March/April 2001

Confession time–I was late for work this morning. Not because I drive so far—which I do. But because there was an accident at one of the major intersections I regularly and often unthinkingly speed through. I’ve often noted how potentially dangerous it is. Two main highways converge at less than right angles, at a point where one has only a stop sign and the other no sign at all. To add to the potential for trouble, the through way approaches the intersection via two dips in the landscape. As a result traffic traveling at high speed reappears without warning right behind traffic pulling out at start-up speed.

Barefoot and clad in a wetsuit, Stockwell Day buzzed across Okanagan Lake on a personal watercraft to arrive at his first news conference after winning a seat in Canada’s House of Parliament. It was the sort of moment Day’s fans love and his enemies hate. The splashy debut was typical of the Canadian Alliance leader’s gregarious personal style—a style that his opponents believe masks potentially threatening policies. After all, he is the first Canadian national leader to openly make conservative Christian convictions a part of his platform—and to enlist the help of evangelical church groups in winning power. This is Canada, where religion and politics have traditionally kept a wary distance from one another.

Arcane ceremonies, mysterious creeds, and the smell, however faint, of ritual violence—all reasons that religious cults are often criticized and suppressed by both the state and mainstream religious groups. From Japan, to China, to Russia, to the Western democracies of Germany and France, cults and sects are being targeted for investigation, interrogation, and even suppression. This crossfire of criticism and scrutiny is viewed by many people as deserved, because they believe that cultic groups pose a threat to a well-ordered society. But this conclusion begs the question. What is a cult?

In the midst of the 2000 presidential primaries Congress took an extraordinary action that generated barely a blip on the radar screen of media coverage. Democrats in Washington proposed resolutions that signaled a surprising level of religious intolerance—by a political party that traditionally prides itself on being the champion of tolerance. The resolutions denounced Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating and its disdain for Catholicism, views made much after George W. Bush’s campaign visit to the fundamentalist Christian university in February 2000. Nearly all the other presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, vigorously criticized Bush for not chastising university officials for their “intolerant” policies.

No right is absolute. Nor is any power, governmental or other, in our system... Equally certain is it under "a government of laws and not of men" such as we possess, power must be exercised according to law; and government, including the courts, as well as the governed, must move within its limitations.

- Supreme Court Justice, Fred M. Vinson, United States v.
United Mine W orkers (1947)

When reflecting on his election to the presidency in 1800, Thomas Jefferson was pleased with how quickly the nation had adapted to the peaceful transfer of political power from one party to another. Republicans had narrowly defeated the Federalists; John Adams, the incumbent president, had quietly stepped down; and unlike the radical and bloody outcome of the French Revolution, the American constitutional experiment had found resistance in the worst of feelings bitterly dividing the two parties. Two weeks after his inaugural address, Jefferson referred to this first constitutional test as the “revolution of 1800.” It was an election that had been decided by the voice of the people under the rules of the Constitution. In the history of nations this was indeed revolutionary. It was a new era, and it needed someone with Thomas Jefferson’s experience and wisdom to cultivate and sustain it further.