A Politician Of Faith?

Don Boudreaux has written a letter to a radio station that he posts on his blog:

I'm appalled by everyone who called in today expressing hopes that one day one of their children "might become President of the United States."

My son, Thomas, is ten. I hope that he graduates from college and has a satisfying and lucrative career. But I'd much rather that he be even a janitor or a used-car salesman than become a successful politician. To succeed at politics - especially at the national level - requires duplicity and shamelessness rivaled only by arrogance. For my son to become President he would have to abandon nearly every moral precept that my wife and I try hard now to impart to him: honesty, forthrightness, decency, respect for others, and modesty. We emphatically do not want our son to yearn for power, for to do so would inevitably corrode his humanity.

Thomas, like nearly everyone else in this world, will be fit to rule himself when he is an adult. He is not, and never will be - again like everyone else - fit to rule others, even if those others elect him to do so.

Consider the character traits listed by Professor Boudreaux for a politician. Can a person of faith make a successful politician? More specifically, can a person of Christian faith make a successful politician?

I have wondered about this question before, and my answer has been (still is) that I thought it would be difficult because I thought a successful politician tended to be someone who acted as Professor Boudreaux describes in his letter.

Perhaps one illustration of this comes from recent primary camgaigning. Consider the following story from the Washington Post:

The attacks led to the most bizarre moment of the campaign: Huckabee announcing this week that he would not run a negative ad that he had prepared against Romney, then playing it for reporters and television cameras, virtually ensuring it would be seen across Iowa.

I also think it would be difficult because government is about power over others; government is about force and coercion. While government can use power and force in good ways and with justice, primarily when government uses power and force to protect individuals and their property from harm by others, government today goes far beyond such just uses of power. Someone elected to political office today is going to be confronted with nearly countless opportunities to touch power and to vote in support of the use of power to rule over others rather than in support of protecting others from harm. Few political leaders today, maybe the number is zero, define their political agenda as limited to the use of government's power to protect individuals and their property from harm by others. It seems to me very likely that any successful politician will have to act in ways that uses power and force to rule the lives of others, and acting in this way seems to me quite at odds with the teachings of Jesus.

I'm not sure I can trust a politician who announces their Christian faith as part of their personal character, and especially a politician who makes their faith one of the reasons people should vote for their election. I suspect my more likely response to a politician who announces their faith should be: "You hypocrite."

Would you agree with me?