Way back when …
In the depths of my personal history, I lived next door to Pete Mondale and his wife. It was back in the day. Back when I had just gained my own personal freedom and earned my own apartment in Washington DC. It was a studio in a renovated brownstone in a neighborhood on the precipice of regentrification. I paid $280 a month for a room the size of my current diningroom, a kitchen, two large closets and a bathroom which was not so large. There were five apartments in the building and one in the basement in which lived an Hispanic family of unknown quantity. An intense guy named Mike lived on the third floor; he rode a motorcycle and took me for rides every now and again. The second apartment on the third floor seemed to rotate a lot. On the second floor next door to me lived a forty-ish woman and her little boy. She was on welfare and never turned the lights on … just the television. The little boy visited me a lot. After the mother died of a heart attack and the little boy went to live with older siblings, a young woman named Amy lived in that apartment. On the first floor lived an older African-American couple. For security there was a deadbolt on the front door to the building. If I stood in the middle of my kitchen and stretched out my arms I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips … on all four walls. But it also had beautiful high ceilings and huge windows (three of them!). And I could afford a place of my own. All by myself. Nothing matched, except one set of coffee mugs, until my brother broke three of them in the porcelain sink and I slept on a mattress on the floor. But it was all mine. That, and my bicycle and my 13″ black & white television set.
The bonus was that it was next door to Pete Mondale and his wife. They, being middle aged, owned their whole house. They had regentrified it. It was beautiful. They took good care of their house. And, without being parental, kept half an eye on me. Just half. Just enough. We were not close at all, but I knew that if there was an emergency, I could knock on their door for help. There never was an emergency, but their door was always there.
Pete Mondale is the brother of Walter Mondale, who at the time was campaigning for president on the Democratic ticket. He was the first nominee in history to select a woman as a running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. They ran a exquisitely executed campaign that everyone knew was doomed from the start. They were running against the incumbent Ronald Reagan. It was gloriously hopeless from the beginning.
I had just begun dating LightHusband and his earliest memories of me are that I yell at the television during political debates. I still do, when I can stomach them. He was completely dumbfounded. Why would anyone yell at an inanimate object? But I was yelling at the foolishness of Reagan’s policies … remember trickle-down economics? … he was intrigued. Now he yells too on rare occasion.
In my family, we talk back to the television and radio and express disagreement. Especially when we think something is wrong or ill-founded (read: stupid) and we might even throw our hands up in the air as well. In fact, one time during a particularly good rant, someone asked me if I am Italian. Not one little bit, I replied. All British. Just none of the hangups. And I’m cheeky too.
All of that is to say, while I’ve been an independent for a long time, I’ve viewed life primarily through the lens of a Democrat. I worked for my senator when I was in college. Senator Stafford was a life-long Republican and I thoroughly admired him and supported his work. I believe that the government’s job is to protect it’s citizens, to provide a safety net for them should they need it, and several other things that I haven’t yet verbalized enough to write. I still don’t know who I’ll be voting for in the upcoming presidential election. There was a time when I certain it would be Obama … but recently I’ve been thinking about Nader. I know … throwing my vote away again.
In 1989 and 1990 LightHusband and I had been married a few years and we had our “conversion experience” and joined an Evangelical Free Church here in town. We took all the classes. Learned all the ropes. Joined all the clubs. Did all the right things. Learned how to fake it til we were makin’ it. Began teaching 5th&6th grade Sunday School. Sometimes the kids knew more than we did, sometimes we knew more than the kids … everyone learned in that class. I still keep in touch with a couple of those kids … who are now grown ups!! Somewhere in this time period one of the larger radio stations in the area became “Christian” so I began listening to it going to and from work each day. Thoroughly indoctrinated I was.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for President. And the whole world went to hell in a handbasket. You may not have not noticed it at the time, but it did according to all the naysayers in the Christian world. Particularly in the pulpit of many churches. I remember going to visit our pastor at some point during the election. He and his family had recently moved out of their townhouse right next to ours and were transitioning to a single family home. In the interim, they were house sitting across town. I want to take some time to set the stage for this visit because it’s important. This pastor and his wife were the people who had lead LightHusband and I to Christ. We were very close to them. Our houses had shared a wall for several years and we had shared life with them.
When we got to the house, I noticed that their two girls (homeschooled and in first-ish grade) were watching “Ren & Stimpy” that precursor to South Park without any supervision at all. It was an episode in which one character was farting on the head of the other in the bathtub. While we spent a lot of time quoting and laughing about Monty Python together as adults, I knew that this was not something either of them would condone for their very young daughters if they really knew about it. But they weren’t really paying attention. In any case, I was there to try to talk to our pastor about political discussions from the pulpit and why I didn’t believe they were appropriate. The whole “Ren & Stimpy” thing threw me off guard temporarily and of course, I was a young Christian arguing without much back up.
What I didn’t realize was that he didn’t think he had to listen to a woman about much of anything in any case so I might as well have been talking to a wall. At the time, I had no idea about the whole complementarian/hierarchical debate and the damage it could do a relationship. I also did not have a good enough command of the scriptures or the faith to be able to stand against his belief that politics and faith do mix in the pulpit. Oh, how I wish now for a Richard Land (head of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) to counter-act the prevailing wisdom of the time. “Pastors are called to serve all their parishioners, he says, and to endorse a candidate even privately is needlessly partisan and divisive. “I have an obligation to minister to all Southern Baptists, and it’s true, four out of five of them voted for George W. Bush, but I have an obligation to that other fifth as well,” he says.” [We The Purple p. 144]
While Bill Clinton weathered some moral crises during his presidency, hundreds of thousands of people did not die at his command or because of his lies. He has his flaws, but despite the claims made about him during the election cycles of 1992 and 1996, he did not turn out to be the anti-Christ. Neither did Al Gore, nor did John Kerry. It’s interesting to me that in every election cycle there are Christians who make the claim that the Democratic candidate is actually the anti-Christ. It’s no surprise to me now that there are those out there making the same claim (and more stridently than ever) about Obama.
The point is that by the time George W. Bush was handed the presidency in 2000, I had come to the decision that it was safer in Christian circles for a person to acknowledge being a homosexual than to acknowledge being a political independent or Democrat. Not that either acknowledgment would be particularly safe, mind you … just that one would lead to slightly less ostracizing than the other.
That’s wrong. On both counts, but I’m not writing about homosexuals today. Jesus is not a Republican and I’m not certain He’d vote for one. But He’s not a Democrat either, and I’m not certain He’d vote for Obama. No matter how much I like him. I began to think more seriously about how would Jesus interact with the political system that we have constructed here. It’s fairly different from the political system that he encountered in first century Jerusalem. It’s not an autocratic police state. We have a lot more freedom. Trying to take the gospels and epistles and make a one for one comparison is fairly disengenuous.
I’m not certain Jesus would vote. Although it’s hard to know. He didn’t participate in the power structures of the day, but then hardly anyone did. The idea that an average citizen could participate at any level in a system of government was as foreign to them as flying to the moon. Who would do such a thing? If he did vote, I think Jesus would put relationship first over rules. I think he’d take that into consideration when looking at candidates and their platforms. He’d think about Love, Grace, and Mercy and how that all fits together.
But when push comes to shove … I don’t think Jesus would vote. Tomorrow I’ll tell you why.
