Presidents breach of contract

By Oh Young-jin

Assistant managing editor

During the National Prayer Breakfast at Coex, southern Seoul, last week, President Lee Myung-bak and first lady Kim Yoon-ok kneeled down and prayed together with hundreds of other participants.

The picture of the first couple on their knees made it into all the newspapers.

Cheong Wa Dae said that it was not pre-planned, while Rev. Kiel Ja-yeon, who led the morning prayer, said that it was an instruction he received from God for the congregation to kneel and pray.

As a non-practicing Christian, I have little objection to a show of respect and faith to the all-mighty, whether it is an act of kneeling or lying down in prayer. But when it comes to elected leaders, especially heads of state, their public display of one’s preference, particularly regarding such private matters as faith require second thoughts because they are not individuals but institutions that represent the nation in its entirety.

Let’s check what went wrong with our President’s action.

As a church elder, President Lee owes a lot to the support of the Christian community for his election. It is well known that his mother was a devout Christian whose five-o’clock morning prayers would wake him in his childhood, giving him a lifelong habit of being an early bird.

But when he took his presidential oath, Lee promised to be impartial to all interest parties and serve the national interest. He may privately kneel in the praise of God but in public he is expected to act in a way that leaves no doubt that he prefers no one religion over another. His given role is the “ultimate reconciler.”

This is why none of Lee’s predecessors have knelt in public religious events.

It is also worth remembering that representatives of all publicly-recognized religions were invited to perform memorial services according to their rituals during the two recent national funerals for two former presidents.

Lee’s action raises a question over conflict of interest for his show of preference for his religion over other faiths in the breach of his contract with the nation. In order to erase such public suspicions, he may have to do the same during a Buddhist ceremony later this month.

Secondly, his kneeling came at an odd time when he faced challenges by Christian leaders for his plan to introduce “sukuk,” an Islamic method of raising funds through bonds.

Cho Yong-gi, founder and pastor of Korea’s largest Full Gospel Church, threatened to drive Lee out of office, unless he gave up his sukuk plan. The Christian Council of Korea vowed not to vote for lawmakers who pushed for the sukuk bill in the next general elections.

Cho later retracted his threat, while the council also denied any no-vote campaign.

But Lee and the ruling Grand National Party decided to put their Islamic bond bill on hold.

When all pieces fell into place, Lee was made to look like a vanquished general kneeling before a victorious Christian army or a remorseful son trying to curry favor with disciplinarian parents.

Neither are the images of an ideal president, who is expected to keep his head high except for national tragedies because he represent the national institution of the highest order.

When they kneel, it is the nation that also kneels.

For churches, that instance makes for bad publicity.

I am sure that the majority of Christians are taking no joy in seeing President Lee on his knees because they are prudent enough to know of the separation of state and church and expect the President to act according to his oath.

The problem lies more with their leaders, who are more political than religious. They act as if they have debts to collect from Lee for their contributions to his election. If Lee owes anybody, it is to people irrespective of whether they voted for him or what religion they practice.

Pastor Cho should have acted like the national leader he is. He has built the world’s biggest congregation virtually from scratch. Although he requires no election for his dominant position in his church and in the Christian community as a whole, the size of his congregation makes him a leader in his own right, a position that requires him to be more responsible in action and circumspect in speech.

As an elder of society, he is also expected to transcend his immediate interest and look after the greater good of the nation. It is worth of recalling that President Bush invited Islamic leaders after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, isolating Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida from mainstream Islamism.

That effort to reconcile differing interests is the job of the President and Christian leaders should help Lee achieve it.

In the age of social networking that interlinks the world by instant messaging, it can be safely presumed that a lot of people of the world feel tempted to think that Korea is no longer a secular state but a Christian one.

Just imagine how such a wrong impression will antagonize the Islamic world that Korea would have better trade relations with and may rely on to promote its national interest. Ask ambassadors in Seoul representing Islamic states how they feel.

Last but not least, presidential aides, who are responsible for presidential protocol, safety and public relations, should take a moment to review how the President was caught unprepared for a pastor’s call to get down on his knees and pray. It is their job to protect the President from any harm, physically or politically. If it was true, as admitted by Cheong Wa Dae, that nobody knew what was coming it should be taken as a deplorable case of their negligence of duty.