Radical Civility

On the eve of the campaigning season in the spring of 1864, two Union officers made their way to the summit of a mountain in north central Virginia. The mountain lay on the north side of the Rapidan River, which constituted the boundary between territory controlled by their side and that controlled by the Confederates. The day was cool and clean and through telescopes the officers could clearly see an enemy camp below them across the stream, where men were lounging about in shirt sleeves or doing their laundry or playing the new-fangled game called baseball. Finally the officers put down their telescopes. “My God, adjutant,” one of them said, amazed. “They’re human beings just like us!”

Human beings just like us.

This is an endangered concept in the struggle between the Christian Right and those they have identified as their enemies, a group that includes me because I am a college professor and therefore, presumptively, an agent of secular humanism; because I am a Christian who disbelieves in Scriptural inerrancy, which makes me something like a heretic; and because I hold other views which they find abhorrent. For example, I am a reluctant proponent of a woman’s right to abortion and I believe that condemnation of gays and lesbians is simply the behavior of bullies.

I may explain my views on these issues some other time. But for the present I want to explain the views of those who would despise and reject me. They have a perspective that makes as much sense to them as mine does to me. They have the same right as I do to express it, and they are children of God. Christ took the nails for them the same as for me.

It is late Wednesday afternoon and I am driving the forty-two miles that separate my home in north Columbus from Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio. The traffic is sporty at times but not too bad; I reach the church a good twenty-five minutes before the mid-week Bible study is scheduled to begin. The Bible study is taught by Pastor Russell Johnson, whom I have so far encountered only in his role as the guiding force behind the Ohio Restoration Project. The Ohio Restoration Project is a phenomenon of the political-cultural war that is ravaging this country, dividing it at a time when it is under attack and needs to be united. But as Pastor Johnson sees it, the role of his organization is defensive. He and the “Patriot Pastors” he is enlisting represent the traditional values on which this country was built and which they are only trying to preserve. It is other forces, outside forces, forces that involve people like me, that have obliged them to take up arms, as it were, and enter the lists of politics.

(Continued)