“We see through a glass darkly, as St. Paul taught us, and we see through candidates even more darkly.”—Newsweek editor and American Gospel author Jon Meacham, at the Chautauqua Institution, August 4, 2008, in his lecture “God and Politics: From George Washington to George W. Bush”
(Yesterday morning, at the beginning of the “Religion in Public Life” theme week, Meacham delivered a wise, frequently witty address tracing the impact of religion throughout the history of American politics. He noted that there might be any one of a number of reasons for disliking George W. Bush, but the notion that the 43rd President introduced the use of religious imagery was simply not accurate. At the same time, he observed that the idea that the United States was a “Christian nation” was not only ahistorical but a “theological impossibility.”
Meacham—who had the audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he recalled that Bill O’Reilly had labeled him “a hard-left pinhead” —had an easier time, I believe, convincing the audience of the latter possibility than the former. This was evidenced by a question from the audience about whether the Soviet Union, “granting every bad thing you can say,” really was definitively evil given that it had “ended a repressive aristocracy, bore the brunt of the fighting against Germany and then turned the other cheek in the end at the ’62 missile crisis.” To his credit, Meacham rejected that idea immediately: “But Soviet totalitarianism was unquestionably to my mind was an evil.”
After all this time—more than 50 years after Khruschev revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes, nearly 35 years after Solzhenitsyn catalogued the wrongs of the Soviet regime even under Lenin, in The Gulag Archipelago—it amazes me that some people such as this questioner continue to make excuses for a regime that not only imposed a police state on Eastern Europe but even on its own people.)
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