Ted Cruz: “I am a Christian first, an American second.”
Thursday
Because I’m a sucker for any article that applies Jonathan Swift to modern politics, I was pleased yesterday to see Bill Moyers in Salon citing what he thought was a Swift poem to attack Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Although the poem isn’t actually by Swift, it doesn’t really matter as it is well chosen.
The Swan Tripe Club in Dublin: A Satire was attributed to Swift when it was published in 1706, but it instead was written by William King, a minor poet of the age who has an entry m Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It describes Cruz perfectly.
Moyers turns to an 18th-century satire against religion factionalists because he finds Cruz to be a “fundamentalist charlatan who craves power above all else.” Moyers has a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and is therefore particularly alert to religious hucksterism. He accuses Cruz of playing rough, using his “brass knuckles, sharp elbows, and forked tongue” to go after “the Affordable Care Act (including a 21-hour rant on the Senate floor), immigration reform, Planned Parenthood — and against the Anti-Christ, Barack Obama.”
In Evangelical-rich Iowa, meanwhile, Cruz
switched to the God Squad. He is the new Chosen One. His ground game in Iowa relied on scores of fundamentalist clergy, hundreds of volunteers, and his own father, Rafael, a Texas pastor who told a Christian TV channel that his son’s race for the White House was divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit.
In Swan Tripe Club, William King attacks a group of men who are out to stir up religious unrest in the Church of England. The poem borrows language and images from Dryden’s MacFlecknoe and Absolom and Architophel—Swift would have been more original—to condemn the men as dunces. Life is going fairly well, King writes, until these men start inventing “imaginary schemes” and seeking out dangers that don’t actually exist:
And now Imaginary schemes we seem to spy.
And search for dangers with a curious eye;
From thought to thought we roll, and rack our sense,
To obviate mischiefs in the future tense:
Strange plots in embryo from the Lord we fear;
And dream of mighty ills, the Lord knows where!
Wretchedly wise, we curse our present store.
But bless the witless age we knew before.
After the poem introduces the conspirators, we meet the man who spurs them to divisiveness. Here is his inflammatory speech, which will sound familiar to anyone who has been watching Cruz:
What though our danger is not really great?
‘Tis brave to oppose a government we hate.
Poison the nation with your jealous fears,
And set the fools together by the ears:
Whilst with malicious joy we calmly sit,
And smile to see the triumphs of our wit…
The figure of “Religion” then shows up to chastise the factionalists. King is following the 18th century practice of allegorizing abstractions and is not being satiric here. He sees Religion as indeed beautiful:
When, lo, before the Board, confessed in sight,
Stepped forth a heavenly guest, serenely bright;
No mortal beauty could with her compare,
Or poet’s fancy form a maid so fair;
Around her head immortal glories shine,
And her mild air confessed the nymph divine…
The passage quoted by Moyers is included in her admonition. It points to how Christianity’s so-called friends have contorted her beyond all recognition. Where in the Bible, Religion asks the conspirators, do you find the grounds for your rage?
Ask not, my frighted sons, from whence I came,
But mark me well; Religion is my name;
An angel once, but now a fury grown.
Too often talk’d of, but too little known:
Is it for me, my sons, that ye engage.
And spend the fury of your idle rage ?
‘Tis false; unmanly spleen your bosom warms.
And a pretended zeal your fancy charms.
Where have I taught you in the sacred page.
To construe moderation into rage…
Cruz’s father is particularly guilty of turning the angel of Christianity into fury, and now his son is getting into the act.
To riff off of a line in The Princess Bride, I don’t think their religion professes what they think it professes.