Nancy French, "best-selling author," according to the Washington Post and wife of National Review's David French, is horrified that so many so-called Christians are perfectly okay with the fact that Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States.
I was there that day and swallowed hard as the crowd, full of anti-Romney fervor, cheered. Was this what Christians were about? Making theology a political litmus test struck me as terribly misguided, especially since Christians, more and more, find ourselves at the short end of that stick. Yet, when this evangelical crowd had a chance to mock a good man for his beliefs, they relished the opportunity.
My husband and I, members of the Presbyterian Church of America and Republicans at the time, should have been welcomed by the “values” voters. After getting to know Romney and his wife, Ann Romney, when I worked on a book project with her in 2007, we threw our support behind them and suddenly became the target of evangelical ire. One political activist saw me wearing a Romney campaign hat and angrily said, “You obviously don’t love America,” leaving me near tears, since my husband was just days from deploying to Iraq. She would later become a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.
Romney won the GOP nomination four years later, but neither he nor Huckabee ever became president. Nearly a decade later, evangelical Republican voters embraced Trump despite his well-documented flaws, sins and lack of repentance. Throughout his career, Romney has stood for strong moral values, sometimes at great personal and political cost, but he has never been Christian enough for some Republicans. Somehow, after everything we’ve seen, President Trump still is.
Hubby agrees.
It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity.
Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our daughter — and our God.” Graham noted that even the most private of sins can have very public, devastating consequences, and he asked a simple question: “If [Clinton] will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”
True. If you can lie before your Creator, you can lie before me easily enough.
But here's the deal.
You need some work done at your house. So you jump on to some online database or other and you turn up two names, both of whom you know personally.
Contractor Number One is as upstanding a guy as you've ever met. Married to his first wife and won't even look at another woman. But then you look at his customer reviews.
One or two three-stars, some two-stars and a WHOLE lot of one-stars. You read headings like "LOUSY" and "DO NOT PATRONIZE" and "CROOK" over and over. Again and again, you read about how people are suing him for work not done or done sloppily.
Contractor Number Two is, basically, a piece of garbage. He's on his third wife but that's going to change soon since he's on his fourth mistress. Dude will basically sleep with anything or anybody that's not tied down.
But you look at his online reviews. Five-stars all the way down the line. Service-wise, nobody has a bad thing to say about him.
Which one are you going to hire, Dave? Nanner?
Thought so.
Professional ConservatismTM gave us John McCain in 2008. Good guy, great guy, noble guy. Godawful presidential candidate. Four years later, Professional ConservatismTM gave us Mitt Romney, another candidate who had no idea how to beat a Democrat.
Who did you think we were going to select four years after that? Someone who genuinely wants it, someone who treats my concerns as actually important?
Or Jeb Bush?
Dave? Nanner? We weren't picking the Presiding Bishop of the United States. We were picking this country's First Civil Servant.
And that was all we were doing.
Grow the damn hell up.
It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity.
Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our daughter — and our God.” Graham noted that even the most private of sins can have very public, devastating consequences, and he asked a simple question: “If [Clinton] will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”
True. If you can lie before your Creator, you can lie before me easily enough.
But here's the deal.
You need some work done at your house. So you jump on to some online database or other and you turn up two names, both of whom you know personally.
Contractor Number One is as upstanding a guy as you've ever met. Married to his first wife and won't even look at another woman. But then you look at his customer reviews.
One or two three-stars, some two-stars and a WHOLE lot of one-stars. You read headings like "LOUSY" and "DO NOT PATRONIZE" and "CROOK" over and over. Again and again, you read about how people are suing him for work not done or done sloppily.
Contractor Number Two is, basically, a piece of garbage. He's on his third wife but that's going to change soon since he's on his fourth mistress. Dude will basically sleep with anything or anybody that's not tied down.
But you look at his online reviews. Five-stars all the way down the line. Service-wise, nobody has a bad thing to say about him.
Which one are you going to hire, Dave? Nanner?
Thought so.
Professional ConservatismTM gave us John McCain in 2008. Good guy, great guy, noble guy. Godawful presidential candidate. Four years later, Professional ConservatismTM gave us Mitt Romney, another candidate who had no idea how to beat a Democrat.
Who did you think we were going to select four years after that? Someone who genuinely wants it, someone who treats my concerns as actually important?
Or Jeb Bush?
Dave? Nanner? We weren't picking the Presiding Bishop of the United States. We were picking this country's First Civil Servant.
And that was all we were doing.
Grow the damn hell up.
8 comments:
Now if Michael Gerson would only figure that out.
I liked Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts. He really is a nice person, very moral, etc., etc. He is not a Christian, however. I didn't vote for him because of any "Christian" values, likewise I didn't vote for Trump because of his religious values or personal life. I voted for Trump because I knew right away that he could win.
Meanwhile, in other late-breaking news, the economy is surging ahead and unemployment has hit a 49 year low, at 3.6% (many states have lower rates of about 3.2%.)
Several things are tiresome about Mr. and Mrs. French
1. Their habit of extrapolating from disagreeable personal encounters. (And, no, I don't take her account at face value). This is her husband's version (https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/america-soured-on-my-multiracial-family/567994/).
2. French, more than any other soi-disant Republican, takes the worst Democratic talking points at face value. It has somewhat amusing results in National Review, when French puts forward a dubious thesis in one column and Andrew McCarthy takes it apart in another.
3. Their obtuse incomprehension of other people's decision-making. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that evangelical voters, like everyone else, choose between available alternatives, but it's over their head. Or, perhaps they fancy we're all duty-bound to strike silly and ineffectual poses, like voting for Evan McMullin.
4. Then there are the floating standards. Here they are uttering animadversions against Franklin Graham. Even if one agreed with the French's on substance, it's not as if evangelical big-wigs have been (heretofore) immune from uttering crass, ill-considered, and infelicitous things. We've been reading about it for 40 years (though, to be sure, a great many such stories are bogus). These men are builders, not people writing fussy legal briefs, and the media are their enemy.
5. Recall this comment by Pat Buchanan in 1987, "When the mob is coming to get the old man, you don't have him sit down and compose a list of his 'mistakes'. You start firing from the upper floors." French, Ross Douthat, and Rod Dreher have that vibe of being men whose bravery under fire (metaphorically speaking) is just about zero. (French deployed as a JAG, by the way). You don't choose your situations, and the French's are living in one where the opposition is willing to dispose of every scruple and every courtesy to get what it wants. Ashley Kavanaugh learned that the hard way. When's Nancy French gonna get a clue?
6. The Republican Capitol Hill nexus has, bar some brief shining moments, been a study in failure theatre for about 60 years now. The situation's not as pronounced at the state level, but it's just amazing how little Republican pols manage to accomplish. (Look at the condition of higher education in states which have durable Republican majorities). Any acknowledgement of that on their part?
7. If 'collapsing witness' bothers them, why not tell us their reaction to The Bulwark recruiting contributors from veterans of Slate and The Huffington Post and Wm. Kristol jonesing for donations from leftoid billionaires. Oh, and tell us what you think of David Brooks.
/ rant off.
Now if Michael Gerson would only figure that out.
The rap on Gerson was that he was always a poseur and a self-promoter. He was a speechwriter, tasked with producing copy which mimics his boss's boss's boss's style. Supposedly, the man had reporters on speed-dial. When the press knows who you are, you're doing it wrong. (There was a reason Peter Robinson and others so employed during the Reagan Administration didn't much care for Peggy Noonan).
While we're on the subject of 'collapsing ... witness' and such, did anyone in the Bush clan ever offer a critique of the Democratic Administration which had by 2016 been in charge for 7 years? What are the rest of us supposed to make of them snoozing through the IRS scandals but arousing themselves in 2016 just in time to throw darts and the Republican presidential nominee?
I am thinking that we, with a lot o help from the media, have been developing the specifications for a "ruling class" for quite a while: right schools, right speaking, open tax returns, etc., etc.. Then along comes a Trump who breaks all the norms causing the likes of Michael Gerson, George Will & even George Bush to start clutching at their pearls. I am learning that they really don't care very much about results. It is all about form.
A smoothie can lies thru his teeth & get away with it. ("You can keep your own doctor" has never been properly called out.) Trump says something outrageous & everyone falls on his fainting couch.
For Nancy Pelosi to accuse Barr of lying is downright laughable. I kind of like the observer who notes who cares about a billionaire's tax returns, she wanted to know how someone like Nancy who has never held a job outside of governing can be worth twenty-eight million dollars. Now, that is worth sticking our noses into.
I didn't vote for, and wouldn't vote against, someone because he's a Mormon. In this regard, I disagreed with the "evangelicals" who ruled Romney out because of his religion. I was uneasy with both the Huckabee and Cruz campaigns about their injection of a mild form of religious crusade into their efforts. We do not vote for President for a national pastor-in-chief. The Frenchs' self-righteousness is not pretty. Trump has done more to protect the liberties of religious believers than any president in recent memory.
Still, voters are entitled to consider religion when they vote if they want to. If a candidate espouses a religion which teaches that other religions should be suppressed by the power of the state, that's a problem. This would apply, in my thinking, to any but the most "modern" and "reformed" Muslims.
The remarks of one James Kirkpatrick on French and several others.
..."David French, one of the most prominent Never Trump activists of the 2016 election, rushed to Gunn’s defense, saying: 'No. This is wrong. His old tweets were 100 percent offensive and gross, but this is not how we judge people. This is not how we determine the fate of a person’s career:' In contrast, however, when Roseanne was purged for a single tweet, French penned an entire piece for National Review on May 29, 2018 entitled 'Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness.' [where he argued should be terminated]."
What Joseph Sobran said, "Behind every double standard is an unconfessed single standard".
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