Flatline

In my reading of current events this morning I stumbled upon the news that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) will not seek another term in the U.S. Congress. Rep. Stupak is a nine term Democrat from the Upper Peninsula area of Michigan. While he has dealt with relative anonymity in the House for almost his entire career, he appears to have always been a somewhat popular Congressman in his district. (As American voters, we tend to hate Congress while typically voting for our incumbent Congressmen and Congresswomen...it has something to do with bringing bacon home or something like that.)

Of course, Stupak's life and career changed dramatically within the past few months. He was really the single politician who could best de-rail President Obama's entire domestic agenda (and, therefore, presidency) by influencing a handful of fellow pro-life Democrats to vote against the mammoth healthcare reform package because it did not contain language banning tax dollars from being used for on-demand abortions in the U.S. Out of our entire 535-member, star-studded, bicameral Congress, it was this unknown anomaly from northern Michigan who suddenly held an incredible amount of power.

Stupak became an immediate sensation. The GOP threw their arms around him as he teamed up with Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) to attach a pro-life amendment to the original healthcare bill. Conservative talk show hosts clamoured to get the old Democrat on the air. The more I read and heard about the guy, the more I really liked him. Like him or not, Stupak was suddenly the picture of principled ethics within the larger sausage-making documentary known as the healthcare legislative process, and our nation loves it when our politicians seem committed to their ethical moorings. Up until the 11th hour, it honestly appeared that Stupak & Co. were willing to put principle above party, loyalty to life above loyalty to president.

Then March 21 came. The calendar said it was the first full day of spring, that season which reminds everyone of new life. As Stupak's group of pro-life Democrats gave a new breath of life to the administration of Barack Obama, it came at a terrible cost: the death of any lingering pro-life movement within the Democratic Party. I fully believe that one day the American pro-choice movement will be derided and placed on the ash heap of our history--right there next to racial segregation and slavery--and the Democratic Party is doing itself few favors by excluding any anti-abortion mentality from its ranks. In the meantime, on March 21, Bart Stupak did himself absolutely no favors by going against his own amendment and voting for the pro-abortion Senate bill.

I suppose we could continue to pile on this man, but I think he's had enough. Stupak is "retiring" (that is, quitting with some trace of dignity) in the same way that LBJ did in the spring of 1968, as a beaten, lame duck politician whose ethical principles vanished we he began to doubt them. Peer pressure is an incredible thing, and is only increased when those in real positions of power begin to lean in on you. We will likely never know what those in power (such as President Obama and Speaker Pelosi) said to Rep. Stupak in the days leading up to the passage of the healthcare package. We will probably never know if hard-line threats to dissolve his political career were made or if bended-knee pleas to save the party and the president were given.

I think that we can be confident of the following: by March of this year Bart Stupak was either going to sacrifice his political career for the principle of the right to life for all or he was going to sacrifice his political career for the life of Barack Obama's fading popularity. He exercised his right to choose and went with the latter. And now his overall quiet, principled political career is a flatline.

Someone call a doctor: Is there a place for theology in the healthcare debate?

In my pastoral theology class yesterday we attempted to discuss the theological dimensions of the groundbreaking healthcare legislation which has been such a point of high contention in our nation over the past nine months or so. As our professor pointed out, evangelical leaders have been remarkably silent on this issue. Certainly we would agree that items which turn into a national obsession, prompting hours of discussion around water coolers and dinner tables, are never exempt from being brought into the pulpit, and yet we are left with deafening silence from our leaders on the theological justifications or concerns of nationalized healthcare.

Perhaps one explanation for this silence is the fear of partisan backlash from congregants or admirers. After all, I can't think of a more politically polarizing week than what we just had in this country. Every single Republican in the Congress voted against the bill the president just signed into law; if a politician supported this bill, he or she was a Democrat, and most likely not a so-called Blue Dog Democrat. Pastors and denominational leaders understandably should enter this politically and philosophically fractured debate with trepidation.

But I think more is going on here. At issue for many must be the theological tension which exists in this debate due to the biblical understanding of social justice and the hard lessons of recent human history. Church leaders must be aware of the remarkable injustice of the healthcare system as we have known it. And there must be a point at which we cringe at the avarice which was displayed by all sides of this recent debate. Whether the sticking point was our national debt, my increasing taxes, or grandpa's Medicare, greed absolutely propelled a debate which should have only been about the greater good of our society.

At the same time, we Americans who took advantage of collapsing Socialist governments of the 20th century to stake our own claim to world domination are keenly aware of what happens when society depends on government structures to do our good work for us. With a population of over 300 million, the structure necessary for a complete overhaul of medicine must have the most integrity of any social structure in history if it is to stand the test of time in any positive way. A House vote which hinged on pro-life Democrats abandoning their ethical ship in the waning moments of the 11th hour already says something damning about the integrity of this particular structure.

Consider this lengthy quote from the German theologian Helmut Thielicke:

Milan Machovec has classically described the resistance to the fall in the Marxist-Leninist system (in his “A Marxist Looks at Jesus”). As he points out, Marx and his first disciples sharply criticized the social system which left the alleviation of human suffering to private initiative and therefore to chance. Three or four generations of Socialists knew very well what G.B. Shaw portrayed in his plays, namely, that “private Samaritans” do not alter the foundations of exploitive capitalist society but simply promote the allusion of the pure and the pharisaism of the rich—a double deception which has to be radically dispelled. Socialist states, then, set up a system of social security to care for the sick and handicapped and unemployed. But how could these noble 19th century Socialists foresee that in the 20th century a situation would arise in which thousands of people would believe that official institutions alone are responsible for the needy, that the state has taken over everything, that the compassionate and self-sacrificing heart has been replaced, and that at the last resort individuals would feel no discomfort for others suffering around them? Thus the ancient egoism and cowardice and pharisaism come back in new garb. The devil cannot be banished or outplayed by institutional safeguards. The fall cannot be organized away, for it transcends organizable structures. The resistance of the bad as it occurs in a new form gives the lie to the dream that love can be institutionalized and that this institutionalization will give rise to non-alienated man.

Ultimately there is an incredible tension which we believers face between all that is right about affordable healthcare and all that is wrong about the relatively short history of government-structured socialism. This is what our intellectual and theological leaders must wrestle with in the days and years to come. One thing is certain: silence won't cut it any longer.