The Essential Paul Simon: Timeless Lessons for Today's Politics

6. Culture, History, and Politics

239 6 Culture, History, and Politics Editor’s Note Paul Simon loved history and read voraciously about it and the prominent leaders who shaped our nation and the world. He was always seeking to learn the lessons that can be extracted from history and to discover what the lives of famous and successful leaders can teach us. These are recurring themes in his writings, as the selections included in this chapter illustrate. In his devotion to history and the life stories of great leaders, Simon was following a great intellectual tradition in American education. If one reads the biographies of many of the early leaders of this country, it is evident that they took their reading duties quite seriously and were convinced that they could learn civic and personal virtue from history and from the examples of those who came before them. Such themes are evident in the biographies of such early leaders as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. Lessons from history and biography also figure prominently in the upbringing and education of more recent leaders like Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Simon followed these models and learned as much as he could; he also wrote columns avidly recommending that others take the study of history seriously. Religion and religious education are also frequent themes in Simon’s writings. As his own autobiography indicates, Simon was raised in a very 240 Culture, History, and Politics religious home and environment, and the lessons from his Lutheran upbringing are evident in most of his work. Robert E. Hartley’s biography on Simon also covers his early life quite thoroughly and emphasizes how important religion and religious instruction were to Paul and his brother Arthur’s life. Educators and parents of that day, like Martin and Ruth Simon, firmly believed that the shaping of character begins at home and that it is reinforced and deepened by the lessons acquired from early and frequent church attendance. Simon’s early life was saturated with those kinds of lessons. The instruction from home and church were also just the right influence for shaping not only personal character and virtue but also civic character and virtue. Thus, what was good for the individual was also, happily, good for the community and ultimately the nation. For all his strong belief in the salutary role of religion in personal and public life, Paul Simon was also an ardent advocate for the separation of church and state. Most important, he believed that the First Amendment clearly required the government to keep a strict hands-off stance toward churches and religion, and vice versa. He did not believe that the churches, synagogues, and mosques, qua organized religion per se, should be actively involved in the political fights of the day. They should help shape individual character, the norms of society, and the mores of the community , but they should not tell their congregants how to vote or for whom to vote. They should not be involved in raising money and sinking it into political campaigns. He was surprised and hurt when he first encountered criticism from the emerging Christian Right led by such pastors and fundamentalist leaders as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and he reacted quite negatively toward their stinging criticism of him and his political ideology. He also fired back with pointed refutation and rebuttal of their positions. Early on in his political life, Simon thought the work and influence of the Lutheran church was quite important for enhancing the civic virtues of its people, and he believed that they would just naturally agree with his brand of Progressive politics if they examined their consciences and studied the Scriptures adequately. In short, what we now call the social gospel was his fundamental position on the important teachings of the New Testament in the Christian Bible. He understood that the early civil rights movement was heavily centered and influenced by the black church, and he had no Editor’s Note 241 problem with that influence since he thought the cause was intrinsically right and in line with his own sense of justice. Like many liberals of his day, Simon held the easy assumption that proper Christian values would lead people of goodwill to approximately the same conclusions about politics he held. Later, when the push-back from the Right grew to such power, he became a much more ardent and...