In Sunday's Washington Post, Kathleen Parker commented on Franklin Graham's prayers in the Pentagon parking lot during what would have been his chance to lead a military prayer service - an offer that was withdrawn by the Pentagon. You can read the commentary at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/07/AR2010050704065.html. In his daily blog, Michael Sean Winters reviews her comments in a way that indicates he does not get what she was talking about. You can read his comments at http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=2864.
I think Winters missed her point about the commonality of spiritual experience, which she tried to show with neuroscience, as cited in Barbara Bradley Haggerty's book Fingerprints of God. She contrasted Haggerty's views with Graham's worldview and apparently MSW's on Christian exceptionalism. Her conclusion was that God does not play favorites in making connections - with her proof being that the neurostate associated with prayer is not a result of the act of praying but the result of God responding and establishing some kind of connection. In other words, she is positing the universality (and measurability) of grace.
I agree that God does not play favorites arbitrarily - and certainly not on racial lines. I do believe He does have favorite ontologies, however we are judged based on how we do them as individuals, not groups. Judging groups would not be favored by God under such a theory. Whether one is for or against Jesus is not a matter of self-identification or group identity, but how one conforms their actions to the law of Love. Anyone can do that and group membership does not assure anyone that they are doing it well. What is most exceptional about Jesus were his divinity and universality. Jesus said that if you were doing his work, you were for him - as many of his parables reveal. The judge of the sheep and the goats did not go in for labels, he cared about results - by their fruits ye shall know them.
In recent days, many of the commenters on Winter's daily blog have wondered over the issue of lurkers being led astray (and the state of orthodoxy of the Jesuits and why they employ Winters). To an extent, the left and the right are arguing past each other on many issues. I think conservatives have a fantasy that what they have been taught is immutable and that violating that immutability will lead others astray and into damnation. At the core of this seems to be a belief that the moral law exists for divine happiness rather than human happiness - which is heretical because a God that can be made unhappy is not a god at all (God being happiness itself).
This reminds me of a discussion in ethics class in minor seminary about whether we ought to follow the moral law because doing so makes us completely happy or because the perfection of God demands it. I got a B because I did not believe in a duty to God. We are not necessary for God, God is necessary for us. Once we believe we are necessary for God, we replicate the pride of Lucifer. The fruit of that pride is uncharitability to others, including and especially in the political sphere, where the DC area is ground zero and some of the argument is fiercest. Both sides share some of the blame for this tone, however the greater tragedy is an uncharitable morality on the right that departs from the Law of Love while seeking the letter of the law. This is especially the case in the Church's rather recent teaching that homosexuality is disordered, which has led some Catholic gay teens to suicide. If driving someone to suicide is not leading them astray, I cannot image what is.
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