Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

Half a millennium ago, in the vast forests of medieval Europe, armies of knights routinely battled one another for no greater purpose than the glory and wealth of their kings, who derived their sovereign authority not from popular election, but from the privilege of their birthrights. Aside from military conquests and coups d'etat, the only force capable of unseating the monarchical sovereign was the Catholic church, which could make or unmake a king's claim to power merely by bestowing or withholding its blessing of his occupation of the throne.

Things have changed over the last 500 years or so. Today we believe in democracy, which means that our armies no longer go to war for national glory or territorial conquest, but solely for defensive purposes, and only as a last resort. Our leaders are not the inheritors of the stockpiled political power of family dynasties; they are chosen to rule by the people, and can take office only after a majority of citizens have selected them in a popular vote.

What's that? Oh, right. Whoops.

Well, two out of three isn't so bad, is it? At least our government officials still see themselves as secular spokespersons of the people, not of the church. At least they don't take their marching orders from the clergy, especially when church doctrine is at odds with prevailing public opinion, right?

That question, at least, we may answer with a firm, unambiguous, "Well, not yet, anyway." But the horizon is looking somewhat bleak.

Though in light of the present political culture it's difficult to recall, as recently as during the early days of the 2000 Republican primary campaign season, the mainstream of the Republican Party was still at least nominally committed to secular political values like the rule of law and the final authority of the U.S. Constitution in matters of public life. Thus, when the candidates for Republican presidential nominee were asked in a debate to name a political philosopher with whom they identified, Steve Forbes named John Locke, Alan Keyes mentioned the Founding Fathers, and John McCain chose the Founding Fathers and Theodore Roosevelt, all of them members in good standing of the American democratic pantheon, all quite appropriate selections for aspirants to the highest office of a mature democracy.

George W. Bush, the reader will recall, responded, "Christ, because he changed my heart." Asked to elaborate, Bush went on, "When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as a savior, it changes your life, and that's what happened to me."

If there was a single moment when Bush clinched the nomination, that was it. In that instant, Bush won over one of his most important constituencies: the Evangelical right wing of the Republican Party.

There was nothing inevitable about the close alliance that came to be forged between Bush and his Christian conservative loyalists; the Christian right had never been entirely comfortable with George Bush, Sr.'s moderate Episcopalian faith, and his prodigal son, the playboy-turned-neo-Puritan, was as yet an unknown quantity. Yet it is inconceivable that Bush, Jr. could have won (lost) the 2000 election without his Evangelical supporters. Indeed, Karl Rove attributes the slimness of the margin of Bush's -- er, Gore's -- victory in the last election to the lower-than-expected turnout of Evangelical voters, and is placing renewed emphasis this time around on that demographic. Had Bush not embraced this constituency with the authentic and audacious chauvinism of which his father could only muster a transparent pantomime, he may well have failed to win the Republican primary, to say nothing of the general election. But the almost smug confidence with which he pronounced his words at that debate, and his reference to such an intimately personal messiah, firmly established his born-again bona fides to the Christian right-wing, who duly delivered their hero to the White House.

Bush's loyalty, or pandering, or whatever you'd like to call it, to the Christian right is a more profound and disconcerting phenomenon than his captivity to other special interests like the gun lobby and the energy industry. However fanatic their ideology or shady their methods, these more run-of-the-mill interest groups at least accept the basic legitimacy of the democratic process and the authority of the written law. Indeed, the NRA's entire political platform rests on a fetishism of the Second Amendment of the Constitution that verges on idolatry.

Christian conservatives, on the other hand, tend to dismiss both the law and the democratic process as the imperfect creations of imperfect beings, which must, when necessary, take a backseat to the divine word of the Holy Scriptures. Thus, when an Alabama judge refused to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the state Supreme Court building last year, it mattered little if at all to his religious defenders that a Federal court had deemed its presence unconstitutional and had ordered its removal, and that by refusing to remove it, an official guardian of the rule of law was denying that his own personal religious convictions were bound by it. It mattered little to them because, indeed, they share his conviction that the laws of the land are subordinate to their own personal understanding of the Word of God, and that the former should be ignored, violated and resisted whenever it is in conflict with the latter. This same mentality, needless to say, informs the extremists of the Right to Life movement, and their patent disregard for the Roe v. Wade decision.

The existence of such fringe elements and the degree of their organizational capacity is distressing enough in itself. But when the President of the United States starts to invoke their rhetoric, and endorse, if only by his refusal to condemn, their open hostility to the sovereign authority of the law, the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum. Bush has repeatedly invoked God as the ultimate inspiration for his policies, sometimes specifically in order to contrast it with the mandates of statutory, regulatory and constitutional law. He has publicly proclaimed his intention to base his decisions of federal judicial appointments in part upon the degree of a candidate's faith. And in his initiation and execution of war, he has routinely disparaged international laws and treaties under the pretext pursuing aims mandated by God (or some thinly disguised proxy thereof). When the President himself, proudly and habitually, puts his religious convictions before his legal obligations, can we really continue to call ourselves a democracy, "a nation of laws, not men"? In a country that prides itself on its history of unwavering adherence to the sovereign authority of laws drafted by duly authorized representatives of We, the People, our president is a latter-day John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and his party is falling behind his anti-democratic zealotry in lockstep.

As if it were not enough, moreover, that the Republican Party has somehow managed to make it respectable for government officials to shun the law in the name of their God, its political operatives are attempting to impose their theocratic agenda upon the Democrats as well. The Republicans' latest tactic against John Kerry has been to attempt to compel the Catholic church to deny him Communion to punish him for his pro-choice position. At least one bishop has followed the logic to its conclusion, announcing his intention to refuse to administer Communion to any Catholic who votes for politicians who are pro-choice, pro-stem cell research, pro-euthanasia or pro-gay marriage, literally forcing them to decide between their political values and their salvation. Is this the kind of political culture the Republicans want for the U.S.? Do they wish to restore the authority of the church of pre-Reformation Europe, when the clergy had veto power over the decisions of the secular state? Is this what they call "democracy"?

Bush is, no doubt, familiar with Matthew 6:24: "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." The state, likewise, cannot pledge itself unreservedly to the ultimate authority of the Will of the People, on the one hand, and to the dictates of any church, on the other. A nation cannot be, at the same time, democratic and theocratic. If you don't believe me, ask an Israeli. Or brush up on your history of the English Civil War. Or look at the State Department's deliberations on democracy and Islam.

It is reasonable enough to argue that respect for faith, or even the degree of faith's prevalence, is a measure of a culture's health. But when faith comes at the expense of reverence for the authority of the law, when the law is seen as a disposable adversary of the commands of the church, the price of the bargain is lawlessness. Lawlessness can take two forms. The first is a state of chaos, in which each person acts solely according to his personal will, without restraint and without conformity to principle. The second is tyranny, in which the leader regards his own will to be, in essence, the law.

As the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has begun to reveal, the Bush administration has created conditions in at least one arm of the government that have incubated both tendencies. The Bush administration's cavalier dismissiveness toward international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, has set the tone for how power is to be exercised in the New American Century. Autocrats who consider their own discretion to be the penultimate authority of the state demonstrate by example to their subordinates that they, too, might regard the law as merely an obstacle to circumnavigate. Such is what seems to have occurred within the military under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld, the philistine's autocrat, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the thinking man's autocrat.

Invocation of God as one's guiding authority is no compensation for the dereliction of the law. For unless we are willing to forfeit our liberties and act as if God's commands really were the law of the land, as, for example, they were in Afghanistan under the Taliban, then we might hasten to consider Nietzsche's admonishment that the priest is the man who "calls his own will God." Precisely the same might be said of the pious country priest who calls himself the President.