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<\/p>\nFive years ago, my college celebrated its centennial. For Jeanne and me, the highlight of a series of events scheduled to mark the anniversary was a lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin. We arrived early enough to sit in the second row, twenty feet or so from the podium, and along with a packed house were held spellbound for over an hour as our favorite historian used examples from the lives of Presidents about whom she has written best sellers\u2014LBJ, FDR, JFK, and Lincoln\u2014as the anchors of her discussion of leadership qualities.<\/p>\n
In the midst of her talk she mentioned her newest book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism<\/em>. Although the book had been published three years earlier and apparently spent several weeks at the top of the NY Times bestseller list, I was unaware of its existence. I ordered it from Amazon the next day\u2013it was terrific.<\/p>\n The Bully Pulpit<\/em> touches on a part of American history with which I am not particularly familiar, the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries described on the back cover as \u201cthe first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.\u201d As I learned about the childhood and adolescence of William Howard Taft, I also learned about his father, Alphonso, a judge on the Cincinnati Superior Court bench who, from a life filled with accomplishments, picked his dissenting opinion in a case concerning prayer and the reading of the Bible in public schools as the achievement of which he was most proud.<\/p>\n In that case, the court ruled that such prayer and reading could not be prohibited; in his dissent, Judge Taft wrote that \u201cthe Constitution of the State did not recognize the Christian religion any more than it recognized the religions of any other citizens of the state . . . the school board had an obligation as well as a right to keep religious partisanship out of the public schools.\u201d Several decades later, of course, this position became the law of the land.<\/p>\n Judge Taft\u2019s position reminded me of a reader\u2019s comment posted on my blog the day after the 2016 Presidential election, in which I expressed my confusion about the support Donald Trump received from evangelical Christians.\u00a0The commenter perceived that I was a \u201cliberal\u201d Christian, and wrote that<\/p>\n I am unclear to how a liberal Christian votes . . . if you vote according to your faith that would be voting against abortion and those things that take God out of our government, am I correct?<\/strong><\/p>\n To which I responded:<\/p>\n This liberal Christian votes according to policies that seek to facilitate assistance to the poor, the homeless, the needy, the disenfranchised\u2013exactly the persons Jesus told us that we must be most concerned about. Given the nature of separation of church and state, God does not belong in our government, but in the lives of those who profess the Christian faith. As to abortion, I describe myself as intelligently pro-life or conservatively pro-choice. Take your pick.<\/strong><\/p>\n That post was followed in the succeeding weeks by several more posts in which I grappled with the now familiar phenomenon of Christian support for Trump, including this one a couple of weeks after the election.<\/p>\n