Mustangs, Ministers, and the Misery of Politics

Like you, I'm often scared of religious people. They can be arrogant, preachy, narrow, provincial, and very, very poor listeners. Perhaps also like you, I often find academics to share many of the same attributes. Both groups also tend to associate solely with their own kind, which does little to broaden either their experience or their perspective.

In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.

He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.

Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.

So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.