The American election: another perspective.

Edward McBride's recent C.I. article presents the standard conservative Catholic view of the American election ("The American Election", CI, January 2005, pp. 13-15). Perhaps readers would like to consider the matter from a somewhat different perspective.

The Church weighed in by stating that Catholics must not vote for a "pro-choice" candidate, and Bush won a convincing victory. Faithful Catholics were left with only one option if they wished to make their votes count. Or were they?

Did a lack of clear thought and competent leadership hide an option that Catholics missed? Am I talking about Ralph Nader, the rumpled champion of equally rumpled causes? Of course not. But what about the option of staying away from the polls as an expression of Catholic solidarity? What if the American hierarchy had convinced Catholics that not voting en masse would tell both political parties that Catholics were about to again become a voter bloc to be taken seriously. What a news story that would have made. But why do that? George Bush was the pro-life candidate, wasn't he? And we were obliged to vote for him, weren't we? Suppose those two questions were taken as real rather than rhetorical.

No matter which party had won, the brows of both Republican and Democrat leaders would be even more furrowed than usual, as the realization dawned that Catholic voters could be the key in the 2006 congressional elections and in the 2008 run for the White House. Just think what the candidates would be saying and promising then. But few people seemed to have thought beyond the choices between Bush and Kerry. My own sons voted for Bush, saying, "At least, he's a Christian." My questions are these: Does Bush represent Christian morality because he signed a bill banning "partial birth" abortion and because he endorses traditional marriage? And here's the really big question: is George Bush a Christian? The answers are anything but obvious.

Is George Bush a Christian?

Here's an example that illustrates what I think happened. Years ago, when my wife and I moved to another city, we were looking at a house for rent. The man who owned the house asked us if we went to church, and we said yes. He said he hoped we went to the Church of God and then went on to explain that he could not understand why anyone would go to any other church. "It's the Church of God," he said, almost shouting. "Why doesn't everyone go there?"

The poor fellow had assumed that the name said it all. He is an extreme case, to be sure, but he is not the only one who makes that wrong assumption. Let's take "pro-life" for example. I liked it better when we were simply anti-abortion. That is specific. If we were pro-life, too, as our Catholicism bids us also to be, we would be less likely to equate pro-life with (and thereby unconsciously limit it to) anti-abortion. That's one way false assumptions are born. They simply sneak in under cover of darkness.

Certainly, those who promote abortion and homosexual "marriage" do not represent Christian morality. We can be sure of that even though they claim the high ground by declaring that such aberrant behavior is consistent with freedom, choice, democracy, and so on. But we are not entitled to misuse those words just because the culture of death does so. And that brings us to George Bush and his foreign policy adventures.

No spin doctors, please.

Let us eliminate the spin doctors' versions before getting down to real business. Anyone who still thinks that Iraq presented any kind of military or terrorist threat to the United States needs to look at the facts, which are so readily available that there is no point in repeating them here. Afghanistan was something else again, but all the rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was simply that. Moreover, Washington knew and ignored the truth about the absence of those weapons. Why? To unseat a dictator? The great moral imperative of bringing down Hussein is also contradicted by fact. Hussein's regime, though brutal, was no more and in some cases far less so than dozens of others around the world, some of which have favoured-nation trade agreements with the United States.

And let us not forget the half million Catholics who lived in Baghdad and who were free to practise their religion under Hussein. Unfortunately, the invasion removed that freedom for good. Given the recent attacks on Catholic churches, Christmas Masses this year had to be cancelled for security reasons. Future prospects are equally grim, given the odds against a Shia government's (the Shia are 60% of the population) continuing Hussein's policy of religious freedom. Many Catholics have been forced out of their devastated homeland, which we have no reason to believe they loved any less than we love ours.

Another, far more plausible, explanation posited for Bush's invasion of Iraq is that he believes he has been commissioned by God to reshape the Middle East. In fact, there are credible reports of his saying exactly that. Let us be clear about one thing: trying to reshape the world by means of military power proceeds not from the humility that characterizes a Christian. People my age remember that we fought defensive wars against others who wanted to do the same thing. To understand George Bush, we must go beyond the "noise" that fills the air around the phrase "born-again Christian" and determine exactly what it means.

Born-again Christian

In the 1830s, an Anglican priest by the name of John Nelson Darby helped found the Plymouth Brethren movement. Darby's goals and those of his movement were to redefine the millennium as it had been known and taught for 18 centuries. He taught that the relationship between God and Man was really defined by seven "dispensations" designed by God to test Man's obedience. Those who want to know about these dispensations and the religion it has spawned are referred to John H. Gerstner, Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth: A Critique of Dispensationalism (Brentwood TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1991).

The bottom line with Dispensationalists concerns the end-times and, specifically, the pre-tribulation rapture. That's the event that has all "born-again Christians" sailing off naked into the blue yonder, leaving behind their neatly folded clothes, along with the rest of humanity, including Catholics. Nearly all evangelical Protestants now accept this teaching. Their bible is the Scofield bible, which was produced about a hundred years ago as an adjunct to Dispensationalist theology. I am personally acquainted with people who ardently believe in the Scofield bible, including its interpretation of the end-times.

Is Mr. Bush a Dispensationalist? All the signs point to it. Is Jerry Falwell a Dispensationalist? I don't think there can be much doubt about that. Are Dispensationalists Christians? I think the answer has to be no. Its differences from the Church are neither culture-based, as was at least part of the reason for the Protestant Reformation, nor even theological. They go to the very heart of the Christian message and, most definitely, contradict the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church.

Are Dispensationalists Christian?

The teachings they retain: viz., anti-abortion and anti-homosexual-acts, happen to be hot-button items in North American politics, thanks to the failure of the Catholic laity to prevent the collapse of Christian culture. But does that mean that Dispensationalists thereby inherit the right to represent Christian morality? Here's a quick litmus test. Does anyone really believe that the culture of life can be brought about by bombing and armed invasion? And does any reasonable person believe that the "non-democratic" nations of the world are waiting to be "liberated" by the United States armed forces?

The foray into Iraq has succeeded in producing an effect that should have been expected but apparently was not. It has managed to unite previously disparate Muslim factions against a common enemy: the United States. But Mr. Bush still doesn't seem to get it. His conception of downtrodden masses longing for "freedom and democracy" as the overriding universal in human history is more than just simplistic; it reflects an unparalleled ignorance of cultural history. And just behind the absurdity of the abstraction lies the crushing human drama being played out every day in Iraq.

I believe that Bush's Dispensationalism may be the basis of a policy that furthers the culture of death, just as surely as Kerry's abstract vision of abortion is a political expedient that follows in the same track. So, is Bush a better president than the misled and confused John Kerry would have become? The answer depends on a final question: would America be better off standing by helplessly while Kerry follows his position to its ad absurdum conclusion or standing by helplessly while Bush marches the world towards Armageddon, which Dispensationalists can scarcely wait for? (They get to fly away just before the balloon goes up.) Any answer that rests on numbers killed (unborn children vs. American soldiers and Iraqi citizens) will not resonate with those who value individual human life.

Summary

I will summarize my case by stating that I think those Catholics who believe George W. Bush's anti-abortion, pro-traditional-marriage statements make him a bona fide pro-lifer and friend of Catholicism misunderstand either Mr. Bush or Catholicism, possibly both.

Editorial reader's comment:

* Staying away from the polls and not voting to show we have power is not a reasonable position.

* How can the author say that "Washington knew and ignored the truth about the absence of those weapons?"

* There is no proof here that Bush is a Dispensationalist. Not a bit. These are three fatal arguments

Casey Ahern is a U.S. Air Force veteran of the Korean War. He married a Canadian and writes from the border city Sarnia, ON.