A Prayer for Clinton’s Redemption : Presidency: His expression of faith and his warning against secularism are heartening; when will his actions match his words?

In parsing the 8th Commandment’s injunction against lying, Luther’s “Small Catechism” enjoins us to put the best construction on everything. How might a neoconservative, pro-life Catholic apply that sage, ecumenical counsel to liberal, pro-choice Baptist Bill Clinton’s remarks at a recent White House interfaith breakfast, where the President worried aloud that the political “environment in which we operate is entirely too secular?”

Well, the good news is that the President said any number of things that people of my persuasion could only applaud.

He unapologetically professed his own religious convictions. He made clear that Christian faith can, and does, sustain deep commitments to religious tolerance and religious freedom. He deplored interpretations of the 1st Amendment in which “freedom of religion” is construed as “freedom from religion.” He rejected closet Christianity and challenged others to “frankly admit” that they are “animated” by a faith that affects “what we feel, what we think and what we do.”

He called for a “new ethic of personal and family and community responsibility,” arguing, “We can’t possibly do anything for anybody in this country unless they’re willing to do something for themselves.”

He implicitly criticized Democrats who are chary of character-based approaches to crime, welfare dependency, drug abuse and the other pathologies of the urban underclass, warning that moral “revitalization at the grass roots” must not be dismissed as “right-winger” rhetoric.

At bottom, the President seemed genuinely concerned that one of the gravest obstacles to our national renewal is the threat of a subtle establishment of secularism as the official ideology of the United States of America. President Clinton is a sophisticated enough politician to know that such an establishment, in defiance of the religious convictions of 90% of Americans, would be a social and political disaster. But he also seemed to suggest--quite correctly, in my view--that thin theories of personal autonomy as the be-all and end-all of the American experiment make for an anorexic democracy.

The not-so-good news is that the President’s professed convictions in these matters seem to be in tension with other ideas of his, with his sense of his constituency and with several of his appointments.

Tolerance, which the President rightly applauded, is not the genteel avoidance of differences; it is the robust engagement of our most deeply held convictions and differences within the bond of democratic civility. The pro-life movement, like social conservatism in general, doesn’t want to be “tolerated.” It wants its arguments to be engaged. And on issues like abortion, euthanasia and the gay and lesbian insurgency, where profound questions of civil rights and the moral architecture of democracy are at stake, you don’t engage conservative arguments by the simple expedient of attributing “good faith” to those who, wittingly or unwittingly, are promoting a culture of death.

Then there is the question of constituency. Judging from the invitation and attendance lists at the President’s interfaith breakfast, the Clinton White House seems blissfully unaware that the religious left is a dried-up husk and that the growing sectors of religion in this country are evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The tired bureaucrats of what Richard Neuhaus has styled the liberal Protestant Descendancy and a small cadre of aging Catholic radicals and dissidents are implausible Schwarzkopfs in Bill Clinton’s call to arms against secularism and selfish individualism.

Finally, many of us still find a disconnect between the President’s stated convictions and his appointments to high office. Social and religious conservatives did not oppose HUD assistant secretary (and lesbian activist) Roberta Achtenberg and Surgeon General (and back-seat sex-ed maven) Joycelyn Elders simply because we thought their views wrongheaded--though that would have been reason enough. We also opposed them because they had gone out of their way to demean the religious and moral convictions that were the basis of our oppostion to their politics. Rhetorically kneecapping classic morality (which Dr. Elders, in particular, has raised to a perverse art form) hardly constitutes tolerance, much less the engagement of differences within the bond of democratic civility.

You’ve got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. But talking the right talk is, or could be, the beginning of a serious conversation.