Though some may argue religion has no place in politics, Nancy Petty, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, says that faith can have a powerful role to play.
“I think that religion in political life of our society can be a very healthy thing when it engages people in dialogue,” she said in an interview with Frank Stasio on The State of Things.
The statement was part of a larger conversation about religion and public life. It included Petty, and three professors who are taking part in a Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.
Jose Casanova, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, is one of the initiative’s speakers. He told Stasio that whether people like it or not, religion is going to mix with political ideas.
“In every conflict, in every political transformation, you had pastors and ministers on both sides of the barricades,” he said. “Even from the same denominations.”
Religion has long been a powerful motivator in battle, and that is no different in much of modern warfare. Even in the United States, according to Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of religion and Islamic studies at Duke.
“Oftentimes, you see our soldiers, for instance, going into the battlefield with certain kinds of religious war cries that they have emblazoned on their t-shirts,” he said.
But, Luke Bretherton, associate professor of theological ethics at Duke, said that religion still plays an irreplaceable role in human life, especially when it comes to things like birth, death, one’s place in a community and how to live a moral life.
“This is always, in a sense, part of what we might call religion in terms of how do we make sense of the world within a larger frame of reference.”
The conversation will continue when Jose Casanova speaks on the subject at Duke on February 19th.
