who have been stripped of all they possess and who have right entirely on their side will at last be heard.” Our duty as Christian voters is to try to see to it that they will not have to wait that long.

We must try, as Dr. King and the widow in this parable tried, to ensure a recalculation of God’s love during the jubilee year of American political life; a redistribution of God’s blessings over which many claim ownership, when in truth we are merely stewards. In a democracy, it becomes our responsibility to thus heed the call of the prophet Micah, to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.