Sharon, Conn. — “The Founders were not afraid of religion,” James L. Buckley explained in a reflection in his book Gleanings from an Unplanned Life. Buckley was a one-term senator from New York. He was elected on the Conservative Party line. His funeral Mass was the morning after the first Republican presidential debate this year, and just about everything about that liturgy seemed to contrast with much of our politics today. Buckley was a public servant in the most noble sense, serving in, unusually, all three branches of the federal government. And the way he lived his life — he has been called “sainted,” and his daughter gave testimony to that in her eulogy of him — calls all of us, and also our politics, to our better angels.
When we hear about religion in politics today, it is all too often someone insisting that God endorses his politics or candidate. Buckley was allergic to that. He worked to be the man God would want him to be. So much so that over the years he publicly reflected on the temptations of reelection and why, maybe, given that humans are as we are, term limits are necessary for public office.
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