With God on Our Side

I am reading a book about Lincoln. Though not a Lincolnphile, I find myself being drawn back to him time and again. Part of it is the plethora of great books written about him, from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals to George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo. Part of it is that for all the iconography around Lincoln, he still comes off as a real human being, with significant faults to go with his many virtues. But mostly it’s because you can go back to his own writings and speeches, without interpretation, and find nugget after nugget of wisdom and common sense that still rings true today.

One of the greatest speeches Lincoln gave was the Second Inaugural Address, in March of 1865. After four years of incredibly bloody war, all of which was painfully felt by Lincoln, the outcome was finally in sight. There was no doubt that the North was going to win. Sherman’s march to the sea was over, leaving a wake of devastation behind him. Grant was about to launch his relentless and brutal final push through Virginia. If there was ever a time to crow, this was it.

But Lincoln was not one for Mission Accomplished speeches. Instead, he gave one of the most thoughtful and reflective orations of this, or any other war. Lincoln avoided the undoubted temptation to proclaim the righteousness of the northern cause and invoke God as sanctioning the victory. Instead, he pondered the war and concluded: “Both [the North and the South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes”.   

As I read this again, I was struck by the humility evident in this passage. We all have the tendency to impart our beliefs with a sacrosanct sense of rightness. Too often we leave out the inevitable ifs, ands or buts that make any pronouncement suspect. Yet here was a man with the weight of countless deaths upon his shoulders avoiding the temptation to assuage his conscience by proclaiming the sanctity of his cause when it would be easy to do so. If any acts of Lincoln were super-human, this was it.

I contrast this with the seemingly accelerated tendency of politicians today to not only cite their religious beliefs as driving policy positions, but intimate, or actually assert, that God has personally directed them to adopt those positions, or, even worse, that they speak for God. For example, in 2015 Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that God had instructed him to run for the Presidency. Considering how pathetic and futile Perry’s campaign was, if that were true it was probably because God wanted to whack him upside the head to rid him of his arrogant self-righteousness. If so, I am afraid it likely failed.

Which brings us to Doug Mastriano, current candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. He has run an odd campaign Eschewing broad based support, he has focused his efforts on energizing his core constituents. This strategy won him the Republican nomination, but time will tell if it can succeed on a state-wide basis.

Part of this strategy are livestream Facebook chats. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mastriano uses these chats to frame himself as knowing God’s will. He asserts that he and his followers are the on the side of righteousness while his opponents are not. At a recent rally Mastriano was quoted as saying “God called us to run for office…. You get the call of God, you got to do it…. We have the power of God with us…. We have Jesus Christ that we’re serving here. He’s guiding and directing our steps.”

Ultimately, Mastriano wants us to believe that when he speaks, he is channeling God. He knows God’s will, and God’s will is a match for his own. He knows God’s views on climate change, same-sex marriage, and the legitimacy of the 2016 Presidential election, and, amazingly, they are his views as well. There is, seemingly, no difference between Mastriano and God.

I am probably the last person who should comment on anyone’s religious beliefs. I have never been able to fully excise my Baptist upbringing, though I long ago rejected the literalism and sanctimoniousness of those early lessons. I have, at various times, leaned toward deism, embracing a humanist Jesus without all the doctrinal trappings. I have found great solace in Buddhist teachings, especially the concepts of Maya, and the need to curb desire, though to me it is more of a philosophy than a religion. I have identified myself as an agnostic and an atheist, and everything in between.

For all that, I do feel qualified to say that if there is such a thing as blasphemy, it is being unable to conceive a difference between God’s will and your own. Maybe my own religious travails have sensitized me to such claims of omnipotence. Be that as it may, to the extent there is religious truth the contours and depths of that truth is a mystery. Someone can legitimately say that they believe X or Y doctrine, but to claim full assurance of that doctrine, and to assert that you know it is true because God, however conceived, has told you that it is true, is heresy of the grossest kind.

I am willing to forgive this doctrinal arrogance in priests, imams and other religious leaders. It is their job to impart the parameters of their denominations, and they would not last long if they stood before their congregations and said the equivalent of “Gee, I kind of think this is true”. I am also willing to overlook this presumptiveness by those in the proverbial pews. Most are looking more for solace and some sense of meaning in life. Few really are interested in putting their beliefs under a microscope. There is nothing wrong with that.

However, I cannot absolve this pretention in those that want to govern. Someone who does not recognize the difference between their pronouncements and those of whatever God they worship will act with an imperiousness that is antithetical to any notion of democratic, or even human, ideals. After all, if you and God are simpatico, of what import are us mere mortals.

I return to Lincoln, and one of his less celebrated pronouncements. Amid the war, Lincoln was challenged by Horace Greeley, a prominent journalist, for not doing enough to end slavery. In response, Lincoln said: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not to either save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by feeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that”.

Lincoln was roundly criticized at the time for his seeming ambivalence about slavery. Even now, such willingness to acquiesce to human bondage seems callous, at best. There is no doubt that Lincoln abhorred slavery, and wished it gone. However, he saw his duty as upholding the Constitution, and the Constitution embraced slavery. When there was a conflict between the Constitution and his personal beliefs, the Constitution prevailed, rightly or wrongly.

There is little doubt in my mind that those who cannot differentiate between their own intentions and God’s will quickly jettison the Constitution, duly passed laws and any and other constraints if they clash with their personal beliefs. After all, what are such man-made decrees compared to God’s, and how convenient that God sees it my way.