Monthly Archives: March 2009

To lure independents, nominate a conservative?

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In yesterday’s open thread on HillBuzz, the poster made an interesting argument that I’ve been mulling ever since:

We don’t believe Republicans can win the White House with a moderate—they need a conservative, and should not try to court moderate Democrats like us. Paradoxical, we know, but hear us out. We believe Independents don’t know what to do with a moderate Republican like McCain . . . there isn’t a clear line of distinction between Republican and Democrat in that case, so Independents don’t see a good choice to make, and seem to default vote Democrat in that case. But, those Independents had no trouble voting for Bush . . . and Republican turnout for Bush in 2004 was higher than it was for McCain in 2008. Without Palin, a true conservative, that turnout would have been dismal.

As fellow Palinites, those folks are of course offering this in support of the proposition that Sen. McCain did considerably better with Gov. Palin on the ticket than he would have if he’d picked someone else—something which I argued last summer would be the case and am convinced was indeed the case, despite the MSM’s best efforts to bring her down.  As someone whose political convictions are fairly described as conservative, I of course believe already that the GOP ought to nominate a conservative for the White House next time rather than a moderate.  As such, the perception-of-intelligence problem (our tendency to judge as “intelligent” anyone who comes up with a good argument for what we already believe, or want to believe) is clearly in play here.  The fact that I have, and know I have, a predilection for counterintuitive arguments such as this only reinforces that.  So as I read this, I have to try to filter all those things out.Having done my best to do so, however, this still makes sense to me—and the evidence, such as we have, does seem to bear it out.  When, after all, was the last time a Republican won running as a moderate?  Wouldn’t it be Eisenhower in 1956?  Broadly speaking, Nixon ran as a conservative in 1968 (talking about the “silent majority”), George H. W. Bush ran as a conservative in 1988 (“Read my lips:  No new taxes”)—before losing in 1992 after his time in office proved him nothing of the sort—and George W. Bush ran as a conservative in 2000.  Reagan, of course, inarguably was a conservative, if a rather more pragmatic one than many sometimes remember.   Meanwhile, even if you don’t blame Gerald Ford for his loss in 1976, the Republican Establishment types didn’t do much in 1996 or 2008.The first read, anyway, does seem to suggest that independents are more likely to vote for a conservative Republican than for a moderate Republican, at least at the national level; this thesis seems to me to support further investigation even if I do find it appealing.  Not being a statistician (except for a certain amateur interest when it comes to sports), I have no idea how to investigate this to see if it stands up to more rigorous examination—but I hope someone puts in the work, and if so, I’ll be interested to see their conclusions.

What our gaffes reveal about our character

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The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart
his mouth speaks.—Luke 6:45 (ESV)Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.”  It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter:  because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see.  They’re the places where the mask slips.  That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.The highest-profile gaffe of recent weeks, of course, is the president’s “Special Olympics” quip on The Tonight Show, which (much to the administration’s chagrin) turned out to be the rimshot heard ’round the world, despite the best efforts of his sycophants to wave it away as meaningless.  We know better than that, these days; we know gaffes are meaningful, and so by and large, we haven’t bought that line.  At the same time, though, what I haven’t seen is much thoughtful reflection on what Barack Obama’s gaffe does mean—most of the commentary has only been interested in its political significance (and on increasing or decreasing that significance, as it suits the one offering the comment).An exception to that is John Stackhouse’s recent post, probably because it’s not just about the president—it’s also a reflection on his own gaffes:

We have to cut each other a little slack: people under stress sometimes do inexplicable things, including making tasteless jokes or using inappropriate language.But I’m not inclined to let myself entirely off the hook, however forgiving I might feel toward President Obama or any other public figure. I recall the words of Jesus: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).That joke came from somewhere. That word came from somewhere. . . .Yes, we live in a sarcastic and vulgar culture . . . It is part of the air we breathe and the toxins enter us whether we like them or not.Again, recognizing that kind of constant cultural influence should help me be more understanding and forgiving of others who screw up in public.Nonetheless, it is simply true that sometimes I really do mean what I say. Sigmund Freud was prone to overstatement, but there is more than a grain of truth in his dictum, “There is no such thing as a joke.” And as I search my heart for the attitudes expressed in this joke or that word choice, I confess I am sometimes dismayed at what I find. . . .Sometimes, alas, the way you really do think about things and the way you really do talk about things—that is, the way you think and talk when you think no one can hear or no one will be offended—really does come out in public.Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy.And may we attend to what we have inadvertently exposed in our gaffes. It’s good to get forgiveness. It’s better to get healed.

I believe we’re right to ask what the president’s wisecrack tells us about the abundance of his heart; but as we do so, we’d best not get too cocky; we’d best proceed with all due humility, and ask ourselves what we’d let slip about our own hearts if we were in his shoes.  And perhaps we’d also do well to bear in mind the counsel of the book of James:Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.—James 3:1 (ESV)

Here’s a noteworthy admission

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God bless them. . . .  Over 50 million people voted for me and Sarah Palin—
mostly for Sarah Palin.—John McCain
That, courtesy of CNN’s PoliticalTicker blog, was one of Sen. McCain’s comments today at the Heritage Foundation.  It’s a remarkable comment—remarkably honest, I think, and really remarkably gracious, too; it reminds me again of all the things I really do like about the man, for all the issues I have with him.

No matter how far you run, the Father’s heart goes farther

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Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace,
nor are your best days ever so good that you are beyond the need of it.
—Jerry Bridges

That summarizes the message of Luke 15 about as succinctly as anyone ever has. It’s unfortunate that the crowning parable of that chapter is usually referred to as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” because the reality is, both sons are lost. One betrayed his father publicly and abandoned him physically, while the other betrayed him privately and abandoned him internally, but each in his own way was a prodigal, in desperate need of grace; neither realized it or asked for it until it was offered (no, the younger son didn’t come home repentant, but in hope of earning his way back into the family), but the father offered it to both of them anyway. As he always does, whether we want him to or not. Such is the gospel.

HT:  Of First Importance

This is what a political cannonization looks like

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and no, that’s not a misspelling; British MEP Daniel Hannan definitely broke out the rhetorical cannons for this one, and his aim was unerring.  The Aged P called this a “very polite and beautifully enunciated assassination,” and he’s right; to his description I would only add “devastating,” because it’s that, too.  Here in the U.S., Republicans like Aaron Schock ought to be taking notes, because most of what MEP Hannan said to PM Gordon Brown could be said with equal point to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others in the Obama/Pelosi administration.

We should have seen Sarah Palin coming

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When I started this blog, I lived in a small town in the Colorado Rockies—and when I say “small,” I mean it; to give you an idea, there are more students in my oldest daughter’s new elementary school than there are people living in Grand Lake.  (Full-time, anyway.)  If you’ve never lived in a small town in the mountains, you need to understand that it’s a different world up there.  You might have the idea that mountain towns are full of colorful characters, and it’s true; they also tend to be fiercely independent, even more fiercely stubborn, and not always so good at compromising and playing nice with others.  As I’ve written before, the downside of that is that you tend to get communities that range from mildly dysfunctional to complete trainwreck towns like Leadville was (and maybe still is, for all I know).I’m not just going on my own experience in saying this, either; during my five years up there, I compared notes fairly frequently with other mountain pastors, because we were all dealing with similar issues that our flatlander colleagues just didn’t understand.  All our communities were different, to be sure, but we shared common root issues and struggles.  Our town made the headlines twice during my five years there:  once when one of our residents sought redress for his grievances against the county’s commercial hub in the cockpit of the 60-ton Komatsu D355 bulldozer that he’d turned into a 75-ton tank, and once when our church’s oldest and most-beloved member died of an unprovoked attack by a rogue bull moose, something which really isn’t normal moose behavior.  None of my colleagues had anything quite that out of the ordinary happen, but they all had some pretty strange stories of their own; that’s just how it is in the mountains.  Or as my organist from Colorado would say, that’s life in a tomato can.All of this is the reason why I found myself starting to write in an e-mail yesterday, “If there’s a Patrick Henry left in this country, he lives somewhere in the Rockies”; but as I wrote that, I suddenly remembered how many of our most characteristic people—the sort of folks who were still climbing fourteeners in their eighties and musing that when they died, they’d have their bodies autoclaved and set out to fertilize the roses—spent significant time in Alaska every year, and/or had lived there in the past and loved it.  It occurred to me that outside of Anchorage and Juneau, the spirit of our little mountain towns, which is the spirit of the old frontier folks who just had to get out from under the conformity of society, is also very much alive and well in Alaska.  (Maybe even in Anchorage and Juneau to some degree.)That having occurred to me, I suddenly realized that that said something very important about Gov. Palin.  Her emergence was a complete shock to most of the Washington elite—of both parties, which is why she took some heavy hits from many who should have had her back—but it shouldn’t have been; the fact that it was says a lot more about them than it does about her.  I don’t say that we should have expected someone as purely gifted as Sarah Palin to appear on the scene, because she’s a once-in-a-generation political talent (yes, I think she’s a level beyond Barack Obama in that respect, for all his evident gifts as a campaigner), but in a more general way, we really should have seen her coming.  In particular, the very elites who were so scandalized by her arrival on the landscape should have seen her coming, if they were actually doing their jobs.Why?  Well, what is the Republican base looking for?  Another Reagan—and by that I don’t just mean a “real conservative.”  Newt Gingrich was more conservative than Reagan, and I don’t believe we’re looking for another Newt (or even the return of the first one, though many folks would accept that in a pinch).  No, the base is looking for a common-sense, common-folks, common-touch conservative, someone who’s conservative not merely pragmatically or even philosophically but out of an honest respect for and empathy with the “ordinary barbarians” of this nation; we’re looking for someone who understands why Russell Kirk, the great philosopher of American conservatism, lived his entire adult life not in one of the media or academic centers of this country, but in rural Mecosta County, Michigan (the next county south of where my in-laws live)—and who understands that that fact has everything to do with his conservatism.  We’re looking for someone whose conservative principles are anchored in the bedrock of this nation, and who understands our conservatism not merely as an intellectual exercise, but out of shared life experience and a common worldview.That, I think, is why George W. Bush won the GOP nomination in 2000, because he projected that—and indeed, he has many of those qualities; he just wasn’t all that conservative, and so he disappointed many.  For all the Texas in him, he still had too much of Harvard and D.C. in him, too, and so was too prone to play by the rules of the political elite.  It’s telling that the great success of his second term (the surge) came from standing up, not to the mandarins of his own party—some of them, yes, but they were balanced somewhat by John McCain, who’d been arguing for the surge for years—but to the senior leaders of the U.S. military, whom he could approach on very different terms.  He could tell the Joint Chiefs to shut up and soldier; he doesn’t seem to have had it in him to do so to the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the White House correspondents, and in that lay much of the malformation of his presidency.The problem is that the qualities the GOP base is seeking aren’t qualities which are rewarded by the political process in most places; in most of this country, to achieve the kind of prominence and to compile the kind of record that are necessary to justify a run for the White House, it’s necessary to compromise those qualities.  To get to Washington, you must increasingly become like Washington—that’s just how the political process works across most of this country.The exception to that—the only great exception I can think of—is the remaining frontier communities in the American West; and of those, it may well be that the only one that’s really large enough for anyone to rise to political prominence without extensive exposure to the elite political culture in America is Alaska.  I don’t hold our mountain communities up as any sort of ideal—I know well from experience that they’re no Shangri-La—and I’m not going to try to do so for Alaska, either; but if anyone in this society was ever going to rise to political prominence as a true champion of conservative ideals, of the spirit of us “ordinary barbarians,” without being co-opted and corrupted by the spirit and outlook of the political elite, it was going to have to be from someplace like Alaska.  We aren’t going to get another Reagan from Massachusetts, or Minnesota, or Arkansas, or Florida; from Alaska, we have a chance.  The fact that few in the elite would be likely to take such a person seriously is actually part of the point, since they didn’t take Reagan seriously either; the revolt against elite opinion (which is not, mind you, the same thing as populism, for all that many in the MSM confuse the two) is part of what the base wants, and someone willing to lead it and stick to it is one of the qualifications.All of which is to say, we might not have predicted specifically the remarkable and gifted woman who is governor of Alaska, or that she would arrive on the scene exactly when she did (though as bizarre as the 2008 presidential election was, when would have been a likelier time?), but we should have expected someone to come out of Alaska, and probably fairly soon.  The “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” sort of incredulous reaction that we got from so many in the punditocracy was not only unjustified, it was a clear sign of their myopia, that they’re so burrowed in to being insiders that they’re largely incapable of looking out the window to see what’s going on outside.  The GOP base wants another Reagan, and won’t be truly happy until it has one; and where else could such a figure come from?Update:  Welcome to all of you coming over from C4P and HillBuzz—it’s good to have you drop by.  The moose stew should be ready in a bit.  If you want to check out a few more of my posts on Gov. Palin, the links post is here.

Thought on worship

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I’ve been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven’t managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I’ll just put this out there as best I can at the moment.  There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it’s still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor’s/worship leader’s job is to give people what they want in worship.  All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption.  I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the “worship experience” is the core of the “attractional” part.  It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook.  It’s the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they’re still doing that in the current economy; I’ve had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to):  the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch.  If the music’s good enough and you like what he’s selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we’re asked to put in.  Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on.  What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it’s a discipline because worship is a discipline.  It’s not about what the liturgy does for us, because it’s not about what worship does for us:  it’s about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.It’s the discipline of recognizing that we don’t come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God’s call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don’t look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together.  It’s about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need.  It’s about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance.  It’s about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren’t strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he’s given us.  Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline:  it’s the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.As we look at the form and content of our worship services, “Is this what I want?” really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, “What is this asking me to do?  How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?”  To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.

What has Christ to do with politics?

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What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians?

—Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, 7

This famous rhetorical question of Tertullian’s has been used in many ways—including, by many skeptics, as a tool with which to bash him in particular and Christians in general as arrogant know-nothings who prefer to stay ignorant.  In context, that’s not exactly fair, given the nature of the philosophy he’s rejecting, and the sort of disputations it produced; but the fact remains that most people aren’t satisfied just to wave away all skeptical inquiries and challenges as Tertullian did, declaring,

With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.

I don’t think we should be satisfied thus.  For all that he meant it as a rhetorical question, if we truly believe that all truth is God’s truth and that his common grace is available to all people—which, if we follow Scripture, I think we should—then his question needs to be taken seriously as a question, and addressed accordingly.

The same, I believe, must be said of the relationship between faith and politics.  Consider Tertullian’s description of the philosophical art of his day as

the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions—embarrassing even to itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing!

That’s as vivid a description of academic disputation now as it ever was—but at least as much, if not more, it’s also a vivid description of our political scene.  Looking out at a political landscape in which people do things like try to bankrupt their political opponents with an unending stream of frivolous complaints, Tertullian might well have asked, “What has Calvary to do with D.C.?”  And again, though he would undoubtedly have answered “Nothing,” and moved on, we need to stop and consider the question carefully and thoughtfully.  What is the proper connection between these two very different things, the life of faith and the life of politics?

This is a problematic question, and while it has ever been thus—this relationship has never been as clear and easy to understand as many people have assumed—the current polarized state of American politics causes us to feel the problem quite keenly. The negativity and the fearmongering are corrosive to the spirit, and the vehemence with which people disagree is wearying.  To be sure, neither the nature nor the degree of this problem are unique in American history (just think of the 1860s, when the political divisions in this country were so deep, we wound up going to war over them); what is new, however, is the particular role of religion in our political disputes. In the Civil War, as Lincoln noted, it was true that

both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other

(while in the background echoed St. James’ anguished cry, “This should not be!”).  In contemporary America, the situation is very different. In our day, by and large, churchgoers tend to side with one party, while those who have no use for church vote for the other—and in popular perception, the gap is nearly total (to the frustrated fury of liberal Christians, who understandably don’t like being overlooked).

In light of this, many would say that the problem is that religion is mixed up with politics when it shouldn’t be. In this view, religion only serves to exacerbate our differences and drive the wedges between us deeper, and the only solution is for religious folk to keep their faith in their churches and out of the voting booth.  There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.

Our current situation is complex, and there is no one step we can take that will make it better; everyone involved in our political system contributes in some way to its problems, and it will take efforts from all sides to improve America’s political health. Those who are Christians need to address the ways in which overtly faith-based political involvement has often been unhelpful; to do this, it will be necessary for us to do a much better job of integrating our theology with our politics.

That might seem counterintuitive to many, who would point to the great many references to the Bible and Christian faith which we already hear from our politicians (and not just Republican politicians, either), but it’s the truth. The problem is that as frequent as such statements may be, most of them aren’t good political theology; while there may be an effort to relate Christian faith to politics, the effort is made in the wrong way and thus does not bear good fruit. Rather than true political theology, what we get instead is mere theologized politics; we get faith used as a tool to advance a political agenda, rather than free to critique and correct that agenda.  This is the point at which things go awry.

Another shameless plug

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I’ve been working for a while now on a new website for our church, and now we’re all set up and going.  I’m sure I’ll be tweaking things for a while, and that others here will be doing so as well, but as a beginning, I’m happy with it.  Wander over and check it out, if you would, and if you have any suggestions for improvement, leave a comment on this post—I’m always glad for a good idea or two.  And if you happen to be in the area of a Sunday morning, drop in and say hi—we’d love to have you join us.