The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  Antitheists disagree that we have worth because human beings are precious in God’s sight. They treat religious beliefs as mere superstition—and for some, as something less than knowledge and therefore having nothing to contribute to political philosophy or to our understanding of human nature. But it is one thing to argue that God doesn’t exist; it is quite another to insist that faith can offer nothing of use, that it “poisons everything,” to use a Hitchens phrase—that it can’t offer insights into the human condition. Augustine and Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr, Maimonides and Rabbi Joshua Heschel, Mahatma Gandhi and Avicenna, and countless others, prove otherwise. (To be fair, I have friends who are atheists who don’t accept supernaturalism as a warrant for moral beliefs but still value the moral insights and arguments of religious thinkers who make what they deem to be rational claims. As one of them put it to me, “We wouldn’t dream of tossing Jesus or Augustine in the trash.”)

  In sum, then: without an appeal to transcendent truth and authority, there is nothing one ultimately can anchor morality in; and if politics is stripped of morality, it’s merely a power game. Politics, without fixed moral points, easily devolves into unchecked power, from which abuses result. And theology, once considered the queen of the disciplines, can deepen our understanding of public life and the common good. Those who criticize religion as an inherently baleful influence on politics would do well to understand, as Nietzsche did, just how ugly and terrifying a world without moral absolutes would be.

  It needs to be said that many thinkers have wrestled conscientiously and intelligently with how to find moral grounding without God, arguing that our knowledge of right and wrong is innate in us. “Religion gets its morality from humans,” according to Hitchens. “We know that we can’t get along if we permit perjury, theft, murder, rape. All societies at all times, well before the advent of monotheism, certainly, have forbidden it.”5

  I don’t find their efforts ultimately persuasive, but this book is not the place to dive deeper into these ageless disputes. Suffice to say that, for the faithful explicitly and even for many secular people implicitly, religion provides an indispensable moral true north, and it would not be reasonable to expect all these Americans to leave their compasses at home.

  As for those of the Christian faith who insist that their theology argues against political involvement—who argue for segregating the “sacred” from the “secular” and that Christians should be, in the words of the historian of religion Darryl Hart, “occupied with a world to come rather than the passing and temporal affairs of this world”6—I would respectfully suggest they are distorting things to a rather serious degree.

  Citizenship is an important Christian concept. For those of the Christian faith, the ultimate allegiance is to the City of God, to borrow a phrase from Saint Augustine. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Philippi. “And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” But as the theologian Timothy Keller pointed out to me, in the book of Acts Paul regularly refers to and relies on his Roman citizenship, which came with both rights and duties. (At the time Roman citizenship was restricted and taken quite seriously, a “coveted treasure” in the words of the New Testament scholar Sean A. Adams.)7 “That is something like what we see in Jeremiah 29, where the Jews who were ultimately citizens of Jerusalem were called to be excellent citizens of Babylon,” according to Keller. “It is clear as can be that, while our ultimate allegiance is to the City Above, that should make us the very best citizens of our earthly cities.”8

  Moreover, the Christian faith, as I understand it, teaches that theological truths apply to all of God’s creation; that Christianity was never meant to be privatized; and that the biblical narrative is of God’s active involvement in human affairs. Whatever one thinks about the Christian story, it does not portray a God who is distant, removed, and remote, indifferent to and disengaged from our lives or the life of this world. God clearly wanted to instruct us about how we should live in this life by participating in the human drama, not just as the author of it but as an actor in the drama.

  FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD

  The God of Judaism and Christianity requires us to care for justice, and politics is a realm where that plays out. If Christians care about justice, then, they need to be involved with politics.

  The biblical prophet Jeremiah tells us to seek the welfare of the city to which we have been exiled and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its prosperity we shall prosper. Withdrawing from an arena where human rights are contested—where the welfare of the city is decided—isn’t a serious option. I would say the formulation of Rav Aharon Lichtenstein applies to the whole of scripture: “The Torah is neither world-accepting nor world-rejecting. It is world-redeeming.”9 The Jewish term tikkun olam means “to repair the world.”

  Christians in despair over the state of the world often miss the full picture. There is in fact much in America that is going right on a daily basis, in ways so common as to be forgotten. We take for granted, far more than we should, that by many measures we are living in the most privileged nation on earth during the best time to be alive in human history. And contrary to the impression left by some on the religious Right, the United States in the twenty-first century is not the Roman Empire under Nero, when, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, “Nero set up as the culprits and punished with utmost refinement of cruelty a class hated for their abominations, who are commonly called Christians. . . . Besides being put to death they were made to serve as objects of amusement; they were clad in hides of beasts and torn to death by dogs; others were crucified.”10 Yes, Christians are losing some cultural debates, but it is silly to describe our plight as if we were being fed to the dogs.

  As for those who counsel retreating from politics: those who devalue the importance of politics tend to be those who live in luxury and safety, where systemic injustice is a distant reality, unseen and unfelt by those living in comfortable neighborhoods. “It is hard for those who live near a Police Station / To believe in the triumph of violence,” T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock.’”

  The temptation to retreat from politics goes aground when it hits this historical truth: America and the world have been made tangibly better and more just because Americans of faith took their beliefs into politics.

  Let’s first note the countless acts of kindness and charity by individuals motivated by faith who have helped the homeless, drug and alcohol addicts, single mothers and children of prisoners, the elderly and infirmed, victims of natural disaster, the poor and hungry, refugees and those trapped in slavery and sexual trafficking around the world, and more. According to the Pew Research Center, “people who are highly religious are more engaged with their extended families, more likely to volunteer, more involved in their communities and generally happier with the way things are going in their lives.”11 Other studies show that the religious among us are more likely to give to charities than those who do not identify with a faith tradition.12

  But I have in mind as well great acts of compassion by government. For example, the global AIDS and malaria initiative is President George W. Bush’s greatest legacy; more than 13 million people are on lifesaving antiretroviral treatment as a consequence. This was a policy that came about in response to human sympathies that were shaped in large part by the faith of Mr. Bush; some of his key advisors, including Michael Gerson, who was a senior policy advisor and chief speechwriter to President Bush and a committed evangelical Christian; and the rock star Bono, who worked with the president to combat AIDS. (“I’ve become very fond of him,” Bono said of Bush. “Underneath his armor, there’s passion, compassion. He has it.”)13

  I have in mind, too, movements for justice, including the abolitionist, labor, and pro-life movements, as well as the civil rights movement.

  Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a civil rights activist; he was a reverend—pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Chu
rch in Montgomery, Alabama, as well as a graduate of Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, where he received his PhD in systematic theology. Dr. King was also author of one of the landmark documents in American history, Letter from Birmingham Jail.

  Written in 1963, it was addressed to white clergymen from Birmingham who believed King’s efforts to overthrow segregation were “untimely.” They counseled patience. They wanted the issue to be waged in the courtrooms rather than on the streets. These ministers were more concerned about civil rights protesters than the injustice the protesters were seeking to rectify.

  In his nearly six-thousand-word point-by-point rebuttal, King argued that one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws—but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. “Now, what is the difference between the two?” King asked. “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?” To which he answered thus:

  A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.14

  The dignity and worth of the human personality, King believed—as did Lincoln a century before him, and the American founders a century before him—were God given. (John F. Kennedy, one of the most revered figures among liberals and Democrats, declared in his inaugural address that “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”)

  It was religious faith that gave the civil rights movement its moral force. And it is religious faith that, at its best, provides ideals that transcend different cultures and allows us to stand in judgment of all cultures, including our own. Any movement for social justice depends on a set of values to define it.

  It should be pointed out that King’s letter was written by a Christian who believed in justice, but it was sent to Christians who were arguing that we delay justice. Which again underscores the point that religion can sometimes be a force for social good, and sometimes not. It depends on the wisdom, integrity, and courage of those who interpret and act on the scriptures. The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes, as Shakespeare put it; and all of us can cherry-pick from history to make very nearly whatever point we want. A fair reading of history is that Christians have opposed and been implicated in countless social evils. The record has always been mixed and remains so to this very day. But one must also admit that in many instances moral progress in our history was begun by courageous religious people doing what they thought God was calling them to do.

  WHAT WENT WRONG?

  As someone who has spent much of his life sympathetic to the positive role faith can play in political life, I sometimes feel the Trump presidency has very nearly been an outright repudiation of my views: not about whether politics can benefit from the influence of the Christian religion, but whether in reality it usually does; whether, in the practical outworking of things, both politics and the Christian witness are now made worse by people of faith actively involving themselves in politics.

  I’ve harbored these concerns on and off for the last several decades. I have long been troubled by what I perceived as the subordination of Christianity to partisan ideology—the ease with which people took something sacred and turned it into a blunt political weapon. I saw this happen time and again through the years, always hoping that these temptations and abuses would recede and give way to a movement dedicated to justice and human dignity, one that stood in judgment of all political parties and ideologies and that was beholden to none. But Jerry Falwell Sr. gave way to Jerry Falwell Jr., Billy Graham gave way to Franklin Graham, and things are now worse, not better. The Trump era has utterly discredited significant parts of the American evangelical movement.15

  Most people miss what was most troubling about the 2016 election cycle. It is not merely the fact that Trump won four-fifths of white evangelicals in the 2016 election against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was advocating policies they considered inimical to their beliefs. What is much worse and more troubling is that so many of them supported Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries, when there were more than a dozen candidates who were, by any reasonable standard that ought to matter to evangelicals, light-years better than Trump. I would go so far as to say it’s very nearly impossible to defend even a single evangelical vote for Trump in the Republican primary, at least if evangelicals genuinely cared for the values they purport to represent.

  Yet Trump not only did well with evangelicals; he won a plurality of evangelical votes in key early contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. He garnered significant support on “Super Tuesday.” And by April 2016 he was the preferred candidate of more than a third of weekly churchgoers.16 Trump could not have won the GOP nomination without the Christian vote.

  A conservative friend who is generally very supportive of Christianity told me that the real danger for evangelical Christianity is that “it becomes a vehicle for resentments of middle-class white America,” adding that “the church may become a voice for the resentments of the strong in the country when in fact it should focus on helping the weak.”

  As for evangelical leaders: what we saw from most was not pained, reluctant, qualified expressions of support for Trump—support based only on the fact that his opponent in the 2016 election was a committed liberal, Hillary Clinton. I would disagree with that stance even as I could acknowledge it’s a defensible one.

  What we have seen instead—from prominent evangelical figures like Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Eric Metaxas, Robert Jeffress, the former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, and others—are defenses of Trump that range from rhapsodic to ridiculous. One illustration: Jerry Falwell Jr., president of one of the largest Christian colleges in the world, said that in Trump evangelicals had found their “dream president.”17 He insists that Trump is a Churchillian figure,18 “one of the greatest visionaries of our time” who “lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the New Testament.”19 Falwell Jr. added that Donald Trump has “single-handedly changed the definition of what behavior is ‘presidential’ from phony, failed & rehearsed to authentic, successful & down to earth.”20

  We all know—presumably in their quiet and more reflective moments they all know—that if a liberal Democratic president or candidate had acted in the ways Donald Trump has in his personal life, many of these evangelical leaders would be savaging that person based on the conviction that personal morality in political leaders matters. That is, after all, precisely what they did during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

  Here is Gary Bauer, today a vocal Trump supporter but in 1998 the head of the Family Research Council: “The seamy facts under public discussion are shameful enough. But fascination with this story should not be allowed to obscure the deeper lesson these incidents impart. That lesson is this: Character counts—in a people, in the institutions of our society, and in our national leadership.”21 In the same year Franklin Graham wrote that Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky should not just concern his family but “the rest of the world,” adding, “If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”22

  Yet today, with Trump as president—when the excuse that failure to support Trump would lead to a Hillary Clinton presidency is long gone—many evangelical leaders dismiss those concerns almost entirely, some even invoking the Bible as their defense for Trump’s outrageous conduct. They are, in fact, using many of the same arguments used by Clinton’s defenders in the 1990s to respond to criticisms by the religious Right.23

  A set of data points illustrates the double standard we’re se
eing. In October 2016—several weeks after the release of the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about his affairs and declared that when you’re a star, “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything”—more than seven in ten (72 percent) white evangelical Protestants said an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life. Five years earlier, when Barack Obama was president, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants said the same. No group shifted their position more dramatically than white evangelical Protestants.24

  But it’s not only Mr. Trump’s sexual transgressions that are relevant here; it’s the whole package deal. Mr. Trump lies pathologically. He exhibits crude and cruel behavior, relishes humiliating those over whom he has power, and dehumanizes his political opponents, women, and the weak. He is indifferent to objective truth, trades in conspiracy theories, and exploits the darker impulses of the public. His style of politics is characterized by stoking anger and grievances rather than demonstrating empathy and justice. In sum, Mr. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one. It is a repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, instead offering disdain for the powerless. Donald Trump’s perspective is might makes right.

  To be clear, Trump’s most visible and vocal Christian supporters aren’t responsible for the character flaws and ethical failures of the president. But by their refusal to confront those flaws and failures, they are complicit in the debasement of American culture and politics. Even more personally painful to me, they are presenting a warped and disfigured view of Christianity to the world. They are effectively blessing a leader who has acted in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with a Christian ethic.

  A friend of mine who is an atheist told me that what is unfolding is “consistent with what sociobiology theorizes about religion: its evolutionary purpose is to foster in-group solidarity. Principles serve rather than rule that mission.” This certainly isn’t my view of faith, but in the current circumstances—given what is playing out in public—this is not an unreasonable conclusion for him to draw. And he’s not alone. This kind of perception is multiplying. The evangelicals I have mentioned are doing more to damage the Christian witness than the so-called New Atheists ever could.