Saints and Sinners: Does Bush need a ‘kitchen cabinet’?
In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the unexpected and turned to the country’s clergy for advice on how to rescue the country from its recession doldrums.
“Because of the grave responsibilities of my office,” Roosevelt wrote in a “Letter to the Nation’s Clergy,” dated Sept. 24, 1935, “I am turning to representative clergymen for counsel and advice, feeling confident that no group can give more accurate or unbiased views.”
Clergy from across the United States stepped up to the plate and just days later, offered their economic stimulus ideas, which touched upon various aspects of the economy — from Social Security and Federal aid to the Public Works Program and even combating alcohol abuse.
Roosevelt later remarked on how helpful the replies had been — and one would imagine that he took at least some of the advice to heart (though how much, we may never know).
But are today’s clergy wise enough in the ways of the world to advise the president of the United States on the momentous matters of state?
The late Rabbi Rudolph Rosenthal once served on the mayor of Cleveland’s crime commission with four other clergymen. They were ridiculed as the “God squad.” Critics, Rosenthal said, often asked, “What do they know about crime — these preachers who have led sheltered lives?” Rosenthal’s response: It amused him to be characterized as a “naive clergyman in a naughty world.”
Should President Bush be consulting the clergy for their views on going to war? Some ministers are speaking out on their own:
The Harvard Magazine, in its January-February 2003 issue, quotes the Rev. Peter Gomes, who spoke out against the war in a sermon delivered on Oct. 6, 2002, entitled “Patriotism is Not Enough.” Gomes, who is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University, said that “Bombing Iraq into oblivion as payback to those who have done us injury, at this moment seems to me to be the wrong thing to do. … As a citizen I demand a better excuse than revenge, or oil, for the prosecution of a war that is likely to do more harm than good, that will destabilize not only the region but the world for years to come, and that, worst of all, will confirm for all the world to see our country’s reputation as an irrational and undisciplined bully who acts not because it ought, but because it can.
This is not to say that all clergymen who are using the church as a forum to debate the morality of war take Gomes’ position. Others defend the use of force in Iraq by using the argument of theologians like Augustine and Aquinas that there is such a thing as a “just war” when military force is morally justified and necessary to combat injustice.
In any event, is President Bush neglecting a valuable moral resource by not soliciting the views of the clergy in the country’s present crisis as Roosevelt did in 1935?
Should the president take a leaf out of the book of President Andrew Jackson who appointed a “kitchen cabinet” in the 1830s? The kitchen cabinet was a group of non-appointed and non-elected advisers. It included clergy, newspaper editors, and Jackson’s longtime friends and family members. They were nicknamed the “kitchen cabinet” because people pictured them keeping out of sight by coming into Jackson’s office by way of the kitchen and backstairs.
Jackson said he hoped the kitchen cabinet would provide the kind of moral focus needed to keep the shaky union together. With our culture in decline and our spirits in need of lifting, we are looking for the same moral focus Jackson sought.
Could today’s clergy provide this?
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)