Media Good reasons why Bradley wont talk religion
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
Why wont Bill Bradley talk
about his religion? Perhaps the level of discussion so far has scared him off.
Perhaps.
George W. Bush has been generally reviled for his answer to the
debate question on his favorite political philosopher, whom he identified
smugly as Christ, who had changed his heart. Then the
governor slipped into his schoolboy, shoulders-tucked-up slouch, assuming
correctly that once he had said Jesus the discussion was over and that his
opponents who came up with lesser beings like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and
Theodore Roosevelt had been outclassed.
He was half right. The Mormon Orrin Hatch was maneuvered into
backing Jesus, and Garry Bauer, whose real reason for running is to gain name
recognition as spokesman for Christian fundamentalism, and who might have named
Jesus anyway, had been beaten to the punch.
Among the Democrats, former Sen. Bill Bradley says religion is
private and he wont talk about it, and Vice President Al Gore agrees --
but, he told CBS 60 Minutes, he is a born-again Christian and
asks himself, faced with key decisions, What would Jesus do?
No one on 60 Minutes was religiously literate enough
to ask Gore whether Jesus would bomb Belgrade neighborhoods, continue sanctions
on Cuba and Iraq or pull the switch on the electric chair.
Bush deserves the derision his answer has evoked, but not because
of the answer. Rather, it came across as a ploy, because he refused to
elaborate on what that meant -- either you get Jesus or you dont -- as if
the man Jesus and his message have no ambiguity, no intellectual and specific
moral demands for which men and women, even during the last 20 years, have been
willing to die.
In short, the problem is not that the issue of a candidates
religious beliefs has entered the campaign but that their real religious
beliefs have not.
Among the eight Republican and Democratic candidates floated
before us in TV debates, there must be one, we say to ourselves, whom, because
he acts from moral principles, we can believe. For most Americans, moral
principles have roots in either religious or humanistic convictions, which a
political leader, if he has thought about them, ought to be able to
articulate.
When we dont know enough about where some of these
candidates are coming from intellectually, the religion question is a way to
find out. Thus John McCains memoir, Faith of Our Fathers, is
ingeniously constructed as, in the broad sense, a religious testimony. His
faith is implanted in the several sources most Americans revere:
ancestors, comrades and God. Without overdoing it, he portrays his imprisonment
as a quasi-religious experience; and he prudently ends the story with his
release, avoiding his responsibility for the break-up of his marriage and his
entanglement in the Keating Five scandal.
Meanwhile, because political writers rarely study religion and
religion writers seldom cover national campaigns, questions with theological
implications are snuffed out. A candidate may say, for example, that both
evolution and creationism should be taught in public schools, and no one would
ask the more important question, which would reveal more about how his mind
works: Does he see a conflict between belief in God and evolution?
Or, if Orrin Hatch is a Mormon, why didnt he name Brigham
Young or Joseph Smith? Alan Keyes is a Catholic; but his deepest conviction
seems to be a hatred of the income tax. He is antiabortion, but where is he on
the death penalty? Has he read the American bishops letters on economic
justice and the arms race?
At first glance, Bill Bradleys silence on the subject of
religion is mysterious. Like McCain, his strong appeal is his authenticity;
and, to a degree greater than McCain, Bradley has a reputation of idealism and
rectitude going back to his college days.
Since Bradley gives the impression of speaking from his inner
core, it would seem to make sense for Bradley to share those convictions, at
least to some degree. Why would he not? Two TV news shows have observed in
passing that his silence seems strange, given his evangelical
background, without explaining what that means.
There are several possible explanations for his silence. One, he
may really believe that religion is private, not something
politicians should talk about in public. Two, hes hiding something.
Three, his opinions would lose him votes. Four, all of the above.
The irony is that his religious beliefs are already on record, in
John McPhees 1965 New Yorker profile of him as a Princeton College
student, published as A Sense of Where You Are (1978), and in
Bradleys own memoirs, Life on the Run (1972), and the more recent
Time Present, Time Past (1996).
Obviously Bradley is not trying to hide his religious history,
because Time Present, Time Past spells it out in some detail in his last
chapter. But he must suspect that if he tries to talk about it on TV, it will
lose him votes. Why?
Partly because its complicated, and the TV debate format
does not allow for distinctions or complexity. Partly because he is a lapsed
fundamentalist. He actively rejected the evangelical Christianity into which he
poured his heart and soul during his youth. Theres no way he can tell his
story to people who have not read the book, particularly he cant tell his
story within the format TV imposes, without turning off lots of voting
Methodists and Baptists, who, in many parts of the country, constitute the
American religion.
As a college student and a member of the Fellowship of Christian
Athletes, he taught Sunday school at his Presbyterian church every morning,
even when he had returned from an away game at 4:30 a.m. When his peers were
already thinking of him as future president of the United States, Bradley told
McGhee his only goal was to set a Christian example by implementing my
feelings within the structure of society. Before every game he would turn
on his hi-fi and play Climb Every Mountain from The Sound of
Music.
The basic definition of a born-again Christian is one
who has had a conversion experience, in many ways similar to those
experienced in the Great Awakening at the beginning of the 19th century.
Reduced to a state of helplessness by some tragedy or sense of sin, we realize
our utter dependence on God and turn to him as savior. This personal encounter
with Jesus Christ, a conversion, lifts us up, and we are born
again.
In high school, inspired by attending a Fellowship of Christian
Athletes convention, Bradley preached a sermon in his Presbyterian church. His
conversion came as a Princeton freshman, when, as a small-town boy reduced to
tears by flunking French, he turned to God for help.
His combined status as a star athlete and religious believer made
him a new kind of celebrity, but it also created problems. Fundamentalists
started making demands he couldnt satisfy, he was shocked by the absence
of black athletes in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and he began to see
his fellow evangelicals as narrow-minded.
At Oxford he found himself not believing his own words when he
participated in a Billy Graham crusade; when he heard an Oxford minister preach
in defense of white power in Rhodesia, he walked out, never to
return.
Since then, Bradley has not become an atheist, but seems to have
sewn together his own private creed from elements of his old faith,
the Westminster Catechism, the erudition of Catholic priests, and the gospel
singing of the African-American Episcopal church, which brings tears to his
eyes. When he asks himself the big questions of life as he stares out on
moonless nights with a sky full of stars, he knows he is anchored
in nature, in Gods grace and in humanitys potential to
grow.
He does not shrink, at least in his book, from moralistic
rhetoric, like, Too many people are trapped in a hedonism exacerbated by
wealth; and even the poorest, most desperate parts of our society are in a grip
of the pleasure/money syndrome. That a man planning to run for president
in 1999 would attack Americas deepest love -- pleasure -- in 1996 is
exhilarating.
We can well imagine what would happen if he tried to explain all
these ideas in 30 seconds. First, as we saw when Bush said Jesus changed his
heart, few journalists know enough about religion to ask the follow-up
questions. Second, since the press has only a few categories in which
religious-political issues can be framed, he could look forward to headlines:
Bradley Calls Religious Right Narrow-Minded, Hits Money and Pleasure. Demands
for apologies would follow, and for days no one would ask about anything
else.
A panel on Howard Kurtzs Sunday morning CNN media discussion
show, Reliable Sources, agreed that the religious issue is not
going away. It will be hard for Bradley to not talk religion when voters learn
what he has already said.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is NCRs media
critic.
National Catholic Reporter, January 14,
2000
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