This one was originally written in the first days of November, 1996, and posted to the OOG list. It has since been posted various places on the internet over the years (a Xoom page, a Facebook note, &c), but those places have all disappeared. So now it is being posted here. I still agree with most of this.
Lost My Cherry to Reagan
“Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed. Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or in practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social, or economic order of this passing time. At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope. At worst, such orders attempt to suppress the good news of the Kingdom and oppress human beings who are the object of divine love and promise.” --“Christianity and Democracy,” Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1981
This quote comes near the beginning of its document. There are things in the article with which I do not agree, and some clarifications that need to be made, for instance the distinction between Communism and Totalitarianism (neither of which I can embrace in this fallen world). But when the article first came out, a few months after I graduated from a large high school in an extremely conservative Texas suburb, I would have agreed with far less of it. In those days I could not have understood how any Christian could not be a Republican, let alone how a Christian could choose to be a Democrat. Now I wonder, along with the article (reprinted in the October issue of First Things), how a Christian can claim, on exclusively religious grounds, to belong to any party.
In my high school days I was an unapologetically hard-right fundamentalist. By my sophomore year, I had already received special permission to take some evening continuing education courses at Dallas Theological Seminary, an institution whose theology struck me, at the time, as leaning a bit to the liberal side. I had purged my music collection of anything not specifically written to glorify God. I had even taken the extra step of cleansing my collection of Christian rock on the bases that 1) many of my coreligionists who believed that rock and roll could not in any way glorify God were caused grief by my enjoyment of such pagan rhythms and 2) according to Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 (the “meat offered to idols” passages) I was required, as the stronger brother, to give up what causes my weaker brothers to sin. I was a bona fide, washed-in-the-blood, Bible-thumping, fightin’ fundy. So it was only natural that, as I morally approached my majority at the close of the seventies, I actively campaigned for the stand-tough, on-God’s-side candidate of Fallwell’s choice, Ronald Wilson Reagan (despite the ominous fact that his three names have six letters each). In fact, I campaigned so diligently that, at barely more than eighteen years of age, I was asked to be my precinct’s Republican Party chairman.
Time passed. On the music front, I heard Jimmy Swaggart (whose own music had been condemned as honky-tonk-Satanic by an earlier generation of conservative brethren) condemn the evils of Christian rock and the opulent life-styles of its performers. He mentioned one of the hardest-rocking groups of those days, Resurrection Band, by name. I happened to know that these people live in one of the few successful communes of the Jesus Movement, a commune that still works and ministers in the toughest part of Chicago; a commune where the members live in poverty by choice, using their limited resources to help those living in even greater poverty, both physical and spiritual; a commune from whose clearly-reasoned and well-documented periodical, Cornerstone, I had, as a young man, first heard of Roe-v-Wade and apartheid. I also happened to know, thanks to photo essay in Life magazine, that Swaggart himself lived in a mansion of baronial proportions, and none of the rooms were being used to house the poor. (Of course, we would all later learn that Swaggart had a problem keeping, in the words of the Church Lady, Little Jimmy in his pulpit.) My music selection began to grow again.
On the political front, changes also began to happen. I worked as an independent contractor through much of the Reagan administration. I was a small businessman, one of those described by the Gipper as “the backbone of America”; it felt to me like America was trying to break its own back. But we prayed, read our Bibles, and ate our government surplus cheese and butter with humble thanks. Then came Iran-Contra.
Now, for those of you who have forgotten, let me remind you of a little crisis that helped propel Reagan forward in the 1980 polls: the Iran hostage crisis. A small Texan with large ears and an even larger business had mounted a daring commando raid and gotten his own people out. President Carter crashed helicopters in a failed attempt called “the Debacle in the Desert.” Bumper stickers asked “Ross Perot, where are you when we need you?” and another macho hombre, who had greeted a younger America from Death Valley every week and had forced some sort of conservative order on the Babylon of California, shot forward in the polls; Reagan would know how to deal with those God-less ragheads. People talked openly and longingly of turning vast stretches of desert into nuclear pools of glass; the slaughter of anonymous thousands was a source of grim humor.
Later I would learn that America had decided to sell weapons to these same desert dwellers; in the name of fighting the evils of drugs and God-less commies, America had given into the hands of our sworn enemies more tools of death. And what had we done with the proceeds? Provided the tools of death to other thugs who claimed to share some of our beliefs. I stopped remembering that euphemisms like “collateral damage” meant families huddled around graves of the innocent. I heard stories of American-bankrolled despots whose underlings were good at removing fingernails and rejoiced that the righteous war was being fought. Villages were strafed nearly daily--men, women and children dying at the wrong end of efficient death from the air, the might of American technology turned against the supposed hiding places of evil men. It was like handing military equipment to the Crips and saying, “Now you boys be sure you get them drugs off our streets.” We armed thugs to fight thugs, and the innocent died. For these and other crimes, more than 100 highly placed Reagan-Bush administrators would be investigated, some charged, fewer jailed. This from the candidate of the Moral Majority, my candidate, the man who was militantly Pro-Life.
Now here I am at the end of the nineties. Another election. The Character Issue is hot, but focuses on the people around the president, not as much on the president himself; I suppose that the direct charges of adultery ring a bit hollow when cast by a Republican leadership who are on their second or third wives. But when I look at the charges against the thirty-odd members of the Clinton administration, I see mainly good old American greed. The sort of capitalistic infractions that are, ironically, usually the trademark of Republican businessmen. And then I have to remind myself of the bloody victories of the Reagan-Bush administrations.
Character Issue indeed. And how is it that you can tell when a politician is lying? All have sinned; all are corrupt. I can not, like the good people mentioned in this morning’s paper, vote on character alone. Our nation’s kindly uncle Reagan, a man whose words were turned into a tract for witnessing to the unsaved, supported policies of mechanized death.
But if the results of Reaganite infractions were more directly deadly, the results of capitalistic greed are still to be abhorred. I lived through the Texas S&L bust. I know that the first things to go when times are tight are exactly the sorts of things James calls “true religion,” the sorts of things that Matthew’s Kingdom Discourse says will separate the sheep from the goats. Prisons get worse; schools “make do”; people without incomes (in whose houses and apartments I’ve spent many years) have to get by on less and less; children without fathers, orphans, eat less and wear thinner hand-me-downs; as Bono put it, “the rich stay wealthy, and the sick stay poor.” These things, the results of the sins of the Clintonians, are what I normally associate with Republican policies, policies that define themselves in opposition to “tax-and-spend liberals.” And now they are the result of the sins of tax-and-spend liberals.
On the other hand, the party of compassion has their own sort of evil. For me it is epitomized in Clinton’s veto of the partial birth abortion ban. Medical literature agrees that, whatever the fetus is, it feels pain. And here is a form of torture so vile that banning it passes both houses with relatively little fight, and Clinton vetoes the bill.
So my choice seems to be this: vote for the party that will kill the unborn in various nasty, if relatively swift, ways. Or vote for the party that will slowly crush and kill the spirits of the sick, the imprisoned, the widows and orphans. It is an intolerable decision. And despite the diverse claims of some members of the Moral Majority and the Catholic Workers, God is on neither side. To quote DA, “Everyone seems to think You’re on their side, but I don’t think You’re that small.” At best, one side or the other may occasionally slip up and make a policy decision that is on God’s side.
And yet on Tuesday I must balance evil against evil and cast several important ballots. Where is Jacob’s angel, from whom I might wrest a bit of the divine? Where is the God of Solomon, who might ask me what boon I would request of Him? How can that same old sinner who looks out of the mirror at me every morning be trusted to choose well without divine intervention?
“I don’t know how to make any choices any more; I mean, who do I vote for? I get the feeling that as soon as something appears in the paper it ceases to be true. I want to meet the man who can crack this world of injustice like a safe. Someone with the courage to allow room for good things to run wild.” --T Bone Burnett, “The Wild Truth”
Kyrie, eleison
Libera nos a malo
etiam veni cito, Domine Iesu
pax vobiscum,
MMe
