The First Liberal
The Liberal Code
of Jesus Christ
Why I wrote the book
Note: I begin with an apology to those who think this should be a religious work. My purpose is to discuss the political ramifications of the words and deeds of Jesus and to show how they formed the basis for modern Liberalism. For that reason, I discuss Jesus as an historical figure and do not refer to him with capitalized pronouns or other indications of faith. This is not a book about religion. It's about a philosophy of life that could grant the Western World a life of peace, honor and happiness. Unfortunately, we've cloaked that philosophy with so much ritual and reverence that we hardly recognize it anymore.
---Dennis Martin Altman, Lexington, Kentucky, 2008
In 1994 I left my home turf, the media centers that are New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., to join the faculty of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. This book is written because of what I found there.
On the surface, Kentucky is a state that should hold no surprises-it's in America's Bible Belt (BB), its economy is largely agricultural, and many of its people speak with soft Southern accents. By all outward signs, Kentucky should be a land of clean-living, peace-loving, and charitable people; and to some extent, it is. The quality of life one finds in Lexington and Louisville, the other big university town, is culturally rich, ethnically diverse, and unpressured. But those cities are eyes in a storm of contradictions.
The state's population ranges from concentrations of the most highly educated (in the two big towns) to the less lettered enclaves of Appalachia. Overall, Kentucky ranks a poor forty-seventh among the states in percentage of residents with bachelor's degrees, and it's rated thirty-fifth in the proprietary "smartest state" index created by author Morgan Quitno. * The state is poor as well. In terms of per capita income, Kentucky ranks forty-fifth among the fifty states.
Tragically, the area's rankings rise only in listings of negative factors. It's eighth in diabetes, fourth in cancer deaths, and seventh in deaths from heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions. These lamentable numbers have been tabbed as the "Kentucky Uglies" by observers, and they provide the backdrop to the most severe of the commonwealth's contradictions.
While Kentuckians are statistically underpaid, unhealthy, and undereducated, they tend to vote as if they were rich, robust, and well prepared for any professions they might care to pursue.
This is generally true of the rest of the Bible Belt as well. (The BB consists mainly of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina, most of Texas, and Kentucky.) The Belt states all rank unfavorably among the fifty states in terms of income, health, and education. However, they continually vote to keep things just the way they are. Illogical as it may seem, the BB regularly elects politicians who short-change them in terms of their greatest needs. What's wrong with this picture?
Are they politically naive? Do they hold a distorted view of how government works? Are they unaware of the achievements of Liberal programs like Roosevelt's New Deal, which improved health, education, and prospects for employment for poor, rural Americans? Or have they been blindsided by their preoccupation with other issues that obscure their view of their own world?
That may be the case. Republican politicians have learned the secret of convincing the poor, rural people of the Southern states to vote against their own best interests and keep conservative candidates in power. They court poor Southerners because they're easy. They vote emotionally. They respond to candidates who aggrandize the military, wave the flag, and belittle those who rely on welfare payments.
Some Republicans don't have to pander to them. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never had to "get down" and appeal to rural Southerners because they could count on the votes of educated people in Northern states. I found that to be the case when I worked for President Gerald Ford in 1976. We knew we wouldn't run well in the South because we were up against a favorite Southern son, Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, so we didn't try.
But living in Kentucky, I continually found myself thinking that if these people could be shown that their fears have been played and parlayed by modern political carpetbaggers, they might begin to wake up. That possibility is a wishful and unlikely hope. But grand hopes die hard, and the possibility of raising social awareness is the stuff of life to Progressive Christians and humanists. And since every journey begins with a single step, such is the purpose of this book.
* Statistics, citations and other corroborating data are in the full edition
Kentucky Association for Economic Development, www.kaedonline.org.
Kentucky School of Public Health report, 2006.
