Is America Ready for a Christian President?

By Christopher Chantrill
September 24, 2011

Leave it to a RINO. Now Gov. Mitt Romney is doing the Democrats' work for them by worrying that Rick Perry is too extreme to be electable.

That's not the way that Democrats talk about their candidates. They go straight for the guilt trip, and worry out loud, e.g., about whether America is ready for a black president.

With Obama in a spiral dive, it is starting to look as if the next president of the United States is going to be a Christian. I mean, of course, Christian in the modern sense, as someone that has come out of one of those religious right churches, or even, like Michele Bachmann, attended Oral Roberts University, now part of Pat Robertson's Regent University.

In 2008 America said it was ready for a black president. So now maybe it's time we returned the compliment to our liberal friends and ask whether America is ready for a "Christian" president.

Liberals thought that George W. Bush was America's first Christian president, and maybe a Yalie WASP could be, in the way that Bill Clinton was our first black president. But Palin, Bachmann, and Perry -- these candidates don't come out of Yale-dom. It's not that they have the sawdust trail about them -- how could they, when Elmer Gantry was so solidly early 20th century? But they are obviously strivers -- over-earnest, over-contrived, over-enthusiastic: not to the manor born.

Given the power liberals have to define the cultural horizon, it is easy to miss the importance of today's enthusiastic Christianity. Liberals are taught in their secularist seminaries that God Is Dead, and so the usual journalistic trend-spotters don't write breathless articles in The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine about the worldwide spread of enthusiastic Christianity. You need a different kind of cultural radar to make sense of the rising moral movement that Palin, Bachmann, and Perry represent. But modern history shows that moral movements are what it's all about.

Back in the middle of the last millennium, capitalist entrepreneurs invented modern industrial capitalism. We are talking not about textile factories, but about commercial plantations growing sugar and then cotton. The capitalists made lots of money out of sugar and cotton, but there was one little problem: their profits were based on slave labor, and a lot of it. Around the middle of the 18th century a moral movement arose to oppose this inhumanity, and within a century it abolished slave labor from the face of the earth. This movement had just about finished the cleanup on slavery when a new moral movement was born.

When our liberal friends descant upon racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, they are singing about the moral movement that got started 150 years ago in reaction to the inequalities of the industrial revolution -- the textile one, not the slave one. The workers in those days, moralists said, were exploited by the new industrial order. So also, in due course, were blacks, women, and gays, and the moralists created a moral movement to oppose and to right these injustices.

The old anti-slavery movement, its object achieved, faded away. But not the moral movement to mitigate worker and other exploitation. For this movement wanted not just to help the workers, but help itself. It wanted political power. Its moral zeal eventually built the authoritarian welfare state, the rule of the educated experts, and it expected the world to live happily ever after.

But, Nietzsche wrote, "power makes stupid." Or, we could say today, power makes Obama stupid, big-government stupid -- stupid enough to flush the United States down the toilet. The movement that swore to help the workers is ending by betraying them in a cesspool of corruption and powerful stupidity.

It would hardly be surprising if a moral movement arose to oppose this corrupt dynasty, this negation of all that is just and good. On the contrary, it would be shocking if such a movement did not arise.

For anyone with eyes to see, there is a moral movement now spontaneously arising in America to fight the injustice of the authoritarian welfare state. The enthusiastic Christian churches, the Tea Party ladies, the conservative movement, and at least half of the Republican presidential candidates are part of it.

Our liberal friends instinctively know that something is wrong, even if, in the argot of their psychology, they are completely in denial. That is why they get so upset over "theocrats," "Christianists," and Tea Party "terrorists." They can feel a moral movement building against them, and they cannot bear to think of the next president of the United States coming out of that movement.

As Gandhi wrote, first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Is America ready for a Christian president?