John McCain Is at It Again

John McCain talking with reporters.

Jesus said to them, “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’”
Matthew 25:42-45

John McCain is at it again.

Once again, McCain undermines the cynicism with which we tend to view politics and politicians. More than half of the governors in the United States have declared that they will not accept any Syrian refugees. Some of the presidential candidates have said they oppose taking in any refugees, while others have said that they would only allow us to take in Christians. In times of fear, nothing is as popular as xenophobia. 

McCain, on the other hand, responded with a seeming disregard for what is popular. 

I suppose if you have been a prisoner of war for over five years, and brutally tortured, public opinion polls don’t seem like much of a threat. John McCain is a real war hero and at his best he has also been the embodiment of what we would like to have in our political leaders.

With the exception of a few months during the 2008 presidential campaign, when it seemed like his body had been possessed by alien forces causing him to sound like a caricature of an angry old man, he has generally been remarkably free of political pandering. In 2004 he stood up against the “Swiftboat” attacks on John Kerry, and he has been resolute in his opposition to torture. And even in 2008, he had that remarkable moment when a women in the audience started talking about how she believed Barack Obama was not a real American, and that he was an Arab, McCain took the microphone from her and said, “No.” He repeated the “no” as the more zealous partisans in the crowd began to boo. “He’s a decent family man and a good American with whom I just happen to have some fundamental disagreements,” said McCain. “And that’s what this campaign is about.”  

On Sunday, presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) declared that only Christian refugees should be able to enter the country because "there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror." And Governor Chris Christie was prepared to bar all refugees, “even orphans under age five.”

But on the issue of Syrian refugees, it was McCain being McCain.

He was clear that there could be security issues and there needed to be a vetting process before refugees were admitted, but for him it was a matter of his Christian faith. We are called, he said, “to love one another.”

When asked whether we should limit the refugees we accept to those who are Christians, he spoke clearly: "I don't think any child, whether they are Christian or whether they are atheist or whether they are Buddhist, that we should make a distinction," he said. "My belief is that all children are God's children." 

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Irony of the Jonathan Gruber Story

The children of this world are wiser in this generation than the children of light.
Luke 16:8

Once upon a time everyone who was serious about politics was reading Reinhold Niebuhr. Today it is hard to find anyone who knows who he is. That is too bad, because his insights are at least as relevant now as they were when he was alive and at the height of his popularity in the early 1960’s.

Niebuhr was one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, but his greatest contributions were in the area of political philosophy. He took the deepest insights of Christian theology and applied them to the practice of politics.

The people who worry about “mixing religion and politics” need to go read Niebuhr. And the people who want to impose their own (highly selective) literal reading of the Bible also need to go read Niebuhr.

Niebuhr’s best book on politics, “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” ought to be required reading for anyone who aspires to public service. The book is inspired by that verse from Luke's Gospel. His basic insight was simple and undeniably true: the “children of light” do more harm through their naïve ineptitude than the “children of darkness” do on purpose.

“It must be understood,” Niebuhr wrote, “that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves.” The children of light have a naïve understanding of the world around them and are unrealistic in their assessment of the human capacity for evil. But they are also naïve about their own mixed motives.

The strange case of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber is just the latest evidence of the truth of Niebuhr’s insights. He was so taken with his own cleverness, and had such a great need to talk about that cleverness with other clever people that he had no sense of the harm he might do.

When he was first confronted with a video of himself talking about “the stupidity of the American people” and how that figured into the marketing of the Affordable Care Act, he said that it was just an “off the cuff” remark at an informal conference. But it turns out there are many video recordings of him making approximately the same statements at many conferences over several years.

The irony, to use one of Niebuhr’s favorite concepts, is astonishing. How is it possible for anyone, let alone an economist at MIT, to be that stupid?

In this instance there is plenty of irony to go around.

Bill O’Reilly spoke piously about Gruber insulting the American people, but his program has a regular segment in which a young staffer is sent out to cities and college campuses to ask people questions they can’t answer and then make fun of their stupidity. And after the last presidential election there were many references to the stupidity of the American voters who did not understand the issues.

Seriously, the stupidity of the American people is one of the few things on which commentators from both ends of the political spectrum seem to agree. Of course one side thought the 2012 voters were stupid, while the other side thought the 2014 voters were the stupid ones.

Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Isaiah 1.16-20

“Come, let us reason together,” was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s favorite Bible verses. He quoted it often and it was indicative of how he thought government was supposed to work.

Fifty years ago today, congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It stands as testimony to the greatness of his political skill and moral leadership.

As a young person living through Johnson’s presidency, I gave him little credit for the Civil Rights Act, or the War on Poverty, or the Voting Rights Act, or Medicare, or Medicaid. And I gave him almost all of the blame for the war in Vietnam. Looking back, I am amazed by his accomplishments.

For many people today, the Civil Rights Act seems like ancient history. And for a significant number of people, it seems like something that has outlived its usefulness. We no longer have segregated businesses, there are no laws about who sits at the back of the bus, we don’t have “colored” bathrooms or water fountains, our schools are integrated, and there are no (legally) segregated neighborhoods. Listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR yesterday morning, I heard a caller delineate his own impeccable personal history of Civil Rights awareness, explaining that he had been brought up with an integrated circle of family friends and acquaintances, so that he never thought about race. Then he asked earnestly if perhaps the pendulum had swung too far. One of the panelists thanked him for his profession of racial acceptance and then gently recounted the racial disparities in employment, income, wealth, education, and incarceration.

We have come a long way.

But we have a long way to go. One of the benefits of being white is that we don’t have to think about race. That is a significant part of the meaning of “white privilege.” The inability to recognize white privilege is one of the major reasons that further progress in combating racism is so difficult.

Fifty years ago, the issues were more black and white.

But that should not blind us to the enormous courage required for President Johnson and others to support the Civil Rights Act fifty years ago. And without taking away from Johnson’s heroism, we should also remember that he didn’t do it alone. He was supported by an army of civil rights works, congressional staffers, and government bureaucrats who worked tirelessly and selflessly to do the right thing.

And then there was the bipartisan support, which is almost unimaginable today. When the bill was filibustered by Senate Democrats Richard Russell and Robert Byrd, Republican leader Everett Dirksen led 27 northern Republicans to vote with 45 northern Democrats and one southern Democrat (Ralph Yarborough of Texas) to end the filibuster and pass the bill.

Sequestration: A Bad Idea about to Become Law

"For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’”
Luke 14:28-30

In his New York Times column last week David Brooks told the story of how the idea of sequestration originated. According to Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics,” the idea was introduced on July 26, 2011, when Jack Lew, who was at that time the White House budget director, visited Harry Reid’s office and told him that they had an idea to force a budget deal.

“What’s the idea?” Reid asked.

“Sequestration,” said Lew.

Then, says Brooks, “Reid folded himself over with his head between his knees, as if he were going to throw up. Then he came upright and gaped at the ceiling.” Reid told Lew that his staff had already suggested that as a last resort and he had told them, “Get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?”

The House and the Senate passed the legislation and the President signed it.

The theory was that this was an outcome so onerous that they would be forced to come up with an alternative plan to reduce the deficit.

As we now know, that didn’t work out nearly as well as they had hoped.

There are a few folks who think that the sequester will be just dandy, but most agree that it is a very bad idea. Economists say that it will slow economic growth by about a percent, which does not sound so bad until you recognize that even the growth projections, without the sequester, are between two and three percent. This makes the loss somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of the original projections. And it means many hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost.

The common wisdom is that we need targeted cuts to reduce the deficit. The sequester is a blunt instrument; we need a scalpel. But the budget should be cut.

And the common analogy is the national budget is like your family budget. President Obama and Speaker John Boehner have both used this analogy many times, as have a host of other politicians and pundits. A family can’t spend more than its income, and the nation can’t spend more than it takes in. The fallacy in this is what economists call “the paradox of thrift.” In a family, saving money actually saves money, but in a national economy a reduction in spending by the government slows the economy, which results in slower job growth and reduced tax revenues. Spending creates demand and demand leads to growth.

Eventually the budget needs to balance (although some might argue that “eventually” should be a long time away), but in the short run, it will hurt the economy. And it will hurt real live people. And families. And communities. And the country.

Faith and Politics in America

"Politics are never ultimate, never absolute. We can and must fight the good fight for a better republic and a better world. But our hope does not depend on any political outcome. Our faith and our hope derive from Jesus Christ, who survives all nations and all politics."

Robert N. Bellah

The Bible is a profoundly political book. The prophets proclaim God’s passion for justice as the foundation of the social order. And the message of Jesus is centered on “the good news of the Kingdom of God.” In the Lord’s Prayer, our first petition is, “Thy Kingdom come.” When the early church spoke of Jesus as “Lord,” and “Savior,” and “Son of God,” they knew that all of these terms were used to apply to the Emperor. And they knew that the Empire had killed Jesus because he was a political threat. When early Christians said that Jesus was “Lord,” they were also saying, “and Caesar is not.”

The Gospel is intensely political and we cannot read it with any measure of intellectual honestly and pretend otherwise. It is about proclaiming a vision of the Kingdom of God. It is about social and economic justice. But we must also remember, as Bellah points out, that the Kingdom of God can never be identified with any single political group or cause, or country. Instead, it is always the standard by which every political plan is judged.

What does this mean for us as Christians in an election year?

First, we need to keep perspective. Near the end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of the apocalypse as a time when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven.” Elections matter and the choices are real, but regardless of who wins and who loses; this will not be the apocalypse.

Second, we should not assume that those with whom we disagree are lacking in honesty or sincerity or faith. We are not choosing between good and evil; we are choosing between competing visions of the good.

Third, we need to remember that it is always easier to see the speck in the eye of our neighbor (or the opposing candidate) than it is to see the log in our own eye. As Bellah notes, “We can and must fight the good fight for a better republic and a better world.” But we need to be clear that there is a gap between our vision and God’s vision. This does not mean that one idea is as good as another, or that political issues do not matter. It does mean that we should approach political issues with repentance and humility. 

The Guy in the Flannel Shirt

For the LORD
takes pleasure
in his people;
he adorns the humble
with victory.
Psalm 149:4

Today I am wearing a red plaid flannel shirt in honor of Joe Garrahy who passed away yesterday at the age of eighty-one.

I was not a big fan of Governor Garrahy when he took office in 1977. The idea that our governor was a former beer salesman who never finished college, and worked his way up the political ladder by not offending anyone seemed like the punch line to a bad Rhode Island joke. Looking back, the ability to get along with people seems more valuable in a politician now than it did then.

Those of us who were here for the “Blizzard of ‘78” remember Governor Garrahy’s daily updates on television wearing a plaid flannel shirt. His steady and reassuring presence was an important part of guiding the state through that emergency and that is the image that most Rhode Islanders will remember.

Possibly in the spring of that same year, I was in my office at Mathewson Street Church in Providence late in the afternoon when the phone rang. The voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is Joe Garrahy, is this Reverend Trench?” At that time, I chaired the Social Action Department of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches. We had taken a stand in opposition to something that the Governor was advocating, and he called to discuss the issue. He explained why he was taking the position that he did and I explained the concerns raised by the Council of Churches. He did not change my mind, but he did change how I thought about him, and the conversation led me to reflect more deeply on the issues.

In an overwhelmingly Catholic state, the Council of Churches has never been a big player in state politics, so I was amazed that he would call at all. And he didn’t have is secretary set up the call. And he did not introduce himself as “Governor Garrahy.” He was just “Joe.”

Later the Council worked with the Governor to pass a hand-gun safety bill and I was invited to his office for the signing. On that issue he stood up to considerable pressure from the gun lobby and went against many in his own party. In many ways he was the ultimate political insider and the consummate party politician, but he had principles and he did not like the wheeling and dealing that goes with the political games.

As he prepared to leave office in late 1984, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. He said that he hoped Rhode Islanders would remember him as "conscientious" and "sensitive."

"I hope they remember me as a governor who worked hard and tried to do the best he could for his state, and that when I made decisions, I always tried to make them in what I thought was the best interest of the entire state."

I have seen Governor Garrahy twice in the last few years. Both times he was attending funerals for former members of our church. On each occasion he was careful not to call attention to himself. With his wife, Margherite, he was there for friends. It was not about him.

Joe Garrahy was not a great political theorist. He was not a policy wonk. He was not a charismatic public speaker. He was not a crusader. And he was not without his faults. But if we remember him as just “a nice guy,” we miss the point. He was a good person, who simply wanted to do the best he could for his state. He did good things, and he had no great sense of his own importance, and that is rarer than it should be.