Can Politics Be Moral?

What's a person to do? To approach political issues from a faith perspective is never easy; but how do we relate to this election?

Unfortunately, this dilemma is familiar by now, and we have struggled with it before--every time we confront the choice of voting for alternatives that generate no confidence and little hope. The agony of the choices, itself, suggests the roots of the problem.

The issue is not political purism, as some critics might suggest; rather it is a fundamental lack of moral substance in American politics. In one guise or another, the political status quo seems always to win, and new political imagination never has a chance. After a while, we begin to recognize that this is more than a personnel problem; the causes seem systemic.

Just as we believe that faith must be put into action, we refuse to give up the conviction that morality and politics are profoundly related. So why does it always feel like mixing oil and water? The moral issues at the heart of the public debate are usually unrecognized and ignored, or, worse yet, manipulated and twisted for politically self-serving and ideological purposes.

Genuine moral discourse and discernment seem so out of place in the media's political coverage and endless polling of voters. When "moral issues" do come up they tend to be narrowly defined and become the basis for the politics of exclusion instead of opening doors to compassion and justice.

For some years, liberalism has had a hard time talking about values, and conservatives have turned talk of values into mean-spirited scapegoating or a religious jihad. For liberals, politics has been reduced to arguments over "rights" and group entitlements. Meanwhile, the Religious Right threatens to take over the Republican Party and launch a culture war against everyone who disagrees with them. If liberalism lacks a sense of moral boundaries, conservatives have drawn the boundaries along the lines of racial, class, and gender divisions. Neither political side has demonstrated the moral leadership to help a confused and divided citizenry find common ground by taking the country to higher ground.

All this tends to make Christians committed to justice and peace feel very marginalized, especially during an election year like this one. Most of our discussions center around the old arguments of the "lesser of two evils" and the temptation to withdraw altogether.

But instead of letting our moral values marginalize us from electoral politics, perhaps it is time for us to trust those values and allow them to become a bridge, both to the majority of disaffected Americans and the still unmarked path to a spiritually sound political vision.

The truth is that the widely reported public discontent with politics and politicians this election year is, at heart, a moral revulsion. When ordinary citizens in the street tell interviewers that "the politicians are liars," they are not just showing disaffection, as the media commentators say. They are making a moral statement?and a truthful one.

Voters know that President Bush isn't going to admit that he knew all about the Iran/contra lawbreaking, and that Bill Clinton won't honestly tell us how he handled the draft. One media pundit recently described the "selective presentation of facts" as "the politicians' disease," and observed that such "duplicity is everywhere in Washington." I think "lying" is a clearer description, don't you?

Politics is not only failing to respond to people's needs; it has also failed to address our values. There are real limits to what politics can provide to better the human condition. But politics can make a great difference, for good and for evil, in the ways that we live together. Political leaders can appeal to people's best instincts (like when Martin Luther King Jr. said "I have a dream") or manipulate our worst impulses (like when George Bush talked about Willie Horton). Which values or fears are appealed to is, perhaps, the best moral test of politics.

IT IS POSSIBLE to evoke in people a genuine desire to transcend our more selfish interests and respond to a larger vision that gives us a sense of purpose, direction, even community. Real political leadership provides that very thing; it offers to lead people where, in their best selves, they really want to go.

But it's been so long since we've seen politicians who were committed to more than just getting elected that we hardly know what true political leaders look like. Bill Clinton's attack on George Bush for saying he would do anything to win the election is a joke considering his own chameleon-like capacity to change his political image depending on what group or constituency he is addressing. And the "blame game" has become so standard for both Republicans and Democrats that most people have lost all respect for both political parties. Most people know that they are both responsible for the mess we are in.

We long for political leaders who would be community builders and not polarizers; public servants who practice the art of bringing diverse peoples together for projects of common good, instead of power brokers who represent only those who have the most clout. Building consensus, creating common ground, and finding workable solutions to intractable problems is a far more difficult task than the endless ideological posturing and partisan attacking we have become so accustomed to.

Polls show that a majority of Americans find themselves in some yet to be articulated middle ground on many issues, like abortion, instead of the extremes articulated by the opposing camps. Going to the moral heart of political questions and recognizing the legitimate concerns that diverse communities bring to a particular issue is a kind of public leadership we have not seen in many years.

Our own biblical tradition provides a reliable compass for navigating troubled political waters. Indeed, the insights gained from our best religious values might enable us to transcend the ideological straitjacket that so severely restricts our public debate on both the Right and the Left. Liberalism and conservatism have both failed us, and the way forward will better be found by articulating core values for an ethical politics than by continued adherence to old political orthodoxies.

When the census bureau tells us that more people are now in poverty than any time in the last three decades, and that 40 percent of the poor are children--that is a profound moral issue if we are to take the Bible seriously. But the poor have not been a campaign issue for either side in an election year when most of the voters are middle-class suburban dwellers. The fires of Los Angeles are just five months old, yet racism has hardly been mentioned in this electoral season. And has anyone heard the epidemic rates of rape and violence against women in this country being discussed as a campaign issue?

The disintegrating economy is the campaign's leading and legitimate issue; but what about the rampant materialism that is poisoning our souls and our environment while prompting our children to kill each other in the inner cities? In a special report on the Savings and Loan crisis, NBC reported that all the bank robberies in U.S. history cost the public $2 billion, while hundreds of billions have been stolen by bank owners in the S&L scandal. The bipartisan silence on the issue during this campaign is because both parties let it happen while their own politicians profited.

Meanwhile, the Somalis are starving in a crisis, much of the Third World is starving as usual, and bloody ethnic conflict has replaced the Cold War. Yet the candidates seem to think that the only foreign policy issues worthy of mention are the maintenance of American military supremacy and the sale of jet fighters to undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia--issues on which they agree.

The kind of politicians we get derives largely from the nature of the system itself. As long as the "money factor" so dominates and skews the political process in favor of the wealthy and the powerful, any chance of genuinely democratic reform is impossible. Who gets elected is always perceived as the most important question in an election year; but how people get elected is the more important moral and political issue for the long term.

WHAT'S A PERSON TO DO? Well, first of all, to trust our belief that the relationship between politics and morality is absolutely vital to the future. I believe there is even some hope to be found in the rhetoric of "values," "vision," and "new covenant" being used by the presidential candidates. The fact that neither has much clue as to what the words mean is less important than the recognition that the American people do wish for such things.

The candidates' empty rhetoric should not keep us from addressing the profound longing for political morality that motivates the campaign sloganeering. That longing, which will not be fulfilled no matter what the outcome of this election, is the foundation upon which a new politics can be built.

It is important to find the places where our concerns intersect with the rhetoric of the campaign, even if that rhetoric seems empty. Take the words used by political candidates--change, trust, vision, equality, fairness, opportunity, empowerment, hope--and push for what those words really mean. However sincere or insincere the words may be, we need to probe the implications: "All right, you said it--let's talk about what it really means."

Where does the rhetoric of politicians engage our moral concerns? Where must we strongly disagree, and where do we agree with the words and push for the substance?

Politics must begin to address moral human values. And we should be ready to work with anyone who is ready to do that, regardless of their political background or inclinations. We should speak from experience, from the concrete human situations in which we are deeply involved--housing, health care, hunger, the environment, family services, conflict resolution, relief and development, inner-city children, or international human rights--rather than from theoretical concerns. Most critically, let us more and more clearly articulate the essential moral character of the many crises we confront and the choices we must make.

It must be stated that to perpetuate the status quo with its many victims is simply not morally acceptable. Neither the inequality built into the system nor the irresponsibility it generates are acceptable. Controlling or abandoning the poor are not the only alternatives; empowerment does transcend both liberal and conservative solutions.

The false choice between economy and environment is suicidal to a society, as is the failure to respect and value its racial and ethnic diversity. Nurturing strong families with children does not require discrimination against gay men and lesbians. And choosing life should not force women to be backed into vulnerable and dangerous corners. To ignore the demands for justice, peace, and a healthy environment in other places around the world will ultimately deny them for ourselves.

We need a new moral discourse on politics that transcends present ideological options and begins to open up some new possibilities. For now, we simply cannot place hope in the electoral process that it cannot deliver. The system itself must be fundamentally changed by an alternative vision that is most likely to emerge outside of it first, as most great social movements in history have done.

That reality makes all of our present work for social and spiritual transformation even more important. By being faithful to a moral vision of politics in our own lives and communities, we are making our best contribution and offering our most profound participation. However we vote--or don't vote--in this election is secondary to all of that. The little islands of hope we can help create are potential harbingers of a different political future for this country.

We will not build that future with a negative message, but rather with concrete demonstrations of what moral politics looks like. That is our prophetic calling.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.