c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I wish I had recorded the moment when my son’s middle-school soccer coach told parents to zip it.

Don’t coach your child from the sidelines, she said in a pre-season meeting. Don’t berate the referees. If you can’t behave, you’ll be asked to leave.

Sound advice. And not exactly welcome in a room where 60 percent of the parents were statistically likely to be “helicopter parents,” always hovering over their children. Still, it’s a necessary reminder that “it’s not all about you.”

I would play that recording at next May’s drivers meeting before the Indy 500. No more of the tantrums and petulance that we saw this year, as losing drivers berated their crews and other drivers and threatened fisticuffs, as if this were the junior prom, not auto racing. I didn’t pay $90 a ticket to watch frustrated drivers mouth off. I can see that for free during Manhattan rush hour.

I would play the coach’s advice to our sorry cast of politicians, who clearly will stop at nothing to gain or retain public office. American democracy isn’t about your desire to lead, but about the citizens who make up this nation. No more of your race-baiting, your tapping the dark side of bigotry and fear, and now your inappropriate references to assassination.

Corporate executives who sell out their employees to protect their own salaries also need to hear, “It’s not about you.” So do government officials who rig contracts to reward pals. So do military leaders who cozy up to politicians, rather than serve troops who actually do the fighting. So does the administrator at my son’s school who allowed a wealthy parent to bully the system when a teacher did the right thing by failing a child caught cheating.

Democracy is about competing self-interests. But those who lead and derive the benefits of leadership have an obligation to respect the whole, to see the system’s needs, not just their own. A free-market economy is also about competing self-interests, but there, too, those who presume to lead _ and to cash seven-figure paychecks _ must rise above self-interest. It’s ethically wrong to ignore the interests of employees and customers and a marketplace built on trust, and it inevitably proves self-defeating.

Too many people approach marriage as a place to get their self-defined needs met, and parenting as an opportunity to win competitions with other parents, and religious communities as a venue for acting out personal neediness.

Marriage is about a partnership, not dueling self-interests. Parenting is about raising healthy, self-differentiated, sturdy and moral children, not using children to gain bragging rights. A faith community is a circle of friends, not a place to get personal needs met. Faith should draw us outside ourselves. The call of Jesus was to self-denial, not self-fulfillment.

Entertainment and sports, while pleasing, aren’t adequate metaphors for life. Life isn’t about who holds the remote control. Life isn’t about winning at any cost. People who try those approaches and murder, steal and manipulate their way to glory end up losers.

Life is about fairness, mercy, sharing, seeing the whole and valuing the other. That isn’t just a Sunday School dictum. It’s also what makes democracy work and enables a free-market economy to be nimble and durable.

If our present and would-be leaders cannot rise above self-interest, they need to be shown the door.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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