I didn’t give Mitt Romney enough credit: today he suspended his campaign. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Does this, as the pundits are saying, seal the deal for John McCain? Or does Gov. Romney’s support go to Mike Huckabee and make this a national two-person race?
Either way, it will probably mean one more lesson for the political-science curricula that are sure to be written off this screwball presidential campaign.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets, II.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Today is also the first day of the rest of Mitt Romney’s political life. I hope he’s honest enough with himself to face that fact; and if Mormons celebrate Lent and Ash Wednesday (I don’t actually know if they do), I hope this day’s observance means more to him than its political significance. (Update: apparently they don’t—see #329.)I have to say, I’ve been rather disappointed in Gov. Romney over the course of this campaign. I pulled for him for a long time. Originally, I had expected Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would be the GOP’s nominee this year, and I looked forward to that; when Sen. Frist failed to do his job to get the President’s judicial nominees through, however, I decided I could not support him. (I even sent an e-mail to him to that effect; I got a canned e-mail back.) Having done so, I looked around for someone to support, and Gov. Romney seemed far and away the best choice on the horizon. Given his record and his gifts, I thought he’d be a strong candidate and a good president.Eventually, of course, I changed my mind and started supporting Mike Huckabee (not that that means much—my endorsement means nothing and I have no money to contribute). Some of that was because of Gov. Huckabee’s own strengths; a lot of it, though, was that Gov. Romney had actually proven himself quite a poor candidate, spending lots of money to very little result. (Gov. Huckabee, in this respect, has been the anti-Romney.) Unfortunately, he hasn’t handled that very well, and neither has his team, leading to this rather unbecoming sequence, caught by BigJolly at the Lone Star Times. First, Gov. Romney scolded Gov. Huckabee:
“First a couple of rules in politics,” he said. “One: no whining. And number two: you get them to vote for you and so I want them not to vote for Mike Huckabee and not to vote for John McCain and to vote for me . . . that’s not voter suppression. That’s known as politics.”
Good and noble words, but they didn’t last very long; following his loss in the West Virginia caucuses when John McCain’s supporters switched en bloc to Gov. Huckabee, Gov. Romney’s campaign manager had this to say:
Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain’s inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney’s campaign of conservative change.Governor Romney had enough respect for the Republican voters of West Virginia to make an appeal to them about the future of the party based on issues. This is why he led on today’s first ballot. Sadly, Senator McCain cut a Washington backroom deal in a way that once again underscores his legacy of working against Republicans who are interested in championing conservative policies and rebuilding the party.
At this point, if he’s really all that interested in stopping “Senator McCain’s inside Washington ways,” the best thing Gov. Romney could do would be to cut his own deal with Gov. Huckabee: throw his support behind the real “man from Hope” (Bill Clinton mostly grew up in Hot Springs, AR) in exchange for policy promises, which he could then widely publicize as satisfying his own concerns. Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But at this point, Gov. Romney has it backwards: a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for John McCain. Which might not, in the end, prove to be all that bad a thing; I’m pulling for Gov. Huckabee, but I’ll be content to vote for Sen. McCain in November as well. I don’t know the future, so as far as I know, we might all be better off if Sen. McCain wins the nomination. But if Gov. Romney thinks otherwise, he should take a deep breath and a long hard look at the situation, and act accordingly.HT: Bill
John Stackhouse has a series of posts up on his blog addressing the question, “Do you have to choose between your brains and your beliefs?” His answer, succinctly summarized: No, no, and sort of, but no.
Expanded somewhat, his basic points are these:
Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge. . . . Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.
As he sums it up,
So the question isn’t whether to have faith or not. The question is, In what or whom will I place faith, and on what grounds?
Stand at a coffee bar long enough, you’ll eventually hear someone order a decaf latté made with skim milk. Whenever I hear that, I’m reminded of the coffee bar we used to frequent (even though I’m not a coffee drinker; you may have guessed that my wife is, though) that had gotten that order often enough, they’d put it on the menu. I think this may have been JP’s, in Holland, where Sara, Hap, Wayne and I went to college, since they were fond of naming their drinks; in any case, whichever establishment it was, in putting the decaf non-fat latté on the menu, had named it “What’s the Point?” For some reason, none of the patrons ever actually used the name—but you can bet the baristas did . . . 🙂
I was reminded of this recently in visiting another church for a funeral. It was a UCC congregation, and clearly in step with the liberalism of that denomination; I was out in the hall on kid duty, since our younger ones lack the patience or understanding to sit through a service, so I had plenty of time to read the various materials they had up on the walls. One big eye-catching display was of the graduates of their most recent confirmation class, with “CONGRATULATIONS CONFIRMANDS!” in big letters, life-size head shots of the teens, and copies of brief essays they had written. It made me rather sad, because from the essays, the only thing these students had been confirmed in was what they already believed; there was little gospel there, and little sense of God challenging their comfortable conclusions. It was all much more about them creating their own idea of Christianity than it was about God creating and recreating them.
The most extreme example of this, and the one that really caught my eye, was one young woman who declared in her essay, “I am an atheist.” I looked at that and I thought, “Why bother? What’s the point?” And what’s the point of a church that can teach its children about God, have one of them come out declaring herself an atheist, and consider that a good thing and something to be celebrated? She has every right to her atheism, certainly, but I can’t help thinking, that’s an awfully thin-blooded version of the gospel; in the end, in the coffee bar of life, that’s little more than a decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God (or maybe even a half shot). What really is the point, anyway?
Someone with sharp eyes may have noticed that I added the Anchoress to the blogroll. Why it hadn’t occurred to me quite a while ago that she wasn’t on there, I’m not sure, but that oversight is now rectified. At least it was good timing; I checked in just in time to catch her asking the question, “Are Our Ideologies Our Idols?” Some might disagree with me, but I’m pretty sure (and have been for a while) that the answer is “yes,” and she provides some good evidence for the proposition.
The truth is, I’ve been convinced for a while that our politics is idolatrous, ever since God convicted me about some of my habits. For instance, I’ve tried (and I think succeeded) to stop saying, “I’m a Republican.” I most often vote Republican, and to say that is a simple statement of fact; but to say “I am a Republican” (which I was—I paid dues to the Republican National Committee and kept my membership card in my wallet, for a while) was to define myself in terms of the Republican party. It was to say that the Republican platform was a defining part of my identity, and that the leaders of that party were my leaders. As a Christian, I have no right to do that, nor do any of us.
We’re called to be in the world, yes, but not of the world; to vote, to participate in our government, is to be in the world, but to attach ourselves to a political party and adopt it as our own is to be of the world. Our Christian faith—the content of our beliefs, our commitment to each other, and above all our commitment to follow Jesus the Messiah—must be the source and control of all our political beliefs and actions, and that cannot be the case if we have a pre-existing commitment to the positions or the political success of any political party. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” and it’s equally true that where your goals are, where your sense of identity is, there you will find your heart as well; and when we let that happen, when our politics shapes our faith rather than the other way around—when our identity is defined even in part by a political party or a political cause—then our political commitments have claimed a place that belongs only to God, and we are guilty of idolatry. We are to find our identity in Christ and him only.
It’s worth noting that the same applies to patriotism. I’m not saying that love of country is always or necessarily idolatrous, because it isn’t; but it can be, very easily. After all, America is a concrete reality which has benefited us in concrete ways, and which needs improvement in concrete ways; the kingdom of God, by contrast, can be a little harder to see, and easier to forget about. Plus, we all get to pledge allegiance to our own concept of what America ought to be, and to define our patriotism accordingly; which makes America a very flexible idol indeed. We need to be careful of ourselves.
Thanks, Erin. 🙂
Herewith, the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.
My wife happened to be walking up to me with a book just as I caught the tag, so the book is Camp’s Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B. C. to the Present (which should be a fruitful source for this sort of thing).
(Our topic is “Greed,” btw; the book is arranged thematically.)
“Yuppies’ creed: ‘I want it all and I want it now.'”
“I think the enemy is here before us. . . . I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.”
Weird meme. 🙂 So, tags:
So there’s a discussion going on elsewhere regarding a conservative Christian stereotype known as the Better Christian Woman, or BCW—the label comes from Erin, who may well have coined it (as a sardonic label, anyway), and I know Hap and my wife have joined in, as have others; Barry contributed a post or two addressing the fact that men in the church deal with these sorts of expectations as well, which seems to have surprised some (female) folks.
I’ll be honest and admit that while I see the effects of this in the lives of people I know and love, it’s all a little alien to me. I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative church, but apparently a somewhat different kind of conservative; after all, one of my grandmothers was a career pastor (specifically, she and Grampa were officers in the Salvation Army), and my mother was an ICU nurse who got her start in the Navy. The women in my family show a distinct tendency toward the helping professions (add in a couple social workers, for instance), but then, so do the men (ditto, plus a couple more ministers, including me). I guess I just grew up with the idea that God calls people on an individual basis, depending on who he made each of us to be and what particular set of gifts he’s given us, rather than a categorical one.
It might be in light of that, and it’s certainly in light of the ongoing discussion, that I was interested to read this piece by the Rev. Dr. Linda Schwab, a chemistry professor turned Methodist pastor, on her career path and choices. Her situation is a little different, but ultimately I think her piece raises and deals with the same basic set of questions: who am I, and who am I supposed to be? One of the things I value about her essay is that she understands where the answer to those questions is to be found: not in human expectations, but in God.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289
God is our judge; he is a God of justice. It’s a major biblical theme, a heavy biblical truth, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t like; we tend to prefer the warmer biblical language that God is love, that he’s our good shepherd, and so on, and so a lot of times, we quietly shuffle the “judge” language out the back door into the shed. In some ways, this is ironic, because many of those who most dislike thinking about God as judge are quite convinced they want justice, even folks who really should be asking for mercy (as the Calvinator noted in the comments a while back); I guess the lesson here is that people want “justice” defined as them getting whatever it is they happen to think they deserve. We want justice measured by our own standard, and God uses his standard, not ours.
If we’re going to be faithful to Scripture, though, we just can’t go along with that. All through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger; over and over, he condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.
And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; and it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win.
Which means, I think, that here we see justice and mercy meet; God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice, as here he defeated not just human evildoers but the power behind them, the slavemaster who bound all of us helplessly in sin. In showing us mercy, he was working justice on our behalf.
Rudy Giuliani has dropped out of the presidential race (as has John Edwards on the Democratic side), which removes the only “Republican” contender I simply could not support. Once John McCain came roaring back and re-established himself as a contender, that just sucked all the oxygen out of the room for Rudy; once he’d been one-upped on national defense, he simply didn’t have a compelling pitch. For my part, I’m glad.