Have you noticed how funny John Kerry has started talking in these
last days before the election?
Let me remind you. I quote from last Monday's Washington Post.
"Through many dangers, toil and snares, I have already come," he
said a week ago Sunday. "'Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and
grace will lead me home."
Those lines, you all recognize, are from "Amazing Grace," a hymn
so widely appealing that even dirty rotten secular humanists can be heard
singing it.
Sometimes in bars.
But Kerry—he's Catholic, remember—spoke the words in the Mt.
Olivet Baptist Church in Ohio.
That's because Kerry is running for president and Baptists get to
vote too.
The senator went on to tell them about the Good Samaritan as a
way "to illustrate God's calling to help the least of America's people."
"This," he said, "is how you reach the kingdom of Heaven."
Doesn't that strike you as a funny way for a presidential
candidate to talk?
But not when he's running against George W. Bush and he's trying
to fight piety with piety.
You know what I say? I say don't waste your breath, Senator.
That's a losing battle. If you don't believe it, read Ron Suskind's long
piece about the president in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
It's all about how the president believes he's God's chosen
two-term chief executive. Suskind quotes Bruce Bartlett (a treasury official
for the first President Bush) saying that Bush II has "this sort of weird,
Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do….This is why
George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist
enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be
persuaded—they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands
them, because he's just like them…."
Whew.
That certainty, Bartlett says, "is why he dispenses with people
who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a
mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms the need for
analysis…."
Gives me the fantods. Nothing's more dangerous than the
conviction that God's on your side—especially when the conviction is
accompanied by the military power to blow hell out of things.
I'm not sure I believe him, but Pat Robertson said the president
before the invasion of Iraq told him "we're not going to have any
casualties." The administration denies he said that. But that's the kind
of thinking that accompanies a sense of Divine Invulnerability, so it does
have a certain plausibility.
Here's what else the Suskind article says: Some of the
president's strongest supporters are evangelicals who believe he's "a
messenger from God." And that support leads him to demand "unquestioning
faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides, and his kindred in
the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision…he expects complete
faith in its rightness….He has created the faith-based presidency."
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The Truth, Mainly
Suskind quotes one of the president's supporters: "I just believe
God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to
see the darkness and protect this nation…. I believe he's an instrument
of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public."
And Suskind follows that up with this question: "Is there anyone
in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?"
That's the kind of question Kerry may be worrying about when he
goes around quoting "Amazing Grace" and telling people how to reach the
kingdom of heaven.
I wish he'd stop. One candidate thinking he's been anointed by
God is one too many. The ancient Greeks called it hubris. And it scares hell
out of me. It apparently scares hell out of many others who are a lot
more religious than I am.
In a piece published last month in the Bennington (Vt.) Banner, a
Methodist minister, David J. Bort, approvingly quotes Jan Lin's warning
that "when the most powerful man in the world says he is being led by God
to do what he does, it is much more than saying he is trying to live his
faith. He is implying that to disagree with his decisions is to disagree
with God."
Jim Wallis, writing in the September issue of Sojourners magazine,
asks "How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war,
and pro-American?….'God bless America' is found nowhere in the
Bible…."
Then on the following page, this quotation from Anne Lamott: "You
can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns
out that God hates all the same people you do."
Keep that quotation in mind when you go into the voting booth next
week. And remember what the Founding Fathers said in Amendment I of the
U.S. Constitution.
Go read it right now. You hear?
Retired English Professor Leon Satterfield writes to salvage clarity
from his confusion. His column appears on alternate Mondays. His e-mail
address is:
leonsatterfield@earthlink.net.
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