God and other famous liberals: reclaiming the politics of America Read online

  God and Other Famous Liberals

  RECLAIMING THE POLITICS OF AMERICA

  F. Forrester Church

  Simon & Schuster New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

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  Simon & Schuster

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  Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020

  Copyright © 1991 by E Forrester Church

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  13579 10 8642

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-671-76120-X

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  In memory of my father

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I Reclaiming the Bible

  1 The Most Famous Liberal of All

  2 God's Son Jesus

  3 The Holy Spirit

  Part II Reclaiming the Flag

  4 With Liberty for All

  5 We Hold These Truths

  6 One Nation Under God

  Part III Reclaiming the Family

  7 Your Mother Is a Liberal

  8 E Pluribus Unum

  Epilogue

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  Foreword

  I gave up on Bible, family, and flag twenty-five years ago. At the time, it seemed like the thing to do. As with most of my college friends, I had little use for organized religion; we knew our parents were responsible for almost everything that was wrong with us; and the American flag was flying over Saigon.

  Today I am a minister, father, and patriot. Yet, over the years my beliefs haven't changed nearly as much as these shifting labels might suggest. The issues that arrested my attention in the 1960s—matters of justice and liberty—turned out to have a history. Without knowing it, I was following a path charted by my liberal American forebears, public leaders and private citizens who did cherish family, revere our nation's heritage, and draw inspiration from the Bible. I failed to claim this great tradition for two reasons: I rejected its symbols; and others stole them from me.

  Much of my education at Stanford University took place in the streets, as my fellow students and I protested the Vietnam War and the university's involvement in war-related research. Those who supported expanding the war pinned little American flags to their lapels. Many of us took the bait, wore the same pin, and turned it upside down. Drawing from naval lore, we called this a distress signal, but that is not the message we sent. People who saw an American flag upside down didn't think of a ship whose captain was signaling for help. They saw irreverence and desecration.

  Reinforcing this impression, some antiwar radicals went one step further: They burned our nation's flag. All of us continue to pay for this. Though flag-burning must be at the bottom of any law officer's list of predictable and dangerous crimes, self-proclaimed patriots are lobbying today for a constitutional amendment to protect the flag from fire. The real victim would be the First Amendment, which, by protecting freedom of speech, has long been the touchstone of our free society.

  Looking back on my college days, the enormity of our mistake lay not in opposing the war but in ceding the symbol of patriotism to those who militantly favored it. Neither side possessed the whole truth. Extremists rarely do, and in our zeal we were often guilty of extremism. But many Vietnam War doves (including my father, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, a decorated World War II combat veteran) certainly had a right to the title of patriot.

  One of my Stanford professors, Robert McAfee Brown, contributed to a book challenging our involvement in Vietnam. "We called the book In the Name of America," he wrote in a recent memoir. "We could have called it In the Name of Decency, or In the Name of Judaeo-Christian Morality. But we didn't. We were challenging what America was doing precisely 'in the name of America,' trying to point out that our own heritage had the resources to recall us from such folly, and that we were besmirching our name, our honor, our history, our sense of who at our best we feel ourselves to be."

  The same holds true today. The fundamentalists don't own Jesus and the prophets any more than the Vietnam hawks owned the flag. When Jerry Falwell writes that God is in favor of "property ownership, competition, diligence, work, and acquisition," I wonder whether he and I are reading the same Bible: the one in which the last worker to arrive in the vineyard receives the same pay as the first; and the rich man is told to give away everything he has to the poor if he wants to go to heaven. As for the flag, I also wonder whether Oliver North and I are talking about the same country, when he (convicted felon or not) calls on us to "be faithful to those ideas and values that made this country what it is."

  What ideas and values is he talking about? To be faithful to the things that made this country what it is we must embrace precisely what he rejected: the liberal spirit, its emblems an open heart, open hand, and open mind. However sincere, Jerry Falwell and Oliver North win plaudits as patriots in large measure because the liberal tradition languishes in America, obscured in a thicket of rhetoric. No longer does the word liberal ring with the Liberty Bell or shine as it should from Lady Liberty's torch.

  Of course, there are many good patriotic conservatives in this country. America thrives primarily because of the to and fro of conflicting viewpoints, often passionately held. We are sustained and advanced by the ongoing democratic dialogue. One starts to worry, however, when most of the strong voices, not on the fringes but in the broad center, begin sounding like one another. Reading the same polls, modulating their responses to the lowest common denominator, these voices beckon us tentatively but almost always in one direction, to the right. Hence this book, a patriotic essay, an old-fashioned "apologetic" for the forgotten rhetoric of liberalism.

  Many of the people, texts, events, and shrines I visit will be familiar. My goal is not to break new ground but to hallow old. In reexamining the relationship between the American tradition and the liberal tradition, I shall focus on individuals and events central to our national self-image. George Washington, the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address figure in our history not only as historical figures and documents; like the flag they are patriotic symbols. Until they are reclaimed as also symbolic of the liberal spirit, that spirit will continue to languish.

  My own liberalism, a family inheritance, is both political and religious. My political roots go back to my maternal grandfather, Chase Clark, a New Deal Idaho governor, and my father, Frank Church, who was elected to the United States Senate in 1956 at the age of thirty-two and served for twenty-four years. An early opponent of the Vietnam War and author of much of the principal environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, he went on to chair investigations of the multinational corporations, the CIA, and the FBI. Following the footsteps of our founding fathers, he acted on his faith in America, not on his fear of America's enemies.

  My religious roots run no less deeply through American soil—rich, various, and far more liberal (both in fruitfulness and essence) than sometimes it may seem. My first American forbear was Richard Church, a Puritan, who came to Boston with the John Winthrop party in 1630 and settled in Plymouth. Seven generations later, my great-grandfather and first namesake settled in Idaho. His son married a Catholic immigrant from Germany, and adopted her religio
n.

  My mother's maternal grandfather, seeking a haven where he could freely choose his faith, came from Scotland, traveled across the country with Brigham Young, and became a Mormon bishop in Utah. My mother's father was a Quaker, as well as a governor and judge; he would never sit on a court case where there would be the possibility of capital punishment, because his religion would not permit him to pass this sentence. My maternal grandmother was a Presbyterian, the faith in which my mother and I were raised. I became a Unitarian Universalist as a doctoral student at Harvard, and for the past fourteen years have served as pastor of All Souls Church in New York City. Only in a liberal nation could so many faiths not only be protected but also nurtured and intertwined in a single family.

  With liberalism in eclipse at home while emerging elsewhere throughout the world in so many unexpected places, I offer the following defense of the American tradition and my own personal heritage with a heightened sense of timeliness. Even this would have proved insufficient had I not received a generous gift of time from All Souls, permitting me to accept Dartmouth College's invitation to serve for two terms as Montgomery Fellow.

  Special thanks to Kenneth and Harle Montgomery, who established this remarkable endowment at Dartmouth College; Assistant Provost Barbara Gerstner, who made my stay at Montgomery House as pleasant as could be; my research assistant, Michael Gildersleve; the accommodating staff of Baker Library; and my Dartmouth students, whose intellectual passion and rigor belie all contemporary stereotypes and give me renewed hope for our shared future.

  Though none is responsible for any infelicities either of thought or expression, over the past year I have received generous helpings of advice from my editor, Elizabeth Anne Perle, then vice-president and publisher of Prentice Hall Press; my agent, Joy Harris; many good people at Simon & Schuster; and the following scholars and friends, who critiqued my work at various stages along the way: Stephen Bauman, Debra Berger, John Buehrens, William Sloane Coffin, Holland Hendrix, Carolyn Buck Luce, Louis Pojman, Toula Polygalaktos, Wendy Strothman, Donald Schriver, and Elizabeth Zintl.

  I have been waiting for the right book to dedicate to my father, Frank Church. He was my finest teacher and closest friend. I miss him very much.

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  Introduction

  For forty-three years in the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Whitney Bellows filled the pulpit of All Souls Unitarian Church, where I now serve as minister. An imposing figure in liberal religious circles, he also helped Horace Mann found Antioch College, and organized the American Sanitary Commission, precursor of the Red Cross. This latter effort raised a then-staggering six million dollars to succor the wounded on both sides during the Civil War.

  In 1872, he preached a sermon based on the St. James translation of a text from Isaiah (32:9): "The liberal deviseth liberal things and by liberal things he shall stand." By lifting up this text, Bellows celebrates the best of America, then and now.

  "The Liberal!"—we may thank Isaiah and his translators for that word; it is a good word, a brave word, a sacred word, ... a name that ought to be peculiarly descriptive of the American patriot, the American thinker, the American Christian. . . . The founders, sustainers, propagandists of civil and religious liberty, should of course be liberals; that is, believers in liberty, lovers of liberty, devisers of liberal things—men of open views, high hopes, strong faith, broad charity, wide activity—large roundabout souls, loving and trusting the light; encouraging the freest inquiry; adopting the most courageous policy; interpreting constitution and Bible in the most generous way; allowing the most unqualified freedom of conscience.

  Bellows was an evangelical liberal. So am I. People tell me this is an oxymoron. I don't agree. Evangelical and liberal are not antonyms, even in religion. Each embodies the good news, not the bad news of hell-fire and damnation, where women who have abortions are criminals, the wage of homosexuality is AIDS, and the homeless somehow deserve to be. Despite the prevailing notion that liberalism is both antipatriotic and antireligious, it is neither. God, the most famous liberal of all, has a bleeding heart that never stops. By broad definition, every good mother and father is a liberal. And the same can be said of our nation's founders and prophets. By defaming liberalism, right-wing Christians and self-styled patriots are unwitting traitors to the three things they claim to hold most dear: God, family, and the United States of America.

  When the Carnegie Foundation asked Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal to do a study of America, he concluded that "America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. . . . But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes." Small wonder, for as the dictionary reminds us, liberal means free: worthy of a free person (as opposed to servile); free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted; free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid; free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favor of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform; and, of political opinions, favorable to legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy. Liberal means open-hearted, open-minded, and openhanded. This single word embraces the aspiration, both religious and political, of our forebears: freedom from bondage; freedom for opportunity; and freedom with responsibility, especially toward our neighbor, whose rights and security are just as precious as our own.

  I fully recognize that many people who reject the liberal label, including any number of good conservatives, may possess most, perhaps even all of the above "liberal" qualities. When I speak of liberalism, I am thinking of public policy rather than personal attributes. For instance, Ronald Reagan is a generous, kind-hearted man, but in spirit and application the social policies he sponsored as president were neither. When he saw a hungry family featured on CBS news, he called Dan Rather to find out who they were so that the government could help them out. When Speaker Tip O'Neill told him of a single mother with five children who couldn't feed her family on the reduced food-stamp allotment, President Reagan asked his assistant to get right on the case, not concerning food stamps in general but this one family in particular. Each of these personal acts is a liberal gesture; neither led to a public act establishing a more liberal policy.

  In the following pages, I shall examine the relationship between liberal policies and the American tradition, first with respect to religion, then politics, and finally family values. To understand and reclaim the liberal spirit, we must return to its sources and then adapt its message to contemporary conditions. As for the latter, developing those aspects of liberalism that are conducive to the building of community, I shall de-emphasize certain familiar tenets that enhance the individual. Though this emphasis may differ from that of some contemporary liberals, to adapt the liberal spirit is not to betray it, for the liberal tradition contains its own regenerative capacity. Liberalism is not a fixed set of doctrines but a temper, a public spirit of openness and generosity.

  Therefore, the term neo-liberal, much bandied about these days, is redundant, for all true liberals are in fact neo-liberals. Unwedded to any final set of policies, we are by definition flexible, open-minded, ready to adapt according to changing needs and realities. Governor Chester Bowles described the word correctly when he said, "Liberalism is an attitude. The chief characteristics of that attitude are human sympathy, a receptivity to change, and a scientific willingness to follow reason rather than any fixed idea."

  So what went wrong? Why is liberalism in such disrepute these days? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that most Americans feel battered by the unfolding of recent history, and hunger for simpler times. After Vietnam, the King and two Kennedy assassinations, moral turbulence and ferment over civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights, many Americans long for something simpler—simple themes, simple messages, a Norman Rockwell portrait on the cover of a magazine. Conservatives seize on this longing. They promise a return to the dog by the hearth, its master dozing in a recliner, his wif
e bustling happily in the kitchen. They promise flags flying in the public square, and Americans proud again of their country.

  I don't know what might have happened if liberals such as John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr., had lived, but I do know this. Whatever their private flaws, each of them offered the American people hope and a vision for the future. Today that hope and vision almost exclusively come from the religious and political right, not from reformers who wish to create a more just society but from critics appalled by the consequences of social diversity and protectors who seek to maintain the status quo. That is one reason for the demise of liberalism.

  Another has to do with semantics. The word liberal is a symbol. As with all symbols, we invest it with meanings that correspond to our experience. Depending on one's perspective, liberalism can represent generosity of spirit, an ethical approach to religion, freedom of speech and press, laissez-faire capitalism, fuzzy-headedness, profligacy, spinelessness, welfare statism, softness on communism.

  Not surprisingly, in the 1970s and 1980s, when most of its connotations registered on the minus side of the ledger, when the rhetoric of public morality and compassion struck people as dysfunctional in the hardscrabble world of governing, the word liberal fell from fashion. It became the "L word," a word too tainted to be spoken aloud save in negative political advertisements. One might think of the demise of liberalism as a murder-suicide with only one victim, for many of the wounds were self-inflicted. As Lord Acton once said, "Every institution finally perishes by an excess of its own first principle."

  Take tolerance, a liberal virtue if ever there was one. It is a noble virtue, but not always. In certain contexts to tolerate means to abide with repugnance. Yet some things are so repugnant that common decency demands that we condemn them. When the rights of criminals are more vigorously protected than those of their victims, or when freedom of speech extends to racial, religious, or sexual defamation, liberalism becomes an easy target, a self-caricature. In such instances, the open mind can be lampooned as an empty, unprincipled mind. Most disturbing of all, indiscriminate applications of tolerance invite a whiplash. When civil libertarians cannot draw a boundary line between license and liberty, those who lack sufficient respect for freedom of speech have a field day.