Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even
when they exercise influence and not authority; still
more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of
corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than
that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
— Lord
Acton |
I have over 10,000 books in my personal library. I haven't
read them all. Some I haven't even opened.
I recently discovered one such book. When I opened this 1974
book, I discovered it was autographed by the author. I think I
bought it at a John Birch Society bookstore.
I was too young and politically immature to know much about
the author. I had heard of the author when I was in high school
because I lived close to his political district, but never
learned much about him. Perhaps because he was Catholic, and I
was a pretty narrow-minded Protestant.
As I skimmed through the book a few days ago, I realized I
had a lot more in common with this author than I ever suspected.
If I knew he was a conservative, I had no idea he believed
Christianity must be applied politically. Were he alive today,
he would be lambasted as a "Dominionist,"
a "Theocrat,"
and likened to those "Christian Reconstructionists."
Just like me.
The subtitle of the book is "The Anatomy of an Amoral
Decade, 1964-1974." It is a collection of the author's
newsletter articles. The articles could easily have been pulled
from Christian Reconstructionist newsletters like Gary North's Remnant
Review. They are conservative and many are explicitly
Christian, in a way most Christian-in-name-only
"conservatives" are afraid to be. Here are some of the
subject headings in the table of contents:
- Enduring Values, Absolute Truths
- Morality in an Amoral Age
- The Right to Life
- Education and Child Control
- Judicial Tyranny
- The Nature of our Enemy
- The Sellout to Red China
- Trading With the Enemy
- The Enemy Within
- National Defense
- Big Government vs. the Free Market
- Decline of the Dollar
- The Welfare Burden
- Gun Control and Crime
- Government Control of Medicine
- Watergate
- The Energy Crisis
(It's good to remember that 40 years ago we had an
"energy crisis" that politicians were working
feverishly to solve. The Foreword to the book was written by L.
Brent Bozell, who married William F. Buckley's sister and
was influential in National Review circles. His son, L.
Brent Bozell III, is founder and president of Media
Research Center. Bozell is listed under his Foreword as the
President of the "Society for the Christian
Commonwealth," and senior editor of Triumph Magazine. The
"triumphalist"
R.J. Rushdoony contributed to this magazine.
Bozell's Foreword paints a glowing picture of a political
saint. I should be so lucky as to have some distinguished figure
write such hagiography for me. Looking ahead from 1974, it is
inspiring. I would like to be such a person. Looking back on
history, it is frightening. I don't want to be this person. But
maybe that's where political aspiration inevitably leads.
Here is Bozell's Foreword:
|
The
Christian regeneration of the American public order in
an apostate, secular humanist age: there can hardly be a
more difficult task for any man or group to undertake in
the United States today. It demands in very large
measure all the theological virtues -- faith, in
the source of the grace which alone can make such a
regeneration possible; hope, that it is not and
never will be too late to save even a nation whose moral
disintegration has so far advanced that millionfold baby
murder is a constitutional right; love, to
inspire the sacrificial efforts necessary to sustain any
such mission in contemporary America. The man who
embraces this apparently quixotic cause is, by virtue of
his extraordinary commitment, unique.
Rarely is
this commitment found in America today. More rarely
still is it found in the political arena, whose usual
effect on a man is more likely to corrupt than to
inspire.
Yet this
is precisely the commitment to which John Schmitz's
eight years of elective political office -- first in the
California State Senate, then in the United States
Congress -- finally brought him. Always a strong,
unapologetic Catholic, Schmitz realized more and more
clearly the longer he worked in politics that nothing
could help our country short of a fundamental
re-ordering of American life and thought in a Christian
direction. No mere tinkering with political machinery or
"electing better men to office" could halt,
let alone reverse, the dominant tides of the age:
secularization, dehumanization, the disintegration of
the family, the abandonment of objective moral
standards, the institutionalization of sexual
perversion, crime and corruption.
As he so
well said in TRIUMPH magazine last year: "It is
time we realized that the sickness in America today has
penetrated far deeper than politics, and requires much
more than politics to cure it.
As a
candidate for President of the United States in 1972 --
the year of Watergate and "you don't want McGovern,
do you" -- Schmitz, though very little known
outside California when the campaign began, garnered
more than a million votes. This was a truly
extraordinary accomplishment for a man whose campaign
began with no money and less than a week's advance
notice, a man whose name was not even printed on the
ballot in nearly one-third of the states, and who had no
explicit support from any leading political figure.
This book
tells the story, through a "political
autobiography" and a selection of the best of
Schmitz's political writings of the past decade, of how
John Schmitz made his way from a conventional kind of
conservative politics in California, through a
Presidential candidacy, to a conviction that the United
States must seek actively and purposefully to become a
Christian commonwealth if it is to survive. I salute
this man for his understanding of the duty to which God
is calling America's Christians in this difficult and
often discouraging period of history, and his open and
unequivocal assumption of the essentially apostolic
mission of making America Christian.
Where
Schmitz will go from here is known only to the Lord of
men and of history. But how he came to be where he is
today -- how he came to see where America truly stands
at this moment, what he said about it and proposes
should be done about it -- this book sets forth. Schmitz
finished his years in public office a better man than
when he entered it -- the opposite of what usually
happens. He is apparently proving that the Christian is
not ruled by history or by fate, but with God's guidance
and grace may challenge and even defy both -- and in the
end emerge victorious in that domain whose true and
eternal rule is Christ the King.
- L. BRENT BOZELL
- President
- Society for the
Christian Commonwealth
- Senior Editor -
Triumph Magazine
|
In case you don't know, this man's life crashed and burned in
sexual scandal. The
details are bizarre. His children
were also infected
by this corruption.
Why is it that those who seek political power so often seek
some kind of sexual power as well?
Why is it L. Brent Bozell and other discerning political
leaders never see the scandals coming? Could anyone have
predicted Schmitz's future unraveling?
Every time I think about jumping my political campaigning up
a notch, in the vain imagination that I could actually win an
election, I'm warned by something like this of the corrupting
influence of "the government." I want a Christian society,
but not a "Christian commonwealth."
dominionist
The
Worldwide Crack Up Boom, According to Ludwig Von Mises