Wisconsin: Poster Child for Christian Political Ethics and Christian Community Gone Sour
by James Rapp
Dietrich Bonheoffer makes the point that the Gospel enters the world on its own terms, not as the guest of any political system.
. . . the freedom of the church is not where it has possibilities, but only where the Gospel really and in its own power makes room for itself on earth, even and precisely when no such possibilities are offered to it. The essential freedom of the church is not a gift of the world to the church, but the freedom of the Word of God itself to gain a hearing.1
The Evangelical community encourages its members to seek positions of public trust and authority. However, the Church itself must remain free. It cannot perform its prophetic role if it is captive to partisan politics. The Church must answer, not to party or political office but to God who has positioned it to provide its members with prophetic protection and guidance as they live and work in a fallen world. When the Church fails to serve those functions, its “King Davids” are left to struggle with the temptations of power with no “Nathan” to keep them on the path of moral or ethical rectitude.
Defining the problem
Politics is about nothing at all if it is not about ethics. Electioneering, policy formation, legislation, implementation, and constituent services – every step is paved with ethical imperatives, often ethical dilemmas. Good governance exists only when politicians are held to high ethical standards by the public, and by themselves. Politicians who make an open profession of faith in Christ – especially those who implicitly or explicitly make their faith a reason for people to vote for them – must be unflinching in their dedication to ethical behavior. Not that they never fail in its execution; everyone does. However, they must quickly and honestly respond to their failures with sincere and appropriate remedies. Further, Christian politicians need their church communities to shine an objective, honest light upon their conduct, serving as prophetic voices to alert them when they violate ethical standards of behavior.
Though there is an ethical dimension to all public policy, there is frequent disagreement, even within the Christian community, regarding what is or is not ethically acceptable. So, in the United States, we have developed the political expedients of discussion, compromise, and ultimately majority vote to decide competing visions of right and wrong. While it is often said that morality can’t be legislated, that is exactly what is done in a democratic system. Thus morality under one party’s administration may become immorality (or at the least, illegality) under the next.
Therefore it is crucial that the discussions, compromises, and voting that shape public policy be the work of men and women of high ethical character who are public spirited servants, not opportunistic, party-driven ideologues, willing to sacrifice principle for victory.
Purpose of the Essay
This essay asserts three standards of ethical behavior as the basis for judging any politician’s fitness for office. The first standard requires commitment to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with lapses or errors quickly admitted and corrected when brought to light. Second, the politician must be fair, consistently holding himself to the same standard he or she requires of others. Third, the politician must have integrity, reflecting the same ethical values in public and private life. For Christian politicians these are not just qualifiers for public office, but primary marks of their professed faith in Christ. It is imperative that Christian politicians and public servants adhere to these standards since their actions inevitably reflect, for good or ill, upon their church, their fellow believers, and their Lord.
A case study from Wisconsin
The election of Governor Scott Walker, in November 2010, and his subsequent conduct in office, provides an instructive case study in Christian political ethics gone sour. The rest of this essay applies the standards set out above to Governor Walker’s election campaign and his first two months in office.
Walker, a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, son of a Baptist minister, member of a non-denominational evangelical church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, burst into office with a plethora of budgetary, legislative, and administrative initiatives. Many had not previously been mentioned in his campaign speeches, and nearly all were destined to disturb his opponents and dismay even a number of his supporters. It is not productive in this essay to discuss the ethical dimensions of Governor Walker’s proposals although each has ethical implications. What is pertinent to this essay is the governor’s conduct leading up to his election and in the weeks since the election as his plan was hotly debated and eventually passed into law. Has he been truthful, fair, and displayed integrity?
The Prime Ethic: Truthfulness
We will start by examining Governor Walker’s honesty in his political ads and in his statements after the election.
It quickly became clear that Governor Walker’s Christian ethic did not impel him to create political ads more honest than those of his non-Christian opponents. His approved ads, paid for out of his campaign funds, suffered from the same unethical manipulation of images and facts that plague most political ads these days: innuendo, half-truths, complete falsehoods, photo-shopped images, sinister musical underscores, and accusatory messages delivered in dark tones by deep-voiced professional actors. Hardly a testimony to a high Christian ethic of truthfulness.
But of equal concern, 10 statements of fact in his campaign ads were scrutinized by the impartial fact-checking organization, Politifact.com.2 The resulting rulings were: one true, three half true, four barely true, and two false. Let us look at that in another way. Ten percent of the time candidate Walker told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Ninety percent of the time he told something less than the whole truth. Sixty percent of the time what he presented as true was judged less than half true. And, 20 percent of the time, his statements were judged flatly untrue. The issue for a Christian candidate with that kind of record has to be, how does my carelessness with the truth reflect upon the faith I profess to hold?
Politifact.com also rated 26 of Governor Walker’s statements of fact since taking office, most relating to the debate surrounding his controversial “Budget Repair Bill” which stripped public employees of nearly all their bargaining rights.3 The resulting rulings were: four true, three mostly true, two half true, six barely true, 10 false, and one pants on fire. Again let’s look at those results as percentages. Fifteen percent of the time Governor Walker was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Eighty-five percent of the time he was presenting something less than the whole truth. Forty-two percent of the time he was not telling the truth at all. Walker’s record of truthfulness in office is abysmally worse than it was as candidate – a sad commentary on his ethics and blight on his faith claims.
The Golden Ethic: Fairness
The Golden Rule has been variously rendered by those who value it and those who mock it. Jesus said, “As you would have others do unto you, so ought you to do unto them.” Confucius’ version was, “Do not do to others that which we do not want them to do to us.” Some jokers make it say, “Do to others what they did to you.” Or, more cynically, “Do unto others before they get the chance to do it to you.” But the Greek philosopher, Thales, best captures the advice that politicians, particularly Christians, should heed, “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.”
Let’s look. The Governor has blamed the previous two administrations for “kicking the [budget deficit] can down the road” through borrowing to close a budget gap each biennium. He vowed he would not do so. But his “Budget Repair Bill” proposed just that – refinancing over $100 million in debt, stretching the payments out, increasing the interest paid. So much for the Golden Ethic.
Governor Walker complained that his predecessor and the previous legislature passed their budget repair bill “in the middle of the night” with no public input or opportunity for opponents to amend it. In fact, that is what happened with his own actions. Shame, shame, shame! But Governor Walker, ignoring the Golden Ethic, attempted to pass his “Budget Repair Bill” through the Senate without allowing Democrats to debate the bill or offer amendments to it, triggering the infamous “Escape of the Wisconsin 14” to safe havens in Illinois, leaving the Senate one person short of the 20-person quorum needed to pass an appropriations bill, thus blocking passage for three weeks. When the bill finally came up for debate in the Assembly it was brought to a vote through a contested parliamentary maneuver, in the middle of the night, so quickly that many Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, failed to get their votes registered in the 17 seconds allowed for voting. The Assembly quickly adjourned amid a chorus of shocked Democrats chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Governor Walker did not decry the Assembly’s middle of the night action, or insist that they rescind the action and do it again, in full daylight, under legitimate rules. Another vote against the Golden Ethic.
Senate Democrats asked Governor Walker to remove the “union busting” measures from his “Budget Repair Bill” so they could be debated separately. (In Wisconsin, budget bills must deal only with revenue and appropriations and require a quorum of 20 senators to be present for voting.) The governor insisted that the repeal of union bargaining rights was an essential element of his budget and thus was inseparable from his fiscal policy. He declared that he would not compromise on that issue. He further argued that delay in passing the bill would force the lay-off of 1500 state workers and cause the state to miss a deadline for “kicking the can down the road,” a.k.a. refinancing the state’s $100 million debt. But suddenly, after a three-week standoff, in a feat of political gymnastics difficult to explain, the governor decided that the portions of the bill that dealt with union rights were not essentially monetary and therefore, by removing revenue and appropriation items from his “Budget Repair Bill,” it could be passed by the Republican senate without the 20-member quorum. The irony of a “Budget Repair Bill” with no monetary implications requiring the Constitutional quorum somehow slipped right by the governor and his advisors. So, with only Republican senators present, a re-worked, non-monetary “Budget Repair Bill” was passed, stripping away nearly all union rights for state workers. Meanwhile, the monetary provisions of the original “Budget Repair Bill” never got passed. The Legislature adjourned, leaving the current budget $100 million out of balance, using the governor’s own estimate, and showing that the governor really had one goal in his “Budget Repair Bill” – elimination of union bargaining rights. The ethical and moral acrobatics performed by the governor to achieve his desired goal is truly dismaying. Ethic the Governor ignored: “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.”
The Rock Bottom Ethic: Integrity
A Christian politician should be the same person in private that he is in public. We don’t often get to see or hear our politicians in their private moments, speaking to their friends, family, and advisors. But Governor Walker was the unfortunate victim of a ruse. A blogger, Ian Murphy, posing as David Koch, a wealthy financier of Republican and Tea Party campaigns, and a heavy contributor to Governor Walker’s election in 2010, managed to get through to the Governor and spent 20 minutes drawing out of him information he had not told the public and which the public would never have known if the faux conversation with Murphy/David Koch had not revealed it.4
The call lasted almost twenty minutes, consisting of 3418 words spoken, 3362 (94.1%) of them, the governor’s. One commentator humorously declared that the governor was “as chatty as a middle school girl on a sleepover.” For nearly 19 of the 20 minutes the Governor regaled his supposed benefactor with information about the budget crisis. Question: How many ordinary Wisconsin citizens could have gotten one minute of the governor’s time that day?
More important than the time the governor gave to an imagined powerful, rich, non-constituent benefactor, is what the Governor said that differed from his public declarations.
First, it is important to note that the governor claimed, on several occasions, that no one should have been surprised at the content of his “Budget Repair Bill” because he had clearly stated his objectives during the campaign for governor. (No amount of searching has turned up any mention by Walker, before the release of the “Budget Repair Bill, of stripping unions of their rights, nor has the governor provided any evidence that he had mentioned it.) Tellingly, in his conversation with the faux Donald Koch he boasted that his attack on the unions was inspired by Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Air Traffic Controller’s Union. Walker described his last cabinet meeting before rolling out his “Budget Repair Bill” as a party at his home, after his trip to the Super Bowl.5 In his words, it was “kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb.” His “Budget Repair Bill” would not have landed like a “bomb” if he had clearly described its contents in advance. Ethical principle: Say one thing, do another.
Further, Governor Walker revealed to his faux friend a deception he and his Republican colleagues were assessing to lure the Democrats back from Illinois by “putting out an appeal to the Democrat leader that I would be willing to sit down and talk to him . . . but only if all 14 of them come back and sit down in the state Assembly.” (Emphasis added.) The catch: The deception, would be that once they “sat down” they would have given Republicans the quorum needed to pass his bill. He had no intention of negotiating with the Democrats. “Hell,” he said, “I’ll talk to them. If they want to yell at me for an hour, you know, I’m used to that, I can deal with that. But I’m not negotiating.” Ethical principal: The end justifies the means.
At one point in the conversation the faux Mr. Koch suggested “planting some troublemakers” among the protesters at the Capitol. Walker admitted, “We thought about that.” The reason given for rejecting that strategy was not that it violated ethical standards, or might be illegal. Rather, he said, “My only fear would be is if there was a ruckus caused is that that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has gotta settle to avoid all these problems.” Ethical principle: Expediency takes precedent over rectitude.
Expanding the field of responsibility
This sad litany of ethical lapses reveals a carelessness in one who makes a public point of his evangelical connections. But it raises another question: Where were the spiritual advisors who, in an ideal Christian community, would have provided correction when they saw the governor straying from a strict ethical pathway?
Governor Walker has at least three strong connections to Christian community that are publicly known. He is a member of a non-denominational evangelical church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Additionally, the Walkers host a bi-monthly Bible study in their home. Finally, the Walkers seek and receive spiritual support from the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a Wisconsin/N. Michigan Pentecostal denomination. It is relevant to ask why none of these spiritual connections resulted in prophetic guidance for the governor. It could be that such was offered and rejected by him. It is more likely that those in a position to alert the governor to ethical breaches in his conduct were too awed by their connection to him, or too afraid of offending him, or too committed to his political agenda to act in any prophetic way.
The author of this essay has a 50-year connection to the Pentecostal denomination mentioned above. He contacted the COO of the Pentecostal denomination, pointing out the governor’s need for ethical guidance. Similarly, he contacted the pastor of Governor Walker’s church. There was no reply at all from Walker’s pastor. The Pentecostal COO sent a brusque, one sentence reply, with no salutation or closing, “I have been in touch with the Walkers and they have my full support!!!!!” In a response to a follow-up e-mail, he explained his perspective:
Thank you. [No formal salutation or closing] There are many people who have had to carry the financial burden far too long while others seemly [sic] feel our society owes them. The Walkers are just people who do seek God for wisdom. Because some don’t agree with them for selfish reasons does in no way mean they are insensitive or wrong. We as believers will not be intimidated by those who do not agree. It is time we obey the law and support those who have been elected and give them a chance to prove themselves. After all the majority elected them.6 If we are faithful with our tithes, God will take care of the church. I have sent an email to all our pastors asking them to pray concerning this matter.
It is important for this discussion to reiterate that differences of opinion on the ethical correctness of particular policies are difficult to moderate, and this essay does not attempt to do that. But the manner in which such policies are arrived at and administered is of crucial importance to the witness of the Christian politician promoting them. The Pentecostal COO attempted to defend the ethical propriety of Walker’s budget proposal but ignored the methods he was using in fighting for his objectives.
Conclusion
This case study reveals: 1) the treacherous milieu in which all politicians work, in which there is constant temptation to sacrifice rectitude on the altar of expediency, 2) that Christian politicians – and no assumption is being made that Governor Walker’s profession of faith in Christ is less than sincere – face the same temptations as non-Christians, but the stakes are higher, with implications for the Christian faith in general, and their local Church and church family in particular, and 3) that Christian leaders failed to be the spiritual protectors of a vulnerable Christian politician, for one reason or another refusing to step into the prophetic role that their calling required them to play.
James Rapp is a retired high school history teacher and former small church pastor. He lives in Eau Claire, WI and can be found at his blog, The Cottage on the Moor
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1 Bonhoeffer, “Protestantism without Reformation,” in No rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes . . . from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, vol. 1, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (New York, 1965), 104-05.
2 http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/elections/2010/governor/
3 http://www.politifact.com/personalities/scott-walker/ Note: the numbers used are those posted as of March 20, 2010. The numbers at this site could conceivably change since it is a composite of all the Governor’s ratings at a given time.
4 http://millermps.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/walker-conversation-transcripts-multiple-ethics-and-labor-law-violations-being-investigated/ Note: this web site provides a transcript of the conversation between Murphy and Walker as well as a link to an audio recording of the conversation.
5 The expenses for the Governor and his family to attend the Super Bowl were reported to have been paid from campaign funds (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/115314934.html). The state ethics board signed off on his use of campaign funds and Walker explained that he would be campaigning at the event, and also representing Wisconsin business interests. (What does representing Wisconsin business have to do with spending campaign funds?) While his explanation may satisfy his supporters, it rings a bit hollow with those who expect campaign contributions to be used for political campaigning, not providing expensive vacations for the candidate and his family.
6At the time this note was written, recall efforts had begun for 16 Wisconsin Senators (eight Republicans and eight Democrats) and plans to recall Governor Walker in early 2012 were under way. The COO seems to be making the argument that those recalls would subvert the will of those who elected Governor Walker and his fellow Republicans. But it should be noted that Governor Walker was elected to his previous post as Milwaukee County Supervisor in a recall election which removed his predecessor. “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.”
