By Mara Willard
Last August, to the delight of religion scholars everywhere, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that if he had college to do again, he would major in comparative religion. Kerry made the statement as he installed Shaun Casey as special advisor to lead the State Department’s Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives. Casey, a theologian and seminary professor, beamed at the diplomat’s side, becoming the stand-in for Kerry’s unrealized formation in religious studies.
Shortly thereafter, I visited Casey at his new office at the State Department, which on that Wednesday felt unsettled. The air bristled with anticipation over the Obama administration’s response to chemical attacks on Syrian civilians. Casey’s office was hosting some of that tension. I walked in following his meeting with representatives of a peace church who insisted that he urge Secretary Kerry against military strikes. “Boy, did I get an earful,” Casey said. “They told me the usual: that violence begets violence, that we were showing a ‘failure of imagination.’ I told them they had to do better than that. That I can’t go down the hall to the Secretary’s office and tell him he has ‘a failure of imagination.’”
This tone of Niebuhrian realism is half-ironic. Casey was raised in the Church of Christ, a brand of Christian evangelicalism that was once pacifistic. By his era, however, that tradition had lost its radical Protestant commitment to Christian peace, and today it comfortably embraces the nationalist message of “Support Our Troops.” Casey describes a formative experience of walking to register for the draft in the last months of the Vietnam War, trying to make out whether he could qualify as a conscientious objector. As he walked, Casey says, he realized that “in my own tradition, I didn’t know how to parse that question.” Since then, his professional training and service have been shaped by seeking improved tools for discerning complex civil and theological issues. He describes the questions that have driven his career: “What are the political and public consequences of religious life? What are the political implications of being a member of a religious community?”
Read more at http://religionandpolitics.org/2014/03/04/shaun-casey-talks-about-leading-the-state-departments-faith-based-office/