Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out

Christian Century, March 10, 1999 by David Heim

Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out.

By J. Philip Wogaman. Westminster John Knox, 144 pp., $12.00.

Do Christian leaders have anything distinctive to say--or avoid saying--about the scandal in the White House and the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Though the issue is less pressing now that judgment day has come and gone in the U.S. Senate, questions about what is private and what is public conduct by political leaders--and about how and when such leaders can be forgiven for their trespasses in either realm--are not likely to go away.

These two books appear as opposing poles in the debate. J. Philip Wogaman presents himself as the party of Christian love and forgiveness. He appeared frequently as a commentator on radio and television during the impeachment crisis, arguing that the president should be forgiven and that it is time for the nation to focus on reconciliation and healing. Gabriel Fackre and colleagues, on the other hand, present themselves as the party of tough love and moral seriousness, combating the purveyors of empty forgiveness and cheap grace, among whom they count Wogaman (and James M. Wall and Jesse Jackson) in particular.

Both books attempt to join immediate political judgments with moral and religious claims. This proved to be an unusually difficult task, especially amid a strident debate and a scandal that seemed to diminish everyone it touched.

As the scandal unfolded, Wogaman had the opportunity literally to preach to the president. He is pastor at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., which Bill and Hillary Clinton frequently attend. His book includes two sermons preached after the Starr Report was issued last summer, one of which the president heard from the pew. Despite these intriguing elements and the "pastor to the president" tease in the title, however, Wogaman does not draw on his relationship with the Clintons. He says that the book violates no "pastoral confidences," and that he wrote it simply as a contribution to public debate.

A decisive event for Wogaman was the September 11 prayer breakfast at the White House at which Clinton made his "I have repented" speech and received words of support and encouragement from many religious leaders. This was a "deeply religious moment" for Wogaman and it supplies him with his main theme. The nation faced two alternative paths: "the path of the prayer breakfast, with its tone of repentance, forgiveness, love, restoration and healing," or "the path of the Starr Report, with its emphasis on exposing sins and crimes and passing judgment."

Wogaman stresses throughout his book that the essence of morality is love, not law, and that as a nation and as individuals we need to define ourselves by compassion, not judgment. He told one interviewer that, even though he had not done the things Clinton was accused of doing, he would still not say, "Bill Clinton, I am a better man than you are."

Wogaman went on to comment: "Who is to say that this or that form of sin is less serious than that of another person whose behavior may have been more highly publicized? Indeed, the spirit of self-righteousness may itself be a deeper form of sin. Our primary interest should not be in judging or condemning others whom we consider worse than ourselves; rather, our focus should be on reconciliation, healing, and restoration."

As a tool of analysis, Wogaman's ethic of nonjudgmental love is a rather flimsy instrument. One strongly suspects that if the issue at hand were the Watergate break-in or a case of racial discrimination, he would be talking not about the priority of forgiveness but about the necessity of judgment and about how reconciliation can take place only after justice has been served.

Wogaman is a former professor of ethics, and he certainly is aware of this problem; he knows that Christian thinkers have long struggled to give specific content to the often-amorphous shape of love, whether by grounding love in moral principles, or in norms of justice, or in the practice of the virtues. And he does make an effort to find a place in his ethic for law and "tough love." He admits, for example, that "catching and prosecuting criminals can be an act of love for the community that is being protected and, quite possibly, an act of love for the criminal in restraining him." But he doesn't think that this imperative applies in Clinton's case.

Why not? Because what is decisive for Wogaman is a series of prior practical judgments about the scandal: that Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, while reprehensible, was essentially private; that his lying about it, while wrong, was at least understandable; that public exposure and embarrassment already constituted serious punishment; and that it would be a dangerous precedent to remove an elected president in such a case, especially when it was investigated by what many regard as a partisan and overzealous prosecutor.

I wouldn't quarrel much with that set of judgments. Nor, according to the polls, would most Americans. There is a problem, however, in subsuming these judgments under the rubric of Christian love and forgiveness. For it was not love and compassion alone that settled the case for Wogaman. One could actually have reached the very same conclusions he did simply by making prudential political judgments about the facts of the case and the welfare of the country--and with barely a trace of love or compassion for Bill Clinton.