Taking cues and connecting dots

Hugh Hewitt has had quite a career.

A glance at his resume shows the Midwest native has been a government official, foundation CEO, law professor, newspaper columnist, talk show host and infamously, a panelist booed by the audience during a 2015 presidential debate.

Hewitt asked a question of then-GOP hopeful and surgeon Ben Carson, almost universally regarded as a very nice man, which did not endear the white-haired interlocutor to much of the crowd.

A paraphrase of Hewitt's query: "Could you, Dr. Carson, order ruthless military strikes that could kill thousands of innocent children?"

Personally, I don't care much about any of those details.

I'm more interested in where the well-traveled conservative got started in life -- and about his interesting views on faith.

Hewitt hails from Warren, Ohio, virtually identical in size to Cape Girardeau, where I spent quite some time as a radio reporter in the early 1980s.

Warren is a socially conservative blue-collar city where many unionized workers made wire harnesses for General Motors vehicles.

The 66-year-old Roman Catholic layperson penned an editorial last week for the Washington Post which caught my eye.

Excerpts are presented for your perusal.

"There is very little consensus within American Christianity on much of anything. Any attempt to impose a political order on the spiritual landscape is doomed; we are a country that tends to splinter. Too often, we over-generalize. For example, the fashion is to call any Christian who is not a Democrat a 'Christian nationalist.' That lens is grossly distorted. It doesn't even work on a grossly simplified basis."

Hewitt's observation is correct and cuts both ways. To wit: any Christian who is not a Republican ought not to be tarred as a "wing nut" or a "Marxist."

My late father was a small government lifelong Republican who believed the federal government was careless about money.

By contrast, my paternal grandmother, wife of a coal miner and mother of nine, voted a straight Democratic ticket all her life.

Grandma Long was eternally grateful for the social policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, under whose respective auspices, Social Security and Medicare were created.

Grandma remembered those programs as lifesaving, she said, each time she entered a voting booth.

Not everything is simple, is it?

More notably, Hewitt also wrote the following in his editorial.

"Very few (people) take their voting cues from any pulpit, if there are any to be had."

He's wrong about this because there are faithful worship attenders who are interested in what a denomination, a local church or even a pastor thinks about the issues of the day.

For me, during my quarter-century tenure in the pulpit, I did my best to steer clear of politics, trusting people in this 21st century connected world have the same access to information as me.

Jesus, St. Paul and the psalmists had plenty to say about how one should live.

Maybe pulpiteers should quote the experience of biblical figures and allow people to connect their own dots.