February 22 , 2006

George Bush Has Made a Conservative Out of Me

George W. Bush has made a conservative out of me, despite my life-long passion for new ideas and new ways to improve the human condition. Or, perhaps, he has helped me see how conservative and traditional I really am. Regardless, up until September 11, 2001, I would never have used the word conservative to describe anything to do with my religious, political, or social beliefs. Conservatives, well-represented in my experience by my late father, snarled at changes in any of these three realms. Liberals (now, progressives) snarled at those stick-in-the-muds who wouldn't try new ways. The latter were well-represented by my late mother.

My parents met when they were involved with a hearing on a juvenile offender. Dad was the deputy sheriff escorting the young prisoner and mom was the psychologist who was making an evaluation and recommendation for the court. Dad worked most of his life in law enforcement, ending his career as the equivalent of a CFO for one of the US Bureau of Prisons. When mom worked outside the home, she practiced psychology. (She practiced psychology at home as well, but this was not appreciated for the most part.) Dad was born in the south and mom in the north.

Mom died before Barry Goldwater ran for president, but I can imagine the kinds of arguments she and dad would have had over that election. Actually, I had them for her. In 1964, I saw the pre-Vietnam Lyndon Johnson as having the potential to carry forward John Kennedy's invitation to the nation to reach toward a higher purpose, an invitation to which mom strongly responded. Dad, on the other hand, resonated with Goldwater's over-all call to return to more traditional positions (with the possible exception of his call to bomb the enemy back to the stone age).

Today, I am sure that the bitter arguments dad and I had about Goldwater were intensified by the unresolved grief at mom's death and the distorted family alignment (I was allied with mom and my brother with dad). But at the time, it seemed to be all about the election. The arguments went all over the map. They would start with politics and quickly spill over into social and religious issues. There was no effort at understanding or reconciliation on either of our parts.

On the religious front, I was incredulous that Dad was unable to forgive the Roman Catholic Church for abandoning Latin while intoning mass, even though often he didn't know what the words meant. Many years later, I have come to realize that just hearing these phrases said the same way they had been said for centuries was comfort and meaning enough for him. This provided him with a deep and profound religious experience. Mom, by contrast, was a religious and spiritual seeker, always moving to the edge of new thoughts and sometimes esoteric practices. She was raised in a small mid-west town and the family worshiped in the local Congregational Church. Nonetheless, she found meaning in other places, including a spiritualist movement called Camp Farthest Out, psychic and medical intuitive Edgar Cayce, books supposedly dictated by those "on the other side," and experimental approaches to prayer and healing.

Unfortunately for her and the rest of the family, she took this too far. When she was diagnosed with a slow growing form of breast cancer, she felt this was a test of her faith, refused any and all medical treatment until far too late, and left herself in the hands of those who would pray intensely and futilely for her healing. If dad had been allowed to be in charge, this would never have happened this way. Having once wanted to be a physician himself, he ached for a more traditional approach.

When I think of dad, I invariably think of Tevye's opening song in Fiddler on the Roof: Tradition! Dad was traditional in many ways. This is how he approached all spheres of his life. At work, he was never late, he was respectful to his superiors, and diligent in his duties. As someone who worked with the finances of prisons, he was strong on accountability and on rules governing finance. One of the stories he would love to tell was doing an annual audit of the prison's telephone bills. Invariably, he would discover that the institution had been improperly charged for services and equipment. Then he would demand (and receive) a refund. In one of his non-governmental jobs, he worked for a plumbing supply company as a business manager. He eventually quit because of their insistence on practicing what he felt were unethical, if not illegal, accounting methods. I suspect he would be very unhappy with the billions of unaccounted for dollars in Iraq and New Orleans. He also was a fiscal conservative. If you don't have it, don't spend it. Again, I think he would be extremely upset at the enormous deficits being created today.

He and mom were together on few issues, but both were deeply patriotic. They affirmed the traditional values embedded in our nation's Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. They also enjoyed the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

While on the surface my parents seemed to differ over religion, actually mom, in her own way, was also traditional when it came to her core religious beliefs. She never left the Christian faith. When she died, she was conducting her psychology practice in a Methodist church. Jesus, in various ways, was at the center of her pilgrimage. Her adventures with new ideas and practices amounted to ways to bring this faith alive for her, to get as close to the heart of Christianity as possible, not to abandon it or leave it behind.

And now, many years later, I am discovering that my core religious, social, and political beliefs are far more traditional and conservative than I had realized. I am discovering this because these traditional values embedded in our nation's founding documents and history, as well as in my Christian faith, are being challenged by those who are seeking to make radical changes in those values. I have come to realize that I am dedicated to preserving those values and that, by definition, makes me conservative.

Why are these core values worth preserving? In the political realm, many of those traditional values have been shaped by a need to protect ourselves from a profound human failing. This primal flaw was well-stated by the British student of liberty and religion, Lord John Acton: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our founders' views were forged in significant part by the English monarchical rule. They knew first hand the ruthlessness and pain unchecked power could cause. They lived it. They knew that no matter how noble the person or noble the cause, that this nobility inevitably would be corrupted if there were no checks on the power that could be exercised. This is not a partisan issue or even a national issue. This is a human failing to which any and all of us can succumb. This potential failing is an important part of what lies behind the instruments of a free press, freedom of speech and assembly, limitations on search and seizure, the importance of due process, and the three branches of government. These are the traditional core values that I believe must be conserved if our nation is to continue to be a true force for liberty in the world and not a force for repression and domination.

By contrast, George W. Bush is presiding over an administration that has been relentless and successful at making radical changes in these values. Some of the most public examples of this can be found in the Patriot Act, in the program for warrantless wiretapping, and in the efforts to circumvent existing laws governing torture. These are not slight revisions of traditional approaches. These are radical changes that are profoundly altering our society. They are weakening our hold on rationality and intensifying our emotionality. When our emotions are dominant, we revert to a more primitive set of survival responses that divides the world into friends and enemies, good and evil. This also increases our collective paranoia. Whom can we trust, anyway? By allowing our nation's values to be radically altered, we are allowing our national spirit to be degraded. Increasingly, I am reminded of the heavy gray images of life under the totalitarian régimes that came through the newspapers and magazines a half century ago. Even allowing for some degree of anti-communist bias in the reporting of that era, the tales told by those who were able to escape and come to the US only reinforced the darkness of life in nations where everyone watched everyone else without checks and balances. No one watched the watchers.

Likewise, in the religious realm, there are Christian values that cannot be set aside without radically altering the Gospel. This arena also has important implications for the social realm. Our nation's leader, George W. Bush, is a self-proclaimed born-again, conservative Christian. He gives a clear impression that his faith guides him in his actions and decisions. Yet he presides over an administration that has launched a pre-emptive war that has led to death, injury, and chaos for thousands of human beings, a war that is serving as a catalyst for the formation of more enemies willing to attack than before it started.

By contrast, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies as well as their neighbors (both of which can be very difficult to do). He taught his disciples to not return violence with violence. Jesus, as a Jew of his time, subscribed to the Torah which commands all followers not to kill. There are no ways around these values. Even if allowances are made for protecting self and others from immediate and deliberate harm, there is no possible Christian justification for a pre-emptive war, for labeling whole nations as "evil," for holding human beings in degrading settings, or for torturing them. To love an enemy means that one has to understand the heart of the person or persons determined to do you harm. It is possible to understand and even love without agreeing with the person's worldview or blessing destructive behavior. Any parent of a temper-tantrum-throwing two-year-old knows this distinction.

In this same religious context, President Bush at times has called himself a "compassionate conservative." But his budgets and signed legislation have consistently rewarded the wealthy and powerful and made deep cuts in safety net programs designed to care for the unprivileged of this nation. By contrast, Jesus made it abundantly clear through his words and his actions that God's concern was disproportionally with the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, the voiceless, and the ill. Conservative or not, there is no way one can be compassionate without being moved to action. The literal meaning of compassion is to feel another's pain as your own pain. When we hurt, we are moved to do something about the pain. If we are hurting with someone else, we likewise will be moved to do something about the pain. These actions can range from emergency measures (e.g., feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, healing the gravely ill) to deep structural changes in society (e.g., educating and training the marginalized, building affordable homes, providing health care for all).

On a personal level, George W. Bush has struggled painfully to admit to committing any errors. At a famous press conference in April of 2004, he was asked by a reporter if he had made any mistakes. He said he was sure he had but he couldn't think of any. More recently, he appears to be willing to share some of the blame for the egregious errors made in response to Hurricane Katrina. This is an important start on his part.

Why is it important that a self-proclaimed Christian admit error? Because it has long been a Christian belief that only God is perfect. Any human being or human institution unable to admit error is attempting to emulate God by implicitly, if not explicitly, claiming to be perfect, infallible. The effort to protect our narcissism from the insult of reality is a second and profound human failing that, if unchecked, can lead quickly to some of the worst of human violence. Again, this is a universal human problem, something we all must face.

What all of this has shown me is that, while I had long seen myself as only liberal, I contain both conservative and liberal impulses. These two sides to my soul, so well reflected in my parents, are both necessary. Further, I see more clearly that society needs both conservatives and liberals and that these opposing impulses are imbedded in most of us. On a personal level, my father's grounding in tradition provided a secure-enough foundation for key elements of our family's well-being. Without this, we would have floundered badly. My mother's responsiveness to the new, something I believe comes from God's Spirit, helped make our family life richer, more interesting and exciting. Without this, we would have been much duller.

So, no, I am not a pure conservative. I do agree with Alfred North Whitehead who said, "Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe." (Adventures of Ideas, p. 274) But Whitehead did recognize that all change involved a balance of continuity and discontinuity. The values and positions worth conserving are those that protect, affirm, and enhance life. These values provide the basis for continuity as well as an openness to the new possibilities toward which we continuously are called.

Those of us who are Christian Americans - and we make up more than 80% of the population - have much work ahead of us to restore our traditional values to their proper place. In saying this, I don't want to be mistaken for any desire to blur the lines between religion and state. Avoiding a state religion was one of the goals of our nation's founders because many of them had left England and other European countries where there were oppressive state religions. But it is a fact that more than 80% of the American population identifies itself as Christian. We should never impose our religion on anyone who chooses to believe differently or to believe fervently in the absence of something. As Christians, we are called upon to love all, including those who are different. It would not be loving to impose any religion on those who have different beliefs.

Nonetheless, our Christian values should guide us in our political and social decisions. As anyone who considers carefully the full implications of the Gospel will realize, applying the Gospel to the world is invariably and inevitably political. Our faith inexorably calls us to political action to ensure justice for all. The Gospel is love and justice is love in action.

Our current administration has camouflaged itself as conservative (or neo-conservative, an oxymoron) but it is often radical in its philosophy, theology, and actions. To restore justice and our core values, we cannot any longer allow ourselves to be fooled or beguiled by the false claims of being a political conservative and being a Christian. These claims serve to deceive a discerning eye that otherwise might see all too often motives and actions at radical odds with what have been the energizing values of our nation and the predominant religion in this nation.

Even though we need to oppose strongly these actions being perpetrated by this administration, it will serve no constructive purpose to demonize those who have engineered these efforts at radical change. Instead, we need to reinstitute rationality and civility as a part of the effort to restore our traditional national and religious values.

This restoration needs to start now, and there are definite signs it already has begun in several arenas. But this restoration needs to become a widespread effort, something that is undertaken with full awareness and determination by the entire nation. This requires many of us who have remained silent to start speaking out in as many different venues as possible. If Whitehead is correct, and I believe he is, the essence of the universe advances toward those sacred goals that can be found in Christianity as well as in many of the world's great religions: To love one's neighbor as oneself, to be compassionate with those who suffer, and to strive for the common good of humankind and the world. We need to harmonize ourselves with this Sacred energy once again and allow it to move us toward these beautiful goals that fulfill the conditions for Shalom.

--David E. Roy, Ph.D.

Copyright 2006 by David E. Roy, All Rights Reserved.

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