When I Stopped Being a Republican

I can tell you almost the precise moment I stopped being a Republican. 

It was September of 2005, a few days after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans and the surrounding region. The five days following the storm was one of the most harrowing times I can remember as we struggled to get my mother and aunt out of the city (both in their 80s, they had refused to leave because “we’ve been through this before”).

The state, local and federal governments were overwhelmed. News media seemed to be able to get in and out of the city with ease, while thousands of people were left at the Superdome, the convention center, their own homes. People were dying, and, as we later learned, the federal government (the Bush Administration) and the state government were fighting each other over who should control the relief effort. People were dying while Republicans and Democrats were arguing with each other.

I did what tens of thousands of others did. I took to the internet, to chat rooms, and web sites. I had to figure out how to get my mother and aunt out and find what had happened to my brother and sister-in-law, who lived north of Lake Pontchartrain. The New Orleans Times-Picayune set up discussion sites by neighborhood, and it was through these sites I was able to determine my brother was most likely okay.

And then a photograph was published – President Bush on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, his arm around a man who had survived the storm and lost everything. They were sitting atop a pile of rubble. There was no way the President just happened upon a man sitting atop a pile of rubble. The picture had been completely posed by someone in charge of White House photo opps.

I yelled at the newspaper. People were dying and all the White House cared about a photo opp for the President, to show he cared. Tell that to the elderly woman who died in her wheel chair outside the New Orleans Convention Center.

It took two weeks before the federal government finally intervened. In the meantime, ordinary people had taken their boats, and rangers with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries had taken their boats, and went into the city to rescue people from the tops of their houses. The people had to do what the federal and state governments had been unable to do.

Republicans might be uncaring, and they might walk in lockstep with CEOs, but they were supposed to be competent.

President Bush and the Republicans had lost me.

The next year, a book was published. David Kuo had been one of those young political writers who had been a policy advisor to John Ashcroft and a speechwriter for Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Bob Dole. And then he reached the White House – what looked to be the pinnacle for a Christian in politics. He served as second in command in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

He lasted three years. And he saw and experienced exactly what the Republican establishment thought of Christians and how they used Christians and Christian leaders. And he saw how Christian leaders let themselves be used.

David Kuo

Kuo’s book is called Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Corruption. The media loved it because it embarrassed the Bush Administration specifically and Republicans in general. Few Christians read it.

I read the Wall street Journal editorial and op-ed pages as an antidote to what passes for editorial opinion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But after Kuo’s book, I cannot bring myself to read the Journal’s regular columns by Karl Rove, the man who referred to Christians with expletives.

It’s a book that is well worth reading and rereading, especially in this political year. Unintentionally, it explains part of the reason for Donald Trump. The establishment Republicans were never interested in what Christians were concerned about; they only said enough to keep getting those Christian votes. And now the piper is asking to be paid.

Kuo developed a brain tumor. For a time, it looked like he might make it. But he didn’t, and died in 2013. He had a blog called J Walking, published by Belief Net, which has been left intact but is no longer updated. Occasionally, I reread some of his posts.

I should say that I did not become a Democrat. Or a Libertarian. But my vote is no longer something the Republicans can count on. I don't put my faith in political parties. Or presidential candidates.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: The Culture Wars

It’s difficult for anyone to see the violence perpetrated by ISIS and its various off-shoots and not be appalled and horrified. Enslavement, murder, people being burned alive, beheadings, mass rape and murder of women and children – this is the stuff of Blade Runner crossed with Mad Max. 

Our minds reach for an explanation, the why of this atrocity. And the why is important; we need to understand what has created this force for evil. And I use the word evil deliberately – it is a moral word, and its use is a moral judgment. 

The evil reality that is ISIS has it roots in religion, and it is that reality that secular governments in the United States and Europe are missing. They can understand political and economic realities; they can claim a lack of economic opportunity as a major contributing cause for the attraction of ISIS. What that doesn’t explain is why so many of ISIS’s adherents and supporters come from the middle and upper classes – people who have ample access to economic opportunity.  

Our government and the writers of our newspaper editorial pages wouldn’t consider asking, but it is those crazy right-wing fundamentalist Christians who likely better understand what motivates ISIS. ISIS is messianic religion without the loving, sacrificial Messiah. 

What the news media called the culture wars in the United States – Christians versus secularists or however else you might describe it – have long been over. The Christians lost. My own understanding tells me that the Christians lost because we confused speaking out in the public square – bearing witness – with political control of the public square. We aligned ourselves with one political party because the other was, well, embracing what we simply couldn’t accept. And we accomplished – not much. We were certainly used – our votes were crucial – but we were quickly abandoned. Read the late David Kuo’s Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.  

The public square was never ours to control. 

What was missed by so many – observers and opponents alike – was that the so-called Christian Right actually wasn’t trying to impose its views on American society. What it was trying to do was resist the relentless secularization of American society. It seemed, and often still seems, that the goal of progressives and secularists is nothing less than the complete eradication of any and all religion, and especially Christianity, from American soil. It was this sense that something important was being lost, and not only something Christian, that fueled so much of what poured out of churches and into the voting booths.  

The roots of the culture wars go back centuries, say George Yancey and David Williamson in So Many Christians, Do Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? While they point to the philosophes of the Enlightenment and then the triumph of the scientific revolution in the 19^th century (including Darwin), the roots are actually much older than that, going back to the infancy of Christianity. Read the early church fathers. You will discover that the culture wars are some 2,000 years old. 

The fact is that Christianity always has been the counterpoint. Christians pay their taxes but they will not bow the knee to the emperor. Of course, that should also mean they’re not supposed to bow their knee to any political party, either. And the U.S. Constitution is not equivalent to the Bible. 

Born during our modern culture wars was what Yancey and Williamson call Christianophobia. Like the work colleague I mentioned last week, who genuinely feared that “those Christians” would stuff their religion down her throat, this is not a belief held by a only a tiny number of people. A large swath of our cultural elites actually believes this. Who they are and what they say will be covered here next week, as I continue the discussion of So Many Christians, So Few Lions. 

Photograph by David Lally via Public Domain Pictures: Torn-Out Hearts Memorial, Krakow, Poland. Used with permission.