'Is it not better to openly acknowledge the cross-fertilization and allow others to agree or disagree as they will?'

Last Easter, I didn’t get to Church early enough to get a seat. Despite there being three morning Eucharists in a church that seats a thousand, getting there a quarter of an hour early just wasn’t enough. I ended up in the church hall, video-linked to the main service.

This year I arrived thirty-five minutes early, and as I arrived I saw a queue of people stretching off into the distance, slowly filing into the building only just vacated by the attendees of the previous service. Fortunately, by means of offering to help out with the service, I had succeeded in getting a seat reserved for me right up near the front.

The service was spectacular. Two choirs were singing, the inside of the building was smothered in flowers, the numerous clergy were arrayed in the best festal gold vestments, and the church had hired a small brass ensemble to bolster the efforts of the organist. The whole effect was so celebratory and charged with emotion that I was choked up with tears before we’d even got properly into the first hymn.

The Rector’s sermon did not disappoint, either. He comes from a southern Baptist background, and has inherited something of that fire-and-brimstone style of preaching - which he then marries with a distinctive liberal theology. The radical juxtaposition of style and content is breathtaking.

In passing, he mentioned the Terri Schiavo case - the poor woman over whom was raging a prolonged court battle regarding whether or not to remove the feeding tube that was keeping her alive. President Bush famously returned from vacation in order to sign a bill that brought the Schiavo case under federal, rather than state, jurisdiction. A shame, suggested our Rector, that President Bush was not prepared to put similar effort into drafting legislation that might prolong the lives of (for example) soldiers and civilians in Iraq.

The Schiavo news story has been hugely controversial in the States over the past few weeks. I have rarely heard any issue discussed so often and so intensely. A friend initiated a dialogue about the subject in his blog (on-line diary) - and was eventually forced to delete the whole discussion because it became so heated and nasty.

It seems to strike chords in so many different ways. The personal autonomy issue, centred around the fact that others were making decisions about Ms Schiavo’s life on her behalf. The religious issues concerning the right to life, or the right to a dignified death, and who has the right to make such decisions. The humanitarian issues about whether her eventual mode of death was cruel. And, certainly not insignificantly, the political issues.

Thus, in the past couple of weeks, I have been exposed to what I consider the best, and the worst of American religious life. The church I go to truly made the celebration of Easter the joyful event it should be, and it was packed to bursting with parishioners determined to share in that celebration. Contrast this with the deliberate and contemptible exploitation of the Schiavo case by the government in order to curry favour with the large Christian conservative sector of the population.

America is a highly religious country. I am no advocate of the Established Church in the UK (despite the fact that I used to be paid by it!), but the rigid American seHow can one separate one’s religious ideals from one’s political ideals? Is it not better to openly acknowledge the cross-fertilization and allow others to agree or disagree as they will?paration of Church and State seems artificial to me.

It is not an easy thing to try and analyse the effect of the separation of religious and political life. It is my impression though, that paradoxically, it results in religion impinging more upon public life than it does in the UK - and in oddly perverted and insidious ways.

Personally I find I am grateful that Terri Schiavo has passed away. She deserves some peace. What the lasting effect the end of her life will have on American politics is another question.

Anglican priest from the UK, who moved to California in July 2003.

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