The right hand of God: Jesse Helms's political theology

Commonweal, Jan 27, 1995 by Ferrel Guillory

Like others on the Christian Right, Helms draws a parallel between Israel in the Old Testament and the United States today. "Spiritually we know that we are all Israel," he writes. When Israel obeyed God, the nation prospered, says Helms, and when Israel fell into immorality, civil strife resulted. Just as God would answer the prayers of the Israelites, the senator says, so God would respond to Americans who call upon him. Near the end of When Free Men Shall Stand, Helms writes:

Each of us, then, must place our hope and reliance in God, and in that hope and reliance turn our energies to restoring a government and society that serves us as sons of God. Adroit politicians have successfully divided us into groups of minorities so that now each of us belongs to one minority or another. Thereby our strength is sapped in a disunity designed to keep us in check: a disunity disguised with such utopian slogans as Peace with Honor, Minimum Wage, Racial Equality, Women's Liberation, National Health Insurance, Civil Liberty, and so on and on.

Of course, all of these "utopian slogans," as Helms describes them dismissively, flow out of Old and New Testament concepts of the dignity of the person as a member of the human community. They also reflect modern social, cultural, and economic change. But nothing more defines Helms over the course of a long public career than resistance to change and government activity that promotes it.

At times, Helms can come off as a "smart aleck," as a friend in Raleigh conceded privately after the senator popped off about President Bill Clinton's needing a bodyguard should he visit a military base in North Carolina. But it would be a mistake simply to regard Helms, a former TV editorialist, as a Rush Limbaugh-like dispenser of pointed political one-liners dressed up like folk wisdom. Counterassaults by too-secularist opponents, especially from the cultural Left, have served only to harden Helms's resolve. If he resists change with a nod to theology, it is nevertheless a powerful driving force in his own life and his own politics.

After all, he is talking to himself as well as to his audiences when he suggests that God may have granted only one final opportunity to save America. Though he accuses unnamed "adroit politicians" of creating disunity, Helms actually would save America by dividing it. It is Helms who is the classic polarizing politician, who brings to Congress the us-against-them mentality that flourished amid the internal struggles of Baptists and Southerners to cope with change during his formative years.