What Leaders Should Do
From a late 1990s interview with Sen. John Ashcroft
I was recently looking back through my copy of Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America? by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, and discovered that I had not read the transcripts in the book’s appendix of the interviews the authors conducted with several people they cited in the main body of their tome. So I’ve been catching up on reading those, and am sharing some selected quotes here.
John Ashcroft was governor or Missouri from 1985 to 1993. He then served as one of Missouri’s senators in Washington from 1995 to 2001. After that, he served as the 79th U. S. attorney general in George W. Bush’s first administration from 2001 to 2005. I was especially interested in Sen. Ashcroft’s thoughts, as he hails from the same denomination as I do (the Assemblies of God—in fact, his father, J. Robert Ashcroft, was president of Evangel University from 1958 to 1974, and I did my MA in theological studies at the embedded Assemblies of God Theological Seminary at Evangel).
On the responsibility of government:
Government’s responsibility is to make sure that there is a hospitable set of externals that allow people to do well and to provide a framework in which people can grow. It shouldn’t be growth of government; it should be growth of individuals. Unfortunately, I think too often we get into the situation of the government maintaining an environment in which the bureaucracy and government itself flourish at the expense of individuals and institutions. (p. 219)
When asked by co-author Cal Thomas about the primary cause of moral decline in the United States, Senator Ashcroft said:
Morality is a matter of choice. People make choices. The moral condition of a culture is an aggregation of the moral choices made by individuals. There is a variety of conditions in the culture that signal a disrespect for morals that have affected the kind of choices that are being made. I look at the impact that government has, and I think government has helped create an environment that is hostile to good, moral decision making. Moral choices are primarily shaped by the culture, and culture shapes behavior in an anticipatory or preventative way. Laws shape behavior by punishing after there’s been an infraction. (p. 219)
Regarding internal vs. external motivators, and what is right vs. what is legal:
Incidentally, the culture shapes behavior with the “policeman” on the inside. The law shapes behavior with the policemen on the outside. The more you have the capacity to shape the behavior of a community with the policeman on the inside, the less you have to have the police on the outside. Another way of stating this is that the higher the level of morality, the lower the need for governmental legality. As we have destroyed the ability of culture to shape behavior, we have had to proliferate laws in an attempt to make up for the absence of the culture-shaping behavior. The proliferation of laws has never made up for it, but we keep adding more laws, and more laws, and more laws.
How has government expressed this hostility in the culture? It has done so by supporting the idea of moral parity—which is another way of saying that it has reinforced the concept that the only things that matter are laws. (p. 220)
Sen. Ashcroft goes on to say:
The laws set the minimums for behavior in a culture. They are the thresholds. If you don’t abide by them, you get thrown into jail. If everybody only does the minimums in a culture, the culture will be anemic. (p. 220)
Far too much of “moral teaching” in our society today seems to look more at whether something is legal or illegal, rather than whether it is beneficial to the common good. In his first epistle to Corinth, the Apostle Paul writes:
“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. (1 Cor. 10:13, NIV)
True moral character formation looks beyond legality to whether something is virtuous and beneficial, not just to oneself, but to the broader community.
There are two ways in which culture shapes behavior—through stigma on the one hand, and affirmation on the other. We have devalued affirmation by giving everybody the “gold star” no matter what lifestyle, no matter what conduct they manifest. As long as it’s legal, you get a gold star. So one thing that culture used to build—morality and moral decision making—has been devalued, made worthless. If you give everybody a gold star, the gold star means nothing.
The second way in which culture shapes and provides a good place for moral decision making is through stigma. We have outlawed stigma. We have outlawed it by saying that it’s politically incorrect and inappropriate to say that certain things are wrong. We are no longer capable of identifying things as being wrong, and we are no longer capable of ranking, for affirmation, things that are legal. Once you devalue affirmation and you outlaw stigma, you make it impossible for the culture to shape moral choices. (pp. 220-221)
We could learn an awful lot from honor-shame cultures about moral formation. While we don’t want to have everyone going around “shaming” people who have made mistakes, it might be healthy to recover a collective sense of shame regarding repeated, persistent patterns of bad behavior. (For more on honor and shame in the New Testament world, and how that culture is reflected in Scripture, check out David A. deSilva’s excellent book Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture.)
The genius of the American republic is not that the values of Washington be imposed on the people; the genius of the American republic is that the people’s values be imposed on Washington, D.C. (p. 221)
Don’t misinterpret that. Ashcroft is not talking about a small group of people taking over government to enforce a moral vision from the top down. Remember, he said that culture (the “policeman on the inside”) has to change first, then politics changes as a reflection of that culture. Maybe if we as Christians spent more time on evangelism and discipleship, instead of expecting the government to do the job of establishing and enforcing morality, we might actually see real transformation from the grassroots up. After all, sooner or later, people push back against top-down imposition (look at the growing rejection of Islam in Iran for an example).
Regarding the role of religious and government leaders:
Pastors need to call people to their highest and best, not accommodate the culture at its lowest and least. Christ came to call people to their highest and best. At the risk of being grossly misinterpreted here, the president of the United States ought to call people to their highest and best.
…..
We need people in Washington, we need mayors, community leaders, school teachers, and principals who not only impose by mandate and imposition the threshold rules of the society that are necessary for governance, but who, by model and inspiration, call the culture to its highest and best. (p. 222)
One only need look at our present elected officials (of both parties) to see how far we have fallen short of this ideal. And sadly, many pastors and ministry leaders are doing the same thing of playing to the lowest common denominator of human nature, instead of calling people to be their real “true selves”—God’s imagers representing Him to all of creation, and reflecting the praises of creation back to the Creator (for more on this, see Why the Gospel?: Living the Good News of Jesus with Purpose by Matthew W. Bates).