1.....“INTEGRITY” is the answer I got from everyone I asked, “What is the most important quality we need in our next president?” I was interviewing in preparation for answering the “On Faith” questions “What should we be looking for in a presidential candidate? What do we need to know about the moral values and religious beliefs of a candidate?”
Instead of “integrity,” cynics might answer “celebrity.” Too bad, but non-celebs are “unelectable,” and it would be unwise to thrown away one’s vote on any of them. In the present media-besotted, entertainment-dulled, sports-mad American psyche, celebrities are the divinities. Hollow divinities: contrived celebrity is fame fed only by being famous. To gain the White House, the present president first bought a baseball team and became famous for managing it.
“What we should be looking for in a presidential candidate” is someone with more integrity than we the people now have. We need a president morally superior not only to the president we have but morally superior to us. But does the devious process of candidacy—the process of inducing the morally inferior to vote for the morally superior--discourage persons of integrity from candidacy? Power corrupts: Is the process of seeking power so corrupting as to fatally compromise the integrity of the candidate? Indeed, is the very desire to seek power fatal to integrity?
2.....On the hopeful side, we the people have become wiser about the wastefulness and stagnation of government by contestants with the mindset to win rather than by servants with the mindset to meet the needs and feed the just aspirations of the people. When all else fails, try wisdom. Is it not clear by now that without integrity, wisdom is beyond reach? For integrity seeks not victory of party over party or one branch of government over another but of TRUTH and honor over all their enemies. We need a president with the will and skill to convert contestants into servants.
Here the central biblical model could not be more striking. The Almighty came among us not to lord it over us but to “take the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). When power-abusing leaders take the form of gods, their people become their servants. The founder of Pennsylvania put it concisely: “The people's choice is to serve God or tyrants.”
3.....America’s psyche floats on the weather-changing surface of America’s soul, which has always known that the powers of the mighty, even when granted by the people, are subject to the truthful judgment of THE ALMIGHTY.
All wielders of human might are tempted to prostitute religious language to their purposes. That’s how history got “the divine right of kings,” against which our Declaration of Independence set “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” (The founders' three Bible+Enlightenment terms for God were Creator, Providence, and the Almighty.)
4.....JAMES MADISON did not doubt God's providential will toward us, but was humbly cautious about our hearing: “When the Almighty condescends to address mankind in this our language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.” I wouldn’t want a president who lacked this theological wisdom.
Like Madison, LINCOLN in his second inaugural was reverently humble both in acknowledging the Almighty and in refusing the blasphemy of claiming God for our side: “The Almighty has his own purposes,” and we should beware of claiming him for our purposes. I wouldn’t want a president disregardful of God’s will, or cock-sure about it.
5.....President Clinton’s secretary of state (1997-2001), MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, in her book “The Mighty and the Almighty” (2006), repents that the religion factor was largely overshadowed by the secular in the foreign-policy calculus of her White House years. On 108 pages she refers to God, her centering theme. In the book’s introduction, Clinton quotes Walk Whitman as saying “The core of democracy is the religious element.” Clinton continues: “At their best, religion and democracy each respect the equality and value of every human being: all of us are stamped with the Creator’s image, each endowed with certain inalienable rights....These doctrines are unifying and inclusive.” The founders had the wisdom to keep “political and religious authority” out of “the same hands.” But (as Albright and Clinton here affirm) religion and politics are inseparable, and should be partners for justice and peace.
6.....“About the moral values and religious beliefs of a candidate,” we need to know whether the person is an American in worldview, having the American mind of liberty as God’s gift, integrity as God’s demand, and humility “under God” the Almighty as prophylactic against the abuse of power. As Albright put it (page 222), “democracy does not mean choosing the rule of humans over that of God; it means denying to despots the right to play God.”
7.....Our democracy’s greatest danger is the people’s cynicism about its present dysfunctionality. “Don’t vote,” as I once heard someone say, “it only encourages them.” We need a president and a congress with the integrity, “under God,” to restore the people’s confidence and participation in what Lincoln called “this...best hope of earth.”
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