In God We Trust

The first presidential vote I cast, in 1980, was for a born-again candidate.

It wasn’t for Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president, who was running for re-election, his faith having underpinned his approach to his first term. It definitely wasn’t for his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, also born-again, a caution to those assuming certain public policy positions result from the condition.

I supported the third born-again candidate that year, John Anderson of Rockford, Illinois, home to the band Cheap Trick. On several occasions while in Congress in the 60’s, he had introduced a Constitutional amendment to “recognize the law and authority of Jesus Christ” in the United States.

(My souvenier shirt from the Woodshed restaurant in Rockford, Ill. Try the cottage cheese)

His journey from being one of the House’s most conservative members to moderation, particularly on social issues, was a result of the times and not the epiphany. Here on Earth John Kennedy told us, “God’s work must truly be our own” and Anderson voted for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act in addition to other progressive legislation as he looked at the American plight beyond his solid red district.

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but not his Episcopalian father H.W., were also born-again. I have spent about half my life in a country governed by a born-again Christian, though I only voted for one who made it to the White House, Clinton. The term itself came into circulation in the political sphere fairly recently in our history, in the 70’s, after Watergate. Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s senior advisor chose it as the title of his memoir, after being released from prison. Of course spiritual rebirth predates repentant Watergate co-conspirators, and is a personal journey, as it was for Colson, a prison awakening.

God and religion more broadly play in politics in scope and sweep they had not historically, and I see regional nuances as I have traveled around the country researching How the Democrats Lost America. https://turnerpublishing.com/products/how-the-democrats-lost-america

The evangelical Church of God is headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee, home to an estimated 300 churches in a city of just over 100,000 people. “Every time a building becomes vacant, it becomes a church” I’m told. One local Harris voter told me, “the local religious infrastructure lined up behind Trump, leading the faithful to believe ‘God appointed Trump and he’s the savior’.”

Driving through Oklahoma this spring I happened upon The Truth and Liberty Show with Alex McFarland and his guest Jenna Ellis. Ellis, like Colson, was a counselor to the President, but for Donald Trump. Unlike Colson, Ellis served no time after accepting a plea deal for election interference in Georgia. Before her service to the president she wrote a guide for “Christians to Understand America’s Constitutional Crisis.”

She explained to McFarland that “our rights come not from nature or the nature of mankind, but from God, and it is the government’s responsibility to carry out His will.” I appreciate any reason to pull out my pocket copy of the Declaration of Independence and check the source:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them…

The founders did a careful job to work nature and nature’s God (not God’s nature) into a declaration that all could embrace. Ellis applies a revisionist thumb for God on the scale, it seems to me.

A lot of political hay has been made over “Project 2025.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz warned us that it would be the Trump Administration playbook, and you don’t create a playbook not to use it, and almost a year into Trump II Walz’s admonition seems to be true. But less attention has been paid to the notion of God’s will in the matter. If you ignore the words in the Declaration of Independence, and the spirit of it that infused the Constitution, the operating manual of our democracy, then that very document becomes an instrument of His will to people who think like Ellis. And what does that make Donald Trump in his second term?

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden told us that our democracy was on the line in the last election. If the Republican Party is focused on retrenchment in the Constitution, reading the instructions of governance through God’s will in the owners manual of the Republic, maybe the Democratic Party could breathe new life into the Declaration? The laws of nature and of nature’s God give us our unalienable rights. Not Donald Trump - nor Kamala Harris, nor Biden, nor Chuck Colson.

I think Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and John Anderson would agree with that.