Ethics and Politics
by Tom Lombardo
How blessed are the peacemakers; God shall call them his sons.
A person acting upon God’s authority can neither be stopped nor reasoned with. He knows what must be done in this world and he knows that his reward will come in the afterlife. When asked why he blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, Timothy McVeigh said simply that it was God’s will, and that he was avenging the Branch Dividians whom federal agents had killed at Waco, Texas. Suicide bombers captured in Israel before they manage to carry out their mission deliver serene statements to their captors about the purity of their jihad — and how they would certainly do it again.
We comfort ourselves by saying that these examples are extreme. We extrapolate from that analysis that the rising tide of radical Islam is also extreme, believing that it constitutes some sort of religious madness having nothing to do with politics as usual.
Because of this, we risk missing a cultural lesson of dramatic importance at this juncture in history. Americans hold their spiritual beliefs deeply and sincerely. We feel these immense forces flowing through our souls, and we are incredibly blessed to live in a society where we can find our brothers and sisters who share our faith and try together to discern what these forces mean.
We look for the proper source for our ethical beliefs; we struggle to find a politics that satisfies spiritually and that also addresses the “real world” situation in which we live. It would be wonderful if every political crisis could be addressed the way Gandhi handled British colonial rule or the way Martin Luther King handled racism. Since that is not possible, we lean our rifle against the pew, adjust our body armor, and kneel to pray, hoping that someday the world will be easier to understand.
The country as a whole has dealt with this since the era of the founding fathers. Almost unique among western societies, we have actually gone through four (some say five) great awakenings in our brief history — mass movements when the need to understand spiritual reality took over the popular consciousness.
The most recent awakening took the form of the Moral Majority and the Evangelical Christian movement that swept Republican Party candidates into office for three of the last four presidencies and that controlled Congress for twenty of the last twenty-four years. This political aspect of the Evangelical Awakening distinguishes it from the movements that preceded it. The Evangelicals were not engaging a quest for spiritual truth. Rather, they knew the truth, and they led a ministry that they defined in terms of bringing the truth as they understood it to others. Part of that ministry was to aggressively, intelligently, and skillfully take over as many offices, institutions, and branches of government at all levels from local school boards to the federal judiciary, legislative, and executive branches.
The secret to their success can be summed up in one word: certainty. God had policy positions, and they knew what they were. That might have seemed trite and transparent if it were not for another aspect of this awakening that has had far-reaching consequences for the United States.
Not only did this awakening know God’s policies, this awakening also knew that the end of the world had begun and that following God’s policies was no longer an abstract question of proper morals. This time around, God was playing for keeps. The End Times were upon us. Hal Lindsey published The Late Great Planet Earth; President Reagan believed that Armageddon would happen in his lifetime; retired Lieutenant General William General Boykin toured the country with slide shows explaining that the rise of militant Islam was Satanic. Prophecy scholar Timothy LaHaye, who believes that The Book of Revelations is a “love letter from God,” held private Bible study groups with top military officials that were attended by George Walker Bush before he became president.
The Evangelicals formed a movement based upon preparation for the end of the world. LaHaye’s Left Behind novels sold sixty million copies in a country of three hundred million people. Moral certainty took on the air of military certainty. This awakening was a call to arms. Tens of thousands gathered in mega churches and the forces that flowed through their souls, they knew, validated this entire explanation of reality.
It seemed to many people that 9/11 confirmed that they were right. Think back to the way the reporters acted after 9/11 — in the back of everyone’s mind was the very real fear that the Evangelicals had called it, and that this was the opening shot of the final battle between good and evil on Earth. Pat Robertson famously explained it this way: “Don’t ask, ‘Why did it happen?’ It happened…because God is lifting His protection from this nation and we must pray and ask Him for revival so that once again we will be His people.”
There was no distinction between politics and morality, no distinction between ethics and spirituality. There were no questions left — you were either with us or against us.
We were acting upon God’s authority and we could not be stopped or reasoned with; we knew what must be done in this world and we knew that our reward would come with our Rapture.
Once that millions of citizens had worked themselves into this state of mind, individuals who dared to question the source of the ethics that were informing this spiritual battle readiness were branded as unpatriotic, unfaithful, and downright cowardly. Of course to call for dialogue and forbearance, to call for understanding of where God’s other children are coming from, and an openness to the breadth and depth of Scripture actually called for strong faith and deep courage.
A large swath of the population along with some of the most powerful people within the government hunkered down for the final battle between Jesus and Satan. Revelations says, “This is the hour of victory for our God, the hour of his sovereignty and power, when his Christ comes to his rightful rule!” There was no need for habeas corpus; torturing demons was acceptable; the civilized rights of a secure country had to be sacrificed in a time of war; and those in-the-know understood that the Anti-Christ was already among us, probably about thirty years old and living in the Middle East. Is this really an ethical politics arising from scripture?
When the Evangelical Awakening enjoyed the most influence over the American government, there were still many individuals world wide who were, in fact, going back to the source texts and wondering aloud what this “certainty” had to do with the way God taught morals in his own words. Leading up to the invasion of Iraq we saw the largest anti-war protests ever held. The major news networks either under-reported them or reported on them with incredulity. But they were there nonetheless.
The spiritual teachings were also there, informing people’s ethics, giving shape to their morality. While it is possible to move from the Book of Revelations to the concept of pre-emptive war and a commander-in-chief who holds himself above law, it is not possible to arrive at those concepts from the Sermon on the Mount.
Perhaps this next time around, and perhaps every time from now until the next Awakening, we ought to demand of our leaders that they take direction from the sublime words of Christ himself: “How blessed are the peacemakers; God shall call them his sons.”
