'St. Jack' and the Bullies in the Pulpit

Religion and prayer infuse Danforth's telling of the Thomas story. It is largely a private faith, not a standing-before-the-microphones public declaration of righteousness, yet the calls for divine intervention are plenty impassioned. At one point, just as Thomas was to testify, Danforth herded Sally along with Clarence and Ginni Thomas into his Senate bathroom in search of quiet. He cued a tape recorder.

"Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang. "With the cross of Jesus, going on before."

Going Public

Danforth draws no connections between the divisions bared in the Thomas debate and the polarization that bedevils Congress today. He recalls a more pleasant era of coalitions and compromises that gave way to ever fiercer partisanship starting in the early 1990s after Thomas was already on the bench. He dates the beginning of the downslide to the arrival in the Senate of sharp-tongued former House Republicans.

His sense that the legislative branch is unable to answer large questions -- the fate of Social Security, health care or the world order, for example -- crystallized in March when he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. It opened with the blunt assertion that "Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians."

In that essay and another in June, Danforth argued publicly for the first time that the Republican right is a divisive force in the party and the nation. He traced a relationship between increased activism by Christian conservatives and the collapse of collegiality. He said occupants of the Christian middle are honorably uncertain about translating their beliefs into laws because they are mindful of their own fallibility.

Danforth urged GOP moderates to show that "we, too, have strongly held Christian convictions, that we speak from the depths of our beliefs, and that our approach to politics is at least as faithful as that of those who are more conservative."

The articles rocketed around the Internet. Liberals, along with a raft of lonely Republican moderates, loved them. One person wrote Danforth in relief, having worried "that the Republican Party was being taken over by crackpots." But Danforth has also heard derisive snipes from Republicans who consider him naive, at best. A stranger imposed a curse on him before signing a four-page screed, "Have a nice day. Bob."

"Have a nice day," Danforth muses, "but one hell of an eternity."

Commentator Z. Dwight Billingsly, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pointed out a cold calculus, that when Danforth took office in 1977, there were 143 Republicans in the House and 38 in the Senate, compared with 232 in the House and 55 in the Senate last year: "Danforth-style Republicans can forgive our own party anything except success, probably because they never knew it and didn't bring it about. In fact, it happened in spite of them."

Or, as a Texas correspondent warned in an e-mail to Danforth: "The Republicans never fail to take the Christian conservative vote for granted. Watch what happens when the Christians sit at home in the upcoming elections. I will let you get back to your cocktail party with all your fat cat clients who stand around and demean people that understand our country's problem is spiritual."

Fronting the Center

Does it matter what Jack Danforth thinks? He commands no political army and rules no territory beyond his writing desk and the occasional pulpit. He is up against the most polished political operation of modern times, facing the likes of Rove and House Republican disciplinarians such as Tom DeLay.

Jim Wallis, the left-leaning author of "God's Politics," declares hopefully that "the monologue of the religious right is finally over and the new dialogue has just begun. The answer to bad religion isn't secularism, it's better religion. Moderate and centrist evangelicals and Catholics are going to shape the future."