Love thy health care enemy, pastors say

STOP SCREAMING! Or should that be "Stop Screaming!" ?

That's the gospel message from pastors trying, in their best church voices, to shut down the shout-down scenes playing out in townhall meetings this summer. The call to Christians addresses everyone regardless of their denominational flag.

The Beatitudes Society, director, the Rev. Anne S. Howard, writes:

I've attended a series of meetings this summer, filled with Christians of all kinds--progressive, evangelical, emergent, conservative, moderate, etc--and the mike-grabber in the room has often been the bully. The bully lobs his torpedoes, his agenda, into the center of the room, and his crescendoing verbiage reduces the others to silence. A few parking-lot whispered regrets follow the bully's outbursts, but nobody else steps up to the proverbial plate, or the mike.

"They will know we are Christians by our... silence?"

The Rev. Brian McClaren's An Open Letter to Conservative Christians in the U.S., On Health Care is circulating widely in progressive circles with a Christian-based case for reform. But reform-or-not, he says, Christians need to come to the conversation with love or face "huge flames of unimagined and unintended destruction."

Even if we disagree on health care reform and other political issues, I hope we can agree that it is time for us to start walking - and talking - more worthy of the calling to which we have been called, to use Paul's words, to speak the truth, and to do so always in love...

Neither do the pastors want to join the shrieking about "death panels" springing from distorted versions of the house bill's Section 1233 which calls for insurance companies to compensate doctors if they have end-of life consultations with patients.

When Christianity Today posted a piece by Rob Moll, headlined, "Will Section 1233 Hasten Patient Deaths?" the comments from pastors were scathing -- of Moll's piece, not Section 1233.

Rev. Charles Roberts wrote:

What a shame that CT has stooped to parroting the rhetoric of the reactive right, which has all but crushed civility in public conversation under its heel ... I'm coming up on 30 years in parish ministry, and I assure you that one thing people desperately need is to have open, informative and enlightening conversations with their doctors about end of life care.

DO YOU THINK... there's a religious case to be made for toning down the heat on health care?
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