Preachers and Politics

When I was a boy I remember my mother reading The Catholic Worker, paying much atten­tion to the message Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin offered — an everyday kind of Christianity meant to be lived in the secular world, and a Christianity with decidedly political concerns: to lobby, picket, protest, to stir up others in support of this, against that. I also remember my father listening on Sun­day afternoon to the speeches of a Catholic priest from some place called Royal Oak, Michigan: Father Charles Coughlin. My mother disliked him, called him a “rabble-rouser.” My father disliked him, called him “dangerous” — yet listened to him every week, and, I could tell, was somewhat fascin­ated by his passionate oratory.

I was six or seven, but I sure recall my father telling my mother that Father Coughlin was “say­ing things” a lot of people think, but don’t dare ex­press. I recall, too, asking my father himself to “say things” — to spell out what he had just some­what cryptically mentioned. But he wouldn’t, nor did my mother want him to. Children, of course, often suspect there is more to say, so to speak, than gets said — and are often disappointed after their push for candor.

Years later, in college, I encountered Father Coughlin again — now in a history course taught by a young assistant professor who was much interest­ed in “populism”: the yearnings and fears and re­sentments of ordinary, so-called working-class peo­ple. We read C. Vann Woodward’s Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. We read Millhands and Preachers and All the King’s Men. We read William Carlos Williams’s Paterson — his fiery blasts at the university world, with all its proud gentility and, not rarely, pietistic egoism. We also read about Father Coughlin and others who criticized the New Deal or corporate America from one or another angle of vision, whether of the “right” or the “left.”

The professor made a point of emphasizing the religious aspect of some of that criticism — the populism, so he argued, in the Old Testament (the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah and Amos) and the New Testament (Christ’s angry confrontation with the money lenders, and His defiance of various “principalities and powers”). As I listened to that professor explain Father Coughlin’s critique of American power — especially the early broadcasts of the priest’s, before he embraced anti-Semitism, and thereby discredited himself with many who had heretofore attended him closely — I began to realize why my parents had been made so nervous by him, but (in my father’s case, at least) found him hard to ignore. They were living a fairly com­fortable life, and with respect to my mother, a life grounded in conventional Christian pieties. Here was a man of the cloth who on nationwide radio invoked Christ against capitalists. Not that Doro­thy Day didn’t do the same thing — but few paid her much heed, so she was less a part of the nation’s political life. Father Coughlin was heard by hun­dreds of thousands, and had become, really, a preacher much involved in the politics of his day, the 1930s. I still remember (and nowadays I espe­cially remember) what our professor said about priests and preachers in American politics: “There is a strong religious side to our political life, but it’s always struggling to gain our attention, because there’s also a strong suspicion of religion in our po­litical life.”

Such a remark, in retrospect, is not all that or­iginal or revealing — and yet, as I’ve watched televi­sion of late, contemplating the Reverend Jackson and the Reverend Robertson, and listening, as well, to the other candidates as they gingerly deal with (or try to avoid dealing with) the so-called “social issues,” I’ve been remembering that teacher and his effort to help us students understand the complex matter of religion and politics in American life.

In years of work done in the homes of ordinary people, black and white, Northern and Southern, living in the East or way out West, urban and rural, I have constantly heard strong moral and religious views expressed, and connected to our country’s politics — to the point that I’ve often wondered why some populist with a religious sensibility hasn’t emerged at some point as a powerful American leader. (Though Jimmy Carter called himself a “born-again Christian” and once or twice, early in his 1976 campaign, a “populist,” he never really es­poused a heartfelt struggle on behalf of some of the “family issues” to which some political minis­ters like to pay close heed, and his economic posi­tions were “conservative” rather than “populist,” meaning he was clearly anxious to join the American secular “power elite” rather than take sharp aim at it.) Here is a Massachusetts Methodist, not a Southern evangelical, talking to me in 1980: “I don’t like politicians. I don’t like these two [Reagan and Car­ter] running. They’re each trying to get to you, but I don’t trust them. They try to talk as if they’re praying hard to God to follow His example, but they’re not convincing me. They’re not the kind of religious person I’d like to see in the White House. I don’t mean a minister, no [I had asked]. I mean someone who really believed what Jesus did, and was ready to live the way He did, and stand up for what he believes the way He did.”

No big chance of such a person appearing, that man hastened to tell me then; and I rather sus­pect he is not any more optimistic, in that regard, in 1988. Still, there is among us a continuing hun­ger for a politics that connects with certain moral and religious values, hence the appeal of Robertson to one constituency and Jackson to another. The black people with whom I have worked love their ministers, and love to envision them holding polit­ical power. Many so-called working-class white families I have come to know are less comfortable with the idea of a minister being an office-holder, but are hungry for the expression and advocacy of certain moral and religious values in our secular culture, and have kept listening to various candi­dates for some clue that such advocacy will be forthcoming. True, there’s a big secular vote, too — people scared out of their minds by anyone who even mentions the Bible (Old or New Testaments, both), let alone calls upon it, calls upon God, in a serious manner (as opposed to lip-service at the end of a speech). Yet, even among such people one can hear a yearning for a spiritual side to politics. Driving home one afternoon I heard a caller on a talk show mock both Robertson and Jackson, not to mention Falwell, Bakker, Roberts, and Swaggart — then say he was fed up with all the rest of the can­didates, too. Whom did he want then, the host ask­ed — demanded, actually, with that cynical petu­lance one occasionally hears on such programs. Well, said the caller, he knew no one to suggest. A moment’s silence. I thought we would soon enough hear another caller’s eager, performing voice. But no, there was a sudden exclamation: “Someone who’s truly a man of God, but he doesn’t have to keep saying so, because then he ain’t.” I turned off the radio, to let that one sink in deep.