Last Week's Presidential Election: Reflections from a Christian Democrat

Confession: I was raised in a very conservative Christian environment in which "being a Christian" meant being a fundamentalist Christian (with allowances for very conservative members of such confessional Protestant churches as the Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans) and almost necessarily entailed being politically manacled to the Republican Party. The exposure of Richard Nixon as a lying sociopath hardly changed matters (indeed, to this day I know Christians who maintain that Bill Clinton was "far worse" than Nixon ever had been). So, when I turned 18 I immediately registered to vote as a Republican, and dutifully cast my vote for Gerald Ford (against the outspokenly Christian Jimmy Carter!) and Ronald Reagan in the elections of 1976, 1980, and 1984.

But something happened along the way as I pursued an overly-long graduate theological education far away from my Philadelphia home in the sun-baked, economically-bifurcated hotbed of conservativism known as Dallas, Texas. My politics began to change, at first almost imperceptibly, as I grew increasingly uneasy over America's bellicose militarism and the growing influence of Jerry Falwell's self-righteous "Moral Majority." (And, no, David Gelerntner, seeing as how I was awarded my graduate degrees from a famously conservative seminary, I am not a "left-indoctrinated ignoramus" as you assume the majority of America's academics are; perhaps you think the country would be better off if less of its citizens pursued higher education?). What ultimately sealed the deal for my political transformation was the increasingly clear (as I saw it) disconnect between the social ethics of the Bible I loved and studied and the all-too-evident social and economic realities of the conservative Texas where I lived, worked, and studied.

So, as one might deduce, I was encouraged by the victory of President Obama in last Tuesday's election. That does not mean that I approve of all his policies, particularly those associated with so-called "progressive" social issues. Indeed, as New Testament scholar Daniel Kirk has said, "There is no vote cast that does not require some measure of forgiveness." Nevertheless, I see the triumph of President Obama as a signal that the American people have — by a smallish margin of 2.7%! — repudiated a politics of prideful, resentful, selfish individualism in favor of one that acknowledges that the promise of America can flourish only in community. We are, after all, all in this together. And, as Cain learned the hard way, we are our brother's keepers, whether we want to be or not.

American conservatives, and the Republican Party which has historically been the home of so-called "Movement Conservatism," have always treasured the mythology surrounding the "rugged individual," exemplars of which tamed the frontier and spread the de facto American empire westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean in fulfillment of America's "Manifest Destiny." For such rugged individuals, the arm of government was at best an encumbrance hindering their pursuit of happiness, wealth, and power. This mythology had no greater champion than America's 40th President, Ronald Wilson Reagan, whose physical and ideological embodiment of this message changed the course of the Republican Party of Eisenhouwer, Rockefeller, Dirksen, and even Nixon, all of whom had adapted to the success and popularity of the Keynesian-based New Deal programs instituted by Franklin Roosevelt. In doing so, Reagan thereby changed the trajectory of political discourse, becoming (so I would argue) one of the three most consequential presidents in the nation's history (along with Lincoln and FDR).

Reagan's disdain for the government is best encapsulated in his famous quip, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." (Tell that today to victims of Hurricane Sandy, and they will likely fail to see the humor in it). Indeed, if there is one thing that conservatives of every stripe seem to agree on — and require no empirical validation for — it is that "big government" (aside, of course, from a military that receives more funding than those of all the other countries of the world put together) is bad, and that government cannot do anything but what private enterprise, with its relentless profit motive, can do better. Evangelical Christians, by and large, jumped on the bandwagon, arguing from Romans 13 and elsewhere that the role of government should be confined to protecting the populace from military threats overseas and evildoers within, thus safeguarding the essential freedom of its citizenry.

Things, however, are not so simple. They rarely, if ever, are. To argue that Romans 13 is intended to give a comprehensive vision of the role of human government is both bad exegesis and brutal hermeneutics. Indeed, from Holy Scripture I would argue that we can extrapolate other principles of proper governance from those passages in the Prophets which describe the character of the reign of the promised Davidic ruler we Christians identify as Jesus Messiah. Principal among such characteristics is that of righteousness or justice. We Westerners, especially the conservative among us, tend to define "righteousness" in terms of moral rectitude and "justice" as distributive justice, according to which the virtuous are rewarded and evildoers punished according to their merits (i.e., the equivalent of the Latin iustitia [cf., e.g., Aristotle, Eth. Nic. V.1129a-b; Cicero, Rhet., lib. II cap. 53]). Hence, for example, we always vow to bring perpetrators of atrocities to "justice," by which we mean that the blood of the innocent will be avenged. That is all well and good, but "righteousness" and "justice" in the Jewish Scriptures (the Hebrew צדק [TSDQ] cluster of terms) connote more than that. Indeed, the terms refer to the "right" conduct of both God and humans in the context of the relationships within which they live and operate. Two central "Messianic" Davidic texts stand out in the early chapters of the Book of Isaiah:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this ~ Isaiah 9:6-7

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit ... with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins ~ Isaiah 11:1, 4-5

Throughout the Book of Isaiah the beneficiaries of this justice are consistently the marginalized: the oppressed (1:17), the hungry and naked (58:6-7), and the poor (61:1). The consistent message of the prophets to covenant-breaking Israel and Judah is articulated in the famous words of Amos: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24). And such "justice" will always be tempered by a mercy and humility that is the bane of all self-righteous moralists from time immemorial (cf. Micah 6:8). From these and other texts I would argue that the most important role of government is to promote justice and equity for the entirety of the population — and that this applies especially to those who, for various reasons, find themselves at the margins of society.

At this point I know what many of my more conservative readers are thinking (I know because I once thought this way): "Equality under the law only guarantees equal opportunity; it doesn't and shouldn't mean equality of results." To an extent, I still believe that is true. But we are kidding ourselves if we believe, as even some learned Christians still do (e.g., Westminster Seminary President Peter Lillback [see here]), that one's socio-economic status in society is one's due, and that any governmental attempt to regulate or redistribute wealth is "unjust" and due to "Marxist" thought. [As an aside, apart from the question as to whether or not Marxian analysis has anything to teach postmodern market capitalists (cf. Westminster Seminary's Carl Trueman {http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2008/11/marxing-your-card-lig.php}), today's conservatives consistently fail to distinguish ordinary, FDR-style Democrats such as Barack Obama from Marxists (which they also tendentiously equate with Leninist communism), let alone “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and “Christian socialists” like former British PM Clement Attlee. This is simply unacceptable from an analytic perspective, and such polemics only serve to stifle debate on matters of national importance.] For the fact remains that, the skepticism of affluent suburban Christians notwithstanding, cultural structures and institutions still exist that work to perpetuate poverty and injustice (these structures are at least part of what St. Paul refers to when he speaks of the "principalities and powers" that continue to hold people in bondage). It behooves us as Christians to work to identify and analyze these structures and seek some means to mitigate their deleterious influence on society. How such structural injustice is best dealt with is, of course, a legitimate issue for debate. Count me, however, as one who is more than a little skeptical of the possibility that the issues can be dealt with adequately via the exclusive channel of private charity, including that of the churches, alone.

Indeed, for me what set this election season apart from all predecessors is the degree to which the issues were turned into a referendum on the poor. Ever since Reagan, conservatives have always championed smaller government (at least in theory and in clearly demarcated respects) and lower taxes. And these lower taxes have always disproportionately benefited those at the top of the income scale. Republican conservatives justified this by postulating a theory called "supply side economics," in which the money retained by the rich would "trickle down" to the rest of the populace as they invested back into the economy. Of course, as things turned out, the massive tax cuts wound up benefiting only those people whose taxes were cut. And the result is a society in which the difference in wealth and compensation between the top and bottom of society has grown to where it is at its greatest level since before the Great Depression and the resultant New Deal policies that, in effect, created the broad-based middle class society in which I was raised. We also live in a society in which it is more difficult for the bottom 20% to work their way up to the top tier than even in such supposedly "class-based" societies as Britain. And make no mistake: the purveyors of such economic and political philosophies are happy with that outcome. Though some still, from time to time, give lip service to "trickle down" theories, it has become increasingly more common for them to repaint the issue as one of "fairness" to the rich, who have been re-branded as "job creators." The degree to which this argumentative transformation has been successful, even among those middle and working class people who stand to gain nothing from them, is the most amazing example of political voodoo I have ever witnessed. I am not only amazed, not only saddened, but also sickened by the amount of times I have heard politicians and citizens of the right classify the poor and less well off as "takers," "moochers," and "lazy" people who, in Mitt Romney's infamous words, "won't take charge of their life." Of course, the implication of such rhetoric is that "successful" people all earned their wealth and position due to their own hard work, and so it would be "unjust" for us to expect them to pay taxes at a rate more commensurate with the rates the rich paid during America's years of peak prosperity (of course, spot-on quips such as the one the late, lamented Texas Governor Ann Richards supposedly said about George W. Bush, that "he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple," don't resonate with this crowd). And, also by implication, those at the bottom should simply be thankful, like Lazarus in Jesus' parable, for the crumbs they receive at the foot of the table of the Diveses who have profited most from living and working in America.

Such thought, however, is not only factually false (see David Shipler's book, The Working Poor). It is morally unbecoming of Christians as well, who are commanded to show mercy and compassion for their fellow human beings. Christianity and the philosophy behind Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are, frankly, incompatible. And for self-proclaimed Christians like Paul Ryan to use her work as the foundation of one's economic theory/policies is worse than unfortunate. But what such thought does, more than anything else, is demonstrate the real reason behind the right-wing call for austerity and debt reduction. You see, Republicans  never were overly concerned for deficits when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were piling them up (indeed, Bush VP Dick Cheney famously claimed back in 2002  that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"). Moreover, by clearly implying that federal largess directed toward America's "lazy" poor is driving the deficit, they are appealing to the basest level of America's collective conscience. For the fact remains that "welfare" expenditures— note that they always criticize welfare directed at individuals rather than corporations —  pale in comparison with the military budget that they have no intention of slashing. In terms of pure economics, there is a reason why Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan never revealed details of their "plan" to lower taxes while simultaneously lowering the deficit, and it's a simple one: such a plan is a mathematical impossibility without shredding the safety net from which all Americans benefit. For, as economist Paul Krugman and others have long main maintained, the ultimate goal of arch conservatives ever since FDR has been to scale back this safety net, no matter how necessary or popular it is. But here's the rub: coming out and admitting so would be bad politics and ensure electoral defeat.

Please note that I am not giving a blanket endorsement for all of President Obama's policies. There is plenty to criticize there. Even less am I saying that our country has no need to reflectdeeply on how "social justice" can be maximized. Some people are lazy, and steps ought to be taken to do something about it (as an urban Northeasterner, I believe one of those things is a reinvestment of our government in the large cities that still haven't recovered from the devastation wrought by the double whammy of deindustrialization and the failed "war on drugs"). But selfish complaining about paying taxes to benefit those "other" lazy people is as out of the question as it is morally reprehensible for a Christian to engage in. After all, Jesus himself claimed that the two great commandments were to love God with the entirety of one's being and to love one's neighbor as oneself. I may not know much, but one thing I do know: Looking down one's nose on the poor and judging oneself to be better than they is no way to love them. And leaving the weakest of society to the whims of private charity is not much better.