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PARTISAN REVIEW
It
seems, then, that little has changed over five centuries. It is still
"nothing for nothing" as money now dominates politics as it once dom–
inated religion. But in the past something did change and changed pro–
foundly. Luther's protests against the Catholic Church's practice of
indulgences set the flames that ignited the Protestant Reformation. In
recent times, instead of expecting a political reformation, we grew
accustomed to watching a President accumulate more political money
than ever raised in history and then calmly enter Sunday church with
Bible in hand. Redemption has replaced reform.
The Savior who drove the money changers from the Temple and died
on the Cross for our sins reentered history by way of the recent Ameri–
can presidential election. Asked to name his favorite philosopher,
George W. Bush answered "Christ." Why? "Because he changed my
heart." We used to be told that the Lord's instruction to "follow me"
meant not to run for office but to lead a Christian way of life of worldly
powerlessness and leave politics to the Romans, who preferred success–
ful conquests to the salvation of their souls. That Christianity is silent
on how power should be comprehended and employed is a problem
even more compounded in Al Gore's religiosity. The professed born–
again vice president assured us that whenever he is faced with a difficult
decision, he asks himself, "What Would Jesus Do?"
Are these guys serious? Fortunately for the country, our Founding
Fathers neither allowed Christ to influence their minds nor stopped to
ask Gore's question after the Boston Massacre of
1770,
when British
Redcoats slaughtered American colonists. Had they followed the gentle
Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, they would have "turned the other
cheek" instead of taking up muskets, and we would still be living under
British domination and drinking tea.
Joseph Lieberman also advised us to look to the "compassion and
love of Jesus of Nazareth" for spiritual guidance. Of all the politicians,
Lieberman's religion seems most authentic and admirable. But surely he
was not telling voters that they must drop everything and follow in
Jesus's path to lead a life of suffering, submission, and sacrifice. All this
Jesus talk gets suspicious when it supposedly leads us back to the
Founders. In a campaign speech Lieberman declared: "John Adams, the
second president of the United States, wrote that our Constitution was
made only for a moral and religious people."
Adams would be amused. He once posed the simple dictum: "The
only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue." But when French
thinkers scrutinized our Constitution and asked, in effect, "Where's the
Virtue?" Adams wrote a three-volume, fourteen-hundred-page treatise
