Francis Wilkinson from the New York Times recalls an interview with John McCain two years ago in which the senator told the story about leading worship services for other POWs during captivity in Vietnam. The sermon McCain recounts gives clues to his ideas about God and government. From the article:

I was intrigued by a passage in which he described leading religious services in Hanoi for fellow prisoners of war. “Not because of my particular excess of religious zeal,” he explained, “but because I’d gone to that boarding school and, of course, to the [Naval] Academy, where you had to go to chapel. So I knew all the words to the service.”Here’s Mr. McCain’s description of a sermon he delivered :

One day I talked about the parable of when they asked Christ whether they should pay taxes and he held up a coin and said, “Render unto Caesar, etc.” My point was and still is that when we were flying in combat, we weren’t doing God’s work. We were doing Caesar’s work. So for us to go to prison and then ask God to get us out was not fair to God, to our religion, to our beliefs and to ourselves. It wasn’t a miracle that sent a SAM [surface-to-air missile] to hit my airplane. It was a guy, a technician at a SAM site.

I think it was important, a little bit for the stability factor, that it wasn’t God who was going to perform a miracle, end the war and bring us home. It was men. It was Caesar. I think the majority of those guys felt the way I did but we just had some, just as people turn to faith healing and that kind of stuff, we had some of that. A lot of times I would pray for strength and I think sometimes I got it. Pray for patience to get through the next minute when things were bad. I just don’t think it’s fair to expect too much out of what is basically not the Lord’s business.

Read the whole article here.The summer issue of Leadership journal, which mails later this month, will focus on precisely the problem that McCain raises here. The issue is titled “Render Unto: Caesar’s Place in God’s Work.” It should spark plenty of debate.

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