The Washington Post's Richard Cohen is half right. No, Michele Bachmann is not "batty" or "a bigot," as he crudely wrote earlier this week. Cohen cites Bachmann's various unfortunate public misteps on gays and the debt ceiling as evidence that the Congresswoman must be from another planet. Granted, her vociferousness in articulating her positions on issues is a bit off, but the philosophy that inspires such intensity is not. The debt ceiling sideshow has exposed this is in new and rather entertaining ways.
The philosophy of limited government that Bachmann seems to follow is not crazy. The notion that the United States government will go into default on its debt if the ceiling is not raised is as Bachmann puts it, "simply not true." Revenue doesn't stop filling the government coffers between now and August 2nd and what's more, as Representative Louis Gohmert from Texas has suggested, the government has plenty of assets it could liquidate should there be some sort of 11th hour crisis. The President and the Treasury Secretary are lying to the American people when they claim otherwise.
Receive news alerts
Cohen is on to something, however, when he calls her an "ignoramus" and says she "knows next to nothing." Because, as Cohen must know, there is something more to Bachmann than her limited government philosophy. She and her Tea Party supporters have, to be cordial, defective personalities. A short two-minute conversation with anyone at a Tea Party demonstration would surely reveal this to be true. Many of the members are like that awkward friend who always laughs before the punch line, or that Uncle who insists on telling you about a new addition to his Hot Wheels collection while spitting in your face and not realizing it. They're quirky, bizarre, and weird, but these personal traits are not dangerous as Cohen and others would suggest.
What's pertinent to this discussion is that Bachmann and swathes of her Tea Party support are rather intellectually shallow. Ask a Tea Party member what he or she thinks on the debt crisis and the member would most likely jump into an incoherent rant on some obscure issue like returning to the gold standard or repealing the 16th amendment. Or they might recite Glenn Beck's monologue from his most recent broadcast. Unfortunately, much of what the Tea Party knows is garnered from entertainers, not experts or original source materials. Data seems to support this as one Quinnipiac poll found that Tea Party members are "less educated but more interested in politics than the average Joe." The 2008 criticism that Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin was not "read" on issues was largely true. Just as living near to Russia didn't make Palin an expert on Soviet relations, experience as a tax litigator for the IRS doesn't mean Bachmann is a "constitutional scholar."
Similarly, accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior didn't make Michele Bachmann a theologian either. After announcing her candidacy for President, Bachmann told CBS' Bob Schieffer that she has "a sense of assurance" from God to run for President. Later at this year's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference where Bachmann excited her Tea Party base, an activist explained to the Religion News Service his support for Bachmann: "She comes from us, not to us."
This month revealed, unfortunately for Bachmann, exactly where she comes from. Up until a week or so ago, the Bachmanns were members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), a sect of Lutherans that other confessions regard as out of the mainstream. The WELS doctrinally believes that "prophecies of Antichrist have been fulfilled in the Papacy."
Though she didn't mention the Antichrist, in a 2006 personal testimony at New Life Christian Center in Minneapolis, Bachmann discussed how she became a "fool for Christ." "I decided that as each step came, I would just be faithful in ‘What does His word say?'" Just this week at New Life Community Church in Marion, Iowa, Bachmann reiterated, "the Lord put in me a hunger and thirst for his word." In all, Bachmann concludes, "the Lord said, 'Be submissive.'"
This sort of blind obedience to God's will misses crucial developments in Christian theology. Saint Augustine used the Biblical story of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son to argue that killing a human being can be permissible, "when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time" (City of God, Book 1, Chapter 21). But if God is logos, the Greek word meaning reason, as the first verse of the Gospel of John tells us, then He certainly can't commission anything unreasonable, and human sacrifices certainly are.
Theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham implied we couldn't know God through reason. According to this understanding, God is so transcendent that He does not fit into any of our human nomenclature, even that of reason. The Church has since developed beyond this misunderstanding of God as Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in his 2006 lecture to the University of Regensburg, "the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy." Indeed, we are made in His image.
While Michele Bachmann assured voters she was not anti-Catholic, her intellectual capacity, especially on matters theological, resembles the name given to the anti-Catholic movement of the mid-19th century: know-nothing. Look how, for contrast, Congressman Paul Ryan writes about budget and debt issues. In April 2011 when he proposed the "Path to Prosperity" budget, Ryan wrote to the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan and in correctly citing the Catholic social principle of "subsidiarity," Ryan noted: "This budget is rooted in the dignity of the human person." The very notion that a Congressman would write to an Archbishop for "dialogue" about budgetary issues is remarkable. It showed a genuine effort to engage in a multi-faceted understanding of issues, a real intellectual fitness.
Cohen expressed disappointment that Tim Pawlenty didn't question Bachmann's intellectual "fitness" for the Presidency, but her health. While that may be true, Pawlenty also has received much pushback for his criticism of Bachmann's "non-existent record of accomplishment." Perhaps Pawlenty is right. Where is Bachmann's plan on the debt? Where are Bachmann's "big idea" policy proposals? This week, Bachmann responded by listing her so-called accomplishments of occasionally "fighting against" some bad piece of legislation. That's all well and good, but what has she fought for?
Michele Bachmann is not serious and if the Tea Party wants to be effective in 2012, its members ought to get serious, too.
Nicholas G. Hahn III is an Assistant Editor for RealClearPolitics and a graduate of Political Science and Catholic Studies from DePaul University. He can be contacted here and on Twitter.
Read Full Article »