American political culture evidences an “extreme” dimension that we have not seen since the 19th century, when campaigns and political dialog were far more vicious than today.  In this perspective, allow me to think with you about several examples of this extreme nature of the American political culture.

• First, this week President Bush will sign into law an act banning partial-birth abortion, which the Senate enacted 64-34, despite a filibuster.  Immediately, the ACLU said it would go to court, on behalf of the National Abortion Federation, to thwart the law.  Despite the fact that this ban is supported by large groups of Americans (e.g., Catholics, Evangelical Christians and orthodox Jews), this law is regarded as extreme by the ACLU.  Senator Tom Harkin argued recently to the women of America that this is “step one” in the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade and deny women their rights.  The partial birth practice is a repugnant, dastardly practice that does not have the support of the American people and to characterize its termination as an attack on the freedom of women is absurd.  Yet, it evidences the extreme nature of our political culture. 

• Second is the treatment of Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin.  In a church service, in full military uniform, he exclaimed recently that the US is fighting a “spiritual enemy” in its war on terrorism.  That enemy is energized by Satan.  In our extreme political culture, this has upset no small group of people, especially the media leaders.  Most reasonable people would equate Satan with the term “evil” that President Bush has used many times in his speeches dealing with terrorism.  But, despite the obvious fact that we are dealing with monstrous evil, there are now calls for his dismissal and that his remarks are nothing short of insulting to Islam and “racist.”  Boykin is a highly decorated officer, whose exact choice of words may not have been wise, but only in an extreme political culture would there be an unwillingness to cut Boykin some slack.  Daniel Henninger has argued that American political culture is on “emotional steroids” and is not thinking or acting rationally in such matters.

• Third is the judiciary.  In this extreme political culture, the judiciary needs to be the vital center of our discussion right now.  Over the last 30 years, the judiciary, at all levels, have made much law touching people’s deepest beliefs about the ordering of public and private life, which had previously been the first responsibility of this country’s legislatures.  However, this political culture must recognize that the legislatures are no longer the primary place where law is made.  The time to place the judiciary at the center of a political campaign is now.  In the words of Henninger, “These legislators have become little more than clerks to judges and the complainants in their courts—the law as not much more than a brief.  When this happens, citizens lose their status as voters or electors and become mere courtroom spectators.  How can this be good?”

• Fourth is the manner in which the Democratic Party has responded to President Bush’s Court nominees.  Nothing better exemplifies the extreme nature of American political culture.  Currently, this party has or soon will filibuster six of President Bush’s nominees.  All of them come with the endorsement of the American Bar Association.  All have been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and all have enough Democratic support to be confirmed on the Senate floor.  Yet all are being blocked by a liberal minority that is imposing a new 60-vote super-majority qualification on the Constitution’s advise and consent clause.  It is a raw power play in the extreme American political culture.  Miguel Estrada’s sin was that the Bush administration refused to release internal memos he wrote while serving in the Clinton Justice Department, a requirement no other nominee has ever had to fulfill.  Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen is unacceptable because she voted to uphold a parental-notification law on abortion.  Alabama Attorney General William Pryor agrees with Justice Byron White that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.  California Superior Judge Carolyn Kuhl, as a junior attorney at the Reagan Justice Department, defended the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University.  Charles Pickering is accused of racial insensitivity despite a record of personal courage in racial harmony and endorsements from the state’s leading African-Americans.  Finally, the Party has its critical eyes on Henry Saad, an Arab-American nominated for the Sixth Circuit, and Janice Brown, an African American on the California Supreme Court nominated for the D.C. Circuit.  The common theme of all of these nominees is not their qualifications; they are all eminently qualified and have the Bar Association’s endorsement.  The issue is their conservative view of law, a view that I addressed in the third item of this perspective.  There is no better example of the extreme nature of our political culture than the fate of these judicial nominees.

• Finally, the case of Rush Limbaugh offers some telling perspectives about the extreme nature of our political culture.  Limbaugh has admitted addiction to prescription pain killers.  The liberal press and politicians (e.g., candidate John Kerry) are gloating over Limbaugh’s fall.  One could cite that his addictive behavior was due to pain from a very serious back ailment and from failed surgery.  But, although that is a major difference between Limbaugh and a Darryl Strawberry or a Kurt Cobain, at bottom that is irrelevant.  The difference of course is that he admitted it and has voluntarily sought help.  But it illustrates that in our extreme political culture we revel in personal failure on the other side of the spectrum.  We never show grace, on either the right or the left.  The extreme nature of our political culture produces vendettas, not compassion; and that is true for both the right and the left.  For those of us who are Christians, there must be forgiveness and mercy.  If these two are missing, then there is no hope for our political culture.

See World (25 October 2003); editorial Wall Street Journal (15 October 2003) and Henninger’s editorial in Wall Street Journal (24 October 2003).

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ISLAM’S APPEAL TO AFRICAN AMERICANS

Over the past two decades, two powerful currents have come together in America:  the black-separatist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the training of Muslims in programs financed by Saudi Arabia.  Today, African-Americans are thought to make up about 30% of the fast-growing Muslim population of six to seven million in the US.  (That makes black Muslims about 5.6% of the 36 million blacks in the US.)  In the words of Paul Barrett of the Wall Street Journal (24 October 2003), “As African-Americans embrace Islam in growing numbers, many are moving toward a more orthodox version influenced, in part, by Saudi Arabia’s puritanical brand of Sunni Islam.  These foregoing ideas have combined with homegrown black experience to form a mindset that condemns alcohol and drugs and hails self-sufficiency—but one that sometimes also stresses an unsettling hostility to the American government and of secular society.”  How should we think about this development?

• First, the African-American Muslim experience can be traced back to the stirrings of Black Nationalism in the early part of the 20th century when a search began for an autonomous African-American identity in an often hostile white society.  Often the black Islamic leaders argued that a society governed by strict Islamic law, in which adulterers would be stoned to death and thieves would have their hands cut off, would be superior to American democracy. 

• Second, this quest for black identity within Islam coincided with the move by Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest sites, to step up its world-wide campaign to spread the harsh version of Sunni Islam, called Wahabbism.  Mounting oil profits in the 1970s fueled the expanded Saudi proselytizing, which escalated in the 1980s in response to the perceived threat to Sunni domination from the Shiite revolution in Iran.  Saudi-funded teachers began arriving in the US just as black Muslims began exploring their faith.  Many Black Muslim leaders were sent to Saudi Arabia and studied in Mecca, which galvanized their faith and their fervor.  The result is that increasingly the Islam of the Black Muslims is the Wahhabism of the Saudis, which sees Western culture as decadent and corrupt. 

• Finally, the leaders of these newer Black Muslim groups, especially Imam Siraj Wahhaj, present an enigma.  They proclaim a Wahhabi form of Islam that is severely critical of America and American culture; yet they reject the violence of al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In fact, Wahhaj testified at the trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted of a role in the first bombing of the Word Trade Center in the early 1990s.  He also provided critical testimony in the trial of four terrorists convicted of their role in the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa.  He was also was the first Muslim to give an opening prayer at a session of the US House of Representatives. 

The fact of Black Islam presents many challenges.  Increasingly more aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia, their leaders still the decry violence of terrorism.  Are they recruits for the next wave of terrorists or will they remain loyal, yet critical of the US government?

See Barrett’s most helpful article in the Wall Street Journal (24 October 2003).

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THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AS THEOLOGY

In the late 1980s at a conference at the University of Oregon law school, a speaker declared:  “We, the human species, have become a viral epidemic to the earth . . . the AIDS of the earth.”  Roderick Nash, the leading historian of the environmental movement, has argued that the environmental movement, with its concern for nature, has a “quasi-religious nature,” where a group of “eco-theologians” preach the message of the new “gospel of ecology.”  The environmental message has a story of creation, of the fall of man, and of the various possibilities for redemption. 

In the environmental gospel, the earth was first created in a harmonious and innocent state.  Humans were tempted with the acquisition of knowledge and with that acquisition came advances in economic organization, technology and all the evil instruments of modern industrial civilization.  Davie Foreman, founder of Earth First, contends that the “fall” of man occurred about 10,000 years ago, when the “nascency of agriculture” began the process by which men were left “apart from the natural world” and soon fell into the evils of “city, bureaucracy, patriarchy, war and empire.”  “An ever-widening rift” developed “between the wildernesses that created us and the civilization created by us.”  There is now, in the words of Paul Watson, “. . . a blind allegiance to the laws of man over the higher and more profound laws of nature.”  Environmental salvation can be achieved by restoring the conditions that existed before human activities corrupted the innocence of the earth.  Thus we must restore the “wilderness”, where “primeval character” is restored, “untrammeled by man.” 

All of this of course flies in the face of biblical theology.  Human beings are created by God as His image bearers and as His theocratic stewards (Genesis 1:26ff).  Sin is rebellion against God and the physical creation bears a curse because of that sin.  The physical creation will be restored to its pristine condition when Jesus returns to establish His kingdom.  Then that world will bring forth its abundance as originally planned.  It will be God in the person of Jesus Christ who will restore the physical world, not the legislation of the US Congress or the president.  There is a theology to the modern environmental movement, but it is a false theology.

See Robert H. Nelson, “Tom Hayden, Meet Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas,” Forbes (29 October 1990).

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