Anglicaning for trouble in Zimbabwe

(Photo of Ugandan Anglican clergy by BBC)

According to an article by Libby Purves onTimesonline, "nearly all Anglican churches in Zimbabwe have been forcibly closed by police."

For someone from the paradisaical land of Florida, US, the situation in Zimbabwe is very confusing. It might be funny except it is so sad.

The man who was or is the Anglican bishop of Harare, the capital, Nolbert Kunonga, is a supporter of "Mr. Big," President Robert Mugabe. Kunonga claims that he has broken from the Anglican communion because the Anglican communion has become apostate by not properly condemning homosexuality.

The Anglican Church disputes that. The Anglican Church says Bishop Kunonga was dethroned and in response the rascal "promptly occupied the cathedral, grabbed the church money, and made dozens of his friends bishops."

So the Anglican Church replaced Kunonga with Bishop Sebastian Bakare.

Unfortunately for the Anglican Church, that did not have a big impact on Kunonga. In fact, according to The New York Times, the Zimbabwe "Supreme Court ordered Kunonga to share dozens of churches in Harare, the capital, with followers of Sebastian Bakare ... [but] church officials and parishioners said the police had continued to harass and lock out the bulk of the city's Anglicans.

"'The police have continued to brutalize our people, which is sad,' said Bishop Albert Chama, the dean of the Anglican Province of Central Africa. 'This is political interference. I'm sure the police are getting orders from above. They're protecting Kunonga."

There will be a presidential runoff election in Zimbabwe on June 27. Of course the police are protecting Kunonga. Kunonga supports the president. So the president sent in troops to protect Kunonga's position against the other "legitimate" Anglican bishop.


Zimbabwe has two problems we want to avoid in this country. Unfortunately, in spite of our constitutional separation of church and state, we have been caught up in both of them.

In the United States, as in Zimbabwe, orders of the Supreme Court have been ignored by the president or executive branch with neither penalty nor reprisal! One example is the Climate Report the White House was ordered to release four years ago. For four years, President Bush ignored a direct order of the Supreme Court. The White House released the report the other day only because of intense political pressure.

The second problem has hit us more tangentially than head-on. The president in Zimbabwe is able to utilize the police to strengthen his political position by locking out the opposition. He simply had the police lock the churches of a bishop opposed to his regime.

Not long ago, the Bush administration attempted something similar. The White House tried to shut down a perceived "enemy," an Episcopal (Anglican) priest in Pasadena, California, by sending in the IRS with accusations he was using the pulpit to make political pronouncements and thereby threatening to take away his church's tax-exempt status. The Bushites went after this priest because he was, in their opinion, speaking negatively of Bush's god-instructed war in Iraq.

In this case, the Bush administration's perverse hypocrisy is blinding. While Bush's IRS minions are knocking on the door of an Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, fundamentalist right wing Christian churches throughout the rest of the country are blatantly and openly working to get Bush re-elected to the presidency. This effort was so obvious and so patently partisan that even a few mega-church pastors complained that the "evangelical" wing of the Christian Church had become another political wing of the Republican Party.


There's ultimately only one answer that will suffice: As I understand it, the law now reads that a pastor or religious institution may not openly endorse a political candidate or political party. That means a pastor cannot stand up in his pulpit and tell the people he thinks Mike Huckabee is God's candidate for president. The church cannot publish literature suggesting to parishioners that God wants them to vote for Mr. Huckabee.

That's no longer good enough. The law should be changed to read that under no circumstances may a clergyperson or a religious organization (that would include such groups as Focus on the Family) so much as hint that one political candidate or one political party is more acceptable to God or to Zeus than another candidate or party. Clergy and religious organizations may not engage in any political activity whatsoever as clergy and religious organizations.

That means a clergyperson can, from the pulpit, discuss an unlimited bunch of biblical and spiritual stuff -- immorality, irreverence, and sexual deviance, etc., as well as the need for social responsibility, political involvement, and the fact that the Bible claims God desires mercy not sacrifice, or that Jesus said "Do unto others..." but that clergyperson cannot say that one candidate or one political party is closer to meeting God's requirements than another.

Nor may a religious group publish voter's "guides," or provide transportation to voting precincts, the latter being fraught with the unstated expectation that such a benefit be repaid by voting in the "right" way.

Clergy and parishioners may, of course, vote and pass out leaflets in the neighborhood like anyone else. A clergyperson, in the privacy of his/her home, or as an anonymous flag-waver on a street corner, may comment on the political situation to his heart's content. He may not, however, stand in front of a group and say, as a clergyperson, that he endorses Joe Blow for dog-catcher!

If John Hagee publicly proclaims he endorses John McCain, Hagee's tax-exempt career is over! If Jeremiah Wright says he endorses Al Sharpton, he'll get a visit from the IRS. If James Dobson says that McCain is not qualified to be president, his tax-exempt status is gone, and Focus on the Family becomes one with all us poor folks who fully fund the work of the government.

So be it!