-Caveat Lector-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:08:58 -0600
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "W. F. Buckley - On The Right" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: WF Buckley - On The Right - Jan. 4, 2000
William F. Buckley, Jr. - ON THE RIGHT
Tuesday, January 4, 2000
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WHERE DOES GOD GET INTO THE ACT?
I am gone! For two weeks' vacation! I am wild with liberty!
And inclined to dwell for a moment on a question I have been
asked in other forums in the past few days, namely, what do
I think of the answer given by presidential candidate George
W. Bush to the question, Which political philosopher/thinker
did he identify with? His answer was Christ, "because he
changed my heart." An OK answer?
Let's touch down, however briefly, on those critics who are
offended, I think unnecessarily, by the mere mention of God
as a political mentor. Charles Krauthammer goes all the way:
"For those who are secular, it is scary. You watch these
debates, brimming with God talk, and you catch a whiff of the
Taliban." Well, the nose here has to be extraordinarily twitchy,
because the candidates who sort of swung with God when the
question was asked are as unlikely to advocate Muslim extremism
as Al Smith was to invite the pope to come on over and take
charge, when such a suspicion was encouraged in 1928.
Nobody was going to object, at the Republican debates, to a
call to restore morality. But is that call -- to a moral
renaissance -- to be sharply distinguished from an oblation
to the godhead of morality? George Washington admonished
against any "supposition" that "morality can be maintained
without religion." "Reason and experience," he commented,
"both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail
in exclusion of religious principle."
And the context in which Washington spoke was hardly sectarian.
President Washington wrote with poetic force to the Hebrew
congregation of Savannah on the divine auspices of intercredal
toleration. "May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since
delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors ...
continue to water them with the dews of heaven and make the
inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal
and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah."
But a different question has also been raised, namely whether
it is correct to summon Christ as a source of political
philosophy. In one obvious sense God (Christ was God, in the
Christian understanding) clearly is the source of what should
be the underlying plank of political philosophy, namely the
civil question of how to organize a society in which all men
are equal, and should be free. The difficulty arises in
suggesting that God is going to emanate a platform for the
GOP. And that difficulty is at the heart of the problem of
God as a political philosopher in the context in which that
question was posed during the debates.
Since we are whiffing things, here is a whiff of God that
suggests the dimensions in which he is taken. "What art thou
then, my God? ... Most highest, most good, most potent, most
omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet
most present; most beautiful, yet most strong; stable, yet
incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new,
never old; all-renewing, and bringing age upon the proud,
and they know it not; seeking, yet having all things." The
language of a great poet and metaphysician, St. Augustine.
In the face of such a God as that, one shrinks from pleading
his support for a political agenda, though God's sanction
was specifically and critically sought in the long program
to abolish slavery, in England and here.
In the absence of contradiction, it is correct to assume that
Gov. Bush is sincere in citing God as the cause of that special
heartbeat that changed his life. True, we are cynical in the
age in which President Clinton goes from Easter Service to
the adulterer's couch in a single day. But the great lesson
of Elmer Gantry, the hypocritical preacher in the novel of
Sinclair Lewis, isn't that man can deceive and surreptitiously
defy the very laws that he preaches. It is, rather, that the
laws of behavior that guide the Judeo-Christian world are
everlastingly relevant in part because they are so regularly
traduced.
So yes, one can criticize the political candidate who cites
Christ in answer to a question having to do with political
philosophy. But this only on the grounds that the grandiosity
is on the order of citing air as your favorite food. Forgetting
that, it is invigorating, in a secular age in which the
exhibition of the Ten Commandments is cited as profane
constitutional behavior, to have it straight from such as
Mr. Bush what it is that he thinks of first in the search
for priorities.
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