Tony Campolo, from the first time I heard him in 1980, has been a constant source of reminder, challenge, renewal, and “caller forth of gifts”, and a witness to Biblical accountability. He has been prophetic witness to the Church in America, calling it to account for “The Success Fantasy” (determining what is really success as the Bible portrays and contrasts that with the way “Americans” have come to view it — which has always stuck with me when I hear Bush use the phrase “American way of life” (as Reagan did also), keeping us attuned to the social dimensions of the gospel, asking questions about the blurring of lines between Christians and their politics (and also , the use of politics to achieve and live out or implement Biblical mandates — many of which are embedded in the Democratic party platform ) –(Campolo rarely if ever says that the Democratic platform expresses more “Biblical affinitiies” for those who consider the social and compassion dimensions to be important — but I know he believes this)

…..I hear staunch Republicans complain that although Campolo never says “I’m a Democrat because they express more Biblical longings and seek to provide help to the less fortunate”, he uses language and stresses things which “sound like a Democrat”….the same was hurled at the Sojourners “God is Not a Republican or Democrat” statement…..people complained that the Statement that was published in that campaign “sure sounded like the Democratic party”…. that’s probably becuase so many of the Democratic party activists are themselves Biblically sensitive and socailly /politically Christians who have brought Biblical language to the platform whcih has been adopted over the years (like justice, reconciliation, peace, …..radical stuff like that)

I had majored in Sociology in college, and had a couple of particularly good professors who I took every chance I got. I took a Sociology of Religion course from one of these profs who described himself as an agnostic, but I always sensed there was more to his spirituality than I had seen in most Christians. I was in the Baptist Student Union at college, and I was able to observe some of the dynamics and “sociology” at work in the Baptist diversity that existed there. There already existed a “cultural divide” between prospective ministry students who were planning on attending one of 2 seminaries: Southern (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, where I was headed) and Southwestern BTS) (SBTS and SWBTS). Southern is about 3 hours away from Murray State University, where we were all in school. Southwestern is in Fort Worth, much further away (perhaps a full day’s drive). But Southern had a kind of theological stigma in the minds of conservative students — it had “too many liberal elements”, and Soutwestern claimed to be “more Biblical”.

What I found when I got to Southern just made me shake my head and feel sorry for the misunderstanding the conservative movement had of the idea of theological diversity. There was no “coldness” at all at Southern, which was the often used term to describe the spirituality that pervaded at Southern. There were many “conservatives” at Southern. Of course, I found friends among the guys on my dorm hallway, and many of us were deeply disaappointed when Reagan beat Carter in 1980. Many of the things which the newscasts were saying about political changes in the world came true (like deep cuts in social programs— later, in 1984, I was to become acquainted with people in Lutheran Social Services in Phoenix, and I learned first hand about the effect the Reagan budget cuts had on the less fortunate, and also how the Reagan international actions like the wars in Central America, where Reagan was seeking funding for the Contras, and ended up secretly funneling money through various channels anyway in the infamous Iran -Contra scandals, featuring Ollie North, who became something of a cult hero for the Religious Right via his role in this scandal.

Hearing Campolo that summer of 1980, and then returning to seminary that fall and hearing several professors talking about ploitical issues as they impact theology and ministry and ethics as the electi on drew near, I had been “primed” by Campolo for that political season, and before that, my contact with the stories of The Church of the Saviour starting in 1976, and Clarence Jordan and Koininia in 1974, I had a growing sensitivity to the role of the Church in “politics”— and how politics was a natural intersection for faith in terms of taking the faith to the streets and into action. The Church of the Saviour has since been the best model I have experienced for a balanced Inward-Outward flow. They recognize and live out a structured, intentional plan for community that encompasses the inner life to a degree I’ve not since seen anywhere else, and an “outward” component that recognizes it cannot sustain without the Inner Journey (and vice-versa, thus the name of one of Elizabeth O’Connor’s books: Journey Inward, Journey Outward).

For me, the deck is stacked quite unevenly in the issues at stake in this presidential race. The verbal claims made by the Bush administration, and their record in their first four years, hold up a stark contrast between what they ran on in 2000, and what they’ve actually DONE in that time. THe only thing they’ve made good on is the tax cuts, which has been done with a fundamentalist insistence that it must be done no matter what the circumstance. Paul O’Neill tells us in the book The Price of Loyalty that he could scarcely believe that the Bush administration could proceed with these economic dogmas with hardly any “consulting” with the people who were supposed to be, assumed to be, advising them.

Josh Marshall, blogger and Washington DC political writer, describes it this way:
Telling the majority of voters that your tax policies are designed to shift more of the burden of paying for federal government onto them is not a very effective way of eliciting their support. So, instead, Bush pitched his tax cuts as the solution to whatever problems were most in the news at the time. During the election, he argued that tax cuts were a way to refund to voters part of a budget surplus that people like Alan Greenspan worried was growing too big. By early 2001, it became clear that those surpluses were never going to materialize. So the administration cooked up an entirely new rationale: The tax cut was needed as fiscal stimulus to pull the economy out of an impending recession. In other words, the tax cut that was tailor-made for a booming economy made equally good sense in a tanking one. When the economy eventually began to grow again but only at feeble levels, the administration insisted that things would have been worse without the tax cuts (another assertion impossible to prove or disprove). And when, because of that anemic growth, coupled with gains in productivity, the unemployment rate continued to rise, the administration had yet another excuse: A new round of tax cuts, they said, would generate jobs. from The Post-Modern President: Deception, Denial, and Relativism: what the Bush administration learned from the French.

Further, any contrar opinion, especially among the adminstration’s own “experts” is quickly squelched (if they can persuade the expert to do so):

Within the White House, the opinions of whole groups of agency experts were routinely dismissed as not credible, and unhelpful facts were dismissed as the obstructionist maneuverings of bureaucrats seeking to undermine needed change.

O’Neill was one of the first, along with Faith based director John DiIulio, to stand their ground and get ousted by the administration (or driven to resign, as in DiIulio’s case). The door has been a constantly moving revolving door.

The latter, DiIulio, was one of the first warning signs for me that something was phony about the Bush “faith-based initiative”. And when another of the “Bush White House” leaders (DeLay) who makes quite a big deal about his “faith” is now being reprimanded every other day for ethics violations (and one of his ethical issues is his connection to people involved in and profiting from Gambling Casinos in Native American reservation towns — an issue that doesn’t quite jibe with Delay’s Christian fundamentalist constiuents. )

DiIulio later wrote Ron Suskind , the writer who told Paul O’Neill’s story in The Price Of Loyalty, a long email describing his disgust with the “the complete lack of a policy apparatus” in the Bush white house. The “window dressing” to which nearly all of the “administration experts” have been relegated speaks volumes about the narrow confines in which this government really operates. Bob Woodward reported that Colin Powell noticed how Bush never made any major decisions until after he had met privately with Cheney, often doing so by asking everybody else to leave before he announced his decision.

It seems to me that a large part of the Bush administration is simply window dressing to maintain the appearance of large consutations taking place, but evidence seems to show that most of these “appointees” became isolated from the actual decision making process , particularly those who advised against some of those predetermined strategies. This was never more apparent as this past week, when another “Bush appointed panel” found that basically ALL of the claims abnout the Iraqi threat were false. The Bush administration , amazingly, claims that the finding support them, only NOW, it’s because Saddam had intent. He was “disabled”, and yet his “willingness and desire” constituted grave threat. They lied, a nd now they are desperate, and I hope these narrowing poll numbers are largely because of the dwindling trust of the American people.