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11 August 2011
Rick Perry, an ultra-conservative who regularly boasts of his religious piety and who recently hosted a “National Day to Prayer” conference that included some of the most conservative Christian Reconstructionists in the country, joins a field of other pietistic candidates who have already announced: Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, and ex-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.
In all three cases, each of the candidates claim a ‘personal relationship’ with God; and each claimed that they were told by God that they needed to run for president in 2012.
Perry told the Des Moines Register in July that he’s “more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do.”
This echoed sentiments made only a few weeks earlier by Rep. Michelle Bachmann in June, who shared in several media interviews that she prayed to God about whether or not to run for president and that those prayers provided her with a "sense from God" of "assurance about the direction" she was taking.
At about the same time, ex-Gov. Tim Pawlenty's campaign manager, Nick Ayers, acknowledged that before he joined Pawlenty’s team, he "prayed deeply" over his future path. Ayers concluded that God had "called" him "to a higher purpose," and that higher purpose is leading Pawlenty to victory in November 2012.
What’s going on? Are they all talking to the same God? Why would God tell three different candidates that they’re the “chosen ones”? Why doesn’t God ever coordinate and share His gameplan with more than one person, and with someone who has no conflict of interest in the matter?
There are only a few conclusions to be drawn from this paradox, and none of them are very flattering. The first one would be that these “callings” don’t come from God at all but from the ego-driven ambitions of the candidates who would prefer you to believe otherwise. The corollary here is that any God who exists apparently doesn’t care enough to actively counter the false assertions to let the rest of the populace know that His name is being used in vain.
But if the politicians’ claims are to be taken at face value, then the second possible conclusion is that God seems to be acting a bit maliciously and yanking the chains of devout followers, promising them an outcome that He does not intend to fulfill. This raises the question as to why these politicians – or anyone else – would want to heed, let alone promote or worship, such a jerk of a God.
Either the politicians are lying to us about God’s endorsement, or they’re being played as unwitting dupes. Neither one seems to be a noble characteristic we like to see in our politicians.
But the fact that these politicians are not called upon to explain these discrepancies is an implicit acknowledgement that neither these politicians nor their followers take any of this seriously, that it is all a big show to impress gullible and ignorant voters.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that God has been invoked as endorsing a candidate for the White House. But over the years, while many have heard and heeded "the call," few have emerged victorious. One would wonder how good the reception is for these candidates, and why the Divine One would be either so ambiguous or so deceptive?
One of the more infamous instances was when the wealthy and influential televangelist Pat Robinson ran for president in 1988, ostensibly because God told him to do so. Despite such a divine endorsement, he was handed humiliating defeats in the primaries and withdrew midway through the campaign season.
We would have loved to have heard that post-campaign conversation between Robertson and Yahweh.
