Caesar Borrowing, Then Rendering Unto Heaven

Coverage of a Billy Graham exhibition in his home town of Charlotte, North Carolina reminded me of watching Richard Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, hand him a wad of cash one December (from his own account, of course) so he could go Christmas shopping for his grandchildren:

In May 1970...Nixon was one of 75,000 people gathered to hear evangelist Billy Graham preach in Knoxville, Tennessee. When they passed the collection plate, Nixon realized he didn’t have any money. So he borrowed some cash from a friend.

The friend? None other than Billy Graham.

“A number of presidents have looked to you for spiritual sustenance over the years,” Nixon later wrote to the famous preacher, “but I suspect I was the first to hit you up for a loan.”

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/08/29/2273014/new-exhibit-explores-billy-grahams.html#storylink=cpy

I hope Graham (with whom I once covered some theological ground) gave Nixon some green. When his father, Frank, took him up to the Angelus Temple in Echo Park in Los Angeles to see the colorful Foursquare Gospel preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, they undoubtedly heard her trademark admonition that she didn't want to hear any coins clinking in the plate, just the gentle rustling of paper.

Pressed Chicken

Every Aug. 1, Christians who have lashed themselves to the liturgical calendar commemorate a member of the Sanhedrin, Jerusalem's council of Jewish elders, who issued a minority opinion on whether to persecute Jesus to death. Joseph of Arimathaea is famous not only for his defiance of majority rule but for giving up his own tomb to make sure that Jesus would get a proper burial.

Joseph is a patron saint of doing the right thing. What can his diligent discernment teach us on his feast day, when one of the questions before the American people was whether to feast at Chick-fil-A?

If the Foster Imposters really had their feathers set on giving their lives to be boneless breasts, this may have been their chance. At some Chicks-fil-A, white meat and tempers were sizzling. In the wake of CEO Dan Cathy's proclamations about biblical marriage, gay marriage advocates called for a boycott. The mayors of Boston and Chicago are trying to use the hammer of state power to ban new franchises. In response, Gov. Mike Huckabee and other boycott opponents called on friends of the company to get a tasty sandwich today. Even the ailing Billy Graham ordered in.

Here's how I serve up the issue.

If you don't like chicken hash, don't open the can. If my employees and franchisees depended, as Cathy's do, on selling as much chicken, fries, and ranch dressing as possible, I would confine my expression of my views about potential customers' race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political party, and positions on the Afghan war to Bible study, the dining room table, and Al-Anon meetings. That would be especially wise when it came to a flash point issue like gay marriage, which has split the American people almost exactly in half.

Boycotters should also count the chickens after they're deep-fried. I agree with Andrew Sullivan, who argues that marriage equity should be won at the ballot box and believes that the best response to Cathy's contributions to anti-gay marriage groups was Jeff Bezos' $2.5 million gift to the other side (chicken may by the only thing Amazon doesn't sell):

There is no contradiction between marriage equality and a robust defense of the rights of those who oppose marriage equality - including maximal religious freedom and maximal free speech. In fact, it is vital that we eschew such tactics, as they distract from a positive argument that has been solidly winning converts for two decades.

We may never learn whether boycotters are hurting the company more than Huckabee and Graham helped. Given the social and cultural demographics of those who are still eating a lot of fried chicken, not an especially enlightened food, Cathy may actually net out with even more eggs to pass along to his pet causes. The photo above, which I took tonight, doesn't do justice to the hundreds of cars and customers descending on the Yorba Linda store. Most probably don't like gay marriage. Some just may not like being told where to eat.

Chick-fil-A has a bone to pick with New Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Messing with the First Amendment is a treacherous business. When Gingrich was planning his presidential run, he found it politically expedient to stigmatize Muslim U.S. citizens who wanted to add a cultural center to an existing worship space near the World Trade Center. Palin and others joined in, doing considerable damage to our social and cultural consensus about bedrock constitutional principles. No one should complain about the infringement of Chick-fil-A's freedom of speech by the mayors of Boston and Chicago who didn't oppose the wannabe presidents who tried to deny freedom of religion to millions of Americans.

So call me chicken, but neither the boycott nor Chick-fil-A Day was for me. I voted against Prop. 8 and preached in the south Orange County, California parish that I serve in support of The Episcopal Church's recent decisions to permit the blessing of same-gender unions and prohibit discrimination against transgender persons who want to be deacons, priests, and bishops. As one might imagine from a glance at public opinion polls, not everyone at our church agrees. We remain together in community anyway. That may be just a little harder to do now that activists have labeled loyal Chick-fil-A customers as bigots.

Ross Douthat argues that, as with many wrenching social issues, the case for gay marriage is being made by appeals to reason as well as other means:

The cause of gay marriage has indeed advanced because many millions of people have been persuaded of its merits: No cause could move so swiftly from the margins to the mainstream if it didn’t have appealing arguments supporting it and powerful winds at its back. But it has also advanced, and will probably continue to advance, through social pressure, ideological enforcement, and legal restriction. Indeed, the very language of the movement is explicitly designed to exert this kind of pressure: By redefining yesterday’s consensus view of marriage as “bigotry,” and expanding the term “homophobia” to cover support for that older consensus as well as personal discomfort with/animus toward gays, the gay marriage movement isn’t just arguing with its opponents; it’s pathologizing them, raising the personal and professional costs of being associated with traditional views on marriage, and creating the space for exactly the kind of legal sanctions that figures like [Boston and Chicago mayors] Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel spent last week flirting with.

Boycott supporters are probably more interested in hurting Cathy's bottom line than pathologizing his customers. But now that the chicken wire has gone up, once again dividing us against one another, my junk food choices are complicated by political as well as nutritional considerations. I've had no chicken sandwiches and one hamburger since resolving to give up 30 pounds for Lent. But the next time I want one, I'll probably give Cathy and his local franchisee my business, because they make the best chicken sandwich in town. It's like the scene in "Broadcast News" in which a TV producer played by Holly Hunter tells a Nicaraguan contra to put on his boots if he wants to, not because her camera is recording the moment. I'll choose my chicken strictly based on what tastes best when I'm hungry. You can hold the secret semiotic sauce.

Is that what Joseph of Aramathea would have done? It depends on what he thought about the ethics of the marketplace, where he evidently had thrived. As long as businesspeople obey the letter and spirit of the law, they deserve to profit from hard work and reliable products. Boycotters should also think about the franchises' employees, who don't deserve to lose their jobs in this chicken-feed economy because of their big bird's big mouth. When it comes to politics, the same rule applies to Cathy and his critics. They belong in the voting booth, not the drive-through.

Politics, Religion, And The Nixon Covenant

In this post on some Christians' opposition to Mitt Romney on the basis of religion, I left off what I thought. This morning a couple of smart Facebook friends called me out. First, a buddy from Andover:

Half my ancestors are Mormon, going back to the beginning of the church. It is entirely legitimate to question the judgment of someone who enthusiastically participates in a fantasy based on an obvious fraud, concocted to feed the appetites for power and sex of the founders. And I don't just mean the GOP.

In reply, an Episcopal church friend:

I remember when I was a child and JFK was running for President. The “Protestant” fear was that if a Roman Catholic was elected, the Pope would rule America. Maybe the same people who are so critical about separation of church and state can now find some comfort in it.

I wrote:

You have [cogently] set the goalposts of a debate that will almost inevitably occur if Romney is nominated. I defer to [my first friend's] personal insights and confess to some concerns about the tenets of Mormonism. Of course [Christopher] Hitchens felt the same about orthodox Christianity. [The Episcopal] church has rightly been stressing comity among the three Abrahamic faiths. Any proponents of that view, who would naturally and correctly aver that there would be nothing wrong with electing a Jew or a Muslim, would, I assume, want to take the same view about a Mormon. In the end, the only way to avoid a descent into sheer chaos is to respect the covenant we've reached about a religion test that [my second friend] described.

As I wrote that, I imagined someone saying, "What covenant is that, and when did I sign it?" Hold onto your prayer books, because it was written by Richard Nixon, and it's stood all these years. The question is whether it will survive 2012.

Nixon's covenant was a promise he made to himself and the country and courageously kept throughout one of the closest campaigns in history. As the the GOP nominee in 1960, he said he wouldn't make John F. Kennedy's Roman Catholicism an issue. In Nixon's own words, from the third of their four debates:

[A]s far as religion is concerned, I have seen Communism abroad. I see what it does. Communism is the enemy of all religions; and we who do believe in God must join together. We must not be divided on this issue. The worst thing that I can think can happen in this campaign would be for it to be decided on religious issues. I obviously repudiate the Klan; I repudiate anybody who uses the religious issue; I will not tolerate it, I have ordered all of my people to have nothing to do with it and I say to this great audience, whoever may be listening, remember, if you believe in America, if you want America to set the right example to the world, that we cannot have religious or racial prejudice. We cannot have it in our hearts. But we certainly cannot have it in a presidential campaign.

Nixon was ideally positioned to enunciate and enforce this principle. A Yorba Linda and Whittier Quaker and a deep introvert besides, most of his theological inquiry and conversation with the divine was interior. He was a skeptic about the bodily Resurrection of Christ. He loved upbeat preachers such Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller, but he wasn't a consistent churchgoer. In the White House, his interfaith services were a model that liberal seminaries would have been proud to borrow.

His faith may have deepened late in life. I worked for him from 1979 until his death in 1994. In the 1980s, when I was his chief of staff, he talked a lot about his philosophical reading. I regret that I never had a chance to ask what he thought about my call to ordained ministry. I couldn’t have, since it occurred in part because of professional and personal turmoil after he died. But he made a telling eschatological prediction not long after Mrs. Nixon’s funeral in 1993, when I was meeting with him and a potential library contributor in his New Jersey office. The man, from Japan, diplomatically mentioned a possible gift. Nixon said, “Mrs. Nixon would be pleased.” He paused and added quietly, “Is pleased.”

Still, the free-thinking Nixon probably wouldn't have been mainstream American Protestants' first choice to negotiate the terms of their political engagement with Roman Catholicism. And yet his rule has essentially been followed for a half-century. Outside of reporting about the narrative of the candidates' lives, religion rarely came up, for instance, when Mormon George Romney was preparing to run in 1968 or born-again Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter ran and won in 1976.

The boldest challenge to the Nixon covenant came from the right in 2008, when Fox News and others smeared Barack Obama with the extreme views of his United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I can understand those who said that Wright opened the door with his harsh denunciations of U.S. policy. But any systematic effort to load a religious leader's baggage onto a parishioner-candidate's back would shatter the Nixon covenant -- and more candidacies than one might at first think.

Many politicians, for instance, have sought the counsel of Billy Graham as well as the PR benefit of associating with him. He served as a gracious officiant at President and and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw at the Nixon library. In June 1993, as he and I waited alone in the lobby for the family to arrive with Mrs. Nixon's casket, I asked what he was up to. He said he had just decided to sell his memoirs to Rupert Murdoch's publishing company, though he’d been reluctant at first because of the risqué photos that appeared in some of Murdoch’s London tabloids. “But then I realized,” Graham said, “that those photographs are actually inducements so that his working class readers will have the opportunity to encounter a good conservative editorial message.”

I asked if he thought that anything would come along to reverse the general decline in cultural standards that had become so glaringly obvious.

“Why, yes,” he said.

“What will it be, in your opinion?” I said.

“Armageddon,” he said.

According to Fox News' Jeremiah Wright rule, a reporter would have the right to ask all candidates who are friendly with preachers who believe as Graham does whether they agree that the Almighty LORD was about to send his avenging angels to smite the world in its wickedness. "Will that be in your first or second term?" the reporter might ask. "Aren't those views indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad's? How will your belief in the imminent end times affect your decisions about how to use military power?"

You see where that leads. Here are more examples of what could happen to conservatives and progressives alike if we hold each other accountable for our religious views. Mitt Romney may well believe he'll get a planet when he dies, maybe two if he's really good. But we still need the Nixon covenant, now more than ever.

Brush Up Your Seventies

Look who's arriving at La Casa Pacifica for a party with the Nixons in August 1972: Frank Sinatra, Mary Tyler Moore, Billy Graham, Eva Gabor, Scatman Crothers, Art Linkletter, John Wayne, George Burns, Glenn Campbell, and many more whom I can't quite make out. Dig the clothes.

Hat tip to the Nixon library

"The Economist" For Christmas, Todd, Please!

Franklin Graham on Sarah Palin's conversation with his father, Billy, yesterday at the great evangelist's home:

She...wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

That's pretty weird, since the Bible doesn't say anything about Israel after about 90 A.D., Iran (unless she means Cyrus the Great's Persia in the sixth century before Christ), or the war in Iraq (though Gen. 3 does suggest that the Garden of Eden was near Baghdad). Wrong briefing book, governor!

A Second Look At The Southern Strategy

Reviewing Steven P. Miller's Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, Ross Douthat says there are two ways of looking at RN's success in turning Deep South blue to red:

In one story, Sun Belt Republicanism was a coalition forged in cynicism and denial: it perpetuated real injustices while denying they existed and relied on the votes of bigots to achieve political dominance. In another telling, though, the majority that Nixon built managed to achieve something that seemed impossible at mid­century — using the rhetoric of Christianity and colorblindness to reconcile the white South to a legal and social revolution, and confining the once-ubiquitous support for segregation to a lunatic fringe.