2nd Opinion: Advice for a new year: Remember

Several historical milestones occurring in 2009 offer religious communities and their spiritual leaders some extraordinary teaching moments. These milestones demand attention within America’s churches, synagogues and mosques.

The events include Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday; two 1929 anniversaries, the 80th birthday of Martin Luther King and the start of the Great Depression; and the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II and with it, the beginning of the mass murders of the Holocaust.

Lincoln is widely acknowledged as our greatest president, and as President-elect Barack Obama prepares for his Jan. 20 inauguration, he clearly is channeling the Civil War president in several ways.

Obama has assembled a “Team of Rivals” akin to Lincoln’s cabinet. Like Lincoln, Obama also will travel by rail to Washington for Inauguration Day. The nation’s first African-American president will take his oath of office on the Bible used by Lincoln at his 1861 inauguration. In an exquisite twist of history, Obama and his family soon will take up residence in the White House that was built with slave labor.

Lincoln’s birthday in February is a reminder the struggle to achieve full civil rights for all Americans remains unfinished. In 2009, religious leaders need to zero in on the continuing bigotry and prejudice based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age, physical disability or national origin.

Pastors, rabbis and imams should remind their congregations the assassinations of both Lincoln and King, about a century apart, are permanent stains on our oft-proclaimed national commitment to public morality and domestic tranquility. Religious leaders would do well to read again—or for the first time—the powerful and eloquent words of Lincoln and King, two of America’s best sermonizers, especially Lincoln’s second inaugural address and King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Today’s economic crisis has been rightly or wrongly compared to the financial crash that started four score years ago. What merits no debate, however, is the fact this is a major catastrophe that already has painfully impacted tens of millions, with no end of the misery in sight.

Over the years, the bitter trauma of 1929 faded from both our national memory bank and our individual consciousness. As a result, several generations of Americans, including my own, grew up believing in the endless upward spiral of housing prices, aggressive hedge funds, a constantly expanding job market, rising incomes and an unlimited menu of new consumer goods designed to provide instant gratification and a sense of status and entitlement.

It now is easy to criticize those preachers who for years publicly equated excessive material possessions and financial wealth with God’s will. Such glib pastors, many of them TV celebrities, always were false prophets at best or charlatans at worst.

And, of course, the barons and wizards of Wall Street have “richly” earned the intense distrust of most Americans.

But also guilty are the “respectable” Main Street clergy and lay leaders who venerated investment bankers and money managers while happily forgetting that the law of gravity also applies to the balance sheets of religious institutions, not just the general economy.

Studs Terkel’s book, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, seems to be an oxymoron. How can any war be “good”? But now with 70 years of hindsight, it is clear German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism had to be defeated, no matter the horrific cost. Terkel believed World War II was America’s last “good” or “just” war. Korea, Vietnam and the Iraqi conflicts all were filled with moral, political and ethical ambiguities, but not World War II and the Holocaust.

In 1998, the Vatican issued We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah. Many churches mark Holocaust Day with memorial interfaith commemorations. As 2009 dawns, George Santayana said it best: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us. His column is distributed by Religion News Service.