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Katherine Harris’ History Lesson

Harris ignited a furor with her Witness interview. She sounded a fervent evangelical tone, saying that God “chooses our rulers,” that voters needed to send Christians to political office and that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws.” Speaking to Witness editors, Harris said: “If you are […]

Harris ignited a furor with her Witness interview. She sounded a fervent evangelical tone, saying that God “chooses our rulers,” that voters needed to send Christians to political office and that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws.”

Speaking to Witness editors, Harris said:

“If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”

“If we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women,” then “we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s (sic) certainly isn’t what God intended.”

On Friday, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Democrats and Republicans blasted the comments, saying Harris was suggesting non-Christians were less suited to govern or should be excluded altogether.

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Monroe took particular aim at this Harris comment from the Witness interview: “Whenever we legislate sin, and say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong. 

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Though Harris directly addressed her remarks about church and state, she was less clear explaining her comments about God not intending for the United States to be “a nation of secular laws.”

Asked if the U.S. should be a secular country, Harris said: “I think that our laws, I mean, I look at how the law originated, even from Moses, the 10 Commandments. And I don’t believe, that uh . . . That’s how all of our laws originated in the United States, period. I think that’s the basis of our rule of law.” ~The Orlando Sentinel (via Kentucky.com)

The interview, the public outcry and the campaign’s “clarification” are all a mess, as should be the case with anything associated with Ms. Harris’ ongoing disaster of a campaign.  Let me start at the end.  In the “clarification,” the remarkable Ms. Harris went out of her way to bow and scrape before the cult of inclusion, declaring her commitment to “Judeo-Christian” values, her support for Israel (!) and, apparently, even had her campaign manager (who is, incidentally, her fourth campaign manager) use the ultimate rhetorical cudgel, Holocaust memory, to curry favour:

Bryan Rudnick of Boca Raton, Harris’ campaign manager, said in a statement, “I joined this campaign because Congresswoman Harris is a passionate supporter of Israel, the Jewish people and always has the best interests of all Floridians at heart.

“As the grandson of Holocaust survivors,” Rudnick continued, “I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government, so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our Founding Fathers, without malice towards anyone.”

Good grief.  I am not sure how using the Holocaust to spin bad press works, but I should think that it would be offensive whenever anyone trots out the travails and suffering of his grandparents as some sort of basis for political credibility–that goes for everybody.  Of course, there are professional Holocaust-users who make this guy look like an amateur, but it is particularly pathetic to try to hide a candidate, who is trying to burnish her evangelical credentials with folks in the Panhandle, behind the impenetrable forcefield of Holocaust rhetoric.  Mr. Rudnick had a nice touch with the Lincolnian flourish.  In fact, I believe he scored the modern rhetorical hat trick: getting right with Israel, invoking the Holocaust and getting right with Lincoln all in the same paragraph.  If only he could have worked in the “war on terror,” he could have gotten some kind of spin award or perhaps a talk show on FoxNews. 

Ms. Harris and her manager should be embarrassed, but we should be more embarrassed that this tactic might actually work in our society, because we should already be embarrassed that Ms. Harris should have to resort to such a tactic to defend herself against the raving hordes of the Tolerance Brigades.  The inquisitio nova rides again.  The only person who can be pleased by this fracas is George Allen, who has suddenly dropped off the radar of the national media as they have found a new sacrificial victim to offer to the gods of anti-prejudice.  Maybe the NRSC told Harris to say something really provocative to try to save Allen’s hide and she, ever loyal partisan, went along.  No, that sounds all together too clever for this outfit.   

But before anyone gets too excited about Ms. Harris and rushes to defend her to the last, let us consider her response.  Her “clarification” suggests one of two things: either she really believes all the things she said to the Witness and does not have the stomach or courage to defend them publicly, which doesn’t say much for her convictions, or she was simply trotting out time-honoured phrases designed to win over evangelical voters come the September primary and the November general election and has no more conviction that Christian truth and revelation are extremely relevant to public life than the people who are now savaging her for her supposed intolerance.  If the latter is true, it makes her just another Republican hack opportunist trying to wheedle believers into supporting the Red Republican menace.  Florida Baptists, take note: she either won’t fight for what she said she believes, or she doesn’t believe it.  For Ms. Harris’ sake, I hope she is sincere but weak-willed.  

In some respects, I think Ms. Harris was right, however bluntly and clumsily she may have put it.  Remarkably, it is not her rather sloppy references to “secular laws” that have gotten her in quite a lot of trouble, but her supposedly “exclusionary” statement about Christians.  The typical reaction has been that “non-Christians can be good people, too!”  This is a stupid, frivolous response.   

First of all, she was speaking to a Christian audience, so telling them to elect Christians ought to be about as controversial as telling any group to elect one of their own.  Had she put this in the weasel language of “values” and electing someone who will represent your “values,” all would have been well, and you would see people, probably including Rabbi Lapin and Joe Lieberman, moving heaven and earth to defend her against the forces of moral relativism.  Because she had the gall to speak to Christians in their own idiom and talk about their “values” in terms that they, the Baptists, rather than a bevy of liberal soccer moms, would understand (e.g., “sin”), she receives the ritual pelting.  

But on the question of “secular laws,” and “legislating sin” Ms. Harris does herself no favours.  As much as I am convinced that Christian vision and imagination and Christian teachings on justice and morality would combat some of our graver moral evils through the law (they would combat even more evils if more people sought to live according to them rather than simply vote for their alleged representatives), I am unsure whether anyone really believes that electing Christians will automatically remedy these problems.  Did voting for Mr. Bush prevent the “legislation of sin”?  I could run down the list of why this is not true in his case, but I will refrain. 

At best, this part of her interview is badly phrased.  The remedy, of course, was not to run away from this position as fast as she could, but to restate clearly what she meant was that, for example, Christians need to elect good Christians to serve as a leaven in government and help to bring Christian witness back to the public debate in a way that will overthrow unjust and godless laws and establish some greater measure of good order.  However, Ms. Harris and her speechwriters probably wouldn’t have the first clue of how to go about saying that.  Under pressure, their first instinct was to run and hide under the skirt of “Judeo-Christian values,” which will probably not be impressing too many folks in Pensacola.    

Given the choice between two upstanding, decent candidates (no laughing, please), voting for the Christian makes more sense for Christian voters.  This is particularly true when modern elections have little to do with policy and a lot to do with voting for the candidate with whom you identify the most.  But given the choice between an incompetent, willful Christian who thinks he is on a mission to save the world and who thinks no law will or should stop him and a competent, humble non-Christian who intends to carry out his duties according to and within the law, it is probably not as clear who will “legislate sin” and who will be a better custodian of the law and justice. 

Ms. Harris’ appeal really just sounds like the old Republican song: if we just elect the “right people” to run Leviathan, everything will be fine.  This doesn’t do much for the integrity of her view.  What would do a lot more for her view would be to argue that no one, Christian or otherwise, will be able to prevail at the heart of Leviathan as long as it remains as lawless and unmanageably huge as it is now; you cannot have the “right people” tending to the needs of the Hydra–they will simply get eaten. 

Now the only other kind of law you can have if you don’t have secular law is religious law, which is to say a law made by religious authority regulating the life of religious believers.  Any government, even if it is filled with Christians and inspired by a Christian ethos, bases its laws on Biblical and canonical precedents and understands itself to be subject to God’s will and authority, is always in some sense fundamentally secular because it is an authority of this world–the divine source of its authority notwithstanding–and few governments this side of the Pharaohs have ever really pretended any different. 

Imagine, for instance, someone standing up to Justinian–Justinian, now–in 536 and saying, “You need to get rid of this whole Corpus Iuris Civilis because God doesn’t want secular laws.”  I do believe, besides getting a good laugh out of Justinian, you would not have been taken seriously in one of the more self-consciously Christian “theocracies” in history.  Even the Christian Empire had secular laws.  Even the state that idealised symphoneia between emperor and church did not fundamentally compromise the secular nature of imperial rule.   

Even if we interpret it very generously, seeing it as what might have been her attempt to acknowledge what Kirk called “the roots of American order,” her confused statement about where “the law” and “rule of law” came from–Moses and, uh, those Commandments and everything–is just preposterous.  The Law comes from Moses and is found in the Pentatuech, but for where we get “the law” we would do better to look at Blackstone’s commentaries. 

The only thing more worrisome than the idea that Ms. Harris is just posing as a hard-core evangelical Christian for political advantage is that she actually believes that the laws of the United States derive in some immediate, discernible way from the Decalogue.  The Decalogue is central to Christian morality, it is a vital part of every Christian’s moral obligations, it is an important part of our civilisation’s religious inheritance from ancient Israel, it is essential to our cultural and moral norms as a people belonging to Christian civilisation, and it is relevant to our public life today, all of which makes appeals to its religious authority legitimate in current political debates, but what it is not is a meaningfully direct source of secular law in the sense that “the law” comes directly or even ultimately from the Law.  We are more likely to find legal precedents in the Corpus Iuris Civilis or the common law of England than we will in the Torah.  Except as an historical model that might serve as a worthy example to modern legislators, the Decalogue for Christians should count primarily as the commands of God to the faithful of the New Israel, and less as the historical source of all our earthly laws. 

What I hope Ms. Harris was trying to say was that religion should not be barred from influencing legislation and that mythical separations of church and state should be tossed out the window as the fancy of Mr. Jefferson.  What I seriously hope she was not saying was  that we need a national government modeled on Calvin’s Geneva.  My thought is: Byzantium, yes, Geneva, no.  The irony here is, I suppose, that Ms. Harris is partly in trouble for denying before a Baptist audience the importance of something–the nonexistent “wall of separation”–that Mr. Jefferson affirmed to a different Baptist audience.  Obviously, a few things have changed among some Baptists, namely their numbers, that now make them more enthusiastic to say that there is no wall of separation.

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