CONTENTS
ACHKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: SIN AND SECULARITY
1. New Moral Language
2. Holiness and Gary Hart
3. Fatal Composure
4. Jeremiad: The Extreme Center
5. A Theology of Willie Horton
6. Playing to Win
7. Secular Innocence
PART TWO: BIBLE BEGINNINGS
8. The Superman Trial
9. Scopes: Who Won?
10. Refighting Scopes
PART THREE: BIBLE ENDINGS: PREMIL
11. Fundamentals
12. America’s Miliast Founders
13. Reagan and the Prophecies
14. Fundamentalism and the Quayles
PART FOUR: POSTMIL
: PAT ROBERTSON
15. Coffee-Cup Apocalypse
16. Campaigning
17. Claiming
PART FIVE: POLITICS AND BLACK RELIGION
18. African-American Miliasm
19. Lincoln’s Black Theology
20. Marginal Man
21. Preacher Jesse
22. Preacher Andy
23. What Did Jesse Want?
PART SIX: POLITICS AND PORNOGRAPHY
24. With Ladies Present
25. In Praise of Censure
26. A Theology of Erotica
PART SEVEN: POLITICS AND ABORTION
27. Catholics: Mario Cuomo
28. Evangelicals: Francis Schaeffer
29. Feminists and Fundamentalism
PART EIGHT: CHURCH AND STATE
30. Religious Separatism
31. Jefferson: The Uses of Religion
32. Jefferson: The Protection of Religion
33. Madison and the Honor of God
CONCLUSION
NOTES
INDEX
To Ted Chichak
agent and friend for over twenty years
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book developed from my reporting of the 1988 presidential campaign. Walter Isaacson, then the Nation editor for Time, proposed that I write three cover stories on the 1988 election, along with ancillary articles for the magazine. That project was supported by managing editor Henry Miller and then-assistant managing editor Richard Duncan. Time also sponsored the Frontline television show on the candidates that I wrote and narrated, The Choice.
Donald Morrison edited Time’s book on the election, The Winning of the White House, 1988, for which I wrote the introduction. To these people, and those in Time’s local bureaus and research department (under Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo), I am grateful for the help that went into the first stage of this book.
At Frontline, David Fanning produced The Choice,
and Sherry Jones directed, with the assistance of Elizabeth Sams. Thanks to their expert work, The Choice
won a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
When it became clear to me that religion would become the focus of my further work on the 1988 election, I traveled to the institutions whose archives proved so helpful—Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma City (where Gary Hart studied for the ministry), the Nazarene Archives in Kansas City, Chicago Theological Seminary (where Jesse Jackson studied for the ministry), New York Theological Seminary (where Pat Robertson studied for the ministry), Elim Bible Institute in Lima, New York (where Randall Terry was trained), and Christian Heritage College in San Diego (where the Institute for Creation Research was begun).
Editors were helpful in letting me try out ideas in their magazines while working on the book, especially Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books, who showed special interest in the project. I am also grateful to Alex Kaplan of Wigwag, Byron Dobell of American Heritage, Elliot Kaplan of GQ, and Terry Zintl, Walter Isaacson’s successor as Nation editor at Time. I am grateful to Dean Lawrence Dumas and the history department of Northwestern University for a two years’ leave of absence to complete the book. My agent, Ted Chichak, to whom the book is justly dedicated, orchestrated the whole project. My editor, Alice Mayhew, sped it along. Natalie Wills was my first reader and most percipient critic. John C. Wills again helped with the research. The bulk of the book was typed with speed and accuracy by Joan Stahl.
Scripture passages, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New England Bible.
INTRODUCTION
THE LEARNED HAVE THEIR SUPERSTITIONS, Prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Since science has explained the world in secular terms, there is no more need for religion, which will wither away. Granted, it has been slow to die in America. Even Marx noticed that, in the 1880s. But he explained it by the raw state of this country: the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.
¹ The funeral, he was sure, had been delayed, not canceled. Yet when Communist regimes were given their own sudden funeral in 1989, an American preacher (Andrew Young) remarked: When they come out from behind the Iron Curtain, they are singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ a Georgia Baptist hymn.
² And he did not mean the Soviet Georgia.
In a time of reviving fundamentalisms around the world, some Americans have rediscovered our native fundamentalists (a recurring, rather than cumulative, experience for the learned). It seems careless for scholars to keep misplacing such a large body of people. Nonetheless, every time religiosity catches the attention of intellectuals, it is as if a shooting star had appeared in the sky. One could hardly guess, from this, that nothing has been more stable in our history, nothing less budgeable, than religious belief and practice. Religion does not shift or waver; the attention of its observers does. Public notice, like a restless spotlight, returns at intervals to believers’ goings-on, finds them still going on, and, with expressions of astonishment or dread, declares that religion is undergoing some kind of boom
or revival. But, as Seymour Martin Lipset observed, statistics tell the story of a continuous ‘boom’ in American religious adherence and belief.
³ Revivalism does not need to be revived. Revival is, like respiration, the condition of its life. Apparent fluctuations in the nineteenth century had more to do with inchoate reporting methods than with oscillation in the things reported on.⁴
Technology, urbanization, social mobility, universal education, high living standards—all were supposed to eat away at religion, in a wash of overlapping acids. But each has crested over America, proving itself a solvent or a catalyst in other areas, but showing little power to corrode or diminish religion. The figures are staggering. Poll after poll confirms them:
Nine Americans in ten say they have never doubted the existence of God.
Eight Americans in ten say they believe they will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins.
Eight Americans in ten believe God still works miracles.
Seven Americans in ten believe in life after death.⁵
When Cardinal O’Connor of New York mentioned exorcisms in his diocese, he was widely ridiculed in the press. Yet 37 percent of Americans believe in a personal devil. Fifty percent believe in angels—as opposed to the 15 percent who believe in astrology.⁶ Cardinal O’Connor is joined in his views by well over twice the numbers that join Nancy Reagan in consulting astral charts.
Practice conforms to profession. About 40 percent of the American population attends church in a typical week (as opposed to 14 percent in Great Britain and 12 percent in France).⁷ More people go to church, in any week, than to all sports events combined. Over 90 percent of Americans say they pray some time in the week.⁸ Internationally, Americans rank at the top in rating the importance of God in their lives. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest, Americans average a rating of 8.21, behind only tiny Malta (9.58).
⁹
One would expect that something so important to Americans would affect their behavior as voters. And, as a matter of fact, no non-Christian has ever been elected president of the United States. No non-Protestant was elected until 1960, when some took the acceptance of John Kennedy to mean that religion would thenceforth matter less to the voters. But if that is true, why did a majority of Americans say, in 1987, that they would not vote for an atheist as president?¹⁰ Some may have exaggerated their own tolerance when a majority said it would vote for a Jew, but educated people probably underreported their resistance to an atheist. What emerges from this and similar questions is that the electorate wants a president who observes his (or, eventually, her) religion. President Eisenhower was, as usual, close to his constituents’ instinct when he said that people should practice their faith, and I don’t care what it is.
Candidates have intuited enough of these truths to put in church time during their campaigns, even the secular Michael Dukakis resuming his exiguous ties to the Greek Orthodox church. Yet his coolness in this area was in striking contrast to the easy religiosity of Ronald Reagan—a contrast that, no doubt, had something to do with their differing successes at election time. People seem to trust the person who shares their moral values. In fact, Paul Kleppner, in a sophisticated study of polling data, found religious styles more predictive of voting patterns in the Populist Era than were the normal data studied (economic, class, regional, etc.).¹¹ George Gallup and Jim Castelli claim that the same thing would prove true today if analysts framed the right hypotheses: Religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate, and least appreciated, political indicators available.
¹²
But most political commentators show acute discomfort when faced with the expression of religious values in the political arena. That was demonstrated when Gary Hart’s adultery became an issue during the 1988 presidential campaign. It is obvious that religion influences one’s view of adultery—77 percent of Protestants think extramarital sex is always wrong,
as opposed to 71 percent of Catholics and 46 percent of Jews.¹³ But when there was a reaction against Hart, analysts had to legitimate
this hostility on anything but the obvious grounds. As a New Republic editorialist put it: The revelation of salacious details [was] justified on the basis of news values or competitive pressures [between networks and publications] or insight into ‘character’—in short, on any remotely plausible basis except disapproval of adultery (which violates an elite social taboo against moralism).
¹⁴ Voters are allowed to like or dislike a candidate for the way he looks, or his television skills, but not for his recognition of the dominant moral attitudes of his society.¹⁵
President Reagan was constantly praised as a great communicator
without giving enough emphasis to what he was communicating. He communicated religious attitudes (despite his absences from church on Sunday); he communicated appreciation of the conventional family (despite his own family’s messy interrelationships). He would pray at the drop of a hat—as when he prayed for a soap opera character’s deliverance from the indignities imposed on her by the show’s writers.¹⁶
The right wing regularly deplores liberal bias
in the media, trying to count how many Democrats there are in the working press, as opposed to the percentage in the electorate at large. It could more tellingly reflect on the number of churchgoers in the national press, as opposed to the general population; or on the uneasy way journalists talk about religion, as opposed to the frequency of reference among ordinary people. Some of the glibbest persons in the nation are oddly tongue-tied when the Bible is brought up. And editors seem to prefer inarticulacy on the subject. Major papers and networks encourage reporters to acquire expertise in the law or economics, but I have not heard of any editor asking reporters to brush up their theology. Religion writers at most papers are kept in their Saturday-edition ghettos. In covering six presidential campaigns, I do not remember seeing a single religious writer on any campaign plane—not even on Pat Robertson’s in 1988, and certainly not on Jesse Jackson’s in 1984 or 1988. (James Wall, the editor of The Christian Century, was on Jimmy Carter’s campaign plane in 1976, but as an aide to the candidate, not as a journalist.)
Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with the remark that I was the only religious nut
—his term for a believer—in his stable of regular reviewers. At an Operation Rescue rally, a journalist joined a group of other reporters with the breathless announcement that antiabortionist Randall Terry was telling bloodthirsty stories about murder and dismemberment to avenge a rape. She did not know, though Terry had named the passage (Judges 19), that he was telling a Bible story, the tale of the Levite’s concubine.
One reason editors tend to shy at political coverage of religion is their fear that this will somehow breach the wall of separation between church and state. Since the Constitution mandates this division, journalists and others seem to think voters should maintain their own hermetic division between religion and politics—and if they do not do so, it is better not to know about something so shameful. Because schools are not allowed to sponsor prayers, it is somehow an enlightened act to turn the other way when candidates pray aloud (as they always do).
If religion intrudes too obviously, as in the case of Pat Robertson’s campaign, this is treated as an anomaly. It is given special coverage by an outsider. Call Martin Marty
is the editor’s easiest recourse for the special case. (Where narrowly Catholic or Jewish views are at issue, the call to Marty may be alternated with calls to Richard McBrien or Arthur Hertzberg.)
The severest test to this self-restraint in the coverage of religion at campaign time was Jimmy Carter’s candidacy. He was the nominee of a major party—and, in 1976, the winning contender. Yet he disconcerted many liberals by using backward
language. It seemed vaguely Dog-patchish for him to say he was born again
—though all baptized Christians are, in some sense, born again according to Scripture passages like John 3.3–7:
Unless a man be born over again he cannot see the kingdom of God. . . . No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from water and spirit. . . . You ought not to be astonished, then, when I tell you must be born over again.¹⁷
It is true that evangelicals put a special stress on the concept of rebirth, using it to describe the psychological experience of being saved—and that, too, was considered an oddity in Carter, though evangelicals make up the largest number of Christians in America, and 40 percent of the population called itself born again
in response to a 1989 survey.¹⁸
How did such a sizable part of the population escape, for so long, the notice of journalists and political analysts? Partly this was the result of elitism. Evangelical believers are, as a whole, less educated and affluent than members of the significantly named mainline
churches. Many people accepted mainline as a term indicating the predominant, if not quite the mainstream,
churches. But the word was appropriately borrowed from Philadelphia’s term for the artery extending into the city’s fashionable suburbs. The mainstream of American religion has always been evangelical. George Marsden, the best student of the subject, calls evangelical Protestantism the dominant force in American life
during the nineteenth century, when it made up the unofficial religious establishment
of our politics.¹⁹
Nathan O. Hatch has traced the role experiential religion played in the democratization of America.²⁰ The revival has been the distinctively American religious experience (much as jazz is the most distinctive American musical form). To the extent that other religions take on an American character, they tend toward revivalism. That explains why a Quaker family like the Nixons could attend one of evangelist Paul Roder’s revivals, where the young Richard was saved, making him, later in life, more clearly the disciple of Billy Graham than of George Fox.²¹ The Catholic scholar Jay P. Dolan has noticed the way his church acquired revivalistic touches in the preaching of parish missions,
mounting by way of hellfire sermons (often delivered by the Passionist Fathers, a revivalistic religious order) to long lines at the confessionals replicating the files of sinners making their decisions for Christ
at the end of a Billy Graham rally.²²
The evangelical Billy Graham has been, over the years, the most admired man in America. He is always high on the list of people given that title on surveys, and he stays there as other leaders come and go. He has been in the top ten uninterruptedly for thirty-five years. During the decade of the 1980s, he averaged third on the list, flanked by Pope John Paul II (number two) and Jesse Jackson (number three). In fact, religious figures made up a majority of the top ten, since the two American presidents named (Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter) were known for their religiosity, as was the Catholic leader in Poland, Lech Walesa.²³
Though Billy Graham represents the broad stratum of religious experience in America—something politicians have recognized and tried to use over the years—commentators continue to neglect or dismiss the elements of that experience: revivalism, biblical literalism, millennial hope (for the Second Coming of Christ). Yet these have profoundly influenced our politics, right down to the shape given to political rallies and national conventions. When, as always happens, new millennial sects proclaim that the end of time is near, these are not seen as the latest manifestations of a central theme in our history—the apocalyptic spirit that drove American settlers to grapple with the devil’s instrument in the wilderness. The religious rhetoric of the millennium was more useful to orators of the American Revolution than were maxims of the Enlightenment.²⁴ The millennium proved just as serviceable in the Civil War, whether to fill with apocalyptic smoke Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic
or to steer war toward a peaceable kingdom
in Abraham Lincoln’s writings. So, when the followers of Elizabeth Clare Prophet gathered in 1990 to go underground at the world’s rending, they were as American as apple pie—or as violence.²⁵
Yet there is a reluctance to explore the America that can produce a Mrs. Prophet as frequently as a Dr. King. I remember when, in the 1960s, journalists were trying to report on black militants. In attempts to understand the movement from the inside, works supposed to be revelatory were studied with intensity—Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks or The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With Fanon, people were willing to follow recondite musings on negritude, and with Malcolm to juggle complex African and Islamic loyalties. But it seems too much to ask journalists to read the Bible (of all things) in order to understand a Pat Robertson or Jesse Jackson—or even a Dr. King.²⁶ I know from experience that it is considered a little kooky for a journalist even to know what premillennial dispensationalism
is—though that is the most important concept in modern fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are not so numerous as evangelicals, but they are a sizable part of the larger evangelical family, and have many ties to other members of that family. And no group making up a fifth of the population can safely be ignored by anyone trying to understand America.²⁷
Yet people who will not learn the intricacies of evangelical eschatology were reporting, in the 1960s, on the death of God
fad that titillated elite divinity schools. That notion actually led some to think there was a falling off from religion in the 1960s, though religious profession and observance generally held steady.²⁸ There has been a decline in mainline religions over the last three decades or so—but that affected the less populous denominations (e.g., Episcopalians, who make up only 2 percent of the nation, or Presbyterians, 3 percent). Evangelical churches, the big ones (like the Baptists, 20 percent of the nation), were growing.²⁹
An evaporation of belief toward the top of the socioeconomic scale occurs regularly in America. Doctrine thins out there—as among Unitarians early in the nineteenth century, or theological liberals early in the twentieth. This is seen as a betrayal of belief by those lower in the scale, who often compensate with a renewal of their own fervor—as the fundamentalists did in responding to theological liberals. Part of the evangelical resurgence
of the 1970s was a matter of new voices being heard as the elite denominations fell silent on religion, learning to speak in more secular terms.³⁰ The religious vote has been, increasingly, an evangelical vote, a fact that helps explain the tendency of recent presidents to proclaim themselves born again—Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush.
In 1988, some thought that scandal among televangelists was bringing to an end this revolt
of the so-called moral majority.³¹ But the surprising power of the flag issue in George Bush’s campaign came from the Pledge of Allegiance that Dukakis refused to support, though it contains the words under God,
the religious Right’s rallying cry in public schools where other references to the Deity are banned. I begin my book by looking at the play of religious issues around candidates in the 1988 campaign. Even Gary Hart, the mystery man
of that election year, can only be understood by investigating his strict religious training.
The strength of evangelicals in our modern political culture surprised many because the evangelicals were supposed to have disappeared from politics after the Scopes trial of the 1920s. Much of our recent history has been distorted because the real issues and outcome of that trial have been misunderstood, as I argue in part two.
The Scopes trial turned on biblical beginnings, the story of creation still being fought for in an age when Ronald Reagan and Marilyn Quayle defend creationism
against Darwinian evolution. Even more heated controversies have surrounded the scenario of biblical endings—the apocalypse, or cosmic showdown, around Christ’s Second Coming. The Second Coming, as one of the fundamentalists’ five fundamentals of faith, is often presented as an extreme or aberrant view in our modern culture. Yet biblical prophecies
of a climactic battle over Israel found a hearing in Ronald Reagan’s White House, and best-sellers like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth instructed ordinary people in views that remained secrets hidden from the intellectuals.
Just as all believing Christians are born again,
so all orthodox believers hold that they live in the end time.
At a minimum, the Christian Scriptures say that Jesus brought the final dispensation to history. There will come no later prophet or lawgiver to establish a different relationship between God and man. The final covenant was sealed in Christ’s blood. Religious history has, in that sense, nowhere to go beyond the New Testament, so far as Christians are concerned. Cardinal Newman described the orthodox view:
But when once the Christ had come, as the Son over His own house, and with His perfect Gospel, nothing remained but to gather in His saints. No higher Priest could come, no truer doctrine. The Light and Life of men had appeared, and had suffered, and risen again; and nothing more was left to do. Earth had had its most solemn event, and seen its most august sight; and therefore it was the last time. And hence, though time intervenes between Christ’s first and second coming, it is not recognized (as one may say) in the Gospel scheme, but is, as it were, an accident. For so it was, that up to Christ’s coming in the flesh, the course of things ran straight towards that end, nearing it by every step; but now, under the Gospel, that course has (if I may so speak) altered its direction, as regards His second coming, and runs, not towards the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times equally near that great event, which, did it run towards, it would at once run into. Christ, then, is ever at our doors; as near eighteen hundred years ago as now, and not nearer now than then; and not nearer when He comes than now. When He says that He will come soon, soon
is not a word of time, but of natural order. This present state of things, the present distress
as St. Paul calls it, is ever close upon the next world, and resolves itself into it. As when a man is given over, he may die any moment, yet lingers; as an implement of war may any moment explode, and must at some time; as we listen for a clock to strike, and at length it surprises us; as a crumbling arch hangs, we know not how, and is not safe to pass under; so creeps on this feeble weary world, and one day, before we know where we are, it will end.³²
All Christian theology has been permeated by this theological version of the end to history.
The Lord’s Prayer is an eschatological prayer. But early Christians thought not only that they were living in the last age, but that this age would end soon. Much of the fear and exaltation of the earliest Christian letters centered on this expectation. Believers wrote about it in a kind of frantic code, and from that language some of the most bizarre aspects of American religion have taken their rise. It is a forbidding subject, in a secular age; yet no one can understand evangelicals’ emotional temperature without addressing it. When the Quayle family’s interest in a fundamentalist preacher (Colonel Robert Thieme) came into the news during the 1988 campaign, odds and ends of his preaching were printed, with no real attempt to see how they were structured, or how closely they were related to the whole fundamentalist endeavor.
I was told by some early readers of my manuscript that modern readers are not prepared to venture into the hermetic world of Christian apocalypse described in parts three and four. But I refuse to think that secularists are less intelligent than the evangelicals themselves, who seem to have no trouble grasping the concepts explained to them by Hal Lindsey, Jerry Falwell, or Colonel Thieme. What the willed ignorance about religion reflects is a refusal to see the connection between Christian doctrine and politics—though people were willing to study black-power doctrine, even of a recondite sort, in the hope of understanding black activists’ relation to our politics. In fact, millennialism and black politics have been related ever since black Protestants formed their own version of the end of history in the nineteenth century—a matter I consider in part five.
The winding down of the cold war has cooled evangelical rhetoric about a final battle in the Middle East; but no part of our history has gone for long without a fresh application of the patterns of apocalypse. And the ending of a century in the year 2000 (or, as some more accurately put it, in 2001) is bound to create that feeling of history taking a corner that always stimulates apocalyptic thinking. Mrs. Prophet’s followers in Montana are a first harbinger of what promises to be another apocalyptic decade, as omen-haunted as the 1890s.³³ The way to cope with biblical zealotry is not to match it with secular ignorance, producing muddle. An understanding of Christian prophecy will be more needed, not less, in the next few years, as signs of the times
are read by everyone under the impending deadline of a millennium.
The hope of new life in a new century will almost certainly stimulate mystical aspirations of the sort now fostered by New Age
movements. Some evangelicals see in this false religion
itself a sign of the apocalypse. History will culminate in the forging of one world
under a diabolic angel of light.
In any chain bookstore one can find dozens of titles in the New Age section—and, sure enough, there are to be found, now, in evangelical bookstores, three dozen or so works exposing
the dangers of New Age religion. Even the threat of peace breaking out after the cold war tends to frighten millennialists, who denounce one-worldism, whether represented by the godless
UN or the apostate
World Council of Churches. A European Community containing ex-Soviet elements is the kind of false peace
against which the religious Right is always well armed. Indeed, New Age eschatology unites a number of the fundamentalists’ old villains—evolution, through the alleged influence of Teil-hard de Chardin in New Age thought; the mind control
of psychiatry and Deweyite
education; and papal Rome, through the ecumenical work of Catholics with Eastern believers.
But the century’s end may be more marked by domestic than international conflict. Already the makings of a cultural war
are present in the religious attacks on pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and the eroticism of rock music and television. We hear again the old myth that the Roman Empire was sluiced to its ruin in a slither of lubricity. And the dying of one age is bound to encourage some cult of decadence—a development already present in 1990 studies like Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy, both of which examine Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siècle dandyism.
In parts six and seven I look at the religious activism of those opposing pornography and abortion in the frame of family values and the preservation of civilization. The assault on the National Endowment for the Arts shows that this political battle did not end with the Meese Commission’s attempt to control pornography. The struggle for a nation’s soul is under way, with the new millennialism as a kind of deadline set for all sides.
I end the book where the riddle of American politics is first posed—with the separation of church and state. Neither Jefferson nor Madison thought that separation would lessen the impact of religion on our nation. Quite the opposite. Churches freed from the compromises of establishment would have greater moral force, they argued—and in this they proved prophets. The first nation to disestablish religion has been a marvel of religiosity, for good or ill. Religion has been at the center of our major political crises, which are always moral crises—the supporting and opposing of wars, of slavery, of corporate power, of civil rights, of sexual codes, of the West,
of American separatism and claims to empire. If we neglect the religious element in all those struggles, we cannot understand our own corporate past; we cannot even talk meaningfully to each other about things that will affect us all (and not only the religious nuts
among us).
PART ONE
Sin and Secularity
New Moral Language
PREACHERS AND POLITICIANS WERE STUMBLING over each other in the 1988 campaign. Televangelist Jim Bakker, whose support had been sought by George Bush, was caught in a sex scandal. When a second televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, was also caught, Pat Robertson complained that this was too much: Bush’s aides must have set Swaggart up, to discredit a brother of the cloth who was seeking the presidency. Gary Hart had got into the act, though he is not a preacher, when philandering drove him from the campaign. It did not seem fair. Swaggart, accepting the charges of kinky voyeurism, returned to his ministry, rebaptized in his own copious tears. Hart merely had normal sex with a willing woman, and his wife claimed she did not mind. If she did not care, said Lee Hart, why should others.
Swaggart, however, dealt with his offense in a framework of moral discourse he shared with his followers. Journalists miss the point when they keep asking, after each new church scandal, if a preacher’s fall has shaken the believers’ faith. Sin rather confirms than challenges a faith that proclaims human corruption. The drama of salvation is played out against the constant backdrop of original sin.
Hart lacked a comparable moral vocabulary for dealing with—what? He would not, until late (and by way of an aside), call it sin. He treated his difficulties less as originated by himself than as created by intruders. Nor did he have a defined set of followers who could explain what he had done. He had to forge a special language for himself, in the midst of his ordeal. That was his real problem, as his experiments with different responses indicated.
At first he relied on simple denial. Nothing, he assured us, happened. Journalists had seen him enter his Washington home with a comely young blonde; but then (in his version) the two exited, almost immediately, and unobserved. He denied spending a night with her, or having sex. The vigor of the denial implied that there would have been something troubling, politically if not morally, had the charge been true.
Then, when it came out that he had spent an earlier night with the same woman on a boat that sailed from Bimini, Hart released equally detailed and exonerating information—the boat had been kept out of harbor by a closed customs office; sleeping arrangements had been sexually segregated; his continuing relation with the woman had been consultative (he needed her expertise on celebrity campaigners). The category of political or moral sin was still implicitly accepted, but—the argument went—it had been wrongly applied to innocent behavior.
When these first two lines of defense proved untenable, Hart moved to a third one. He could no longer maintain (a) that nothing happened, or (b) that something happened but it was innocent. He now took the position that if anything happened, it was not a subject the media had any right to notice. At first he claimed that journalists had not collected enough evidence; now he said they could not, by right, collect any evidence at all. The argument was still a moral one, but the onus had been shifted. Whatever Hart’s conduct, the media had exceeded their moral warrant to inspect the lives of public men. There are plausible arguments in Hart’s favor here. One: that the media had agreed not to invade the privacy
of candidates before. Two: that if they had, in exceptional cases, noticed sexual misconduct, they should not have done so—from respect for a candidate’s right to privacy, or from the lack of a public right to know such things, or from the social benefits of observing such a ban (irrespective of rights on either side).
Hart appealed, at various times, to each of these arguments. Other presidential candidates—and presidents, for that matter—had sexual lives not held up to public scrutiny. His family’s peace had been violated. The journalists had stooped to undignified and untraditional measures. The charges did not affect his ability to serve, even were they true. The level of public debate was pulled down, discourse muddied, and issues
obscured, all because the media had not observed the ban Hart advanced, now, as a social imperative.
These were all moral arguments, each with some force; but there were counterarguments as well, which left the matter unresolved. By jumping from one to another, Hart complicated his position. If, moreover, a person disagreed with just one of his arguments, the others were in danger of being discounted. The moral discourse frayed out, constantly making new evidence relevant. Was it true, for instance, that the media had refused to discuss the private lives of politicians in the past? Sexual charges had been raised against Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams (of all people), Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland. Had this been permissible then, but reprehensible now—or reprehensible (because hypocritical) in all the cases? Such a complex position, whatever its other merits, did not settle the moral question, as did Swaggart’s use of a preestablished pattern of repentance.
It is hard to make nuanced distinctions in the midst of a campaign. Trying to sort out moral arguments, while keeping fuzzy the facts under discussion, had debilitated Hart by the time he left the race in May of 1987. New evidence of his activities was being investigated, by The Washington Post among others, even as he argued that such investigations were morally impermissible. Even four months after his withdrawal, when he appeared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline show, Hart had trouble explaining why real moral concerns in politics (like the Iran-Contra scandal) should be divorced from pseudoissues (like the people he spent his private time with).
When, in December of 1987, Hart reentered the presidential race, he decided to revert to a simpler moral language, having tested the futility of more sophisticated approaches. At the first public debate he joined, he confessed: "I probably should have said in that [Des Moines Register] interview that I’m a sinner. My religion tells me all of us are sinners. But this was obviously a concession with which he did not feel comfortable. By the new moral standard he was proposing (at least part of the time), it made him a hypocrite. So he did not remain consistent to it, but returned to his attack on the press, making even grander claims about the sex lives of the presidents.
I won’t be the first adulterer in the White House," he told The Des Moines Register. He offered Ted Koppel such examples as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and his followers implied that a leader would not be much of a man if he lacked an active sex life. The actor Warren Beatty urged Mrs. Hart to tell reporters, If you want a monk for president, you don’t get me as first lady.
¹ By a spectacular reversal of the values assumed in Hart’s own first denials, marital fidelity was now presented as a disqualifying feature: Would you rather have Richard Nixon than Gary Hart?
This was edging toward an entirely new moral argument, which some of Hart’s supporters thought was the only way to end hypocrisy on all sides. Hart, they felt, should have answered questions about his being an adulterer with this challenge: Yes, I am. So what? That has nothing to do with political qualifications.
That is what many people actually feel—including Hart himself. His momentary pose as a penitent was not convincing, even to himself. In this case, the truth might actually be the best defense. His base of support, insofar as he had one, was not united on a religious position, like Jimmy Swaggart’s congregation.
But this approach, even if one agreed with its assumptions, was not likely to accomplish what Hart needed in immediate terms. It would not preclude further discussion, precisely because it was a new position for a candidate to be taking in public. As the first candidate of Adulterers’ Lib, Hart would be expected to discuss his novel situation—just as the first Catholic candidate, or black candidate, or female candidate was expected to comment on the timing of his or her emergence on the public scene. The idea of a Catholic’s running for president is acceptable now. No one raised that as an issue for Alexander Haig or Bruce Babbitt in 1988. But the issue was strong enough to contribute to Al Smith’s defeat in 1928 and to make John Kennedy face a panel of skeptical Protestant ministers in 1960. In the same way, Geraldine Ferraro had to defend her position as a female candidate for vice-president in 1984 and Jesse Jackson as a black candidate for president in both 1984 and 1988. The newer their claim, the more time they had to spend explaining it.
That adultery should be irrelevant was a new political stand in 1988, as could be proved by the very historical examples Hart had cited. There is no evidence of adultery in George Washington’s life.² Most scholars deny it in Jefferson’s life as well—but it certainly was alleged against him in the 1804 campaign, and was considered a relevant argument against his presidency.³ John Quincy Adams was accused unjustly of pimping for Czar Alexander I while serving as the American minister in St. Petersburg, and Andrew Jackson was accurately accused of having lived in adultery with his own wife (the adultery was inadvertent, since her divorce was not completed for the first four years of her second marriage to Jackson).⁴
The most famous sexual charge brought during a presidential campaign was of no use to Hart at all. In 1892, Grover Cleveland admitted that he might have fathered an illegitimate child. But he told the truth about this youthful indiscretion (which did not involve adultery), and a panel of leading clergymen declared that he had acted honorably in caring for a child that was only possibly his.⁵ The electorate, given all the facts by a cooperative candidate, approved his actions and chose him as president.
Later cases of presidential philandering—Warren Harding’s and John Kennedy’s—were kept secret at the time precisely because it was acknowledged they could hurt the men’s electoral chances. John Kennedy even wrote a note early in his 1960 campaign complaining that he would have to give up his poon days
for election purposes.⁶ Though he did not abide by this wry resolution, he did break off a White House affair with Judith Exner when his brother pointed out its dangers.
Gary Hart knew well the trouble a candidate’s private life can cause. He managed George McGovern’s 1972 campaign and later wrote a book about the vetting of Thomas Eagleton for possible scandals in his background. He overheard Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s aide, ask Eagleton: Now, Tom, is there anything in your background that we ought to know about, you know, like dames . . .?
⁷ Eagleton’s problem was not dames,
but the suppression of his medical record, which included electric-shock treatments. But Hart saw, up close, the price Eagleton had to pay for hiding problems from his own political allies. Nonetheless, he acted just like Eagleton when supporters asked him, repeatedly before the 1988 race, if he was being sexually indiscreet. He assured them unequivocally, in many different confrontations, that stories about his womanizing
were (at least currently) false. If Hart was disturbed by media hypocrisy, that was nothing to the reaction he caused among his own female supporters, whom he had deceived when recruiting their support.⁸
Some felt that Hart, whatever his indiscretions, deserved a measure of sympathy in a year when the media seemed to change the rules of scrutiny overnight. After Watergate and other scandals, a new suspicion of politicians, coupled with the technological resources for pursuing inquiry, had made it difficult if not impossible to maintain a dignified public posture. Cameras of the Cable News Network, if not those of network or local news, seemed to be at every caucus and little rally, picking up things like a snappish response to questions about Senator Joe Biden’s law school grades.
After Judge Douglas Ginsburg had been nominated to the Supreme Court, he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration, in part because it was discovered that he had smoked marijuana as a young law professor. Since this happened during the presidential campaign, the question about substance abuse was put to the candidates (or anticipated by them). Bruce Babbitt and Albert Gore admitted they had used marijuana, though at younger ages than Ginsburg’s last reported use. This was the same campaign in which it came out that the two preachers running for president, Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson, had sex with their wives before marrying them. Does the public need to know this kind of thing?
Some even said there was a kind of generational vendetta
taking shape, to bar from higher office those who came of age in the sixties, when relaxed social constraints led to experiment in what were called different life styles.
The raising of the character issue
in 1988 seemed more a cultural issue: As Depression-era radicals were punished for leftist political associations in the 1930s, kids
of the 1960s might see their youthful high jinks return to haunt respectable later careers.
But before we succumb to pity for politicians, we should remember that there have always been generational tests for them. After World War II, it was almost impossible for men of a certain age to win political office if they had not worn the uniform of one or another branch of the armed forces. John Kennedy was still trying to use this ban against Hubert Humphrey fifteen years after the war ended. Conversely, in the nineteenth century, men who had worn Confederate uniforms were excluded from federal office—especially on the federal bench—after the Civil War.
More recently, generations of Southern senators, brought up with the notion that keeping blacks in their place was not only an allowable but an admirable social goal, woke up in the 1970s to find that the rules of the game had been changed. A new generation of Southern politicians arose, less blatantly racist.
Most generational tests reflect an opening up of politics rather than a closing off of the approaches. Gary Hart was wrong when he said that George Washington’s sex life would exclude him from election if he were running today. But one thing certainly would exclude him—his slaves. For the first four decades of our existence as a country, from the time of Washington through that of Andrew Jackson, holding slaves was no barrier to being elected president. But before slavery became illegal, that practice became unacceptable in a president. The political rules changed in a way no one can regret.
It is absurd to say that a new puritanism has straitened entry into politics at our highest level. In 1988, not only were two Catholics running for president (a thing unthinkable for most of our national history); so, briefly, was a woman (Representative Patricia Schroeder). So was a black. So were candidates who supported gay rights. In fact, at lower levels, gays were winning and holding office.
The president himself was, in 1988, a man who had been divorced and remarried, a handicap that Nelson Rockefeller found crippling as recently as 1964. There is more curiosity about candidates’ private lives precisely because so many different kinds of people are now being considered for an office that used to be restricted to white male heterosexual Protestants (and those men married, but only once). In the old days,
voters could assume a set of stable values in the candidates, reflected in the limited social options for those seeking the presidency. We still informally limit the range of realistic choice—there has been no serious Jewish candidate for president yet, nor any gay candidate. But the field is not nearly as confined as in the past. The choice of past leaders was made within a framework of trust assured by the lack of significant differences in social convention.
That situation is changing, not because the American people are becoming less tolerant—quite the reverse. In fact, the openness to new possibilities is what has introduced confusion. Gary Hart’s need to find a new moral language exemplifies the problem modern politicians face, at many levels, because of the rapidity of moral change in American society. Some changes have outraced the law, creating a gap between the society’s stated norms and generally acceptable conduct. Public reaction showed a tolerance for early experiment with drugs in the cases of Gore and Babbitt, though there are still laws on the books against that activity (laws that explain the harsher attitude toward a law professor or a judge who breaks the laws). Liberal candidates like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson supported gay rights, though homosexual activities are still illegal in some states.
In this flux of changing values, it is hard for a candidate to give the kind of unspoken assurances that were traditionally provided by a president. Our leaders have not normally been chosen for their brilliance, but for their stability. People want leaders whose responses are predictable, not erratic, who reflect a social consensus, who represent more than they enlighten. That explains Ronald Reagan’s popular defense of old values.
He did not really take people back to the past, but he made a dizzy rush toward the future less disorienting. He did so by clinging uncritically to notions that reassured people, despite their lack of practical impact. Neither the sexual nor the drug revolution was reversed, or even held static, by the Reagans’ exhortation to say no,
but these developments were made somehow endurable by being treated as anomalous. Reagan made it possible to live with change while not accepting it.
Gary Hart offered new ideas
to the public already seasick with novelty. He offered technical solutions to problems felt to be moral. He did not have a conventional political base or a reassuringly familiar background. All this was true of him even before the evidence of erratic private behavior and deceptive public statement was added to his burden. It is true that new social programs must be forged for the situations that confront Americans; but arguments for those programs must be moral in order to elicit the kind of trust presidents need to be effective. Hart found he had to articulate ethical arguments for keeping the press out of his life. But he started from a position—including an initial profession of conventional morality—that made it hard for him to look credible as the castigator of an immoral journalism.
How does one invent a new moral discourse for handling modern sexuality, chemical stimulation, and the relationship of one generation to another? The long history of the Temperance movement, Prohibition, and modern driving penalties shows how difficult the country has found its public treatment of alcohol. New pills and drugs of all kinds just add to this problem rather than replacing it.
Feminism, gay rights, abortion, adolescent crime, the responsibility for the aged, all raise complex new occasions for judgment that make it hard for any politician to find the kind of consensus that used to settle moral questions in a comparatively early and easy way. The modern
