I put my arm around the shoulders of the President of the United States of America and prayed …
When we stepped outside the White House, reporters and photographers from the press corps pounced on us.
“What did the President say?”
I told them everything I could remember.
“What did you say?”
Again I told them everything I could remember.
“Did you pray with the President?”
“Yes, we prayed with the President.”
“What did he think about that?” someone called out.
Before I could respond, an enterprising photographer asked us to kneel on the lawn and re-enact the prayer. The press corps roared its approval. I declined to repeat the words we had prayed in the Oval Office, but I said that we had been planning to thank God for our visit anyway, and now was as good a time as any.
The four of us bent one knee of our pastel summer suits, and I led the prayer of thanksgiving as sincerely as I could, impervious to the popping flashbulbs and scribbling pencils.
It began to dawn on me a few days later how we had abused the privilege of seeing the President. National coverage of our visit was definitely not to our advantage. The President was offended … Mr. Truman never asked me to come back.
A White House staff memorandum in late 1951 stated it bluntly: “At Key West the President said very decisively that he did not wish to endorse Billy Graham’s Washington revival meeting and particularly he said he did not want to receive him at the White House. You remember what a show of himself Billy Graham made the last time he was here. The President does not want it repeated.”
I did visit Mr. Truman many years later at his home in Independence, Missouri. I recalled the incident and apologized profusely for our ignorance and naiveté.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied graciously. “I realized you hadn’t been properly briefed.”
After our gaffe, I vowed to myself it would never happen again if I ever was given access to a person of rank or influence.101
Other instances of unwisdom by the Christian community can be more serious. In Canada, the actions of a vocal portion of the Christian community in relation to the decriminalization of abortion and the Mulroney government’s attempt to establish a regulatory regime might be cited as yet another example of well-intentioned believers nevertheless failing to act wisely at the interface of faith and politics.
In 1968 to 1969 abortion in Canada was made legal by the administration of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, provided a committee of doctors affirmed that it was necessary for the mental or physical well-being of the mother.102 But in 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down this Criminal Code amendment, and it fell to the new Progressive Conservative administration of Brian Mulroney to propose a new law governing abortion.103
The Mulroney government’s first attempt was a compromise that provided easy access to abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and criminalized late-term ones, but it was defeated in a free vote in the House of Commons.104 In 1989, the government introduced a much stricter bill, which, if enacted, would ban all abortions unless a doctor ruled the woman’s life or health was threatened.105 This bill passed narrowly in the House but was defeated by a tie vote in the Senate, where the rules interpret a tie vote on a bill as a defeat.
Under normal circumstances, the rare defeat in the unelected Senate of a bill already passed by the democratically elected House of Commons would bring about a negative public reaction and increase support for the bill in both houses. But in this case, the issue was proving so divisive and unmanageable for the Mulroney government that it decided not to reintroduce the legislation. Since then, no federal government has introduced any legislation on this subject, and Canada remains one of only a few nations in the world with no legal restrictions on abortion.
Throughout this whole debate much of the pro-life Christian community took an all-or-nothing approach—rejecting compromises and often attacking as perceived “weakness” the compromise positions of the pro-life members within the cabinet and parliamentary caucuses even more vigorously than those positions were attacked by their pro-choice opponents. The end result therefore was not a regulatory regime that would at least have provided a “place to stand” in order to advocate for more pro-life regulation over time but nothing, no legal restrictions in Canada on abortion whatsoever.
The Wisdom of the Serpent Demonstrated
Jesus not only instructed his disciples to be wise as serpents in their public conduct; he demonstrated this wisdom in his own public conduct and addresses.
This wisdom was most often displayed on the numerous occasions when Jesus’ opponents would ask him questions in public for the sole purpose of getting him into trouble. This is often the situation when one is asked questions in public by the media or one’s adversaries. On these occasions the questions are rarely asked out of an honest desire for information but are usually intended to publicly embarrass or discredit the answerer no matter how she or he responds.
On one such occasion, for example, Jesus was asked, by his opponents, after a flattering preamble, “Is it right [lawful] to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”106 It was both a political question (about paying taxes) and a moral or religious question (is it right?), and it was purposely designed to get Jesus into difficulty with either the public or the authorities or both.
If Jesus answered “yes” he would be in trouble with the crowd, including his own followers, since the Jews hated the Romans and particularly loathed those Jews who co-operated with them in the collection of taxes. But if he answered “no” he could be charged with treason for advocating disobedience to Roman law and authority. So what was he to do? How was he to respond?
Note first of all that Jesus, knowing the motives of the questioners, did not answer immediately. This was not because he didn’t know what to say, as it became clear that he knew perfectly well what he was going to say. Rather, I suspect that he was teaching his onlooking disciples one of the most basic lessons in responding to public questions from opponents: If you don’t know what to say, shut up until you do. Better to remain silent and appear contemplative or uncooperative than to make a hurried, ill-considered, and foolish reply. “Twitterers,” take note.
Next, perhaps again to show his disciples how to bide their time, he asked several questions of his own. (Responding to nasty, loaded questions by asking some of your own is not a bad tactic in itself.) He asked to be shown the coin used for paying the tax. Someone in the crowd, perhaps one of his interrogators, fished around in his purse and produced a coin, likely a Roman denarius. Jesus looked at it and, pointing to the coin, asked two more questions: “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” Someone answered, “Caesar’s.”
Then came the zinger, Jesus’ reply to the original question, a reply displaying the wisdom of the serpent and the shrewdness of the devil: “So give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Fewer than fifteen words, spoken in less than ten seconds. A wise reply, a brilliant reply—the perfect sound bite. A reply that would have made the evening television news had the cameras been rolling, and a graphic demonstration to his followers of what it means to be “wise as serpents” in one’s public acts and utterances.
Would God that as followers of Christ today we could, in our time and circumstances, respond with such wisdom to questions designed to embarrass or discredit the Christian faith at the interface of