’Tis the season for

Negative Campaigning

I admit it. I love national political campaigns. I follow politics like other men follow football. I enjoy the “sport,” the contest, the competing strategies and the various “plays” each candidate makes.

My first involvement in a national political campaign was at age seven. I helped elect Republican Dwight Eisenhower. I went door to door distributing “I like Ike” fliers and urged people to vote for him to “save the nation.” When Ike triumphed I cut his victory picture out of the newspaper and taped it to my coat and returned to school triumphantly. In the schoolyard I met my first Democrat. Gary Halvin ripped the picture off my coat and tore it up, tossing the pieces into the wind. I ran home crying. The redeeming effect: my mother let me skip the rest of the day from school.

People get strong feelings about politics—often stronger than their feelings about religion. I was recruited as a seven year old foot soldier in Ike’s campaign by negative campaigning in the church. Ike’s opponent was Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois who was an eloquent orator who excited intellectuals and academics but was ridiculed by Republicans for his indecisive, aristocratic professorial air. In my church he was guilty of two mortal sins: (1)He was divorced and (2)he was a Roman Catholic. My church said he might be a servant of the Anti-Christ (whom they all believed to be the Roman Catholic Pope) and if he were elected it would be “the end of America.” They called Christians to unite to “protect the nation” from the Anti-Christ ruling through this evil divorced man. At seven I simply accepted this line of thought. This is how I wound up going door to door to “save the nation.” It was my first experience with negative campaigning.

In the following 16 Presidential elections I’ve noticed a negative fever emerge each time. It lasts about six months. Americans seem to come down with it. Of course, the reason national political campaigns practice “negative campaigning” is it works. One can win office easier by tearing down your opponent than by recommending yourself. Everyone condemns negative campaigning roundly, but they practice it anyway because it works so efficiently. We have about three months left of the current negative campaigning. I expect the fever to again fill the air (and the hearts) of many Americans.

However, this column is not about national politics so much as the church. The negative charge in the air sometimes bleeds into the church. Church folk sometimes recognize the power of negative campaigning and resort to it in the church too—especially if they already have a complaint against their pastor. Malcontent church members can use the same methods of political negative campaigning they learned in politics: sabotaging emails, spreading false rumors and using derision and mockery.

The coming months may be a bad time to launch too many changes in your church. And, even if you do take a low profile perhaps we should all be prepared for some negative spill-over from the fever. It’s in the air they breathe. Even church members might discover the power of negative campaigning to promote their own agenda or get their own way... or to get rid of their leaders.

So, what do you think?

(Please ignore current politics—rather, say something about “negative campaigning” in the church.)

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Keith Drury September 9, 2008

www.TuesdayColumn.com

Keith Drury is Associate Professor of Religion at Indiana Wesleyan University

P.S. In light of the current negative fever, and the existing proneness of the blogsphere toward cruel and ruthless comments I’ll probably write mostly boring columns the next three months. I can’t wait for Christmas when the fever subsides!