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Article. The next four years, many conservative Christians are going to be sitting round the bar of their favorite bistro commiserating over sour grapes. The wine of their intoxication will be "The Myth of the Christian Presidency," while many others will be getting positively giddy in a chain of bars throughout the country called “The Myth of the Liberal Fix.” Let's all sober up, shall we? Back to Articles

The Myth of the Christian President
& the Myth of the Liberal Fix
by Charles Strohmer

Part One: The Myth of the Christian President
Long before the 2008 presidential election, the only question I had was how badly the Democrat would beat the Republican. Their names, to me, would be beside the point. The slow burn across the country against President Bush had become so widespread during 2006-2007 that a large enough percentage of the electorate by 2008 had determined, I believed, that the Republicans simply did not deserve four more years in the White House. A change would occur, was my view.

The interesting question for me was a two-parter: how giddy those who had elected the Democrat would become and how depressed conservative Christians would become. Let’s start with the latter. The next four years, many conservative Christians are going to be sitting round the bar of their favorite bistro commiserating over sour grapes. The wine of their intoxication will be the myth of the Christian presidency. Friends, put down that drink. Give your car keys to the bar tender, reach for your cell, call a friend for a ride home, and then stay out of that place. The moral and social problems that you would like to see our nation rid of, or prevented, are not going to be solved by having presidents – or vice-presidents – who are Christian. 

To learn from history is to gain wisdom. Since Jimmy Carter, we have had more than three straight decades of presidents – Republican and Democrat – claiming quite publicly and deliberately to be active, practicing Christians (even their secular critics haven’t doubted their faith). This string of presidents has overseen the institution of countless domestic and international policies. Yet the moral and social ambiguity of the country has continued unabated, albeit in different guises; and whatever the international community may have hoped to see of the kingdom of God from America those decades pales before their experience of American hegemony. The saga of George W. Bush, the fifth in a row since Carter of overtly Christian presidents, has been merely the most recent, and most stunning, case in point.

I hope conservative Christian historians, teachers, and ministers will now instruct the faithful wisely about one of the biggest lessons of the last thirty-two years: that the change of heart that occurs when an individual becomes a Christian does not by the swearing of the presidential oath of office alchemize into a worldview out of which politics arise that will put paid to the moral and social ambiguity of our nation. It ain’t gonna happen, not even with Barack Obama, the sixth since Carter with a demonstrably public Christian faith. U.S. presidents who are Christians do not function in office as religious leaders. They function as government officials. Conservative Christians need to stop expecting so much from their politicians who are Christian. The swearing-in does not anoint a new president with an evangelistic calling to see others’ hearts changed with the gospel.

Don’t worry, after you sleep it off you’ll begin to see the uncommon sense of it. But it starts with that ride home. Where is that ride, anyway? The name of the place you need to be picked up at is “The Christian Nation” pub. Well, it’s a big chain. These pubs are scattered everywhere across the land. Maybe your designated driver went to the wrong location. As Steve Waldman helpfully points out in Founding Faith, it was one thing for Christians of the seventeenth century to have fled religious persecution in England to found various Christian political entities along the east coast of America; but that is a far cry from concluding that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. This is not silly hair-splitting. It is a fact of the nation’s founding – although it may require a suspension of disbelief for some people, before the penny drops.

Funny thing is, you don’t have to do much homework to discover this. Just read the Constitution. Anyone who wants to know what specific religion, if any, fundamentally organizes a nation merely needs to read said nation’s constitution – its only legally binding founding document. Want to know about Iran or Pakistan? Each nation, clearly stated in its constitution, is an “Islamic republic.” Voila! There’s the religion. Nowhere, however, in the constitution the United States of America is it written that our nation will be Christian, or any religion. There is not even a mention of “God” or even of “Providence,” unless you count one mention of the “Providence Plantations” of Rhode Island, which is beside the point. A chief reason for the Constitution as we have it was because the founding fathers of our nation were historically too close to the failed Protestant political experiment of the colonies and the early states to have forgotten what it taught everyone.

The original Protestant colonies were not interested in religious freedom for everyone but in freedom to practice their particular approach to Christianity, “often at the expense of other denominations,” Waldman said during an interview on Fresh Air. The colonies were what today we would call sectarian (Waldman aptly describes their religious-political ethos in his book with refreshing objectivity, given such a controversial topic). Denominations persecuted denominations up and down the coast during seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sometimes in horribly murderous ways, including hangings – people claiming to be Christian doing violence against others who claimed to be Christian, as each religious group experimented at political rule. Quakers were persecuted in Massachusetts by Puritans who considered the Quakers heretics. Anglicans persecuted Baptists in Virginia, sometimes just for being Baptist. And everywhere Protestants were hostile to Jews and fought the spread of Catholicism.

“There was sort of an experiment, “Waldman said, “in having a majority or dominant faith running the state, and in each case the experiment failed.” Our founding fathers learned wisdom from this long, violently sectarian religious-political history, and they applied that wisdom to our constitution by turning away from the 150-year failed experiment of the colonies to a different model. They intentionally established a nation that constitutionally would not be formally Christian but one that would legalize the separation of religion and state. Our nation’s founders, Waldman writes, “forged a new approach to religious liberty, a revolutionary approach that promoted faith . . . by leaving it alone.”

So get over it. I had to. In the conservative churches I attended for many years, I heard it taught with fervor that America was a Christian nation. But something about that claim never sat well with me. After all, I had grown up in America and participated in its sins; but I accepted the churches’ teaching on this, until my niggling questions finally led me to into some extensive research on the issue outside church walls (for a good place to start, see The Search for Christian America, by Noll, Marsden, and Hatch).

Don’t get me wrong. It is not that in 1787 our founding fathers flipped the bird to Christian ideas, values, or morals. Christianity greatly informed the worldviews of all the fathers and of the burgeoning population, even of those who did not considered themselves Christian. Christianity inspired, if imperfectly, family matters, business dealings, political decisions, and so on. Our “secular” nation still lives off Christian capital even today. But that does not a Christian nation make. There are any number of ways to describe the theological and philosophical admixture of the founding, but “Christian nation” is not one of them. (One way to put it, it seems to me, is that the founding experiment was at least a mix of New England Calvinism, Virginia deism, and Jeffersonian enlightenment rationalism.)

This brings us full circle to the myth of the Christian presidency. For those who still believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, it is logical to also believe that the country today is in a troubling moral and social state because it has backslid from that original vision – its founding as a Christian nation. So the solution is simple. Let’s just get back to that. And what better way to do that than through a Christian presidency, or a series of them? Preferably Republican ones. Sober up, will you. It’s not possible to return to a place you’ve never been.

Part Two: The Myth of the Liberal Fix
If many voters the next four years are going to get depressingly soused on the wine of sour grapes, countless others will be getting positively giddy in a chain of bars throughout the country called “The Myth of the Liberal Fix.” The spirits served up in these inns are all bottled, sealed, and carefully shipped by the corporation called Government & Politics. And not without good effect. Elated today, with the election of Barack Obama, are the patrons at “The Fix,” as it is fondly known to insiders. It’s really irrelevant to them that their soon-to-be-inaugurated man is black or Christian. Any president will do, as long as that person’s liberal promises keep the chain supplied. So many glowing faces have been seen drifting out of the vespertine atmosphere of The Fix the past few weeks, that an observer might be forgiven for thinking that the country will be verging on heaven by 2012.

Friends, put down that drink and call a conservative friend for a ride home. And then stay out of that place. G&P Inc. is not going to bring into sight the end of the economic and social ills that you want to see the country rid of. Myself, I don’t doubt that some of Obama’s policies enacted the next four (or eight) years will help improve some situations at home and abroad, any more than I can ignore that some policies of the George W. Bush years contributed to the opposite effect. But sober up, please. If Christians cannot get back to a Christian nation, you cannot get ahead to heaven on earth.

The stark reality is that there is an ambiguity that runs right the way through all human life and activity in this world. Created in the image of God, we have become sinners all. And it’s not just a personal individual thing. Sin indelibly mars the systems, structures, and institutions of the country in such a way that hugely complicated national ills have become the norm. There is no liberal (or conservative) root fix for this collective condition. The best we can expect from our politicians is an acknowledgment of the reality and their help in facing it with sober judgment.

Barack Obama is going to be both good and bad for America and the world, as John McCain would have been – as all presidents have been. It is naive to think that the next four years will be one or the other. Yet millions of Americans seem to. A case in point. Trying to find anything bad that could come out of an Obama White House from liberal Democrats is like asking Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing conservative radio talk show giant, to find something good about an Obama presidency. Those still with faith in The Myth of the Liberal Fix need to sober up to that fact that the policies of the Obama administration are not going to root out the troubles they face or heal the country.

G&P Inc., for instance, has no policies that can end the greed of banking industry CEOs and Wall Street investors whose sin is implicated in the deep and long term economic crisis we are now in. Has anyone heard G&P Inc. calling for repentance from our financial leaders? Or from we peons, for living beyond our means? Even conservative Christian ministers don’t seem to be preaching this, for they too may be implicated. We all seem insistent on living beyond our means through credit. For years I have been calling it the phenomenon of inverted pyramid. It’s a fascinating sight to behold while it’s going up, but keep building on it and sooner or later a height will be reached where the weight and size of the thing is too great for the point of it. It will then topple. The balancing act will be finis. Forget about it, says G&P Inc. Let’s fiddle. Let’s hoist another one. And a hearty toast to throwing more money at the money problem.

If we continue insisting on living beyond our means, our end will come sooner rather than later.  This is the hot message of the economic crisis, now turned international. But it is not the message of our political leaders. Apart from some collective repentance high up on Wall Street and in the banking industry that trickles down to all of us, the $700 billion dollar-plus government bailout and new regulations will create, for a time, a false sense of security. That kind of economic intervention may have been necessary to help keep the financial markets and the credit industry from suddenly becoming depressed, but if it does not accompany some collective repentance from the muckety-mucks (there is currently no sign that it will), the bailout will merely aid and abet (to switch the image on you) the building of a bridge to a future (in ten, fifteen years, say?) that is going to make the current situation seem like a time we’d like to return to. Add into this future the pain we are going to feel when we have to start paying off the staggering $3 trillion(!) dollar-plus debt now being projected as the cost of the war about Iraq, which our government, wise persons all, instead of raising taxes to pay for the war, has been borrowing inordinately from China and other nations to pay it. When those unimaginably high loans come due, unimaginable consequences will follow.

In the face of our collective sins, our presidents and other politicians who are Christian ought to be ashamed of their simplistic, cliche-ridden sound bites. Instead, both presidential candidates in 2008 served up propaganda loops, pop psychology, ridiculous promises of change, and countless other reckless drinks at their pub of choice – none of which saves our future by solving our present, any more than a man with a fan could have stood on the levees of New Orleans and blown Hurricane Katrina back into the Gulf.

One of the most frightening lines in all of Scripture appears almost as an aside. After many horrific catastrophes have come upon the world to stab awake the human imagination to the possibilities of collective repentance, the Book of Revelation notes that even after all those calamities the nations still would not repent. So more avoidable catastrophes occurred. Sin is a reproach to any people, the Bible also says, but righteousness exalts a nation. Let’s sober up, shall we? (Charles Strohmer writes on issues of religion, politics, and international relations.)

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