I’ve been reading a bit in Crusade tonight (James Carroll’s just published collection of Boston Globe articles since September 11, 2001. The following is a link to one of columns included in the book (p. 259)

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / But George McGovern was right

“It’s a we/they world,” Paul Nitze said when he served in the Nixon administration. “It’s us against the Soviets. Either we get them first, or they get us first.” (Nitze was Nixon’s idea of an arms control negotiator.) This apocalyptic way of perceiving the enemy was already outmoded in the early ’70s, but it would take American statesmen another two decades to see it. Nitze, Richard Perle, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Richard Cheney — such apostles of the “we/they world” were empowered in 1972, and if their bipolar vision had not been undercut by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Cold War would still be on. Indeed, these men of 1972 are back, aiming to create another.

I was only 16 when McGovern ran, and I knew nothing of McGovern’s views. My Dad was probably for Nixon, so I certainly didn’t hear anything memorable or positive. It was 2 years away from my first exposures to any sort of prolonged exposure to radical Christianity (like with Clarence Jordan, or a couple of years after that, to The Church of the Saviour, and a couple years after that, to the Reagan years, and my personal experiences with the Christian Right as it reared its ugly head in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptists have baswically no peace groups left. All of them “transferred” to the CBF or to other groups. EthicsDaily.com (which today includes a review of The Fog of War ) is one such outpost of Baptist people providing resources for those who still seek to live and explore and a WHOLE GOSPEL within a TRUE Baptist tradition.

Gordon Cosby, Clarence Jordan, Ethics Daily, Glen Stassen (my Christian Ethics prof at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1980)…all of these had a hand in spekaing to me from within a Southern Baptist framework, but was standing broadly in the Biblical tradition in a way which sought to speak that truth to power. None of them has a place in the present Southern Baptist convention, and that Convention suffers a deep spiritual paralysis as a result of severing the larger part of the gospel from its comprehension and understanding and transmittal of the Christian tradition. Sad, but undeniably true. I suppose there is some chance of revival. We can always pray.