#4: The Doctrine of Elections

People, people,
We gotta get over before we go under.
Hey country, didn't say what you meant.
Just changed the brand new funky president.

          James Brown, 'Funky President (People, It's Bad)'

I can just read it to you, if you’re too lazy to do it yourself:

NO ORDINARY WEDNESDAY

The meeting was about to begin. Around thirty of us migrated across the spacious room the church had set aside for our group, some from the ping pong table, some from the couches and lounge seats at the far end, others from the doorway. Near the room’s center stood a large circle of metal folding chairs. We gathered there, in front of the rear wall bedecked with Steven Curtis Chapman and DeGarmo and Key posters that had that slightly worn and creased appearance, like they were fished out of the dumpster behind Word Christian Bookstore, because they probably were.

Wednesday night was youth group night at this my second evangelical church. As I entered my teen years, we moved from our original church to another a few towns away. Yet our routines there were the same as at the first: many hours of our week spent within its walls – every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, every Wednesday night.

This, though, was no ordinary Wednesday night. Diane, the youth pastor’s wife, lifted her guitar from its weathered black case and began to sing. But I couldn’t really sing ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ or ‘Casual Christian’ with any real conviction. No, I just sat there, mumbling along, my shoulders sagging, staring blankly at the floor and lost in a sea of troubling thoughts.

Yes, there were a few issues weighing heavily on me at the time. I didn’t think I was the worst looking high school sophomore you’ve ever seen, in my Gap T-shirt and my tight-rolled jeans. I also had, like, 3 Bibles and a respectable Michael W. Smith cassette collection somewhere in a drawer in my room. I could even play a pretty tidy rendition of ‘Rocketown’ on keyboard. Yet even with all that, Hayley still hadn’t realized that the answer to her prayers for a committed Christian boyfriend sat a mere four chairs to her right.

I glanced over (casually) and noticed her shifting restlessly in her seat. Slumped in his own chair a few spaces beyond her was Dave, the blue-chip high school offensive lineman. Next to me, Mark kicked aimlessly at the floor with his Adidas Samba Classics. Yeah, it wasn’t just me. This collective malaise affected everyone in the circle. Funerals had more vitality.

Like I said, this was no ordinary Wednesday night. This was Wednesday, November 4th, 1992, and we had awoken that morning to learn of the election of one William Jefferson Clinton to the highest office in the country.

1984 (BUT DOUBLE-PLUS-GOOD!)

8 years earlier, things were so different. 8 years earlier, I sat in a jubilant mood in my Grade 2 Christian school classroom. I was wearing my yellow polo shirt with the little alligator on it. On my desk lay a multi-colored Trapper Keeper and a 64-pack of Crayola crayons, with a crayon sharpener built into the box. I was drinking milk from the small Thermos that came with my metal Empire Strikes Back lunchbox. All was right with the world – but it wasn’t the crayons, or the milk, or Han and Chewie that were responsible.

No, this was a red-letter day, for Ronald Reagan had just won his second election and my classmates and I were celebrating. Not my friend Donald, though. His family had voted for Mondale. Ouch. African American Christians sure did some strange things sometimes. Our teacher, Mrs. Gager, aimed to soften the blow with a few kind words. But the rest of us weren’t going to waste too much time feeling sorry for Donald when we were basking in a post-election glow.

Not that any of us really understood the politics of the situation. My mother had told me that morning that Reagan had won ‘in a landslide’. I didn’t know what a ‘landslide’ was, but it sounded positive. Unlike Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, it looked like this 1984 was shaping into a double-plus-good one. And our parents sure seemed elated. They told us Ronald Reagan was the right man for the job, the right man for America. 

Because America was back after the dark days of the 1970s, thanks to Reagan, the founder of the feast. Like a cowboy riding in from the west, he had restored the pride of the nation and had begun to run the scourge of communism to ground. Yes, once they had called us weak. Now, far away in their snowy ice palaces, the Soviets cowered in fear as their ineffectual system of government melted around them. Soon nothing would be left of the villainous Eastern Bloc but the skeleton of drab architecture and outdated machines.

Returning Reagan to power also ensured the economy remained on overdrive. Corporate giants could continue to wear Armani, or go casual in polo shirts with sweaters tied and draped over the shoulders. They could drive their convertibles and sail their yachts and fly their private jets, sending money trickling down for those of us in the middle class to buy more Rubik’s cubes and Ataris.

Most importantly, evangelicals had at last ascended to our proper place as power brokers. Back in 1980, luminaries like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson mobilized the vote for Republican candidates by decrying the moral degradation and decrepit spiritual condition of the United States. God loved America, they insisted, but she could only prosper if she went “back to God, back to the Bible, back to morality!”¹ If she continued down her dark and immoral path, she would find her freedoms eroded by a left-wing agenda. Ronald Reagan, it seemed, was the cure for what ailed us.

However effective their message had been four years earlier, by 1984 it had definitely sunk in. In this election year, the Moral Majority found a willing army of rank-and-file Christian nationalists in our communities ready to storm the ballot boxes. And surely Reagan wouldn’t forget the service these grass-roots evangelical voters had rendered! We had a friend in the highest office in the land.

This triumvirate – God, evangelicals and the American president – was the ultimate alliance, one that would let us pull the levers of government to carry out God’s agenda. We’d drive back the tide of secularism, snuff out abortion, reestablish prayer in public schools and return Christian faith and values to the halls of American power. Power, in fact, was the name of the game.

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

The power and prosperity that burgeoned under Reagan’s stewardship also made manifest an important truth: God was highly selective when it came to presidential partnerships. He wouldn’t work with just anybody. In fact, His tastes ran exclusively to meat cooked red and not blue. He expressed his disapproval with the lean years of the Carter presidency. Then came the fat years of the Reagan administration, an explicit and undeniable sign of divine endorsement.

That’s why Wednesday, November 4, 1992 descended like an impenetrable fog on that room of once-carefree youth groupers. Elections, first and foremost, were litmus tests of America’s faith. And this election sent a smoke signal to God that His days of national purification, unfettered military spending and laissez-faire economic management were over. The nation was straying from His will.

God was highly selective when it came to presidential partnerships. He wouldn’t work with just anybody. In fact, His tastes ran exclusively to meat cooked red and not blue.

Adam Lee Benner

Also, even after 12 years of Republican leadership, several big-ticket items on God’s punch list remained incomplete. Traditional family values still needed enforcing. The tenuous balance of the Supreme court still needed stacking in our favor. The stench of Roe vs. Wade lingered. After this election, it looked like God was never going to get His way.

Who would protect American sovereignty from the globalists? Who would keep New Age philosophy out of our schools? Who would stop affirmative action from giving our minimum-wage positions of indentured servitude to needy and undeserving black kids? Who now would champion family values? Who would stop the gays from turning everyone gay? Who would overturn abortion laws? Not Bill Clinton. Certainly not his wife, who, if the rumors were true, roamed the streets at night, looking for babies and unattended small children to devour whole.

So we sat there, in that circle, contemplating the end of the world – a world overseen by Republican presidents with the support of the evangelical establishment.

Randy, the youth pastor, sat about a third of the way around the circle to my right, dressed smartly in chinos and a tucked in, short-sleeved button-down shirt. He was leaning forward slightly in the chair, elbows on his knees, fingers pressed together in front of the neatly-trimmed sandy brown moustache that matched his near-shoulder-length hair. He invited person after person to share and listened intently to each speaker. Then, in his usual manner, he offered a few wise, calming and well-considered conciliatory thoughts. Elections are won and elections are lost, he stated, and administrations come and go. Like any other president, this one would also come and go. We should keep in mind, too, that God wasn’t troubled or surprised by this outcome, whatever we might think of it. And we couldn’t know what good might come of it.

Well, nice try, Randy. We appreciated the effort. This wasn’t just another president, though. This was a womanizer, a draft dodger, a one-time recreational drug user. Say what you would about George Bush, at least he had dignity. Now he would be succeeded by the smooth-talking Arkansas governor with wandering eyes and busy hands, stained by a litany of allegations of sexual indiscretions. Yes, ‘Slick Willie’ flouted even the most basic standards of public decorum. With him at the helm, America would be no more than a ship of fools hurtling headlong into the moral abyss.

Sean was the next to talk. What’s done is done, he said. All we could do was move forward. Typical Sean. Always so practical, living in the now. He continued: What were we going to do? Complain about this election for the next four years?

Yes. It turned out that was exactly what we were going to do. And not just for the next four years. This was the dark night of the soul for the Christian right, and we needed to undertake some collective soul searching.

LETTING THE SIDE DOWN

Maybe our parents had ‘settled’ for Bush in the first place. Evangelicals like them, while hot for Reagan, had been lukewarm on George H. W. Bush. Yet they dutifully backed him in the Republican primaries just the same, over Pentecostal shining light and televangelist Pat Robertson, whose campaign started with promise but faltered at the late hurdles. Rank and file Christians had banked on a surer bet. And on Election Day, 1988, they helped win Bush the Oval Office.

Bush, however, never seemed all that engaged with the aims and interests of the Christian right and for their part, the Christian right never pushed hard for him. Perhaps, in these intervening years, everyone became complacent. They assumed the tide of Republican administrations would flow eternal. Jerry Falwell had even shuttered the doors of the Moral Majority in 1989 (in the wake of declining donations) stating that “our goal has been achieved” and the “religious right is solidly in place.”² That kind of hubris bred lethargy and apathy and, just maybe, a tepid response from the public for Bush at the polls in 1992.

Evangelicals like our parents, it seemed, were the architects of their own demise. And ours.

But they had taught us well. They trained us to be politically mindful and active. Now, we had seen first hand the potentially dire consequences of a lost election. We would grow only more committed and more militant in the years to come. And at the next election, when we had the right to vote, we wouldn’t make their mistake. We would be ready.

Until next time…

May the Way of Jesus take you through lonely places,
Away from the false binary of bankrupt and moribund powers,
To open spaces beyond.

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1. Excerpt from Falwell’s ‘Listen, America!’
2. UPI Archives, June 12, 1989: ‘Falwell dissolving Moral Majority‘