Rick Santorum, mainline Protestants, politics and spiritual warfare: An Ash Wednesday meditation

While this year's Republican presidential primary candidates were debating tonight in Mesa, Arizona, I was singing in an Ash Wednesday service.

Out in Arizona the candidates treated each other, and CNN's audience of GOP party faithful, to a night of "brittle, passive-aggressive and macho blustering," as a live-blogger for The Guardian put it. Politics as usual, in other words. While they were politicking, I took part in my congregation's first Lenten soup supper, followed by a quick choir rehearsal; an Ash Wednesday communion service; and our regular Wednesday night choir practice after the service.

From the first bowl of soup to the last choir anthem, we spent three hours at church.

Soup suppers during Lent are a Lutheran tradition, one that's shared with Roman Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Methodists and other denominations who follow the seasons of the liturgical year. I don't know how old the tradition is. Early 20th century? But among Lutherans it's as time-honored as hot dish casseroles, Jell-O salad and lutefisk dinners in the church basement.

Ash Wednesday services are even older. The ritual is thought to date back to the 700s, and not too many years later the English homilist Aelfric of Eynsham recorded, "we strew ashes on our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast."

Holy Communion, of course, goes back to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the first Easter. Bby the time a manual known as the Didache or The Teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles was written at some point between 50 and 120 A.D., it was recognized as the most important part of the early Christian liturgy, in a form still recognizable to us today.

Psalm 51 is a traditional part of Ash Wednesday services. It's the penitential psalm that begins, "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving kindness; / in your great compassion blot out my offenses." In our service, it was followed by a general confession, which our pastor introduced by saying:

As disciples of the Lord Jesus we are called to struggle against everything that leads us away from love of God and neighbor. Repentance, fasting, prayer, and works of love -- the discipline of lent -- help us to wage our spiritual warfare.

The confession itself followed the language of an ancient prayer called the Confiteor. First recorded in the eighth century, its language is familiar throughout western Christendom:

Most holy and merciful Father, we confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinned by our own fault in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done and what we have left undone.

After the confession, we sang Christian contemporary settings of "Create in Me a Clean Heart" by Mary Rice Hopkins and "Change My Heart, O God" by songwriter Eddie Espinosa that pick up the familiar language of the Confietor. (That's what our on-the-fly choir rehearsal was for -- to brush up on the service music.) We also sang hymns by John Wesley, 17th-century German chorale writer Paul Gerhardt and 19th-century Welsh composer Joseph Parry.

After the service was over, we had our regular Wednesday night choir practice. It made for a long evening, but you can't sound like much of anything on Sunday if you don't practice on Wednesday.

So for Sunday we worked up a contemporary, very syncopated arrangement of "O God Our Help in Ages Past" by Isaac Watts. And we ran through the 19th-century hymn "Jesus Paid It All," set to a new tune by contemporary pop musician David Clydesdale, and the American folk hymn "Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy" by Marty Parks, a longtime United Methodist choir director who has put together a collection of anthems for small parishes titled O For a Dozen Tongues to Sing. I think that's one of the best titles in the whole world of choral literature.

In the meantime, out in Arizona the Republican presidential candidates were engaged in their own form of spiritual warfare. Well, the effect wasn't exactly spiritual, but they were certainly demonizing President Obama for an alleged "secular agenda" and "phony theology" ... and trash-talking each other while they were at it.

Wednesday's debate capped off a week when somebody -- it's not clear who but speculation points to Mitt Romney's campaign, made sure the media got ahold of a speech that former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum gave in 2008 at Ave Maria University, a very conservative Catholic school in Florida. In it, Santorum suggested that Satan has subverted the mainline Protestant churches, along with academia and popular culture.

Most of the media comment was, predictably enough, breath-takingly superficial. So I went looking for a transcript

In the true spirit of "horse race" coverage, the coverage centered on whether the four-year-old speech will hurt Santorum, or help him, in the presidential preference polls, and his efforts to put the issue behind him. A more nuanced assessment came from freelance writer Michael J. O’Loughlin in the Jesuit magazine America. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, O'Loughlin was troubled by Santorum's "particular understanding of the world and his unique interpretation of Catholicism." He suggested:

Utilizing one’s faith to inform one’s politics is healthy and encouraging, especially when the resulting policies answer the biblical exhortation to protect the poor and marginalized. But claiming that those who differ from you in the values they hold or the worldviews they profess have been influenced by the Devil himself is truly bizarre and perhaps abhorrent.

Most of the news media accounts just quoted little snippets -- sound bites -- from Santorum's speech, and there wasn't enough context to evaluate it. So I tracked down a transcript posted by People for the American Way on its Right Wing Watch website. Santorum's context indeed was what he described as a "spiritual war" in which Satan is successfully "attack[ing] all of our institutions" in America, starting with academic life and moving on to the church and popular culture, He said:

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious, to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.

Imagine my surprise. While I was singing in the choir and taking part in liturgical traditions that go back to the Apostolic church, I thought I was part of the "world of Christianity," too.