You’d think that political scandals,
inept disaster relief, a war going badly, and low poll numbers
would be enough to humiliate politicians and the religious right
out of claiming that God is speaking to them directly. Then along
comes Pat Robertson, host of The 700
Club, suggesting last week that Ariel
Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing
God’s land” by giving away Gaza to the Palestinians. Of
course, most who didn’t know it already came to realize that
Robertson is an idiot in August, when the “Christian
leader” suggested that the United States assassinate Hugo
Chavez, president of Venezuela, and followed that with the
statement that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for abortion. Unfortunately, rather than leaving it to God
to prove the right wrong, Democrats have taken up God-talk, too.
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader, urged Congress to vote
against the Bush budget “as an act of worship” because of
the document’s “injustice and immorality.” William
Sloane Coffin, the retired Yale chaplain, denounced the Bush tax cuts
by saying, “I think he should remember that it was the devil who
tempted Jesus with unparalleled wealth and power.” Observing the
scene, Joseph Loconte writes in the New
York Times: “Christians are right to
argue that the Bible is a priceless source of moral and spiritual
insight. But they’re wrong to treat it as a substitute for a
coherent political philosophy.” Springfield’s favorite son imparted
considerable wisdom on this point. When it came to religious faith,
Abraham Lincoln kept Christianity at his long arm’s length,
which probably served to encourage others to tell him what God
wanted him to do. But Lincoln wasn’t ready to concede
discernment of the divine to others. To a group of Chicago clergy
who brought him advice in September 1862, Lincoln replied: “I
hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable
that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he
would reveal it directly to me.” Lincoln spent as much time as anybody trying
to figure out what the Almighty wanted, but, unlike many, he was
wise enough to know that that wasn’t easy. If God was on one
side or the other in the Civil War, why did the war drag on so
long, at such terrible cost? “Both read the same Bible and
pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the
other,” Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address.
What’s up with that? Maybe neither side had it quite right;
the prayers of neither side had been answered fully. “The
Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln concluded. That didn’t mean “do
nothing,” however. Lincoln advocated “firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right,” only
realizing we might be wrong. Absolutes and arrogance get in the
way of nations trying to do the right thing. Claiming moral superiority
is the biggest intelligence failure. It leads to mistakes,
miscalculations, deaths. “Americans are never safe against the
temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we
most fervently desire,” wrote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr a
half-century ago. They need religion, he said, to give them a sense not
of infallibility but of humility. Niebuhr brought home the point in The Irony of American History,
written in 1952. “If we should perish,” he wrote,
“the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary
cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength
of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the
hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by
some accident of nature or history but by hatred and
vainglory.”
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2006.
