The right hand of God
Guillory, Ferrel
REPORT FROM NORTH CAROLINA THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD JESSE HELMS'S POLITICAL THEOLOGY From the high dais of the Republican National Convention as well as from a low podium in a smalltown school hall,...
...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...
...Counterassaults by too-secularist opponents, especially from the cultural Left, have served only to harden Helms' s resolve...
...REPORT FROM NORTH CAROLINA THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD JESSE HELMS'S POLITICAL THEOLOGY From the high dais of the Republican National Convention as well as from a low podium in a smalltown school hall, Jesse Helms has delivered what he must regard as the ultimate in motivation...
...The Lord," he says, "may be giving us just one more chance to save America...
...It is a church where the theology is as moderate and mainstream as its red-brick, tall-steeple architecture...
...it is a sobering look at the deeply held Christianity that makes Helms a politician who seldom moves toward the center and who, though often isolated, ought not be underestimated for his tenacity and for his sense of mission in seeking to turn the political dialogue rightward...
...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...
...And he writes "Atheism and socialism-or liberalism, which tends in the same direction-are inseparable entities: when you have men who no longer believe that God is in charge of human affairs, you have men attempting to take the place of God by means of the superstate...
...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...
...But it is more than that...
...If he resists change with a nod to theology, it is nevertheless a powerful driving force in his own life and his own politics...
...When Israel obeyed God, the nation prospered, says Helms, and when Israel fell into immorality, civil strife resulted...
...Our political problems are nothing but our psychological and moral problems writ large," Helms writes in the preface...
...He grew up a Southern Baptist at a time when few of its white congregations questioned the prevailing racial segregation of the region and when the denomination's pre-Depression struggle between fundamentalists and modernists still echoed...
...FERRELGUILLORY Ferrel Guillory is southern correspondent for the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.eigh, North Carolina...
...In the story of the Plymouth Colony, Helms finds a lesson about the superiority of free enterprise to communism...
...Just as God would answer the prayers of the Israelites, the senator says, so God would respond to Americans who call upon him...
...It is a line that offers a starting point for explaining why so much of Helms's biting rhetoric, his persistent obstructionism, and his far-right politics springs from a certain religious reservoir...
...To those who read the Bible literally and who rejected efforts to mesh the scientific with the religious, disagreements were more than mere differences of opinion between reasonable people...
...He was reared in Monroe, North Carolina, a small town where his father was both police and fire chief...
...To "halt the long decline," the senator proposes his brand of conservatism-a brand rooted in the Bible but practically oblivious to the implications of such critical passages as the Sermon on the Mount...
...Helms does not mention in his writings, nor derive any lessons from, the communal arrangements established among the early Christians...
...They also reflect modern social, cultural, and economic change...
...To know what motivates Helms is to understand what lessons he draws from the Bible...
...The 122-page paperback is titled, When Free Men Shall Stand, and it is subtitled, "A Sobering Look at the Supertaxing, Superspending Super-bureaucracy in Washington" (Zondervan, 1976...
...In subsequent essays, Helms defines liberalism far more broadly than its usage in conventional political discourse...
...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...
...To Helms, the profit motive has a biblical O.K...
...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...
...in the parable of the talents, and ownership of property is among the highest of rights...
...When in Raleigh, Helms worships at the Hayes-Barton Baptist Church, located at the edge of his leafy midtown neighborhood...
...He looks back fondly on his boyhood between the two great wars, and he observes, "I never detected in the days of the Depression the kind of spiritual desolation and cynicism, nor the urge toward violent revolution, that has gripped our country in the recent past...
...The all-provident government, which these liberals constantly invoke, is the modern-day version of Baal...
...That often repeated line opens a window into the mind and motivation of the North Carolina Republican who is the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...But nothing more defines Helms over the course of a long public career than resistance to change and government activity that promotes it...
...In a 1993 book, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Michael Lienesch, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reports that within the movement of which Helms is a leader, "free enterprise is seen as an ethical system as well as an economic one...
...Americans, he says, "have bought every nostrum the liberals have been so insistent to sell us...
...Anybody who did not agree, it was automatically assumed that they were non-Christian, or even atheist," says Allen Page, the dean of undergraduate instruction and a professor of religion at Meredith College, a Baptist women's school in Raleigh...
...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...
...Read the context in which Helms places liberals, and you begin to sense why he shows so little restraint in assaulting not only their political positions but also their characters...
...He speaks of the "incompatibility of liberalism with political freedom and biblical morality...
...Adroit politicians have successfully divided us into groups of minorities so that now each of us belongs to one minority or another...
...Like others on the Christian Right, Helms draws a parallel between Israel in the Old Testament and the United States today...
...And yet, in 1976, when he was still a little noticed junior senator, Helms published a collection of essays fully imbued with the mindset that Page describes...
...Clearly, the seventy-one-year-old Helms is a mixture of Old South and New Right...
...Only when they switched to free enterprise in 1623- Governor Bradford's giving permission to each man to set aside enough corn for his own family-did the colony prosper...
...Helms writes in When Free Men Shall Stand that "freedom is the only basis for prosperity," and that "the only guarantor of freedom in the world has been the Christian faith...
...Though he accuses unnamed "adroit politicians" of creating disunity, Helms actually would save America by dividing it...
...Spiritually we know that we are all Israel," he writes...
...As he tells the history, the Pilgrims suffered from disease and hunger under the share-in-common provisions of the Mayflower Compact...
...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...
...Helms assails the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society for having "regimented" and "federalized" the nation...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 2
