Bart Stupak has provided us all a timeless lesson. A high-profile political victim in the battle over health care, the Congressman is avowedly pro-life, a principled commitment that led him to support universal health care and oppose the House bill until it had better guarantees of prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion. In the final bill, he accepted an executive order, what many on both sides of the debate see as lacking teeth on banning abortions. In other words he caved in to expedient compromise.
A friend of mine, George Paul Wood, dismisses one responder's notion that Stupak was a champ, saying that Stupak's decision to vote for the final health care bill with fewer teeth makes him either a cynic or a chump. "If the former, it's hard to consider him a man of pro-life principle. I prefer to think of him as a man of genuine principle, which forces the conclusion that he's a chump."
This raises a troubling point about living a life of principles, dropping champ and shrinking the options to cynic and chump. Are these our only choices when we face such overwhelming disappointments in those who could have taken things one step further and instead chose to ignore the pain of making tough choices? Is there not another name for those who fall short?
Lots of us were disappointed all around on the health care issue, but then politics is rarely "undisappointing," isn't it, no matter where it plays out. Change the venue and see if it reads the same way. It's the decade of the 1950s. Evangelical church leaders everywhere are meeting behind closed doors, wrestling with a changing society and wondering what to do with the "Negro problem." I happen to know much detail on one such august body, the General Presbytery of the American Assemblies of God, but the same scenario played out all over the ecclesiastical landscape. While white theological "liberals" marched, white evangelicals hid or, worse, fought back.
The all-white, all male Presbyters voted against (actually hemmed and hawed for years over) ordaining blacks for fear of alienating whites. In the end the "feeling" was that it was a choice between reaching blacks or reaching whites, a choice they refused to tolerate anywhere else on God's good earth. Various proposals were considered, tabled, rejected, approved and left to gather dust until finally history itself forced the issue – history and Billy Graham, but that is another story.
Leaders inevitably disappoint. Stupak caves in when he might have held out for a more thorough pro-life victory (but why were there only a dozen other such principled legislators by his side?). Instead of being prophetic champs like their Azusa Street forebears [a reference to the "against-the-grain" interracial fervor of the earlier Pentecostal revival], the Presbyters chose compromising inaction. You can see such chumpiness in the ongoing church and Boy Scout lawsuits over child sex abuse, as is playing out once again in the Pope's back yard and in my own Portland. Or in countless corporate scandals that litter the week's headlines, especially those that pit the bottom line against people or God's creation. Nothing stinks more than good people making stupid choices.
Do such stark choices leave us with "cynic" or "chump" as the only options? Seems that in either case all we are left with then is cynicism, if not for us to swallow, then at least for those who follow. Does not the way in which our elders handled America's coming of age and fulfilling the "all are created equal" vision of its Founders account in part for the tidal wave of cynicism of the past half century? As the existentialists readily illustrate, cynicism is a very bleak view on life.
I look again at that word, "chump." It can mean either a stupid or foolish person or a thick, heavy block of wood – in other words, a blockhead. It means a person who lets himself get duped into caving on his principles. So either these heretofore named didn't really have solid principles or they let themselves get caught in "lesser of evils" compromises. I can understand how this works. You are in a tight situation, pressures mounting on every side. You try to hang onto your core values, but in the heat things start looking overly complicated. So you go for what you think is the best way out, only to realize in the end that "out" gets you nowhere good.
As is generally the case, the way looks much clearer from a distance. You know it. The world knows it. But why don't we ever admit it, instead heaping fuel onto the fires of cynicism by hiding history. I am struck by the writer of I John who says that "if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from every sin" (1:17). Bold transparency leads to community and purity, but it can also lead to death – political or physical. Taking that risk is what makes a real champ, though in this life champs don't always survive to see their colors raised and to hear the crowd cheer. But the risk is one definitely worth taking. So, leaders, let's make a fresh commitment to come clean – always.
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