PONTEFICATIONS

"RACE, GUNS, GOD AND GAYS.”  HOWARD DEAN, the frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, in November told a Tallahassee audience that Southerners must stop basing their votes on these four issues.

But when he campaigns this week in South Carolina, whose primary vote comes February 2 immediately after New Hampshire’s, Dean plans to bring Jesus into nearly every speech. 

Dean made it clear, however, that he would be discussing his Christian faith only in Southern states, the states he stereotyped two months ago as being full of rednecks with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.

The reasons for Dean’s hypocritical flip-flop are obvious. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 46 percent of Southerners said a president should rely on his religious beliefs when making policy decisions. Forty percent of people nationwide share this view, but only 28 percent of Easterners agree. Dean stuck his wetted finger into the Southern breeze and is now reversing his rhetorical sails to gain votes by professing beliefs he mocked only weeks ago.

Howard Dean’s obvious contempt for his own stereotype of the South reminded this writer of what H.L. Mencken, the Bard of Baltimore, saw in Williams Jennings Bryan, the thrice-defeated presidential candidate of the Democratic Party as it was a century ago:

“Wherever the flambeaux of Chautauqua smoked and guttered,” wrote Mencken, “and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Bryan set up his traps and spread his bait….out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air….”

And now Howard Dean, selling his own brand of leftist ideological snake oil, plans to set his own traps and bait for Southerners by invoking Jesus. Will those in the birthplace of the original Democratic Party be seduced and deceived by this?

“A prince,” wrote Niccolo Machiavelli in 1532, “must appear to all who see and hear him to be…pious…faithful…honest…humane, and completely religious. And nothing is more important than to appear to have that last quality.” 

A prince need not actually be religious, the Renaissance political analyst hastened to add, and will probably be more effective as a ruler if he is unencumbered by genuine religious scruples. But a prince must appear to be religious “because the masses always follow appearances…and the world is nothing other than the masses.”

So how genuine is former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s newly expressed Christian faith? Jesus, he reportedly recently told editors at the Boston Globe newspaper, was “an important influence” in his life.

“Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind,” Dean told the Globe editors. “He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything…. He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.”

The Jesus embraced by Howard Dean is a mere liberal social activist, a do-gooder whose “extraordinary example” of helping the poor and downtrodden is “pretty inspiring when you think about it.”

What is missing from Dean’s picture? To devout Christians, Jesus Christ is infinitely more than a social worker or political activist. Christ is a loving God who became human, delivered the Creator’s message and example of divine love to humankind, and willingly became the sacrificial lamb of a new Passover whose crucifixion and resurrection saves those who believe in Him from the fear of death.

The Jesus envisioned by Howard Dean is godless.

Dean’s Jesus is nothing more than a gee-whiz fictional superhero who is “pretty inspiring,” who liberally heals the consequences of sin but never violates Political Correctness by saying, “Repent and sin no more.” Howard Dean’s Jesus tells people to love their neighbor but never asks them also to love God.

Howard Dean grew up with a Roman Catholic mother but followed his father’s Episcopal faith. Like his father, Dean married outside his faith. His wife is Jewish, and his children have been raised as Jews.

But 25 years ago, Dean left the Episcopal Church in a petty political dispute. His church had opposed violating neighborhood property rights by allowing a public bicycle path that Dean favored. Some question the depth of religious commitment in a man who can abandon his faith over such a trifle, apparently able to change religion the way some people change styles of clothing. Or worse, as Franklin Foer of the liberal New Republic magazine suggests in an excellent article entitled “Howard Dean’s Religion Problem. Beyond Belief,” a politically ambitious Howard Dean cynically found it useful to join the most influential church in Vermont, the Congregational Church.

Dean since 1982 has called himself a Congregationalist, a denomination that grew out of the Puritan faith of the Mayflower pilgrims. Each local Congregational church has no higher authority than its own congregation, which in theory could by democratic vote incorporate snake charming or other theological innovations in its own practice.

I was raised Congregationalist. I know Congregationalism. And Howard Dean, seen through my eyes, is no Congregationalist.

Dean’s own church, the First Congregational Church UCC of Burlington, Vermont, retains the name it began with in 1805 but was taken over years ago by the United Church of Christ (UCC).

For nearly half a century this 1957 “union” of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches has been democratically absorbing the property of local Congregational Churches.

It has done this by mobilizing local Social Gospel liberal activists in a community, persuading them to join the local Congregational Church, and then having these mostly new members demand a vote of the congregation now packed with outsiders over whether to merge with the United Church of Christ.

Such an attempted takeover failed in the Congregational church where I grew up, but not before leftist activists succeeded in voting to transfer the church’s summer camp property to their own breakaway entity. This was entirely legal. It took advantage of small Congregational churches’ democratic nature and vulnerability to vote-packing. Nationwide, this technique apparently has been used (to one degree or another) to gain control of literally thousands of Congregational churches and their property and to convert them into UCC member churches.

Some of these resulting Congregational/UCC churches are so far to the Left politically that they are the Protestant equivalent of the neo-Marxist Liberation Theology movement in the Roman Catholic Church. Other UCC congregations, which retain a high degree of local autonomy, may be moderate or even conservative -- but a portion of the money worshippers put in every collection plate goes to UCC headquarters in Cleveland.  And a portion of that UCC money goes to fund the social agendas of Left-leaning organizations such as the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

Hundreds of Congregational churches like the one in which I grew up staved off UCC takeover attempts. Many, but by no means all, of these now belong either to the 400+ churches of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches or to the 150+ churches of the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. Even so, ministers trained at UCC seminaries with UCC social values sometimes find their way into the pulpits at non-UCC Congregational churches.

Dean’s own local church – one of 160 in Vermont that have joined UCC in a New England where the Congregational Church around the time of the American Revolution was the official state church – seems relatively low key about its liberal social agenda.

A recent play at Dean’s church’s theatre has been “The Accidental Activist” by Kathryn Blume, “co-founder of the Lysistrata Project” (apparently named for playwright Aristophanes’ heroine who ended war in ancient Greece by persuading the women to wage a “sex strike” until their men made peace).  “The Accidental Activist” is described as “one lone person’s on-going search for a good reason to get out of bed…the story of her astonishing inability to save the world.”

But part of every dollar put into the collection plates of Dean’s local church goes to the United Church of Christ, which beyond question is a far-Left, social activist organization. For example, on June 26, 2003, the UCC issued a press release proclaiming that “the United Church of Christ (UCC) may be one of the few religious voices of praise for today’s Supreme Court decision that has challenged the constitutionality of sodomy laws.”  The release recounted UCC’s history since 1975 opposing any legal discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.

Howard Dean weeks ago on MSNBC’s “Hardball” was asked by Chris Matthews why he had been the first governor in the nation to sign same-sex civil unions into law for homosexual couples but has refused to take what Matthews deemed the small further step of supporting outright homosexual marriage. 

Dean replied that he did not support homosexual marriages, “because marriage is very important to a lot of people who are pretty religious.”  Dean apparently regards himself as other than “pretty religious” in this matter.

“So,” observed columnist George Will about this dialogue, “the argument about the public meaning of marriage is merely a semantic quibble important only to the ‘pretty religious’? Dean has said of his faith that ‘I don’t think it informs my politics,’ and that he became a Congregationalist ‘because I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church about 25 years ago over a bike path.’ Fine. His faith, whatever it is, is his business and no disqualification for the presidency. But his qualifications supposedly include a searching intellect. Where is the evidence?”

Dean has said “[I] don’t go to church very often. My religion doesn’t inform my public policy.” But Dean says he prays daily. He should feel politically at home in the United Church of Christ.

In 2002, e.g., the Reverend Mark Bigelow attracted media attention by asserting that Jesus Christ was pro-abortion. “One thing I know from the Bible,” said Rev. Bigelow without citing any biblical passage, “is that Jesus was not against women having a choice in continuing a pregnancy. Jesus was for peace on earth…and choice on earth.”

That same claim appeared on the 2002 holiday greeting card of the abortion-providing Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on whose Clergy Advisory Board Rev. Bigelow is a member. Rev. Bigelow is also pastor of the Congregational Church of Huntington in Centerport, New York, an affiliate of the United Church of Christ.

Howard Dean also served as a Board Member of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. And around the time of his three-year residency at a teaching facility called the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont (now the Fletcher Allen Hospital) in Burlington, Dean reportedly in 1978 or 1979 served as an intern in an OB/GYN rotation at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Burlington.  Dean reportedly continued as a physician at this Planned Parenthood clinic after his internship, “providing routine GYN care and medical consults.”

Howard Dean, M.D., has avoided answering questions about whether he ever performed an abortion – or how many he might have performed. He strongly opposed the recently passed bill to ban partial-birth abortion, and he has favored allowing girls to get abortions without parental notification or permission. But if the Jesus of his United Church of Christ is pro-abortion, then why has Dean avoided answering whether he himself has performed abortions?

The political Left has long suffered what I call “the credulity of the infidel.” Having lost their faith in God, they are willing to believe in any number of shoddy alternatives – from UFOs and occult New Age beliefs to the infantile pseudo-religion of Marxism. (Deeper analyses can be read here and here and here.)

The newest and by far shoddiest pseudo-religious enthusiasm of such leftists is what some of Howard Dean’s critics call the “Church of Dean.” With Messianic certitude and a God complex not unheard of among medical doctors who hold life-and-death power over patients, Howard Dean has created a hard core of zealous supporters that in many ways resemble a cult. Some describe themselves as “born-again” supporters.

What these mesmerized True Believers are responding to, surmises Garance Franke-Rufa in the leftist journal The American Prospect, is that Dean embodies “something the country has not seen in a very long time. He is, essentially, a northern evangelist” of the Puritan type. Such people conquered a wilderness, led the Abolition Movement, and, in 1692, killed nearly two dozen people accused of witchcraft at Salem.

In a nation where 87 percent of the people are religious, writes Amy Sullivan, “To become America’s majority party again, the Democrats will have to get religion.”

“For too many Democrats, faith is private and has no implications for political life,” writes Jim Wallis, editor of the leftist religious rag Sojourners. “But what kind of faith is that? Where would America be if the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself?…The separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from our public square…The Democrats are wrong to restrict religion to the private sphere.” 

“Too many of us hold a hoity-toity view of religion and think the religious are superstitious fifteenth-century ignoramuses,” writes hyper-lefty Michael Moore in his new book Dude, Where’s My Country?

“We’re wrong,” Moore continues, “and they have as much a right to their religion as those among us who have no religion. This arrogance is a big reason the lower classes will always side with the Republicans.”

So this week get ready to see Howard Dean with what amounts to his own prefabricated cardboard cutout of Jesus on stage with him as he campaigns for Southern votes in South Carolina. It will be a thin, two-dimensional Jesus, and Dean will declare Christ to be more socialist than savior.

Such hijacking of Jesus, as Boston University Religion Professor Stephen Prothero documents in his new book American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, is nothing new in American politics or culture.

As Bill Sammon of the Washington Times observed, leaders of genuine faith such as President George W. Bush or Senator Joseph Lieberman do not stop to check whether they are north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line before giving voice to their religious beliefs. It should tell us something that Howard Dean does.