Canadian-Americans, The Civil War, Hillary Clinton and a Strange New Respect for Religion

It’s an odd thing about us transplanted Canadians. In truth, most of my siblings and I (there are eight children) were born in Canada of American citizens, which gives us dual citizenship. The odd thing is that we are among the relatively few Americans who regularly keep an eye on things Canadian. That attentiveness is evident in the pages of First Things . An additional and important reason for that is that we have a lot of Canadian subscribers. I left Canada at age 14. Today it sounds like something close to child neglect, but in our family, as in many others of the time, it was assumed that by about age 14 or 15 you were old enough to get on with your life more or less on your own. More or less, since I went to a church-related school in Nebraska, where my oldest sister, Mildred, was married to a faculty member. That was for the third year of high school. Toward the end of the year, the president of the school¯whom I would later meet as president of the seminary I attended, Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis¯suggested that I might be happier somewhere else. I had organized beer parties in the dormitory and a panty raid on the girls’ residence. (When did panty raids go out of campus fashion? That surely is a historical marker worthy of scholarly attention.) Only a little to my surprise, I discovered that the school viewed such activities with distinct disapproval. For reasons with which I will not bore you, I then went to Cisco, Texas, to finish high school, but dropped out after a month or two. High school was an awful bore, although setting off explosives with the Bunsen burners in science class was fun. That, too, met with distinct disapproval. So I got some friends and relatives to pony up a few hundred dollars and bought a grocery store and service station about six miles outside Cisco. My claim to fame is having been the youngest member of the Chamber of Commerce, at age 15. Cisco’s claim to fame is that that is where Conrad Hilton had his first hotel. In some Hilton hotels today you can still find a book on Conrad’s building of his empire, including a picture of the hotel in Cisco. I don’t follow pop culture closely, but I understand today that the crown of the empire is a naughty establishment called Paris Hilton. As for Cisco, it is in West Texas, about which people say there is nothing wrong with it that water and a few good people wouldn’t remedy. To which the response is that the same might be said of hell. But I digress. I was on the subject of transplanted Canadians and how they keep an eye on one another. That’s one reason I read David Frum with some regularity. He was born of Jewish parents in Toronto, and I of German Lutheran parents in the Ottawa Valley. From our northern perspective, Toronto was the Deep South. One thing we American-Canadians have in common is the capacity to view the American scene with a sense of puzzlement and wonder. Of course that’s true of immigrants to the United States more generally, and you might think that Canada is not foreign enough or distant enough to provide such perspective, but you would be wrong about that. When in grade school in Pembroke, Ontario, I took powerful pride in all those maps on the school room wall with the British Empire colored in pink and covering a fifth of the world. King George VI, Churchill, and, for that matter, McKenzie King, the prime minister of Canada, were to my friends and me immensely more important figures than FDR, who, for some reason I never quite understood, my Dad, a Lutheran pastor, intensely disliked. In any event, among the things on which I had a distanced perspective was the American Civil War. Here is where David Frum comes into the story. He recently posted on NRO that he and his family drove to Canada for vacation this summer and along the way they listened to the audio of Shelby Foote’s great work The Civil War: A Narrative . Frum writes:

I finished this first volume enthralled but also uncertain whether to commit to the 55 listening hours of Volume II and the 70 hours of Volume III. This is not the Civil War as it was, a nightmare slaughter, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans died in fear, pain, mud, and filth, in terrifying battles under often incompetent leaders. It is, though, the Civil War the way most Americans prefer to remember it: heroic, gallant, transforming, with claims to justice on both sides, and peace and reconciliation as the reward for northern victory and the recompense for southern defeat.

I am embarrassed for David Frum. As it happens, this very summer at the family cottage in Quebec, I read all three volumes of Foote’s magnum opus. (You may remember Foote as the very engaging talking head in Ken Burns’ PBS series on the Civil War.) Contra David, it has enough "fear, pain, mud, and filth in terrifying battles under often incompetent leaders" to last one a lifetime. I also read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals , on how Lincoln’s crafty political skills kept his cabinet together during the course of the war, and both works are the subject of a reflection on the justice and injustice of the Civil War in a forthcoming issue of First Things . But, for the moment, my purpose is simply to register a complaint to the Society of Canadian Transplants (if there is such a thing) against David Frum’s letting the side down by failing to demonstrate the wisdom that is supposed to accompany our perspectival distance from the puzzlement and wonder that is the United States.

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I rarely agree with Katha Pollitt, a star writer in The Nation . Truth to tell, I rarely agree with much of anything that appears in that magazine of unreconstructed leftisms. But Ms. Pollitt has some interesting things to say about the religion factor in the culture and political wars, and especially about the Democrats’ newly found "respect" for religion. She writes: "You would think that the left would savor this new, muscular secularism. But that’s not what has happened. In the progressive media, the atheist bestsellers have gotten a lukewarm reception. Writers continue to blame leftists’ and liberals’ lack of respect for God for the rise of evangelical Christianity, the triumph of the Republican Party, the conservative impulses of the working class and the general failure of events to turn out as we would like." What’s the point of all this chatter about respecting religion? asks Ms. Pollitt. She’s supposed to be nice to people who are religious or even become religious herself? There’s "something both grandiose and masochistic" in this leftist breast-beating about having neglected religion. "We’re far too few in number to have so huge an effect. I’ll bet most right-wing Christians have never even seen a copy of The Nation . We might as well just say what we think. Besides, a huge percentage of us are Jewish! If we found ‘faith’ we’d be brushing up on our Hebrew, not accepting Christ as our personal savior or filling up the pews at Our Lady of Sorrows." No matter what lefties did, she says, right-wing Christians would still think them "suspect, alien, and bound for hell." That’s not true, of course. Born again is born again, regardless of one’s politics. Not only, Pollitt complains, are those Democrats urging a new "respect" for religion, they want it to be "authentic." She quotes Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic consultant and evangelical Christian who said on CNN, “This is not about Jesus-ing up the party, so to speak . . . . It just won’t work if it’s seen as a cynical ploy.” "Right," says Pollitt, "Make it a sincere ploy. Don’t be like poor Howard Dean claiming Job was his favorite book of the New Testament¯which, come to think of it, would have been a clever Jewish joke, if Dean was Jewish. Hire faith-friendly outreach consultants, liaisons and gurus; show up at the Sojourners’ Forum on Faith, Values and Poverty to get Jim Wallis’s blessing; and most of all talk about your deep, intimate, personal belief in God¯better yet, Jesus¯as often as you possibly can. Coriolanus had to show his wounds in the marketplace, and you, Democratic presidential hopeful, have to publicize your spiritual life going all the way back to Sunday school. But at least Coriolanus had the sense to be embarrassed." Hillary Clinton is a case in point, says Pollitt. "It’s bad enough that she actually supports faith-based initiatives and¯something I very much doubt Jesus would do¯lobbied for Bill Clinton’s crime bill, which expanded the death penalty. Do I really need to know that she prays that God will help her lose weight? Kudos to Dennis Kucinich and Joseph Biden, who have refused to discuss their relations with the deity." Ms. Pollitt says it’s fine with her if a candidate believes in God. "Unlike some militant atheists, I don’t think it matters for public policy that Obama believes Christ absolves his sins, or that Hillary Clinton hopes God has time to help her pass up dessert. We all believe weird things. My parents, for instance, believed for decades that the Moscow show trials were legit. But all this wearing of religious faith on the political sleeve is a huge pander, and lacking in dignity besides. Next they’ll be talking about how their marital troubles have made their marriages stronger than ever. Oh wait, they already do that. Message to the progressive community: There are more of us secularists, skeptics, atheists and agnostics out here than you think. How about sending a little love our way, for a change?" The message is that, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats are alienating their "core constituency" with all this talk about respect for religion. Michael Gerson, former White House speechwriter and now a columnist for the Washington Post , picks up on the theme . Senator Clinton, he notes, really is serious about religion, having been formed by the liberal activist wing of her United Methodist Church. As you might expect, her understanding of religiously informed politics is very different from that of, say, James Dobson or Archbishop Chaput. "Her defense of abortion rights," says Gerson, "has been strident, even radical. She has attacked pro-life people as enemies of “evidence,” “science” and “the Constitution.” And she has blamed pro-life “ideologues” for the prevalence of abortions because of their “silent war on contraception”¯a remarkable accusation that Roman Catholic opposition to birth control is somehow responsible for abortion in America." So, says Gerson, the question is: "How are religious voters likely to respond to a religious believer who is also a social liberal? Roman Catholics, with their strong commitment to the poor, should be open to a Democratic message of economic justice. A majority of Christians, Catholic and Protestant, support the goals of broader health coverage and increased humanitarian aid abroad. But the most intensely religious Americans of both traditions also tend to be the most conservative on moral issues such as abortion. And it is hard to imagine that these voters will be successfully courted by the most comprehensively pro-choice presidential candidate in American history." All of that could dramatically change, however, if the Republican nominee is Rudy Giuliani, says Gerson. "Whatever Giuliani promised concerning the appointment of conservative judges, a pro-choice Republican nominee would blur the contrast between the parties on abortion. And between two pro-choice options, a larger number of religious voters might support the one with a stronger emphasis on poverty¯because [as Hillary Clinton frequently says] Jesus did have a lot to say about how we treat the poor." Gerson is right, of course. Those Democrat-leaning religious folk, both Catholic and evangelical, who like to play "the social justice agenda" against the "life agenda"¯failing to recognize that the greatest question of social justice in our time is the protection of innocent human life¯would have a field day were it to come down to a choice between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. "Respect for religion" can cut in surprising political directions.