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Ben Domenech is Editor at Large of The Spectator, as well as a Fox News Contributor and host of “The Ben Domenech Podcast.” He wrote last week of Patrick Joseph Buchanan’s Republican Primary challenge to incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Buchanan lost, but his showing was enough to give him a prime-time speaking slot at the RNC Convention in Houston on August 17, 1992.
Jeff Greenfield, the five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst wrote: “The presidency of George H.W. Bush was in trouble. [In that vacuum] strode 54-year-old Pat Buchanan, a cheerfully pugnacious conservative who had spent his adult life shuffling between the political world—speechwriter for Richard Nixon, communications director for Ronald Reagan—and the media, where he wrote columns and was a frequent face on TV shows ranging from the “McLaughlin Group” to “Crossfire” to “The Capital Gang.”
“Buchanan’s insurgent primary run a quarter-century ago [included] the grievances, legitimate and otherwise; the dark portrait of a nation whose culture and sovereignty are threatened from without and within; the sense that the elites of both parties have turned their backs on hard-working loyal, traditional Americans.
“Buchanan didn’t win the primary, and in the end, he didn’t come close to winning the race, but his 37% of the vote in New Hampshire was enough to give the president a black eye—the New York Times called it ‘a jarring political message’ that carried ‘many ominous signs for Mr. Bush.'”
Domenech argues that Buchanan’s “speech would be the most memorable by far [as] delivered by a television commentator, syndicated columnist and former Richard Nixon hatchet man—the 54-year-old Irish Catholic Pat Buchanan, who delivered what came to be known as ‘The Culture War Speech.'”
“The first thing I want to do tonight,” began Pat Buchanan, “is to congratulate President George Bush and to remove any doubt about where we stand: the primaries are over, the heart is strong again and the Buchanan brigades are enlisted—all the way to a great Republican comeback victory in November.
“[Arkansas Governor Bill] Clinton however,” he continued, “has a different agenda. At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the [Democrat] Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
“Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: ‘Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.’ And so they do.
“Bill Clinton says he supports school choice—but only for [secularists] state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, private schools, Jewish schools or Catholic schools need not apply.
“The agenda that Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide [by] in a nation that we still call God’s country.”
U.S. Senator Al Gore (TN) was announced as Bill Clinton’s running mate at the DNC Convention a month earlier in New York. In his speech Gore made a startling declaration that the “central organizing principle” of governments everywhere must be the “environment.”
In Houston, Buchanan placed Gore’s alarmist “environmental” harangue in check: “Wrong Albert, the central organizing principle of this republic is FREEDOM. And from the ancient forests of Oregon and Washington to the Inland Empire of California, America’s great middle class has got to start standing up to these environmental extremists who put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers and jobs.
“Yes, we disagreed with President Bush,” continued Buchanan, “but we stand with him for the freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.
“We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and we stand against putting our wives and daughters and sisters into combat units of the United States Army. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.
“We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against would-be Supreme Court justices like Mario Cuomo who think they have a mandate to rewrite the Constitution.”
This much is clear: Jesus’ ekklesia kingdom assignment from Matthew 16:18—expounding a Christendom on the offense where “the gates of hell shall not prevail against”—seems like a relic from the America of a couple of centuries ago.
When was the last time that American Christendom provided a strategic cultural plan to restore America to her Judeo-Christian foundation and reestablish a biblically based culture? Contemporary Christendom seems more solicitous about its buildings, butts and budgets configuration than about how the culture in their community is doing.
If Christians stay home this Tuesday, Nov. 8, then those living in rebellion against God elect their representatives, create and pass legislation reflecting their godless values and codify into law their immoral, crude and distorted views that run afoul of God and His values.
American secular leadership has built an uneven and fake wannabe foundation on sand over the last 100 years, where parents have entrusted their children to secularism’s choir leaders, to be indoctrinated and have their lives ruined by desolate ungodly sectarians: This must end. Contemporary culture gives the eschatological grounds for this conviction.
But praise be to God, Gideon’s and Rahab’s will be entering the public square this very Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022. And exactly like young David of ancient Israel before the giant Goliath (1 Samuel 17:46), “Faith having brought God into the scene could announce the victory in advance.” {eoa}
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
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