Rep. Liz Cheney: Speaking Truth to Power

My May 15 blog post was about columnist Michael Gerson, whom I called a man of integrity. This post is about Rep. Liz Cheney, whom I see as a woman of integrity. But please note: being a person of integrity doesn’t mean that such a person’s ideas/opinions are always correct.

Rep. Liz Cheney, a Woman of Integrity

The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives met on the morning of May 12 to consider Cheney’s leadership role in their Party. The candid Wyoming Representative spoke briefly at the beginning of that meeting and led a short prayer, closing with these words:

Help us to speak the truth and remember the words of John 8:32 — “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” May our world see the power of faith.  

Rep. Liz Cheney on May 12, 2021

Less than twenty minutes later, Rep. Cheney was set free from her powerful position as the chair of the House Republican Conference (HRC) because of her unwaveringly speaking the truth about the lies still being propagated with regard to the 2020 election.

A person of integrity is one who consistently speaks and acts in harmony with their core beliefs in spite of the negative consequences that might result. In other words, a person of integrity tells the truth when it would be to their personal advantage to lie or at least to keep quiet.

Rep. Cheney is a woman of integrity because she is speaking the truth to power, denouncing the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election even though, as she knew well, continuing to do so would likely lead, as it did on May 12, to her ouster as the third ranking Republican Representative in the House.

Rep. Liz Cheney, an Opponent of the “Big Lie”

During the entire four years of the Trump presidency, Rep. Cheney was a loyal supporter of the President. She voted in line with Trump's position 93% of the time. But she consistently disagrees with his persistent position that the 2020 election was stolen and that he was actually re-elected.

To support his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, DJT and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election.

U.S. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz subsequently contested the election results in the Senate. Their effort was characterized as “the big lie” by then President-elect Joe Biden—and that designation has, for good reason, been regularly used in this regard ever since.

On May 16, Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday asked Rep. Cheney if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik, Cheney’s successor as HRC chair, are “being complicit in the Trump lies.”

Cheney’s straightforward response was: “They are, and I’m not willing to do that.” (See a 40-second clip here.)

Rep. Liz Cheney, a Proponent of Problematic Ideas

Those who are not conservative Republicans find much objectionable in Rep. Cheney’s political views and public statements about political matters. To give just one example, she is sometimes called a “warmonger,” and not without reason.

A May 16 post on NewYorker.com states that “Cheney, like her father [the Vice President from 2001 to 2009], is a committed hawk and a believer in the aggressive use of American power.”

Rep. Cheney has a right to her own opinions and political views, but there is a difference between opinions and facts. We can either agree or disagree with someone’s opinions, which cannot be objectively verified to be either true or false.

But it is different with facts: they can only be acknowledged as being true or denied by lying. Rep. Cheney accepts the facts about the 2020 election and speaks that truth to the powers that oppose her.

So, in spite of her problematic ideas, Cheney’s championing the truth about the 2020 election is a mark of her integrity. And in this regard, as one D.C. newspaper headlined on May 14, “Incredibly, Liz Cheney Is on the Right Side of History.” That is because, in expanding words MLK, Jr., made famous:

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward truth.

Michael Gerson: An Evangelical with Integrity

Today (May 15) is the 57^th birthday of Michael Gerson, the well-known columnist for The Washington Post. Happy Birthday, Mr. Gerson! And thank you for being an evangelical Christian with integrity.

Michael Gerson, the Evangelical

As I have noted a number of times, there has been, and continues to be, considerable criticism of white evangelical Christians (WECs)—and for good reason. But, as I often have said to my “old codger” friends, not all WECs are the same. We must acknowledge significant differences among them. 

There is little question but that Michael Gerson has been a lifelong evangelical Christian. As he himself explained in “The Last Temptation,” an April 2018 article in The Atlantic, he “was raised in an evangelical home, went to an evangelical church and high school, and began following Christ as a teen.”

In that same article, included in full in a 2020 book titled The American Crisis, Gerson states that his experiences as a Christian through the years make him “hesitant to abandon the word evangelical. They also make seeing the defilement of that word all the more painful” (p. 258).

Gerson was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America.”

Michael Gerson, the Writer

Although he has done other things, Gerson is chiefly known as a writer. For example, he was a speechwriter for Bob Dole and a ghostwriter for Charles Colson. Then from Inauguration Day in 2001 to June 2006, he was the White House Director of Speechwriting. As such, he helped write the second inaugural address of Pres. George W. Bush.

After leaving the White House, Gerson wrote for Newsweek magazine for a time, and then in May 2007 he began his tenure as a columnist for The Washington Post.

In 2010, Gerson also was the co-author of the book City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era. The Foreword was written by Timothy Keller, the well-known evangelical pastor, and it was issued by Moody Publishers.**

Michael Gerson, a Man of Integrity

In his opinion pieces for The Washington Post, it seems quite clear that Gerson writes as a man of integrity. Here are examples of what I mean.

On October 28, 2019, Gerson’s WaPo opinion piece was titled, “White evangelical Protestants are fully disrobed. And it is an embarrassing sight.” In that article, he writes, “Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [=WECs] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself.”***

Gerson’s opinion piece for January 7 of this year, the very next day after the ill-fated events of Jan. 6, Gerson’s piece was titled, “Trump’s evangelicals were complicit in the desecration of our democracy.”

He pointed out in that piece, “As white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, anarchists, criminals and terrorists took hold of the Republican Party, many evangelicals blessed it under the banner ‘Jesus Saves.’” Further on in that article, Gerson wrote,

It is tempting to call unforgivable the equation of Christian truth with malice, cruelty, deception, bigotry and sedition. But that statement is itself contradicted by Christian truth, which places no one beyond forgiveness and affirms that everyone needs grace in different ways. There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.

And then on May 3, Gerson’s opinion piece was “Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful.” (More about this later.)

And please note: Gerson still is listed as a Republican, so he not only is an evangelical Christian with integrity but also a Republican with integrity. This country badly needs more WECs and more Republicans like Michael Gerson.

_____

** A good reminder in a May 7 tweet by Tim Keller: “Less than 2/3 of evangelicals in the US are white and less than 10% of evangelicals in the world are American. (And not all white US evangelicals are the same). So, when you say, 'evangelicals have done this' or 'claim this'--keep this variety in mind.”

*** For those who cannot access The Washington Post articles by Gerson because of a paywall, click here to see those opinion pieces by Gerson. (If you don’t have time to read all three, at least see the first one, which was posted on May 3.)