Judging a President’s Sinfulness

As President Clinton drove through the streets of Worcester, Mass., last month, one of the many signs being waved at him looked like a message straight out of the country’s Puritan past.

It read simply: “Scarlet A.”

Hester Prynne, an adulterer in “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic tale of Puritan New England, was punished for her sin by a bizarre requirement meted out by Protestant elders: that she wear a scarlet A on her chest for the rest of her life.

President Clinton may think he is the Hester Prynne of the Electronic Age. His public outing as an adulterer--splashed on television and the Internet much as Prynne’s scarlet letter was embroidered on her dress--and Americans’ ambivalent reaction to it illustrate a conflict of ethical standards rooted deep in the American identity.

Citizens who cannot decide whether to fully forgive or condemn the president reflect the dual, if not dueling, worlds of American Protestantism: the demanding moral order of the Puritans of the 17th century and the more forgiving and emotional strand of evangelicalism that began to develop about 100 years later.

“It’s a very American moment,” said Alan Wolfe, a Boston University sociologist whose recent book, “One Nation After All,” explores middle-class values.

“It’s a conflict between hard Protestantism and soft Protestantism,” he said, “with [independent counsel Kenneth W.] Starr representing hard Protestantism--uncompromising, disciplined, straight back-boned--and Clinton representing soft Protestantism--inclusive, therapeutic, forgiving.”

Over three centuries, most Americans--Roman Catholics, Jews and others--have assimilated the original Protestant ethic of hard work, sexual probity and adherence to community standards, even as they have retained their singular religious faiths and as the country has evolved into the most ethnically and religiously diverse in the world.

“Whether you are Catholic or Jewish or Buddhist, if you live in this culture, you become protestantized,” said Steven Tipton, a professor of religion at Emory University.

“The Protestant legacy in both its strains . . . has left a large imprint on the institutions that we inhabit.”

The two impulses are interwoven far beyond the case of Starr vs. Clinton. The Puritan strain, for example, is in evidence in legislative proposals to ban pornography on the Internet and to curtail benefits for welfare mothers who have children out of wedlock.

The more forgiving strand appears in the willingness of many Americans to look past the transgressions (sexual and otherwise) of friends and family and even those of public figures, such as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who has been reelected five times since confessing that he hired a male prostitute. But perhaps the legacy appears most starkly in the drama underway in the nation’s capital, where legal issues of perjury and obstruction of justice are framed in a morality play.

Fundamentalist vs. Taboo Breaker

On one side is Starr, the son of a Fundamentalist minister, whose stern Protestantism mirrors almost exactly that of the country’s Puritan founders, for whom--as 19th century French historian Alexis de Toqueville observed--”the chief care was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community.”

“There is a Puritan tradition in America . . . which laid great stress on sexual probity as an especially important sign of a person’s good standing before God,” said Richard Madsen, a sociologist at UC San Diego.

On the other side is Clinton, who has repeatedly broken the Puritan sexual taboos and then looked for grace in the more forgiving strains of Protestantism.

The urge to break taboos followed closely after the Puritan’s first landing. Dancing, card playing and even illicit sexual relations began to be visible in the more affluent second and third generations of Colonists, much to the horror of the first generation.

By 1740, a religious revival called the “Great Awakening” swept the Colonies. Although in its early days the revivalist tradition was a call back to the stricter faith of the early Puritan fathers, its evangelists, who held camp meetings along the rugged frontier, relied on people to come forward, confess their transgressions, rededicate themselves to God and be cleansed through their declaration of faith. Today, this process of reclaiming one’s place in the community of faith is expressed in some traditions by being “born again.”

“The Puritan strain runs through our culture like a red thread,” Tipton said. “But there is a parallel theme--you see it in the Pentecostals and in some Baptists--which emphasizes that if you repent, you can be redeemed.”

The Southern Baptist tradition in which Clinton grew up combines the Puritan and the revivalist, said Harvey Cox, a religion professor at Harvard Divinity School. And the latter “has to do with encouraging the errant wanderer, the lost sheep, and being very celebratory and affirming, especially when the lost sheep comes back.

“In some ways the penitent scoundrel . . . isn’t an outcast, he’s the star of the show,” Cox said. “Without him, there wouldn’t be anything to the revivalist drama.”

Cox, himself a Southern Baptist, said that Baptist churches emphasize the story of the prodigal son, who leaves home and spends his inheritance living a lavish life before trudging home impoverished. His father, who had given him up for dead, offers a huge feast and the family rejoices.

“And if you fall by the wayside again, you do the whole thing--the repentance--again,” Cox said.

Clinton’s tempestuous life strikes some parallels to the Bible tale, with his repeated public humiliations (the loss of his first reelection bid as governor of Arkansas, a series of sex scandals and the resounding defeat of his proposal for national health insurance) followed by redemption at the polls.

A similar theme of public repentance intertwined with community forgiveness is also part of the Catholic tradition, although today that repentance generally takes place in the privacy of the confessional.

“Catholics believe penance is an indispensable element of genuine forgiveness,” said Rev. Michael J. Baxter, a Holy Cross priest who teaches moral theology at the University of Notre Dame.

“It involves changing one’s life in such a way that it changes the damage that has been done. As Catholics, we believe in the visible aspects of sanctification. So part of genuine repentance is that person, who is returning to the Father, should start to look different,” Baxter said.

Moral Questions Yet to Be Solved

Although such religious traditions explain some of the nation’s apparently contradictory reactions to the president’s private life, there is also a great deal that is novel and disorienting. For the majority of Americans, Clinton’s behavior has raised moral questions that are far from settled.

“People have never been asked to read a pornographic novel about a president while he was president,” Wolfe said.

Religious leaders and students of values say that the public has to ask: What do we expect of a president in an era when so much has become public that used to be private, and when figures that carry moral authority are in short supply?

While many are willing to accept a president with human failings, there is still a sense that the high office demands higher standards of behavior than those required of ordinary citizens.

For instance, a number of Southern Baptist ministers believe Clinton should be forgiven, if he repents, but that he also should resign because he is no longer fit to hold office, said Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“If the pastor of a Southern Baptist church was involved in any of the things the president was involved in with Ms. Lewinsky . . . and he was contrite and remorseful, his congregation would forgive him, but [it] would also expect him to resign from his pastoral position,” Land said.

‘Nobody Quite Knows What the Rules Are’

But many Americans seem torn about what standards and punishment are appropriate for a president whose official acts get high marks but whose private conduct is found sorely wanting. Their confusion arises in an era in which the public is served up increasingly explicit accounts of candidates’ private lives.

“We have a situation where nobody quite knows what the rules are between what’s public and what’s private,” said Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political science at the University of Chicago. “We’ve got to have some kind of principled way to evaluate . . . what private life tells you about the political person’s character.”

Others said that the country would do better to focus on what politicians are doing on the job and forget their private lives.

“It’s very difficult to lead in public when people know everything in the back closets of your life,” said Los Angeles Rabbi Richard N. Levy, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which represents reform rabbis.

Levy noted that in Old Testament theology some of the greatest leaders--King David, Moses and Miriam--were punished by God for their private sins but continued in their role as public leaders.

“When we find out there are stains in our leaders’ moral behavior, it becomes very confusing for people because we’re not sure what to do,” Levy said. “Should we say they are not fit to be our leaders or should we say that in the private sphere they sin, as all of us do?”

In these times no one has been able to command the moral authority that Americans seem to want now that both institutions and their leaders are showing their all-too-human failings. From the difficulty of many religious institutions to speak to today’s troubles, from the junk-bond culture of Wall Street to the failings of the public schools, Americans do not know where to find leaders to shape a moral consensus or even offer suggestions.

“We’re really in a dilemma, and . . . we may not be able to come up with a coherent moral vision, with a road to walk,” Baxter said.

The times call for someone like “a Lincoln or a Gandhi,” Baxter said. “But this may not be an age where that kind of leadership is possible.”

“We don’t have a voice in this country to help us reflect or think about these things,” said psychologist Eugene Kennedy of Loyola University of Chicago, adding that people are “milling about spiritually and ethically.”