Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Kerry: Giving Nuance a Bad Name

(Reprinted from the issue of October 28, 2004)

Nuances matter. Indeed, they are practical necessities. Over 20 centuries, the Catholic Church has insisted on fine distinctions, shaping the intellectual and ethical as well as religious life of the West. To ordinary, dimly educated people, this habit has even become a joke: angels dancing on pinheads, and all that. “Scholastic” has become a popular synonym for abstract hair-splitting.

Yet anyone who has read St. Thomas Aquinas with any care must be impressed with his subtle and scrupulous reasoning. He doesn’t settle for defeating an opponent; he does something far more impressive. He states an opponent’s case as strongly as possible — often better than the opponent himself could state it! His object isn’t victory; it’s truth. He is the polar opposite of a politician.

Nobody ever wrote more nuanced English prose than John Henry Newman. Like St. Thomas, he never wrote for personal victory — except when he tried, in his great autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, to vindicate himself and the Church against the slander of Charles Kingsley.

But Newman proves that nuance is not the enemy of forceful expression. Far from shrinking from strong assertion, he could say, very deliberately, that it would be better that the entire world should perish in the extremest agony than that one venial sin should be committed; or that the most barbarous superstition is preferable to religious indifference.

Today, unfortunately, John Kerry is giving nuance a bad name. The fact is that he specializes in the false nuance, as in his garbled justification for supporting legal abortion. He pretends to be upholding “the separation of church and state” and “constitutional rights” by refusing to “legislate an article of my faith” — a flagrant confusion of several distinctions, but it sounds thoughtful to the thoughtless. It impresses the sort of cleverish people who fancy themselves “intellectuals” and congratulate themselves on being smarter than President Bush.

Bush is obviously confused too, but at least he speaks in simple words that don’t offer false flattery to his audiences’ intellects, and he has some orthodox instincts, so to speak, on moral questions. I think both men are bound to be harmful to the country. But Kerry would be more harmful to the Church. Therefore, though I wouldn’t dream of voting for either man, I confess a painful preference for Bush.

“Growth is the only evidence of life,” Newman says somewhere. Living in a more civilized age, he never had to address the topic of abortion; but this aphorism should remove any doubt about where he would stand. It states a general principle, not an “article of faith.” He was speaking, I believe, of the Church’s development as evidence of her spiritual vitality, against the Protestant idea that only “primitive” Christianity could be authentic. But the principle has wider application, and who can really doubt that abortion, whose very nature and purpose is the violent interruption of growth, is murder?

The most Kerry will say is that “I respect the [Catholic] belief about life.” That watery concession is supposed to be an affirmation — “nuanced,” to be sure — of his “faith”? In the final weeks of the campaign, as The Washington Post has noted, he has been stressing his “faith” at every stop, trying to close the “God gap” that favors the Republicans among pious voters; but his favorite text is from the Epistle of James: “Faith without works is dead.” Translation: “Bush only talks about his faith, but I act on mine.”

That is to say, Kerry is now trying to turn his liberal record of supporting the welfare state to advantage: He’s not just a politician voting for pork and party, you see; he’s been applying the Beatitudes and performing the corporal works of mercy all along! Funny he’s never mentioned it before.

So Kerry is trying to nuance his way into the good graces of both the pious and the impious. Are you a Christian? He’s your man. Are you an atheist? He’s your man. He has even campaigned from the pulpits of black Protestant churches. (It may be a hopeful sign that Catholic churches haven’t been inviting him to speak to the faithful.)

“Flip-flopping” doesn’t capture much of Kerry’s record. That’s a habit he’s only acquired in and for the 2004 campaign, to cover up his extremely consistent past as a liberal. Now he’s adopted the equivocal style of so many Catholic pols who are “personally” opposed to so many of the things they actually vote for: Kennedy, Cuomo, Ferraro, Daschle, Pelosi, and on and on. They always make a big show of wrestling with their consciences, but it’s only professional wrestling: The matches are rigged, and they always win. You’d lose a lot of money if you bet on their consciences.

The cream of the jest — and very sour cream it is — is that the Democrats have managed to appropriate the word “conscience.” When a liberal Republican (Jim Jeffords, Lowell Weicker) switches parties, he generally cites his conscience as the impelling force. Conservative Republicans haven’t learned this trick yet; Barry Goldwater was the last of them to speak of his conscience (and that was in a ghost-written book).

By implication, conservative Republicans don’t even have consciences. They combine ruthless greed with religious fanaticism. I can think of many reasons for abandoning the Republicans, but the spiritual superiority of the Democrats is not one of them.

This election will decide not only whether John Kerry will be president of the United States, but also whether he will become the second most prominent Catholic on earth. Until this campaign, nobody has particularly, let alone primarily, thought of him as a Catholic at all. He tells us that he has been living his faith through his legislative efforts — another thing he forgot to mention in his convention speech.
 
The Press and the Church

One thing this campaign has forced me to see clearly, which I suppose many of us have long felt, is how badly informed the American press is about Catholicism. It never, but never, corrects misstatements about the Church. When Kerry said “the belief about life” was “an article of faith,” nobody called it an error, a gaffe, or an outright lie; it was just one of those nuances. The same is true of similar assertions by the other personally opposed.

We Catholics ought to be vocal about this. We ought to demand that coverage of Catholic issues at least get the facts straight. It’s not as if Catholic teachings were secret, is it?

Jewish groups make sure journalists know all about their views and they respond to the smallest misrepresentations. Catholics should be doing likewise about both the basics of the faith and constant distortions and caricatures. “Great is the truth and it will prevail” — but only if someone is speaking it vigorously. Currently the Catholic trumpet is making uncertain sounds.


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Joseph Sobran