I grew up as a child of the Religious Right.
I came of age in the 1990s during the peak of Focus on the Family’s political influence and the drama of President Clinton’s sex scandals. I was taught that we could not and should not separate private character from public office. In 2000, before leaving the country to spend several years in Romania, I remember watching a debate on TV at my grandparents’ house when George W. Bush promised to restore the honor of the presidency and bring character back to the White House. Everyone cheered.
I wasn’t cheering during the 2016 election. The first big letdown came during the primary season, when I watched watch leaders and organizations who had once championed the importance of character pass over other Republican candidates in order to support Trump. That sense of disillusionment was reinforced by surveys after the election, when white evangelicals swung from being the group most likely to say that personal character mattered for public office to being the least likely group to say so.
To be clear: I sympathized with those who felt pressed to make a pragmatic choice between two unacceptable, unprincipled candidates. What grieved me was not the reluctant evangelical voter but the way so many Christians justified their choice by saying the principles they once held regarding high moral standards for people in public office had been wrong or were no longer relevant.
Public Honor vs. Private Morality
In reading The Weekly Standard last week (a conservative magazine whose editors are not afraid to take on the president when necessary), I came across a brief editorial from Barton Swaim: “So long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”
Swaim notes how little media coverage was generated by the report in January that Donald Trump’s attorney paid a pornographic actress $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. The story didn’t cause many waves in the media and didn’t cost the president much (if any) support. Some Christian leaders claimed that, even if the accusations were true, all of this was in the past and shouldn’t be held against Trump today.
Swaim sums up the lament from some observers (like me): “Well, I guess this is the new normal. I guess a sitting U.S. president can now be the sort of person who cavorts with a porn actress and has his attorney pay her off.”
Swaim has a different view. He says it’s not unusual for sex scandals to leave politicians relatively unscathed: “Politicians frequently caught in sex scandals frequently pay a surprisingly low political price at all, at least when those scandals don’t involve either (a) assault or some other serious illegality or (b) behavior so stomach-churningly loathsome that they immediately resign in disgrace.”
Bill Clinton is the best of many examples. Of course, if Swaim is right, an adulterous relationship with a porn star is no longer considered “stomach-churchingly loathsome behavior” in this day and age. And that, in itself, should tell us something about our culture.
Politicians are self-centered and arrogant, Swaim says. The problem is when “millions of Americans feel they must read about and discuss the anomalous sexual behavior of a lot of arrogant men.” He goes on:
The point is not that right and left should be more consistent in going after sexual misbehavior in public officials. The point is that, making exceptions for illegal and abusive behavior, they shouldn’t go after it at all. Politicians are mostly vain and self-willed men, and they misbehave in the way of vain and self-willed men. If we insist on a public spectacle every time we discover an act of—let’s use the word indiscretion—we won’t change our politics for the better and mainly succeed in further debasing our common life.
Swaim assures us that he is not surrendering to libertinism. Instead, he advocates for an older tradition that stretches back before the 1960s, a time when society knew how to “distinguish between public and private morality.” He quotes James Bowman’s book on honor, which claims that past generations separated public honor from private morality.
It might have been thought to be regrettable that a leader should have fallen short in his private morality, but it was essential only that he should not have fallen short in his public morality—whose public nature made it subject to the demands of honor. Thus he might lie to his wife about where he was last night, but not to his cabinet colleagues about the probable result of a proposed course of action.
Swaim believes our public discourse would be better off if Americans would once again keep quiet about their leaders’ adulterous escapades:
In the 1950s—and in the 1850s—people didn’t seriously believe their political leaders were models of private rectitude. Midcentury Americans weren’t stupid or naïve and neither were the Victorians. But they knew how to keep silent about things that deserved silence—and they were happier for it.
His conclusion: “Conservative culture warriors (are there any left these days?) may interpret this as capitulation, but it’s only by valuing the distinction between public honor and private morality that we can keep our shared culture from slipping further into prurient disorder.”
Loss of Character and Conscience
I don’t know where to begin with this argument. I’m far from being a “conservative culture warrior,” but as a pastor who loves this country and holds in high regard its institutions, it grieves me to see this kind of separation between private and public morality. This is the same kind of reasoning on display by Clinton-defenders 20 years ago.
It’s not that I’m nostalgic for some pristine era of personal honor in the past. I realize that many of our presidents have behaved scandalously in private.
But don’t we lose something profound when we say that private character no longer matters as long as “public honor” remains untainted?
How does it make sense to say that the way we keep our culture “from slipping further into prurient disorder” is to no longer hold public officials to a high standard in their marriages, or in their business dealings, or in their private lives?
Are we to find a man’s betrayal of his wife—his breaking of his most essential vow—to be merely a “regrettable indiscretion” as long as publicly he doesn’t betray his colleagues?
And even if conservative commentators change their principles in order to defend what they used to find indefensible, shouldn’t Christians be the last group to do so?
Christians who say we can split public honor from private morality go directly against the kind of human flourishing described in the New Testament—those who are pure and undivided in heart, those who have wisdom and integrity, those who are held up in contrast to the man who is double-minded and unstable in his ways.
Instead of justifying egregious behavior and turning a blind eye, Christians ought to be praying for a renewal of public honor. And we ought to be praying for God to break our hearts and lead us to repentance whenever we minimize or justify sin. We lament the moral decay of our culture. How much more should we lament the seared conscience of the church!
