John Ashcroft's power grab: The saga of a troubled—and troubling—attorney general

Reason, June, 2002 by Brian Doherty

Yet he is, in his own straight-laced and traditional way, a radical cultural rebel. Despite his outsider status and the opprobrium it generates, he won't give in. Like a caring though peculiar dad advising against peer-group conformity, he stands against the crowd and is publicly (and by all accounts privately) true to the values of a serious religious conservative with one-and-only-one wife (Janet, a law professor with whom he's collaborated on legal textbooks) and three kids.

He's also hopelessly corny, creating waves of contemptuous mirth all across the Internet, where clips of him singing one of his self-composed gospel songs abound. While a member of the Senate, he and three colleagues formed a vocal quartet, the Singing Senators, to record and perform patriotic and devotional ditties. The group even trekked to that capital of American cornpone hokum, Branson--tellingly located in Ashcroft's home state--to croon with the Oak Ridge Boys.

Ashcroft's squeaky-clean Christian image is built on more than personal habits. People have reported that while being interviewed for jobs by Ashcroft, they were asked if they had ever committed adultery. (One applicant reports being asked if he were gay, a story Ashcroft denies.) He was the first senator to publicly call upon President Clinton to resign over his affair with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. As Missouri governor, he vetoed a Sunday liquor sales bill, signed into law the first Missouri restrictions on underage smoking, restricted rentals of violent movies to minors, and cracked down on casual drug use (even as one of his top aides was exposed by a squealing college buddy as a pothead and coke-sniffer and quietly resigned). As federal attorney general, he has revived the sort of porn prosecutions that languished in the Bill Clinton-Janet Reno era.

Still, Ashcroft is not some backwoods, Holy Roller hick. He is part of a generation of Pentecostals who have engaged the larger world rather than staying within their own separatist institutions. Hence, Ashcroft attended college at Yale and law school at the University of Chicago. "Ashcroft," notes Edith Blumhofer, a historian at Wheaton College who has written several books on the Assemblies, "was brought up in what was in some ways a conservative Assemblies of God home. His father was very pietist and devoted to prayer. Yet Ashcroft was not told to go to Yale and fight the battle-he went there simply as a student, with no agenda to convert the place." For a devout member of the Assemblies, says Blumhofer, Ashcroft was exceptional in combining the secular and the religious.

The religious historian Grant Wacker once described Pentecostals as having a "jut-jawed stress on personal autonomy," and Ashcroft is the first Assemblies worshipper to be elected either governor or senator. In that context, Ashcroft's political career can be read as an experiment in the assimilation of a peculiarly independent religious tradition into the mainstream.

The experiment can only be described as an awkward semi-success so far. Certainly, John Ashcroft is the attorney general of the United States--a position of considerable power and influence. But by following the dictates of his faith and upbringing, he has crafted a public image that media sophisticates on both coasts see as charmingly goofy at best and dangerously retrograde at worst. Though many Americans agree with him (at least generally) about such matters as God, family, and abortion, Ashcroft has surely noticed that it just isn't OK to the opinion makers to be who he is.