Democracy and the dangers of political Donatism

I had made an interior vow to write nothing further about the presidential campaign. In my view it has been conducted by both major parties in a manner that emphasizes the trivialities and debilities of American democracy at the expense of demonstrating its strengths. It is my further opinion that the journalistic presentation of the campaign has hardly been more respectable than the campaign itself. But a congruence of circumstances, an "association of ideas" of the kind made famous by Locke and made funny by "Tristram Shandy," redirects my course. In the first place by the crap shoot of the 'Prince' publication schedule I am given space on the eve of the election. In the second place, my last sentient act before beginning the break was to attend an excellent scholarly conference on Augustine of Hippo. Hence though I know who will win tomorrow and why, I choose to address a more serious subject: the civic dangers of political Donatism.

The heresy of Donatism, with which Augustine will forever through polemic be linked, rested on two points: the startling assumption that the Church must be composed exclusively of saints, not sinners, and a belief that the efficacy of the Church's sacraments required the unswerving moral rectitude of the ministers who performed them. In other words, the authority of the Church depended upon the righteousness of its bishops. Augustine gave the definitive Catholic answers to these arguments, but most people find his anti-Donatist polemics, with their apparent justification of religious coercion, quite unsettling. As an English professor, I suggest as a more inspiring alternative the brilliant portrait of the "whisky priest" in Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory."

Today I sense a burgeoning secular Donatism. Many pundits have readily embraced pollster John Zogby's superconductive phrase "the Armageddon Election," one in which partisans act "as if a loss will mean the end of the world as we know it." One hears on every side that our country has never been so divided as in the heat of this current political campaign. The fact that such a statement is historical nonsense cannot obviate the fact that our divisions, though different in kind from those of 1860 or 1916 or 1948 or 1968, are not without their dangers. One of the chief of these, in my view, is that no matter who wins the presidency, large numbers of people will feel empowered to think and speak of him, and by extension of the office he holds, with utter scorn and contempt.

In the liberal bastion of an Ivy League campus most of the badmouthing is directed toward the incumbent president. In East Texas, where I just spent a highly educational weekend at my 50th high school reunion, the language was less polysyllabic, but no less vituperative and disrespectful; its object was the challenger. Yet one of these people will be our next president. He will gain his authority not through his likability or his prowess at shooting ducks, not through his IQ or his Iraq policy, less yet through the comparative fullthroatedness or modulation of his expressed religiosity. He will gain his authority by virtue of getting a majority of the votes cast in the Electoral College.

This is because ours is "a government of laws and not of men". Americans decided long ago, and by the cruelest of means, that states are not empowered to walk away from our constitutional marriage because of unhappiness over the results and implications of a presidential election. No such constraints can govern the psychological or rhetorical lives of individual citizens; but democratic maturity demands the rejection of political Donatism. It is a civic duty to distinguish between any particular political whisky priest who happens to stagger onto the stage and the sacred political priesthood itself.

And I suppose I do regard the presidency of the United States as a "sacred" office. The heaviness of the adjective suggests one of the reasons I had vowed not to write on this subject: that it is impossible to do so without ponderous moralizing. The topic offers endless opportunities for mordant satire, and all too few for lighthearted humor. Yet surely the educated electorate, and by extension the educational institutions with which they are associated, have a higher calling than simply to moan and fulminate more eloquently and grammatically than their less privileged fellow citizens. We may or may not much like our new president, but we need our presidency. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.