Dec
7
It has been said that government and Christianity have never been reconciled. Meaning that while Christian ethics are all well and good in the personal, they don’t apply to the political. The substance behind this belief is the fact that over and over again the world has seen governments acting in an entirely amoral manner and appearing to get away with it. A few examples from history seem to confirm this:
In 1740 King Frederick of Prussia decided to rob the Austrian Empress of her province of Silesia. The attack was without justification in morals but it was successfully carried off to the profit of Prussia. The robbed Empress – Maria Theresa – is hardly known to most people these days, but Frederick of Prussia has gone down as “The Great” because of his successful brigandage.
In 1848 James Knox Polk ran for President of the United States on a platform of obtaining what is today southwestern Canada for the United States. Once in office, he dropped that platform as if it never existed and engineered war with Mexico which resulted in half that nation’s territory becoming part of the United States. Polk is held up as a strong, decisive leader; some one of courage who got the job done.
In 1914 Winston Churchill, serving as First Lord of the British Admiralty, summarily cashiered the commander in chief of the British Fleet because he felt the man not up to snuff and, later, gave in to public pressure and sacked the head of the Naval service because the man had been born in Germany. Churchill, of course, is remembered today as one of the great men of history and as a superlative war leader.
These three examples – and there are a hundred like them – seem to confirm that view. If you are to be a success in the realm of politics, its best to check your morality at the door and be guided entirely by considerations of power and prospects for success. If you pull it off, you’ll go down in history as one of the movers and shakers of the world – admirable and to be studied by similarly inclined people for ages to come.
But it isn’t quite like that. To be sure, Frederick won his war and founded Prussia as a major power in European politics. His examples of deception and unprovoked aggression became models for Prussian policy. Eventually leading to Bismarck in the 1860′s forging German unity under Prussian rule by means of war and deception (and, in to the bargain, a bit of thievery – using the funds of a deposed king to bribe others to do his bidding).
Such lessons as Frederick and Bismarck provided were not lost on their rapt pupil, Hilter who brought such methods to their logical conclusion…only this time it didn’t end so well. In plain terms, what Germany ultimately got via Frederick’s desire to fight an amoral war was total destruction. Cities bombed to rubble, American, British and Russian armies meeting in the German heartland – millions of dead, and all sorts of atrocities perpetrated in Germany by Russians who had many scores to settle.
As regards President Polk, one can say that it is hard to argue with success. We can’t undo the past and the lands once taken from Mexico are now integral to the United States and we – and the world, including Mexico – have benefited from American rule in Texas, California and elsewhere in the American southwest. But Polk’s sleight of hand – run on Oregon, fight on Texas – was probably the thing which made our cataclysmic Civil War inevitable. By bringing in large territories south of the Mason-Dixon line, Polk made acute the debate about the extension of slavery, which provoked increasingly strong reactions North and South; the former shifting from tolerance of slavery towards abolitionism, the latter shifting from an embarrassed acceptance of the “peculiar institution” to an absurd defense of slavery as a good thing. Such polarization made it next to impossible to avoid war – a war which might have been avoided with a bit of honesty on the part of Polk.
For Winston Churchill, the effects of his actions at the start of the First World War were disastrous – and not just for him, but for the British Empire he dedicated his life to serving. While Churchill had justification in retiring the elderly officer in command of Britain’s fighting fleet, the manner in which he did it ensured that bad feelings would be left in the service; feelings which would mean Churchill had fewer defenders if things ever started going wrong. Churchill’s later accommodation of the absurd accusation that the German-born head of the Naval service was unreliable only ended up putting in charge of the Naval service a man who would ultimately sabotage Churchill’s war policies and lead directly to his ouster from office less than 9 months after the war began.
So discredited and distrusted, Churchill – the one politician in all of Europe who understood military strategy and had the clearest understanding of what was needed to abridge the slaughter and bring swift victory – was kept out of any policy-making position for the rest of the war. He was allowed back in to office, but only in a subordinate role and not concerned with deciding how to fight. Because Churchill was unable to effect the course of the war, the war went on much longer than necessary and cost literally millions more lives than it should have.
Furthermore, when the post-war period came up, the lingering distrust of Churchill as being not a team player and being erratic in views eventually resulted in his, once again, being excluded from all power to influence events. And thus the one man in Europe who completely understood what Hitler was about and knew precisely what would stop him was unable to do other than make warning after warning. Once the game was given away, Churchill was placed in power – but he only had power to ensure Britain’s bare survival…the war would be won, but only at the cost of the Empire Churchill felt (correctly) was overall a civilizing influence and needed to be preserved for at least some time to come.
For Frederick, there was the chance for a king to give his people enlightened, peaceful rule. Sure, he wouldn’t be remembered as “the Great”, but his legacy would have been a Germany at the forefront of human development, rather than a two-century long scourge of decency.
For Polk, he could have expanded the United States, peacefully, in agreement with Britain over the Oregon border and, perhaps, helped convince the small non-Native populations of northern Mexico that union with the United States was in their best interests. Certainly, it would have caused a lot less bitterness and we might have been spared civil war; might have been able to end slavery without bloodshed; might have avoided a century of “Jim Crow”.
For Churchill, he could have, perhaps, not only survived in office in the First World War, but maybe risen to the top later in the war – in time to impart some excellent political direction to the generals to both bring the war not just to a more swift end, but an end which didn’t merely lay the foundations for a worse conflict 20 years later.
In truth, the real question is not “can we reconcile Christianity and government?” but “how do we do it?”. Its not a question of “can” but of “must”. We must rise to our highest ideals in all the things we do, or all our efforts will be, at best, only partial successes and will very often not only fail in their purpose, but create worse troubles down the road.
Even the noblest of efforts are marred by an unwillingness to apply Christian morality. In World War Two, the United States had the most just cause imaginable – fighting the triple horrors of fascism, Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. Did that war turn out as one might have wished? Was the goal of all that sacrifice to have half of Europe under Stalinist tyranny while China fell in to the inhuman hands of Mao’s communist regime? Not at all – but that is what did eventuate? Why?
Because we didn’t apply our highest ideals – we didn’t insist upon doing the right thing, all the time and every where. In the pre-war years we didn’t stand firm against tyranny. We didn’t arm ourselves sufficient for all contingencies. We wrote off our troops and allies in the Philippines while sending aid to Stalin’s Russian – and therein lies the fundamental flaw in our WWII actions, allying ourselves with a regime just as bad as the Nazi regime we were fighting. What is the point of getting rid of Al Capone only to be stuck with a much stronger Lucky Luciano?
It would have been much harder to win WWII had we told Stalin that, after we’re done with Hitler, we’re coming straight after him, as well – but had made that stern declaration, we would not have endured a half century of cold war with all the death and destruction of Mao’s China, Warsaw Pact Europe, Korea, Vietnam and a dozen smaller wars around the globe. It would have been the right thing to do. And its not just in the realm of war where doing the right thing would always be best – in all government actions, doing the right thing is the correct policy.
The much harder task in dealing with our poor people is to lift them up in to people who are self sufficient. Teaching people to do for themselves is much harder than just shoveling a bit of welfare off on them. As long as the very poor are out of sight and not dying of starvation, we’re happy to pretend that we’ve done something good for them. And, for the completely cynical, its nice to have a permanent underclass to both control at voting time and to use as a club against ignorant wealthy people who continually want a short cut to a feeling of moral redemption.
Its harder to teach chastity than pass out a condom. Harder to help a single mother raise her child than provide her an abortion. Its harder to teach a kid to read than to teach him to feel good about himself. Easier to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration than to secure the border. Easier to ban guns for the law abiding than deal with criminal gangs. Easier to talk about being in favor of liberty than actually fighting for it.
Doing the right thing always seems both far too difficult and as if it would not work out the best in the long run. This apparent circumstance is, however, based upon our ability to be deceived, and to deceive ourselves. In essence, we want to be deceived – we want there to be a short cut to success and some secret door which leads us out of our current difficulty. Rather than brace ourselves to the difficult work of getting things right, we ‘re always open to the siren song of the get-rich-quick scheme.
Until we obtain leadership which will commit itself to doing the right thing – even when so doing will at times lead to rejection by the voters – we will continue to flounder about with half-measures with our taste for justice turning to ashes in our mouths. God has provided the rules for us to live by – and they are not hard rules; they are just inconvenient rules for people who want an easy way out.
Cross Posted at OpinionEditorial
