Outside View: Four words that mean a lot

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- I always wonder how certain edits get made on TV programs and others do not. In preparation for the season premiere of The West Wing on NBC, now the winner of even more Emmy awards, the last episode from May was broadcast again on Sept. 17. The show includes a final scene where the Speaker of the House of Representatives, played by actor John Goodman, takes the oath as acting president of the United States.

As the camera pulled out from the West Wing of the White House, the viewer hears Goodman reciting all the words of the very short oath of office except for just the last four words, "So help me God." Maybe it was a dramatic choice to fade out before those words were spoken or maybe the producers ran out of time. But one wonders.

Perhaps the producers looked up the oath that is spelled out in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution and found it did not actually contain the words "so help me God," and they would be correct. Maybe they did not realize that President George Washington added the four important words at the end when he took his first oath on April 30, 1789, and that every president since has followed suit.

To be fair, one can read too much into this deletion. One scene in the show involves a hospital nurse asking "Toby," a White House staff member, to tell the incumbent president, played by Martin Sheen, that the whole nation is praying for the safe return of his daughter who has been kidnapped by terrorists. So prayer and belief in God are mentioned in some episodes.

But the fictional White House of The West Wing is distinctly copied from a Clinton-era model. One gets the feeling of a completely secularized work environment. From time to time one or two characters might refer to their Jewish heritage, but only as a cultural, ethnic, or family heritage and not as a rich and encompassing religion helping the characters to lead fuller and more meaningful lives.

Living Christianity is not a feature for any of the characters in the show. Nor is Islam or Hinduism or another great religion. The values of the characters are loyalty to the fictional "President Bartlett," loyalty to their jobs and careers, loyalty to his political party, loyalty to each other, and of course loyalty to the country.

There is nothing wrong with these loyalties and all these things can be good and appropriate values in their proper perspective. High-level government jobs in Washington, D.C., are extremely demanding and the culture of any White House staff in either party often revolves around such concerns.

But one hungers to see the life force that might animate the characters beyond the transient continuum of policy-wonk reports, a smorgasbord of issues, and the pettiness of interpersonal rivalries. The Bartlett White House on TV worships exclusively before the secular altar of public policy. For the staff, government is the ultimate engine for social reform and they are the elitists who will make the world new again. The impulse as always is noble enough, but the hubris that all social problems may be solved by governmental decree seems never to be questioned in the plots.

The West Wing represents an alternate vision of America. It is one that the culture of Hollywood is far more comfortable with than the vision embraced by the administration that took over the real life West Wing in 2001. That's OK. It's probably good therapy and an emotional safety valve for liberals who have been out of office for three years.

The therapeutic value aside, the show represents an interesting window on a spectrum of cultural disconnects in modern America. I choose not to refer to these fault lines as "cultural wars" because I think that term both exaggerates and misidentifies the debates over social issues played out in the governmental realm. Rather I think two broad groupings of allied sub-cultures can be thought of as those who place their faith in secular humanism and those who believe in higher natural law.

In general, secular humanists rely on government to advance a social agenda based on a non-religious approach to human problems. Those who have faith in a higher natural law look to God for their ultimate personal salvation and relegate the role of government to that of a referee whose job is not to advance any agenda so much as to ensure the rule of law.

The divisions are not neat and sharp. This doesn't always mean that some higher-law advocates do not mistakenly attempt to use the power of government to impose their ideas, nor does it mean that all secular humanists are hopelessly unrealistic as to the limits of governmental power. But the degree to which the four words, "so help me God" are symbolically absent from American popular culture is the same degree to which our broad cultural alliances have difficulty finding common ground.

The secular coast dwellers have a condescending habit of treating the believers of the interior nation as backward rural cousins who are not their intellectual equals. The interior dwellers and churchgoers counter with charges of hubris and "anti-patriotism" on the part of the humanists on the coasts. Both groups accuse the other of narrow-minded intolerance for the other's viewpoint.

For many historical reasons, Hollywood is currently dominated by the humanists who really do live their lives almost completely on the secular plane of existence where all power lies in their world. They just don't feel comfortable even talking about any higher law in the universe let alone about the nature of the Creator and His power to intervene in human affairs.

As a corollary, they cringe whenever President George W. Bush talks about the need to confront "evil" in the world. Evil is not a word that fits in easily with the vocabularies of people who think all values are relative and none are absolutely true. Thus, if only symbolically, we will continue for some time yet to look in vain to Hollywood products for the four missing words and will hear silence instead.

-- Mark Q. Rhoads is a former Illinois State Senator.

-- United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues.