BOB ABERNETHY, host: Violent demonstrations broke out in Haiti this week over allegations of fraud in the recent presidential election—this on top of the growing cholera epidemic. Several relief organizations say the unrest has been preventing them from treating the thousands of Haitians suffering from the illness. More than 2,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have become sick. Our managing editor Kim Lawton has been talking to relief workers in Haiti. Kim, what do they tell you?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, they’re telling me that the situation is a lot more difficult than many people here may realize. The political unrest, protests in the streets, sometimes violent clashes have really created a situation where it’s hard for people to get around. Many of the relief groups and the faith-based groups have been on lockdown for several days in Port-au-Prince, but also in other cities around Haiti.

ABERNETHY: Lockdown meaning they don’t go anywhere?

LAWTON: They are told don’t go anywhere. Don’t go on the streets. And I understand that you can’t even get anywhere if you try to get on the streets. There are these big barricades and even stones and rocks. Sadly, Haitians are dragging rubble from the earthquake that still hasn’t been cleared away—they are dragging that into the streets so people can’t get around, which means the workers can’t get to the cholera clinics. They can’t get to the rebuilding projects, and it just puts all of that help further back.

ABERNETHY: And as you indicated it does seem as if it’s worse than a lot of us had thought.

LAWTON: Well, as you know I was supposed to be down there right now with a TV crew for our program, and our flight got cancelled. There was an Episcopal delegation with the presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church. Their flight got—their plans got canceled, postponed anyway. They are trying to figure out what to do. A lot of people can’t come and go because the airports have been closed. That’s how bad the situation has been.

ABERNETHY: Yeah, and all this pent-up furry from a year ago when the earthquake—almost a year—when the earthquake hit, it just must have magnified the response to the election results.

LAWTON: Well, some of the people I have been talking to say this protest and all of this violence isn’t just about politics and the election. It’s about the frustration of the people and their plight so long with, you know, not having a place to live. A million-and-a-half people still living in tents and tarps, now the cholera epidemic, and they’re just very frustrated.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks.

Tweet

After I cast my ballot, I began, somewhat covertly, to cry. I squeezed my daughter’s shoulder hard enough with love and hope to make her scold me. Then it was off with her to school, and the rest of the day has been a whirl of data-entry, driving voters to the polls, getting balloons for this evening’s party, and generally participating in the highly oxygenated anxiety that is a party’s local headquarters on the day of the election. I found it deeply exciting, but also humbling, even awe-inspiring, in a way for which I wasn’t fully prepared.

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the curious, and not entirely unhappy, coincidence of meanings in the word “election.” On the one hand, citizens elect representatives; on the other, prevalent in the faiths stemming from Abraham, God elects humans–first a people to be God’s messengers and representatives to the world, and then, through them (but not canceling out their election), and in Christ, all of humanity to be God’s children. An election is something someone does, to be sure; but it is also something that happens to people, as well. There is a remarkable coordination of theological and political significance in “election,” and it is worth noting–if only to resist the powerful idolatrous temptations it presents to us.

Those temptations have such power, not least because they identify quite profound resonances between politics and theology in general. After all, so much of politics, as it exists today in this impatient, petulant, risibly sin-riddled world, is waiting. We wait at rope lines for candidates to pass; we wait for election returns to arrive late at night, faces pale in the sterile glow of TV screens; we wait while a canvasser reads us his talking points on the phone, or urges us to support her candidate on our doorstep.

Less obviously, we wait for our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers and new acquaintances to enumerate, in what often seems to us inexplicably, narcissistically meticulous detail, why their chosen candidate or cause is obviously the only right one, wondering all the while where to begin in disputing their whole way of seeing the world. Sometimes we must even wait for our own minds to make up their opinions on issues we feel we need to have a view on now, if not yesterday. And always we wait to see–with fear and trembling, if we are pious and wise–whether the political causes we supported ultimately turn out the way we hoped they would turn out. (Usually this means waiting to find out how, precisely, we shall be disappointed.) Much of public life is spent enduring interminable time, when time itself drones on.

And then, sometimes suddenly, a change comes. Everything happens, all at once: deliberation ends, the ballots are cast, the votes counted, decisions made, the New Thing emerges. The old order–which seemed so solid, so firm, so unchanging–is swept away by the unprecedented. Politics is a disconcerting concatenation of kairos and ordinary time, with jarring shifts from one to the other, a kind of wild oscillation between “now” and “not yet,” the world as we know it and the Kingdom coming.

Lord knows there has been enough messianism and enough demonization in this campaign. People on both sides have participated in both of these temptations; I certainly have. It’s obviously a temptation to be avoided.

And yet.

There is, after all, more than a superficial connection between the two realities. People do treat their faith like a simulacrum for politics all the time–assuming that religious differences easily classify all of us in this world, separating us into clear categories. And we all know what it means to treat politics with religious fervor, especially here in the United States. Since the beginning, American politics has been saturated with not just superficial pieties, but with profound theological currents as well. We’ve always been involved with a more or less self-conscious quarrel with God over whose election was more important–God’s election of the people Israel, or our election of our leaders, and behind them, of ourselves.

Beyond these rivalries between America and America’s God, however, there seems to me a still deeper analogy to which we should attend. It lies in the ambiguities of that term “election.”

To be elected is to be marked out in a special way, to be sure. But election is not an unambiguously happy fate. It certainly hasn’t been one for the people Israel. It wasn’t for Jesus Christ. And Christian theology says it should not be understood as one for the graciously elected. The fundamental obligation of God’s elect is to be present before and available to God, to say, in ancient Hebrew, hinneni: “Here I am.” Hinneni was Abraham’s answer to God’s call to sacrifice Isaac, Samuel’s reply to God’s call to become a prophet, the reply of the people Israel in Sinai to God’s election of them as a people. (It was also what Adam and Eve did not say to God in the garden, and what Cain did not say to God after killing Abel.) To say “here I am” is a deceptively simple thing to say; but it leads those who offer it, as a kind of sacrifice to God, to terrible places. It leads, as the risen Jesus says to Peter in the Gospel of John, to death: “When you are an old man, you will stretch out your hands and another will gird you and take you where you do not want to go.” “When Christ calls a man,” the twentieth-century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “he bids him come and die.”

Election to the presidency, too, is hardly an unambiguous blessing. Just look at presidents’ “before” and “after” pictures to see what I mean. George W. Bush looked like he was still uncomfortable in a suit in 2000; now his suits look more at ease than his face, and his once full dark head of hair has become thinner, and unambiguously grey. When Eleanor Roosevelt told Harry Truman that her husband had died, he said, “Eleanor, is there anything I can do for you?” To which Eleanor wisely replied, “Harry, is there anything we can do for you?” No doctor would recommend the job of president to people who cared about their health; no insurance agent would willingly insure a president against death. To be elected president seems, in part, to mean that one is set apart for a certain kind of public suffering. What looks like the polished marble of divine promise turns out, after a few years in the office, to have been the sandstone of simple humanity, forced to wrestle with super-human challenges. Would that we were all a bit more like Eleanor Roosevelt.

Abraham Lincoln at Grant Park in Chicago

Wise presidents seem to know this from the beginning, or at least seem prepared to learn it. Abraham Lincoln famously said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Perhaps, as with God’s election of people, all a president can do is say, “Here I am.” Perhaps all presidents are Abraham.

But in this, as in all things, presidents are simply representatives of the people, the incarnation of the popular will. They suffer for all of us; they take upon themselves what is rightfully ours. If so, our belief that we elect presidents is an illusion; we are simply picking one of us to endure, in a particularly vivid way, what is the rightful desert of all of us. We simply pick someone to be the first to absorb what history throws our way. Our election still rests on events beyond our control. Our election is, once again, consequent to our being elected. Whether by history or God, in this respect, does not matter; what matters is that we receive more than we decide; we are acted upon more than acting, and no one, ironically, more so than the winning candidate, the “leader,” whichever he is, who will now know what it is to be taken by another and led through four years in a way he did not wish to go.

I told you at the beginning of this essay that I was away from home this past weekend. I was in Chicago at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion. Everyone was talking about the election, of course. But few among my fellow conference-goers seemed to realize the fearful symmetry to which we were witnesses. My conference was in the Chicago Hilton and Towers, fronting Grant Park–the same hotel that the 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in, and the same park that saw the famous Chicago “police riot.” On Friday night, I was in the Presidential Suite on the 24th floor of the hotel, facing out on Grant Park. It was in that suite that the newly nominated Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey sat, tears streaming down his face. The tears were not from sadness or despair, but simply from the tear gas rising from the streets outside; but I like to think that Humphrey’s tears were also a premonition of what that convention’s catastrophe foretold for the Democratic Party: forty years in the wilderness.

Last Friday night, looking out the same windows that that tear gas came in, I saw the tents coming up in Grant Park for the Obama victory party. Tonight, God willing, I say, Obama will hold his victory celebration in Grant Park, with the old Hilton looming overhead, a brooding mausoleum of the ironies of history.

History has not ended. It has ironies in store for all of us, and certainly for a President Obama, or a President McCain. Whoever you supported for the presidency, whichever man wins it, whatever your religious beliefs, or irreligious beliefs, or nonreligious beliefs: Say a prayer, or think a good thought, give all best wishes for the man we elect tonight to be our next Abraham, and watch him as he walks out on his stage, out into the open, to say–still innocent of the blades and cudgels already hurtling at him from the future–”Here I am.” In the years to come, may he be faithful to his words.

–Charles Mathewes teaches theology and ethics at the University of Virginia. His most recent books are A THEOLOGY OF PUBLIC LIFE and PROPHESIES OF GODLESSNESS.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Religion continues to be a key factor in American politics, especially during election season, and we will be looking at that over the next several weeks. Today, the vigorous political organizing inside Latino churches. Hispanics are now the largest minority in America. Most Latinos are Democrats, but in recent elections, more and more have voted Republican. However, the debates over immigration reform could change that. Many Hispanics favor more liberal immigration policies than most Republicans have supported. But as Kim Lawton reports, it’s not yet clear how that will affect Hispanic voting.

Reverend Claudio Diaz

KIM LAWTON: Sunday morning at a Hispanic megachurch in Laredo, Texas. Latino evangelicals are praying for comprehensive immigration reform and for the political clout to make it happen.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN (at prayer rally): If we just pray only and leave this place just doing that, amen, it’s not going to make the greatest difference, because in this country that God has given us, the United States of America, the way to make our voice heard is at the ballot box, amen.

LAWTON: In Chicago, Latino Catholics are also praying for immigration reform, and they’re registering new voters outside the church after Mass. Community leaders say the national debates about immigration are mobilizing Hispanics to get involved politically as never before.

Reverend CLAUDIO DIAZ (Archdiocese of Chicago): They want to be part of that process that somehow will determine their lives and their future. So it’s been like a jolt of energy to really have a group of people, you know, be updated, get informed, be organized.

Professor EDWIN HERNANDEZ (Research Fellow, Center for the Study of Latino Religion, University of Notre Dame): Latinos are a sleeping giant that has been awakened as a result of these discussions, no doubt about that.

LAWTON: There are more than 42 million Hispanics in America, but most have not been politically active. In 2004, less than half of all eligible Latino voters actually went to the polls. Experts say an energized and still rapidly growing Hispanic voting bloc could have a huge national impact.

Prof. HERNANDEZ: Both political parties are understanding that, are hearing and listening carefully because their political futures, to a large extent, will depend upon how these alignments ultimately are figured out.

LAWTON: Edwin Hernandez is a research fellow at Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Latino Religion. He says much of the new political activism is centered in Hispanic churches.

Prof. HERNANDEZ: The church is one of those institutions that is owned and operated by the Latino community, and so it is also the place where cultural values are transmitted and preserved and enhanced. The more you participate actively in a particular community of faith, the more you’re likely to absorb and internalize those values and translate that into the public life.

LAWTON: The majority of American Hispanics are Catholic, although evangelical Protestants have been making big inroads. Both Latino Catholic and Protestant churches have framed immigration reform as a moral imperative.

Rev. DIAZ: From the Old Testament we have teachings on, you know, be good to the foreigner, be good to those who are not in your circle. And that teaching has certainly passed to Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The theology is that foreigners are brothers and sisters through the Lord Jesus Christ. That reality cannot be denied and needs to be addressed.

LAWTON: The Catholic Church played a major role in organizing immigration protests in Washington, D.C. and across the country. Now, church leaders are pushing Latino voter registration and education. Father Marco Mercado helped found a group called Priests for Justice for Immigrants.

Reverend MARCO MERCADO (Good Shepherd Catholic Church): We cannot tell people to vote for this party or vote for this guy. But we can tell them you’ve got to go and vote. You’ve got to exercise the right that you have, and this is a moral obligation.

LAWTON: Hispanic Protestants are also mobilizing. In Laredo, Texas, an Assemblies of God Church called Iglesia Cristiana Misericordia is on the frontlines of the immigration battles — literally. It is five miles from the border with Mexico.

Reverend Marco Mercado

Reverend GILBERTO VELEZ (Pastor, Iglesia Cristiana Misericordia): Most of our church is composed of immigrants. Do I have illegal immigrants? I don’t know. I don’t know.

LAWTON: Pastor Gilberto Velez says he doesn’t check the ID cards of the more than 2,000 people who attend his church every Sunday. If he knows they’re illegal, he counsels them to return home. But his church also provides them humanitarian aid. He says his congregation members now realize political decisions often affect their ability to fulfill their mission.

Rev. VELEZ: We’re motivating them and educating them. You know, you want some rights, you need to vote.

LAWTON: In late September, Iglesia Cristiana Misericordia hosted a National Immigration Prayer Rally. The rally was sponsored by a coalition of evangelicals called the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Reverend SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, speaking at rally): Immigration reform is not a conservative or a liberal issue. It’s not a Republican or a Democratic issue. We are involved, the church, because we have a spiritual and a Christian obligation to speak up for those that cannot speak up for themselves.

LAWTON: Conference president Samuel Rodriguez is a key leader in the Hispanic faith-based effort to influence public policy. He and other Latino Protestant pastors have partnered with Democratic politicians on immigration reform, but he has also worked with Republican leaders to support traditional marriage.

Rev. RODRIGUEZ: Both parties understand the power of the Hispanic voting bloc. The largest minority group in America, 42-43 million Hispanics, become the deal breakers of national elections.

LAWTON: Professor Hernandez says Hispanics don’t fit neatly into political categories.

Prof. HERNANDEZ: Conservative on family values, conservative on issues of abortion. On the other hand, there are issues related to education, housing, the job, the economy and issues that have to do with the bread and butter issues of how can we move up the economic ladder that Latinos align themselves in those other issues in a more progressive, liberal side.

LAWTON: Traditionally, Latinos, like other minority groups, tended to vote more with the Democratic Party. But that’s been changing. In 2004, the largest number ever — 40 percent of Latinos — voted Republican in a presidential election. Analysts credit Latino evangelicals for much of that. Hispanic Protestants are one of the fastest growing segments of the Latino electorate. They make up about one-third of all Hispanic voters, and they gave strong support to George W. Bush in the last presidential election. Fifty-six percent of Latino Protestants voted for Bush in 2004, up from 44 percent in 2000.

Rev. RODRIGUEZ: The honeymoon period is over.

LAWTON: Reverend Rodriguez says many Latino evangelicals are now reconsidering their support for Republicans. He says they were troubled by some of the Republican rhetoric during recent congressional immigration debates and they wonder what the party truly stands for.

Rev. RODRIGUEZ: Is it compassionate conservatism, or is it a xenophobic, sort of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino party? That’s a question that has to be answered. I don’t necessarily see Hispanics jumping the bandwagon and overwhelmingly voting Democratic. I do see them holding back and not participating in the voting, in the electoral process, and not going to the ballot box, waiting, all right. Let’s find out really who speaks on behalf of Republicans in America.

LAWTON: At the same time, Rodriguez argues that many Hispanic Christians are uncomfortable with Democratic support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Rev. RODRIGUEZ: I think the Democratic Party has an opportunity of engaging many Hispanic voters. To do so, they would need to move a lot more towards the middle.

LAWTON: I asked him which issues he thinks Hispanic evangelicals will base their votes on this fall.

Rev. RODRIGUEZ: Immigration is right up there. However, they’re looking at life, they’re looking at the continuity and respect to an institution that has been around since the beginning. You know, if they had to pick one or the other, it’s probably going to be life and marriage over immigration. Not that immigration is not important. It’s going to be a tough call.

Prof. HERNANDEZ: It’s a tough issue to know what would trump the other, and I think only time will tell. But at the very core issue the immigration debate is about who we are, and when you put my family, my grandmother, my children — I’m going to protect them, and I’m going to seek their well being at the expense of any other issue.

LAWTON: However things shake down politically, experts agree the mobilization over immigration is creating unprecedented new alliances between various ethnic groups within the Hispanic world and between Catholics and Protestants.

Rev. DIAZ: I think it will leave a mark, and we’re making history.

Prof. HERNANDEZ: Pentecostal pastors, priests, lay Catholic leaders have come together and joined forces to say we as a community may be divided by faith and other areas, but on this issue we’re coming together, because we need to take a stand about the dignity of who Latinos are.

LAWTON: Those alliances are poised to reshape American politics for generations to come. I’m Kim Lawton in Laredo, Texas.