Guy Fawkes Reflections

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot ;
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
'Twas his intent.
To blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below.
Poor old England to overthrow.
By God's providence he was catch'd,
With a dark lantern and burning match

Yes, friends, it has now been 401 years since Guy Fawkes and a handful of Roman Catholic conspirators sought to assassinate England’s Protestant king, James I, and both houses of Parliament by blowing up Westminster Palace. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was, of course, spectacularly unsuccessful, and English Protestants were quick to attribute the preservation of the government to divine interposition. Seventeen years before Englishmen had similarly ascribed the royal navy’s defeat of the vaunted Spanish Armada to providential “Protestant wind.” This was, of course, during the long age of the religious nationalism that began with a pair of shotgun marriages in the early sixteenth century, when Martin Luther’s defiance suited the interests of the German princes and Henry VIII studiously determined that Anne Boleyn was fairer than Pope Clement VII was sacrosanct. Shotgun marriages that these were, they proved long-lived—and with generally disastrous results for humankind. The three centuries that passed between the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century (1618-1648) and what Winston Churchill called the thirty years war of the twentieth (1914-1945) witnessed enough bloodshed to make most of the Western world skeptical (to understate things) of the uneasy mixture of politics and religion. The sense, which Oliver Wendell Holmes internalized during the Civil War, that too much certitude in the political realm breeds violence seems borne out by historical experience. Many now resonate with these words of Judge Learned Hand, perhaps the most famous American jurist never to sit on the Supreme Court:

What is the spirit of liberty? [he asked.] I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs other interests alongside its own without bias.

This sounds heroically liberal enough, but I suspect most Latter-day Saints (myself included), for whom certitude is part and parcel of their faith, will read Hand’s declamation with a measure of uneasiness—for in matters of religious faith we are sure that we are right. And should we not carry this spirit of certitude into the public arena? Do not the revelations themselves teach us that “honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently” to fill public offices (D&C 98:10)? Do not we who know the truth have an imperative duty to act on that knowledge, to stand up for what we know, aware all the while that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing?
We do indeed have such a duty, but our zeal in executing duty should always be tempered by President Hugh B. Brown’s wise dictum, “Do not have the temerity to dogmatize in issues where the Lord has seen fit to be silent” (BYU Devotional, 1968). Our certitude only extends so far, and the very rarity with which the Church itself chooses to take a political stand should suggest that our political certitude covers very few issues indeed.
This is an argument often made by Left-leaning members of the Church, and the Right’s counter is usually ardently to recite that “men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness,” pointing out that the Church’s very silence on political matters should be viewed in the context of the principle that “he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward” (D&C 58:27, 26). Perhaps they’re right. But I see at least two problems with this rejoinder: first, there are very few political causes I believe capable of bringing to pass “much righteousness”—or even any righteousness at all. Second, and I think more important, our political involvement as Church members should never lose sight of our revelationary mandate to “stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world” (D&C 78:14). This is hardly a formula for isolationism and indifference or even a ban on political partisanship. It should remind us, however, that there is in our tradition an apocalyptic expectation that “the consumption decreed” will ultimately make “a full end of all nations”—and, I presume, all political parties (D&C 87:6).
I write all of this as a conservative (but only north by northwest—“conservative by temperament” as I tell my classmates at the Yale Law School) aware that the party to which I nominally belong stands to lose magnificently in Tuesday’s election. And I’m thrilled at the prospect. Why? In part because I think a democratic legislature will provide a desperately needed check on a runaway executive in its hellbent assault on civil liberties, due process, public sentiment, the Geneva Conventions and the English language. But I’m even more pleased at the timely reminder that GOP does not stand for God’s Own Party, that politics is politics on both sides of the fence, that for every Bill Clinton there’s a Jack Abramoff or a Ken Foley or a Ted Haggard. Not that I don’t abhor these recent scandals, just as I abhorred the reckless narcissism of the adulterer President sopranominato. But for Republican Mormons like me to be “let down” by our party is a salubrious reminder that we will always by let down in the end by any political party, no matter how closely that party’s platform seems to align with our most cherished moral and civic ideals. Many Mormons (including President Harold B. Lee) were devastated by the breaking of the Watergate scandal because they genuinely believed that Richard M. Nixon stood on the side of the angels. After all, President Nixon had promised to get tough on crime, to bring order out of chaos in America’s foreign affairs, and to stem the iconoclastic tide of the 1960’s revolt against traditional morality—and he had partially delivered on these promises and named two Mormons to his cabinet to boot. But Nixon was a politician and no less susceptible to the rarified air of the heights of power than politicians of any other stripe. 1973 proved, as I hope 2006 will prove, a sobering reminder that Mormon’s impassioned warning that “all things [save charity] must fail” includes politics and politicians. The Haggard scandal in particular should also be a warning about the limits of the often invoked mantra about Mormons’ needing to join together with other “moral-minded” persons in social causes that matter to us. While I certainly have nothing against weighing in with other organizations in the fights against pornography or domestic abuse, I believe we would do well to remain healthfully independent from most moral crusaders who would enlist us in their ranks. Inferences of contiguous contamination may be judicially unfair, but they could nonetheless impede our missionary work. Furthermore, shouldn’t we be suspicious in any case of those who beckon us as co-crusaders with the right hand while the left hand denounces us as heretics?
Shortly after the 2004 election I heard an elderly Church member express gratitude in a public prayer that the recent election had signaled “that the majority of America still believes in prayer and righteousness.” I hope they do, but I personally felt that the reelection of an incompetent President was the product of the DNC’s inexplicable failure to post a worthier candidate than John Kerry (not to mention Kerry’s own failure to formulate a coherent policy on Iraq) than a solemn referendum on matters of morality. Tuesday’s election might come closer to a referendum than 2004 did, though the message of that referendum is likely to be only that the American people will only for so long be sold the same proverbial bag of goods by the same salesmen.
As a new missionary who had spent all of his cognizant years in a haven of Mormon conservatism, I was shocked to hear Italian members of the Church quite regularly lambaste the newly elected G.W. Bush in one breath and praise to the skies one William Jefferson Clinton in the next breath. Didn’t they know what an incorrigible sinner the latter man had been while in office? Two years in Italy and a modest study of Italian history taught me that Italian Mormons, like Italians generally, presume a priori the corruption and iniquity of their political leaders and that President Clinton’s offenses had been relatively minor compared to what Italians are used to. I now think this a sensible approach, though I still think public officials should be held accountable for their private misdeeds—I just think we should keep in mind the high probability of such misdeeds before we invest our collective moral indignation in the cause of any party or candidate, all of whom, by Mormon’s definition, “must fail.” The present generation of Republicans, alas, have failed and deserve to lose the balance of power. But don’t expect too much from their successors.