by John Kasich
I happen to like my preacher a whole lot, and I consider him a friend, so I’m willing to forgive him on this one, but most folks aren’t going to cut their own preachers such slack. Most folks hear the politicking and tune out, and I can’t really blame them. I’ll never forget sitting one Sunday morning in an Episcopal church, and for no good reason the minister started reading a letter from the bishops discussing why we shouldn’t put missiles in Europe. I stood straight up and left. I thought, What do these bishops know about missiles in Europe? Fact is, it was those very missiles in Europe that bolstered the historic negotiations that ultimately led to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, but I didn’t walk out because the politics was all wrong. I walked out because, right or wrong, it had no place in the church.
I even dragged my daughter Reese into taking another such stand—this time at my own church. It was the fall of 2001, just a few weeks after September 11, and she was about two years old. Some woman minister stood up and declared that the only thing the United States had ever exported to the world was Baywatch, implying that in some way Americans deserved to be attacked, and I wasn’t about to sit and listen to that kind of nonsense, so I collected Reese in my arms and stormed out. It was the only time I’ve ever walked out of my own church, and I don’t expect to be walking out again any time soon, but this was just too much.
I called my wife on the cell phone on my way out to the car and said, “Honey, Reese was involved in her first protest today.” I made a joke out of it, but it was no joke. I even ended up calling the pastor and lighting into him for allowing such a discussion to take place on his watch—and by the time I was through with him he couldn’t help but agree with me.
I know how I feel when a liberal minister starts preaching to me, so I can just imagine how liberals must feel when they hear conservative preachers lining up politically. They’re spilling their authority over into areas where they have been granted no such authority, and it can’t help but set people off. Let’s never forget that our preachers hold a tremendous position of power, conferred upon them because of a presumed commitment to serve God. They do not have the right to spill that authority over into a sphere in which they have not been conferred any authority. It drives an unnecessary wedge into what is already a tenuous relationship for many people—namely, their relationship to God.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe I have the right to an opinion on the world around me, and sometimes that opinion extends to issues of faith, but losing sight of the power of grace and forgiveness is deadly. The views of Pope John Paul II were strongly conservative, but his love of people and humanity allowed him to express himself firmly and yet effectively. He was heard, when so many others who seemed to condemn were not.
That said, the concept of worship remains a struggle, particularly for our young people. Believing comes easily to many of us, but to my thinking religion is more than mere belief; worshipping puts it at a whole other level. Christian or Jew, Buddhist or Muslim, it’s all the same. It’s a tough sell. It’s hard enough to get down on your hands and knees and give thanks to a higher power. It was difficult for me, until I opened my arms to it, so I know what it’s like to be on the jaded or disillusioned end of this discussion.
THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD
For me, the stories of the Bible are the lure. I’d read them first as a kid, and then again as a young adult, but for some reason the stories didn’t speak to me at first. They were just stories. But each time I went back to them, and looked at them from whatever new perspective I had taken in my own life, I took away something new. These days, I participate in a Bible study group with some friends of mine in and around Columbus, including Dick Vogt, whom I mentioned earlier. We’ve been meeting every other week for about fifteen years, just seven or eight of us, and not a Goody Two-shoes in the bunch. And we’ve become great friends. We read the Bible, but it’s a jumping-off point to so much more. We talk about our lives. We talk about our families. We talk about our hopes and our fears. We talk about integrity. We talk about doing the right thing. Sometimes, I sit among this group and think, This is me, building and sustaining my relationship with God. This is what religion ought to be about. It’s not some gooey, intangible, unknowable thing. It’s life. And, it’s how to navigate that life successfully, and morally, and responsibly. No one in our group has all the answers, and even as a group, taken together, we don’t have all the answers. But we do our best. We learn from one another. As important, we learn from our mistakes. We consider them. And we strive to be the better for having made them.
Together, we wonder at the rootlessness of many American families, at the disappearing guideposts in a society that seems to move further and further away from organized religion. Church attendance is at an all-time low in too many of our communities, which means our shared moral compass is harder to find than ever before. Passing on values to the next generation? You can pretty much forget about it without the rudder of faith to help chart the way—and yet we remain ever hopeful that goodness and justice and light will prevail.
One of the great leaps we made in our thinking was not to look on the Bible as a set of rules and restrictions. That’s what puts people off to religion. They see it as restrictive, but we’ve chosen to see it as a roadmap for success, to keep us from spinning out of orbit. We don’t really like all these rules, but we know they’re good for us, and that they’re meant to keep us from drowning in quicksand or going over the edge of a cliff. They’re not meant to deny us this or that good time, or to keep us from doing something that might be really cool. They’re the positive boundaries to a life purposefully lived. In this way, we can look on the Bible itself as a kind of roadmap, filled with warning signs but also with signs that encourage certain types of positive behavior. We can’t possibly get it right each and every time—we are, after all, human—but the key is in the effort. The key is in recognizing and celebrating what we have, and what we’ve built, and what we’ve learned. The ability to get out of bed in the morning, and to breathe and to see and to speak and to listen . . . these are gifts from God, and I’d better be recognizing them as such or I’ll lose sight of what really matters. I tell my wife all the time, when I try to explain where I’m at with my faith and my relationship to God, that I’m not off in search of the meaning of life so much as I’ve undertaken a lifelong effort to understand the mystery and magnificence of God.
Back to the Bible. Most of us know the story of Ruth. She was a devout young woman whose husband died, leaving her to live in her husband’s home with her mother-in-law, Naomi, along with another daughter-in-law named Orpon. Naomi’s husband and two sons had all died, and she had no one in the world but these two devoted daughters-in-law, whom she urged to go back to their own mothers. “May the Lord grant each of you will find rest in the home of another husband,” she generously said to her two daughters-in-law, whereupon Orpon bade her mother-in-law goodbye as Ruth clung to her.
“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you,” Ruth said. “Where you go, I will go. And where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me be it ever so severely if anything but death separates you and me.”
Now, if the story ended right there, it would pack a powerful lesson about devotion and commitment and honor, but it continued. Ruth stayed on in her mother-in-law’s home, and she ended up meeting and marrying a wealthy man named Boaz, and she bore him a son, Obed, who became the father of Jesse, in the line of Jesus. She rose to a place of honor and stature in her mother-in-law’s village because she didn’t take the easy way out—and that to me is more powerful still. She didn’t do these things because she sought honor and stature, but because for her they were the right things to do. It’s hard to fault the other daughter-in-law, Orpon, for returning to her people, but in Ruth’s mind her place was beside her mother-in-law, and she took it gladly, and without bitterness, and she was reward
ed for it.
When Jesus asks, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” we read between the lines and know that we probably shouldn’t pay so much attention to the speck in our neighbor’s eye when we’ve got a log stuck in our own. We ought to get our own houses in order before we look upon our neighbors’.
We can sit in our study group and consider the implications of these passages for hours, but they all come down to honor and faith and integrity and all those good things, wouldn’t you agree? They don’t beat you over the head and tell you what you have to do in this type of situation, or even what you ought to do, just what you might do. They’re guideposts, that’s all, but they’re enormously compelling and instructive guideposts. They frame the choices that others have made throughout recorded human history, and ask us to consider the consequences of those choices against some of our more modern dilemmas.
I’m troubled by the shift in our cultural signposts, I truly am. I’m troubled by a pop culture phenomenon like Paris Hilton, and the violent, misogynist content of certain rap music videos. I’m troubled because we seem to have lost our moral compass, and because there seems to have been a precipitous decline in our shared values, even as the Old and New Testaments shine as lighthouses in a sea of shifting standards and situational ethics.
Most folks know where they stand when it comes to religion, and spirituality, and matters of good and evil. Most of this stuff is written on our hearts, and I guess it’s instinctive. But we must renew the real meaning of religion, and stand up for it once more. In a world confused about its purpose. In a world where the magic of technology gives us a sense that we are in charge. In a world of incredible materialism where “success” too often trumps humility and ethics. Realize, the end is not upon us just yet. It’s a difficult message, I know, but the further and further we move from the sanctity and purity of religion, the harder it will be to stand together for a common purpose. We can come at it from different angles, but what counts is that we come at it at all. If you don’t want to pray to my God, or read my Bible, that’s okay. I might feel sorry for you, but you’re not my enemy. We can still stand together on this one. We can still learn from each other. There’s room enough for our separate journeys, as long as we recognize that we’re seeking many of the same things, that our seeking is built on many of the same ideals, and that all good things flow from the reality of worshipping a higher power.
I’ve learned over the years that leadership is doing, not saying, and this applies to matters of religion as well. People of faith should talk less and do more. People of faith who are kind, ethical, optimistic, and humble tend to stand out in a crowd, and we need for them to stand tall—now, more than ever before. Americans are in search of meaning. Money, fame, power, and all other earthly honors fall short of satisfying that haunting search for meaning, and I have to think that the reason so many people flocked to see The Passion of the Christ in movie theaters is that we’re hungry for something more. Absolutely, we’re searching for the values and the structure and the meaning and the purpose we left behind in our childhoods. We might be satisfied or quietly content with our lives, and yet many of us are restless and recognize that there’s a spiritual hole we’re looking to fill in what ways we can. That’s what that movie tapped into, I think, and what we need to take away from it is the certainty that people of faith need to demonstrate these time-tested principles in their daily walk. Don’t just preach goodness, but do good. Don’t just talk about faith, but live it. Take back America not by laws but by example. Offer conscience to a society that too often appears to careen wildly out of control. Americans today are hungry for this type of leadership, and it falls to people of faith to provide it, because I’m afraid it just isn’t going to come from anyplace else.
It’s easy to claim that we live in a world of darkness, with all of the negative images that flash across the nightly news screen, that we’re all stuck behind the same tar truck on a Pittsburgh highway, struggling to look through the windshield. But there’s a lot of lightness out there. And we seem to want to walk in that light, as much as possible.
FAITH IN CRISIS
Remember that gripping story, back in the spring of 2005, when an Atlanta woman was held hostage in her own apartment by the suspect in a series of courthouse slayings? The hostage’s name was Ashley Smith; the alleged courthouse shooter was Brian Nichols, who was accused of killing four people and wounding a fifth; and the two of them became entwined in a deeply personal standoff that left the hostage counseling the hostage-taker. On God. On family. On purpose. And, perhaps most compellingly, on Nichols’s faith-based surrender.
Ashley Smith was no stranger to violence. Her husband had been stabbed to death four years earlier, and she was left to single-parent the couple’s five-year-old daughter, Paige, who was off at a church function when her mother was abducted. Smith took the time during which she was held captive to tell Nichols about her daughter, about their connection to their church, about the repairs she had managed to make to her broken heart and her broken family with the strength of her beliefs. She talked to Nichols about the salvation that lay in wait for him if only he could see his way into police custody without any more killings. Ultimately, she talked Nichols down to where he surrendered peacefully to law enforcement officials summoned to the scene by Smith’s 911 call.
“I believe God brought him to my door,” Smith told reporters, shortly after the manhunt for Nichols had reached its peaceful conclusion.
Indeed, there was such a spiritual connection between captor and captive that upon leaving Smith’s home in police custody a cuffed Nichols turned back to his former hostage and said, “Will you tell Paige hello for me?”
Once she was in the glare of the public spotlight, Smith revealed that she was a recovering methamphetamine addict at the time of her abduction, and that she even offered some of her stash to Nichols when her captor began looking about her house for alcohol or marijuana, but in my mind this does nothing to diminish her strength of character under extremely challenging circumstances. In fact, she later told me on my FOX News show that the moment she declined to take the drugs with Nichols was the moment she began to beat her addiction.
I need look no further than Ashley Smith to know that faith and hope reside in us all. I need look no further than that group of schoolchildren in Kentucky, whose parents were all on welfare, raiding their little piggy banks to collect money for the relief effort following that killing tsunami in Southeast Asia to know that there is goodness and light in this world. Or to doctors who continue to make house calls, or teachers who stand up for their students, or carpenters and tradesmen who donate their time to build low-income housing.
And on and on.
Consider, once again, the timeless and powerful message of St. Augustine, who wrote in his Confessions all the way back in the fifth century that each of us is blessed in our own unique way. I mentioned this book earlier, in my introductory remarks, and I mention it again here because it’s one of my favorites. It has a whole lot to teach us. We all have our gifts, Augustine maintains, and it falls to us to unwrap them and share them with the rest of the world, and once we do there will be goodness all around. We find those gifts in this realm by standing up and being counted. Trust in something bigger than yourself and we shall all be rewarded. Look up into the night sky and know that as the stars shine bright so, too, shall you. Become a part of the constellation. Have faith.
7
TAKING A STAND ON EDUCATION
“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
Jean Piaget
Here’s a distressing thought: The United States consistently ranks at or near the bottom among developed nations in every quantifiable category that measures achievement a
nd preparedness in school age children. No less an authority than Bill Gates, one of the smartest guys going when it comes to our ability to compete in a technological world, says our primary and secondary school system simply doesn’t work. He’s right, it doesn’t, and I’m not alone in suggesting that it’s not about to work anytime soon.
Sadly, we’re just whistling past the graveyard when it comes to primary and secondary school education in this country, and one of these days we’ll look up and see that everyone else has passed us by. We simply don’t have the rigor, the control in the classroom, the innovation, or the personnel to keep pace, and for too long we’ve pit school administrators, teachers, and other establishment types against the parents in a battle that neither side can hope to win. Our public school leaders are reluctant to take any action or bring about substantive change because they’re afraid they’re going to get sued, or they fear the loss of market share, or they worry they’ll innovate themselves straight out of their own jobs. More often than not, it’s just too darn easy to let the status quo prevail. And our kids are flat-out losing. We’re cheating them out of their future, is what it comes down to, and denying them the kind of level playing field to which they ought to be entitled, and the long-term ramifications for our nation’s economic future are indeed troubling.
Consider: The world is changing at the speed of thought. The rise to prominence of population giants like China and India, coupled with the easy access to cheap labor worldwide, threatens America’s basic industries. Don’t get me wrong, there is a rich history of American manufacturing that remains a kind of lifeblood in many of our communities, and America will always make things, but trends point against real sustainable growth in this area. That’s a shame, because on a personal level I have a deep attachment to making things (my uncles worked in the steel mills!), and yet it’s clear even to me that our strength as a nation lies in intellectual property, our ability to create breakthrough technologies in communication, medicine, manufacturing processes and disruptive technologies that transform human behavior—like cell phones, and jet airplanes, and cure-all vaccines.