My thanks to Jared Wilson for posting this. I love the Chieftains (and like the Corrs quite well too, for that matter), and this was just a lovely thing to see.
Run to Win
(Isaiah 6:1-5; 1 Timothy 6:11-16, 20-21)
As I think I’ve said before, it’s funny the things that stick in your head. I remember a Sunday school class sometime during junior high school, taught by the father of a friend of mine, in which he was telling us about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and then he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him, because that’s simply not true; Paul says quite emphatically, “Run in such a way that you may win.” If you want to look it up for yourself, it’s 1 Corinthians 9:24. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class, and I perforce shut up; but I didn’t pay much attention after that. Instead, I was off in my own little world; and if Mr. Mouw noticed, he didn’t feel the need to say anything about it.
Partly, I’m sure, my ego was hurt; but more than that, I was taken aback, and I needed to take time to think about it. For one thing, I was surprised that my teacher had gotten that wrong, and even more surprised that he hadn’t even checked, when I challenged him, to see if he’d made a mistake. More importantly, though, the mistake made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.
Now, as you may have noticed, Paul likes athletic metaphors. I suspect, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he probably had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. Besides that, though, I think when he looked at the athletes of his day, he had considerable respect for how hard they worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games—and as he notes in 1 Corinthians, that prize was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?
Certainly Paul thinks so, and so he encourages Timothy here. That’s not clear in the NIV, which reads “fight the good fight” in verse 12—but while that is what Paul said back in chapter 1, where he was encouraging Timothy to go head-to-head with the false teachers in Ephesus and not back down, that’s not actually what he says here. Rather than the military metaphor he used earlier, this is the language of athletic competition which he uses in so many other places. Run the good race, Paul tells Timothy; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, which is already yours but which you need to grab hold of and live into. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.
What that looks like, Paul lays out in verse 11. First he tells Timothy, “Flee from all this”; reject not only the false teaching going around Ephesus, but reject the motives driving the false teachers. Reject their desire for gain, reject their desire to serve themselves and feed their own desires, and pursue a different way. It’s interesting how Paul lays that way out. First, he says, pursue righteousness and godliness. These represent the two dimensions of the Christian life, the vertical and the horizontal—our relationship with God and our relationships with those around us. This is the global statement: rather than living for yourself, focus on being right with God and being right with others. Live your life in such a way as to please God—make that your top priority; and part of the way you do that is to do right by the people you meet in this world. This, of course, looks back in part to some of the things we’ve talked about in the past few weeks, such as taking care of the powerless and the needy, and keeping our relationships pure.
Next, Paul tells Timothy to pursue faith and love. These aren’t virtues exactly, but something deeper—they’re the foundations of the Christian life. This is a strong contrast with the false teachers. Clearly, they weren’t living by faith in God, they were putting their trust in money, and in all the other things in which the world puts its trust. That’s easy to do, since we can see these things and know exactly what we have; we can see our money, we can look at our bank account and know precisely what’s in it, and we can figure out just what we can afford to do. We can’t see God, nor do we have any way to know for sure how or when he will provide for us—or even, some might say, if he will provide for us. To live by faith in God isn’t easy for us, because it seems much riskier than putting our faith in things we can see and touch and hold and count. And yet, this is what Paul says Timothy needs to do, and what we need to do—to set aside the worldly-mindedness of the false teachers and put faith in God. Otherwise, whatever our other virtues, we aren’t living a Christian life in any meaningful sense.
Along with that, Paul tells Timothy to pursue love. Now, the world would agree with that one, but it would mean something very different by it; there are a lot of folks out there who will tell you they’re living their lives for love, when what they’re really pursuing is romance, or lust, or someone to make them feel better about themselves. What Paul’s talking about is something very different—it’s the self-giving love of God, the love which gives of itself for the good of others. The love of God isn’t about getting for ourselves, unlike so many of our human imitations, it’s about giving ourselves away; and so, where the false teachers were all about the profit they could make off the church, Timothy’s call is to give himself away, to lay down his life, for his brothers and sisters in Christ, for the people of God—for the church. To which we may imagine Timothy protesting, “But Paul, look how badly they’ve treated me—they don’t deserve it!”; and in return, we might well imagine Paul saying, “Look how badly they treated Jesus—at least they haven’t crucified you yet. He loves us anyway; you love them anyway.”
In line with this, Paul says, “pursue gentleness.” It can be easy to justify being hard on people by calling it “tough love”; certainly there are times when there’s a need for firmness, and certainly that will usually provoke squawks of opposition. But even when the time comes to lay down the law, as it certainly had for Timothy, it must be done with gentleness, taking care to give no unnecessary hurt. There was no doubt a part of him that would have liked to punish the false teachers who had made his life so difficult—to make them pay for the trouble they had caused. As Paul reminded him, however, there was no place for that in his call to ministry. Whatever he did, he must do with gentleness, seeking only to restore those who had wandered away from Jesus, not to claim even the smallest measure of vengeance for himself.
The other item on Paul’s list is endurance. This is a mixed metaphor, since I’m not sure how you can pursue endurance, but the point is clear: Timothy is not to be one of those who goes a little way and then gives up. This is a critical part of running to win, because it’s not enough to set the pace—you have to be able to keep it up. The best illustration of this I can think of comes from the life of the great Oregon long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine. Growing up in the Northwest, I heard a lot about Pre; and part of his story was the Munich Summer Olympics. He was always an aggressive runner, and running the 5000 meters at the ’72 games, he shot out of the gate, setting a pace that would have won him not only the gold, but a world record, if he could have sustained it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and in the last 150 meters, having led the whole race to that point, he was passed first by Lasse Viren . . . then by Mohamed Gamoudi . . . and then, 15 meters from the finish line, by Ian Stewart. He led most of the way, but he finished fourth. Winning the race isn’t just about doing well for a while, it’s about sustaining the effort, doing well all the way to the end.
This is the key, because it’s not enough to pursue righteousness and godliness for a while, then take a break and chase your own desires for a bit; it’s not good enough to pursue faith and love for a while, then slide back into the materialism and self-absorption of the world for a spell. It’s not good enough to be gentle until things get hard, then give it up. If we’re going to run the good race of faith, if we’re going to run in such a way as to win the prize, we need to be like the Energizer bunny—we need to keep going, and going, and going. What’s more, we need to realize that God doesn’t just call us to run when it’s easy, he calls us to keep running even, and especially, when it’s hardest.
Of course, we can’t do this alone; that’s why athletes always train with partners, and why they have trainers. To grow in endurance, we have to push ourselves beyond our own idea of how far we can go—and we can’t do that alone; we need people to urge and encourage us to keep going, to keep pushing, to go further. I learned this during my last year in Colorado, taking a couple classes from a veteran personal trainer who had semi-retired to Grand Lake and opened a little fitness business to keep herself busy. There were a couple times I keeled over right there in class, but by the time I had to stop I had a much, much better sense of what I could actually do than I had ever had before. Without her example and direction, and without the desire to keep up with her and the others in the class—there’s that competition thing again; running to win is a very different thing when you’re doing it in a group—I never would have done that. I never would have pushed myself, again and again, beyond what I thought my limits were, and so I never would have discovered that I was wrong.
We see the reason this is so important in verse 20, where Paul writes, “Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.” What has been entrusted to him? The gospel, and the responsibility to lead the church to live it out. Remember what I’ve said all the way through this series—the heartbeat of this letter, which we hear over and over again, is that we have been given the mission to bring the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world, and everything we do must be to that purpose. The race we run isn’t something we run by ourselves, and it’s not just about us as individuals winning our own prizes; it’s about all of us running together, encouraging each other on, helping each other out, and it’s about the people we attract to run with us. If we stop running for a while, we aren’t the only ones affected—everyone around us is, too. Run to win, not just for your own sake, but for everyone else’s.
The Palin Revolution, one year on
One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley’s site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I’ve ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).
One year later, I don’t take any of that back. I’m sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I’m sorry for the lies and smears she’s had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she’s the best leader this country has to put forward, haven’t changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.
Some might say that’s unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don’t believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, “The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents.” It’s a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:
Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).
Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .
Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .
The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.
As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it’s also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.
This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it’s true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you’re not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour’s post “Who Is Sarah Palin”offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys’ network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.
Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say “of course she won,” but it was anything but an “of course” at the time.
Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress “All of you here need some adult supervision!” as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I’m sure he would have appreciated the line.
This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.
Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they’re missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn’t change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did “a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would.”
This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anythingthat would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there’s no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)
This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn’t have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn’t a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn’t on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re faced with having to try to transform your own party.
To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn’t in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn’t really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn’t nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.
As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party’s state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.
As such, Gov. Palin’s utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die,” but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.
Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google “Facebook ‘Sarah Palin,'” and you’ll get “about 9,520,000” hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go “into the wilderness”—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she’s demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she’ll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it’s proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she’s dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party’s opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration’s energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.
Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin’s resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn’t hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don’t value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn’t do it again if she won the White House?
The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state’s executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.
One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That’s leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that’s a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.
And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.
The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she’ll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn’t as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can’t count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it’s necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don’t.
The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she’s already shown that her base won’t just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.
All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It’s been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it’s been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
Reflections on the case of Mark Sanford
Down in South Carolina, the calls continue to build for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign his office. It’s a long fall for a man once considered a possible running mate for John McCain last year, and a serious presidential contender in 2012, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter—as much as anything, because Sanford just doesn’t seem to be able to let go and accept the full consequences of his actions. There are those in South Carolina who would excuse him because they don’t trust his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, and don’t want to see Lt. Gov. Bauer succeed Gov. Sanford; but if Gov. Sanford is that concerned about Lt. Gov. Bauer, he should have thought of that before having an affair. He has dishonored himself and disqualified himself from office; honor demands that he step down, regardless of whether he finds his successor satisfactory or not.
The truth is, at this point, Mark Sanford reminds me of Pete Rose (if not as scummy). Mike Schmidt made a telling comment recently about Rose:
If it were me, and I had lived a lie for 14 years, and I went up to tell the commissioner that I was sincerely sorry for what I’ve done to my family, to the sport, etc., I probably would be back in baseball now and in the Hall of Fame—because I would have been a tremendously remorseful individual. And I would have felt the burden of that the rest of my life, in everything that I did. And I would have, in my travels, been a totally different person.
My lifestyle would have changed. I would have felt an obligation to change and to become someone that the baseball world would once again learn to love after forgiving me. I would have been that guy. And I don’t think Pete has been.
So far, Gov. Sanford hasn’t been that guy either. Had he been willing to confess, step down, take it like a man, and actually take the time to put his life back together to where it really was what he had always presented it to be, his political life would probably already be in the recovery phase; after all, that sort of behavior is so rare among prominent politicians, it would have impressed a lot of people. But instead, he’s trying to hang onto everything he possibly can with both fists, and all he’s doing is making matters worse for himself in the long term. As a result, in the long term, Mark Sanford will matter most in this country as a cautionary tale of how you just never know with politicians, and how they can always let you down.
That doesn’t mean, though, that they always will; there are those who are honorable and faithful, people of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. The hard part is separating them out from the gifted liars who’ve internalized Groucho Marx’s crack that sincerity is the key, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made; and the only way to make that separation is to let time, exposure and opposition do their work. The great difference between Barack Obama and John McCain last November wasn’t ideological, because Sen. McCain doesn’t have an ideology; the great difference was that, for good or ill, we knew who Sen. McCain is, because over the years it’s all been made very, very clear—but we really didn’t have a clue about Sen. Obama. That’s why there are such an astonishingly large number of people (for this early in his term) coming out and expressing regret for voting for the guy: he isn’t who they let themselves believe him to be.
Now, take this truth, and on the first anniversary of Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage, look back in the light of this truth at the battles she’s had to fight this past year. Look back at the PDSers and the plague of anklebiters, the oppo researchers parachuted into Wasilla and the media misrepresentations, and ask: What have they really done? Have they destroyed her? No; they’ve managed to convince a lot of people who would never have voted for her anyway, and they’ve planted concerns in the minds of a lot of potential supporters, but they haven’t done any damage she can’t undo, given time and exposure. What they havemanaged to do, though, is to establish pretty clearly that even given the combined efforts of thousands of motivated people backed by all the money they need for all the digging they want to do, there’s simply no real dirt to be dug up on Sarah Palin.
In other words, all they’ve managed by their efforts is to demonstrate that they can’t bring Gov. Palin down with the truth, because they’ve had to resort to lies, invented stories, misrepresentations, and unjustified charges. I don’t think most people who looked at her in an unbiased fashion had any doubts that she is who she presents herself to be, but at this point I think we can take that as proven—because if she weren’t, we’d have heard about it by now. (And oh boy, would we have heard about it.) If she had had any real skeletons in her closet, they’d have been out of the closet and line dancing on the front lawn of the Juneau statehouse long since. In short, no one needs to worry that Gov. Palin is going to pull a Sanford on us, or that she’s a fake, or that she will in any way prove to be not substantially what we thought she was, because the likes of Celtic Diva, Andree McLeod, David Axelrod and the ADN have done yeoman work for us in ruling out that possibility—not that that’s what they intended to do, but it’s what they’ve accomplished.
The intensity of Gov. Palin’s exposure and of the opposition she’s faced has made this clear in record time: she is, truly, one of the honorable and faithful people in our politics, one of those of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. For all the clouds she’s had to endure, that’s a remarkable silver lining.
(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)
Homosexuality and the roots of division
Jared Wilson makes a very important point—one on which I’ve been intending to comment for several days—on the decision by the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a seriously misnamed denomination) to allow self-affirmed practicing homosexuals to be ordained as pastors:
When concerned folks raise voices of protest and warning, when they say adamantly “This isn’t right,” they are accused of singling out the sin of homosexuality for special treatment, laser-focusing in on the homosexual as a sinner above all sinners, worse than the rest of us.
But I actually think it’s sort of the other way around. It is the proponents of gay clergy who single out homosexuality. It is they who are pressing us to respond to this issue. Nobody is pushing for resolutions on the allowance of adulterous clergy, of gossipy clergy, of alcoholic clergy, of p()rn-addicted clergy, or what-have-you.
It is not those who protest who are singling out this sin. It is the proponents of the sin as normative—or at least, passable—who are singling it out. . . .
And it isn’t those who believe the Bible when it says homosexual behavior is a sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that it isn’t. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible’s testimony, you’re creating the division. But, sure, many of us will oblige in parting ways with you. If pressed—as when votes like this go the way they did—we will cooperate in division.
Read his whole post, because he has more to say beyond what I’m highlighting here, reflecting on the nature and origin of the historic creeds (and, I would argue, the confessions as well); I want to focus, though, on this point, because it’s an important one to understand. The division over the issue of homosexual behavior is the creation of those who want to change the church, and it has been created deliberately to accomplish that purpose; for them to blame that division and the fighting that goes with it on those who disagree with them, as if we should have just surrendered as soon as they made their first demand, is wildly unjust.
It’s interesting, if you hang around in mainline circles, you’re bound to hear folks on the left complaining that “they” (meaning the biblically orthodox) want to take “our” church away from “us.” Which would make sense if the church had taught for 2000 years that homosexual sex is just fine with God, and the view that it isn’t was the innovation. But that’s not how it is; it is, in fact, the exact backwards of the truth (as Mike Callahan might say). If anyone is trying to “take the church away” from anybody, it would be those who are trying to change the established teaching of the church going all the way back through the history of Israel to the writing of the book of Genesis.
Now, I do not say that the singling-out of homogenital contact as a particularly awful sin is the creation of the contemporary Left; that singling-out is itself a sin, and there’s no question that it didn’t originate in the years following Stonewall. But then, that’s not unique to homosexual activity, either; as G. K. Chesterton rightly protested in one of his Father Brown stories, the church has always tended to have fashionable sins, for which it makes excuses, and unfashionable ones, on which it comes down with excessive and graceless force; what they are changes with the times, but the tendency rolls on unabated. I do believe, though, that the way in which the Left has pursued its agenda on this point has served to exacerbate this problem among many on the Right, as counter-reaction pushes those unwilling to surrender biblical orthodoxy toward viewing homosexual activity as uniquely awful, and thus uniquely to be despised; and that does no one any good.
The gospel war in our hearts
The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.
—John Piper, This Momentary Marriage
I have nothing to add to that; I just want to lift up the truth of this this evening.
John Mackey, Mark Steyn, and the intolerance of “tolerance”
A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,
Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.
“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”
Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:
I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!
She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,
- Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
- He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
- He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
- He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
- He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
- He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms – not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
- He and his wife participate in yoga
- He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
- Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
- Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
- There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
- Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
- Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
- Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
- At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
- Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
- “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.
Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.
As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:
- Tolerance is the highest virtue.
- Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.
- Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.
- Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.
- Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.
- Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.
Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.
However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it’s their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.
And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.
That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:
The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .
It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.
He’s right.
Is Rahmbo feeding a backlash?
There’s a fascinating article up today on The Daily Beast by John Batchelor on “How Rahm Is Reviving the GOP”—one which is particularly fascinating because Batchelor is no GOP apologist. (Indeed, he makes such statements as “Suddenly the disgraced and demoralized Republican Congress has an unearned future,” and “The still lifeless Republicans . . . have avoided any credible renovation or even contrition for their decades of swinishness,” as well as quoting a “Republican partisan” as calling congressional Republicans “cowardly” and “brain-dead.” I should note, I don’t particularly disagree with any of this.) He describes “the superhuman clumsiness of a man who has made himself indispensable to the Obama administration and insufferable to the Democratic Congress,” and goes on to write:
The GOP always knew that Emanuel was a problem that could not be solved and could only be endured while he served three tempestuous terms in the House. But now the beleaguered Democratic majority is learning painfully that Emanuel’s talents for bullying, whimsical favoritism, cheerful power-grabbing, and self-congratulatory earthiness have transformed the first hundred days of the Obama administration’s seamless accomplishment into a second hundred days of blame and gloom. . . .
A twist of fate is that as Emanuel’s authority and ambition grow, reaching for swift closure to foreign commitments, staging bipartisan fantasy cruises, then reaching to construct Democratic-only laws that turn the theory of checks and balances into an unlimited credit card on the Treasury, the polling points not only to a rising tide of facedown Republicans but also to a sinking approval rating for a president who entirely controls Emanuel’s fate. Is there a lesson in the detail that the French Revolution waited too long to turn on Robespierre’s ruthless genius, and by the time the guillotine fell, the ludicrously reactionary aristocracy had rallied throughout Europe and led a counterrevolution that swept liberty into the ditch for another lifetime?
In between those two paragraphs are the details, which really are fascinating—and more than a little disturbing. Read the whole thing, and you’ll understand why Batchelor compares Emanuel to Robespierre.
Edward M. Kennedy, RIP
There is little on which I agreed with Sen. Ted Kennedy, and I’ve never been much impressed with the Kennedy mythos; what’s more, I think his moral and physical cowardice at Chappaquiddick dishonored him. That said, it’s inappropriate to ignore the good things about people, and especially to do so with regard to one’s opponents; as such, I think it’s important to point out that there truly were some things about Sen. Kennedy that any fair-minded person would find admirable.
I like, for instance, what John Fund had to say:
Ted Kennedy and I didn’t occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.
In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer—my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they’d learned about treatment. “He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did,” Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. “The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone’s life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington.”
He was a powerful, powerful advocate for the causes to which he committed himself—and his dedication was remarkable. As Bill Bennett writes,
Whatever one thought of him, there is no one in the Senate of his force, sheer power, and impact. If you think there is his equal in this, tell me who it is.
He fought hard, and sometimes viciously; but for all that, he seems to have earned a fair bit of sincere admiration and affection even from those on the other side of the aisle. Mitt Romney’s statement captures some of this:
In 1994, I joined the long list of those who ran against Ted and came up short. But he was the kind of man you could like even if he was your adversary. I came to admire Ted enormously for his charm and sense of humor – qualities all the more impressive in a man who had known so much loss and sorrow. I will always remember his great personal kindness, and the fighting spirit he brought to every cause he served and every challenge he faced. I was proud to know Ted Kennedy as a friend, and today my family and I mourn the passing of this big-hearted, unforgettable man.
Requiescat in pace, Edward M. Kennedy.
The leaven of the Pharisees and the loaf of politics
I posted yesterday on this passage from Ray Ortlund’s blog:
Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.
Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.
As I was writing, I remembered a somewhat similar passage from C. S. Lewis:
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
We may rightly call Lewis’ observation the political application of Dr. Ortlund’s point. I didn’t want to go that direction with my post, so I didn’t reference Lewis at that time. Denver Postcolumnist David Harsanyi did, though, in a recent piece (HT: Shane Vander Hart), applying Lewis’ point squarely to our president and his administration:
This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform is “a core ethical and moral obligation,” beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn’t gaining the type of traction advocates of “reform” had hoped. . . .
On Team Righteous, we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad, we must have the minions of Beelzebub—by which, of course, we mean profit-driven, child-killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.
Why wasn’t this multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders offended that a mere earthly servant was summoning the good Lord in an effort to pass legislation? Certainly, one of the most grating habits of the Bush administration was how it framed policy positions in moral absolutes.
As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious straw man tugging at the sleeves of the wicked.
The problem with this, as both Lewis and Dr. Ortlund point out, is that it’s the ultimate version of “the end justifies the means”—if “we” are on God’s side and “they” are enemies of the right, the good and the just, then “we” don’t need to worry about any moral constraints, because the rightness of our cause automatically justifies anything we do in its service. This is the kind of thing that makes, at the extremes, a Torquemada, a Lenin, a Dzerzhinsky, a bin Laden—the people who will “torment us without end,” and do so “with the approval of their own conscience” because they know it’s for the best—indeed, because they’re really only doing it for our own good.
This kind of thing doesn’t make for good religion; it doesn’t make for good politics, either. As I said yesterday, the only real antidote to this is humility, and for all the degrees and other qualifications on display in the current White House, humility appears to be one thing that’s in short supply there. Fortunately, one good thing about democratic politics is that it’s usually pretty good about humbling those politicians as need it.
May it come soon.