“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
These are among the most memorable words of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Of course, he was talking entirely about race, and specifically about discrimination against Americans of African descent, and his words are no less important today than they were then.
But it is troubling and ironic that at this moment in our history, “the content of one’s character” is no longer considered the ideal measure of any person. I used to believe that conservative Christians placed too muchemphasis on the “character” of elected officials and not enough on actual policy positions. They came across as prudish, overly concerned with sexuality and private morality, and more interested in protecting the pre-born than in the quality of life between birth and death. Never would I have imagined that just one generation later, these same conservative Christians would decide that “character” in elected leaders counts for little or nothing.
When President Bill Clinton was revealed as having engaged in a consensual affair with a White House Intern, Faith and Freedom President Ralph Reed said, “We care about the conduct of our leaders and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.”
The very same Ralph Reed, however, advised conservative Christians in 2016 not to pay much attention to the incontrovertible evidence of candidate Donald Trump’s bad behavior toward women. The infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, he said, “should rank low on their hierarchy of concerns.” Questioned about revelations of an extra-marital affair with a porn star, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said he was giving Trump a “mulligan...a do-ever.”
Of course, a lot of anti-Trumpers could be accused of the exact reverse hypocrisy. When Clinton was president, his most ardent supporters made the same argument that Trump’s supporters are making now, and today, all of a sudden, “character” matters when a Republican of highly questionable morality is in the White House.
Just a cursory glance at the evidence suggests that the ideologues on both the left and the right are willing put up with all sorts of peccadillos from a President who is aligned with their politics, but are also willing to use issues of personal morality against any president whom they deem as a political enemy.
So one takeaway from all of this is that Christian evangelicals are political hacks in sheep’s clothing, using their faith as a means of advancing a political agenda. They are therefore mirror images of political hacks on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but worsebecause they exploit the name of Christ to justify their hackery.
For me, there’s another takeaway. Morality doesmatter in our public officials, but not for the reasons Christian evangelicals used to say it did.
When the Clinton-Lewinsky affair broke in 1998, I said publicly from the pulpit that the President had an obligation, both to the nation and to his family, to resign. No, I did not look to President Clinton for moral leadership. I did not believe that was his job. But his affair was a public problem because he had taken advantage of his position of power to win sexual favors from an intern half his age. That the affair was consensual in the strictest sense does not excuse the power imbalance. It was not, by itself, a criminal offense. But it was more than a personal moral failure. It was a serious injustice that risked being legitimized because it had been committed by the leader of the country. Furthermore, Clinton’s refusal to give the necessary time to repair the damage he had caused his family set a terrible example of placing ambition and power above sacred personal commitments.
I assumed at the time that I was standing on a moral ground that could be shared by Clinton’s critics as well as his most disappointed supporters. But now, given the evidence in front of me today, I have to conclude that the “Christian Right” of the 1990s wasn’t really concerned with Clinton’s personal morality at all. His greatest “sin,” it seems, is that he was on the wrong side politically. The moral outrage was little more than fake piety.
Now it’s 2018, and I haven’t changed my mind about when personal morality becomes a matter of public justice. President Trump is not my spiritual or moral leader. I don’t expect that of him. But when his personal moral failings encourage public injustice, they become a major problem. I’m less concerned about his one-night stands with prostitutes than I am about his history of exploitative behavior towards women. His well-documented sexual exploits as a Manhattan playboy are offensive but less worrisome to me than repeated statements designed to denigrate whole categories of people on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. His adolescent need for constant attention is a personal problem. That he is allowed to flaunt this unhealthy need in such a public way is a serious problem for the country. Whatever he says in private to his advisors, however inaccurate or misguided, is no more of an issue than it has been with any other president. But publicly, regularly, and flatly stating falsehoods because they are more comfortable for him than the truth is an assault on freedom. He benefits from and contributes to a digital culture of alga rhythms and feedback loops that lead people to accept as “true” whatever they want to believe (or whatever he wants them to believe), regardless of the evidence to the contrary. This is the worst kind of propaganda – the kind used by authoritarian leaders to consolidate power. (Read George Orwell’s1984.)
Even if I agreed with all of Trump’s policy proposals, I would deem this president a serious risk to the health of our society. Whether he intends it or not, he sets a tone with his public words and actions that has a direct impact on the level of civility in our society. Unfortunately for all of us, he blurs the boundary between the public and private, as evidenced by late night and early morning off-the-cuff, spontaneous “twitter storms” that instantly become news because they are from the President.Even good policy, which is always subject to changing political winds, is not worth the long-term consequences of trashing civility, which is a necessary virtue for a free society.
Indeed, if President Trump canceled his Twitter account and focused on policy development, his approval rating would be significantly higher. The moderate middle of America will give policies a chance to work, even the ones they oppose (unless they are blatantly discriminatory toward certain groups of people). But how do you give intemperate remarks that denigrate and divide a chance to work? If you have any sense of civic responsibility, you can’t – regardless of policy.
In other words, CHARACTER MATTERS. It matters a lot.
But for a lot of people – including, apparently, many evangelical Christians – it doesn’t. All that matters is that somebody “on my side” is in charge. Unless the broad swath of Americans that former Bush advisor Steve Schmidt calls “the coalition of the decent” demands better, the continued erosion of public character threatens to become a mudslide carrying away our most cherished public institutions and burying the last vestiges of civic virtue.
©2018 by J. Mark Lawson
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