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| John Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate and a former senator from North Carolina, says he doesn't like to advertise
his faith. Andy Nelson – staff |
John Edwards: working-class values and a closely held faith
While Christian beliefs help gird his antipoverty campaign, he believes that politicians who identify closely with one religion cannot be inclusive.
from the September 20, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Edwards's embrace of working-class America is matched by sometimes sharp attacks on the country's elite. He has vowed to end Bush-era tax cuts for well-to-do Americans, refuses campaign money from lobbyists and political action committees, and has taken bare-knuckled stances against big business.
"I don't want to sit at the table and negotiate with the insurance companies – I want to beat them," he said in July at a steelworkers' union hall in gritty Georgetown, S.C., to applause. "I don't want to negotiate with the drug companies – I want to beat them."
"There is a huge class consciousness to John," a friend, US bankruptcy Judge Rich Leonard of Raleigh, who didn't return telephone calls from the Monitor, told a North Carolina newspaper a few years ago. "I think it plays out in so many of his political decisions. I think his primary, overriding political view is to put the starting point in the same place for everybody."
Yet little about Edwards's life now evokes images of the common man. The folksy persona that helped launch his political career has been buffeted in recent months by what pundits call "the three H's": the $400 haircuts he charged to his campaign, his new 28,000-square-foot home in North Carolina, and his high-paying consulting job for a New York hedge fund.
"It's a well-known criticism, and that's the accusation of hypocrisy," says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "Given his populist message, many critics have noted that his lifestyle does not seem to fit the image of someone who wants to level the playing field."
But in his interview with the Monitor, on his campaign bus here last month, Edwards insisted that his personal wealth did not undercut his populist agenda.
"I think they're wrong," he said of his critics. "You could look at anybody's life and pick out particular things and say, 'Well, that's inconsistent.'
"It is true I worked at a hedge fund," he added. "And there's no doubt that one of the reasons I worked there was to earn some income.
"But it's also true that I started a poverty center at the University of North Carolina, I did humanitarian work in Africa, I started a college program for low-income kids in eastern North Carolina, I worked to help raise the minimum wage in six different state ballot initiatives, I helped organize workers, particularly low-income workers, into unions. All those things are indications of what I care about and what my priorities are."
An evolving faith
Edwards, the eldest of three siblings, was born in 1953 in Seneca, in the northwest corner of South Carolina. By the time his family landed in Robbins, N.C., another small town, a dozen years later, his father had risen from floor worker at a cotton mill to supervisor.
"My children were well fed and well clothed, and we lived in a decent house, but we had to be very careful with money because there was no extra," his mother, Bobbie Edwards, recalled in a phone interview with the Monitor.
His father advanced to production supervisor in a textile mill, but felt that his lack of a college degree stood in the way of further promotions.
"He knows what working people go through," Wallace Edwards says of his son.
Wallace and Bobbie Edwards taught Sunday School at the First Baptist Church in Robbins. As a boy, Edwards went to services regularly and attended revivals.
"Did the pastor preach hell and damnation? That's part of it, you know – the consequences of sin," Mrs. Edwards says, recalling the church's leaders in those days. "But most of it was the love of God and the promises of God."
Though now seen as a linchpin of the activist Christian right, the Southern Baptist church had very different views about the role of faith in public life in the era of Edwards's childhood.
"We think of evangelical Protestants today as being extremely politically engaged and aware, but historically that hasn't been the case," says Laura Olson, a Clemson University professor who co-edited the book "Christian Clergy in American Politics." "Southern Baptists had for a very long time been very strong advocates of church-state separation and this idea that we don't want to force anyone's religious perspective on anyone else. They saw faith as a very individual thing – between you and God."
After leaving home for college and law school, Edwards says, he drifted away from Christianity.
"There was a significant period of my life where I wasn't close to the Lord," Edwards says. "I wasn't praying. I wasn't seeking His advice and counsel. I wasn't always looking to Him, saying, as I pray, to do His will and not my own. I became more interested in my own desires and will than His will."
Hard-working, ambitious, and possessed of a silver tongue, Edwards charmed law-firm colleagues and juries and soon became North Carolina's top personal injury lawyer. He won record verdicts for victims of car accidents, faulty products, and botched medical procedures.
In 1990, at age 37, he was named the youngest member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the country's 100 winningest personal injury lawyers.
The verdicts – plaintiffs' lawyers typically keep 30 percent – made him a millionaire many times over. But as he entered politics, they also exposed him to charges of being an "ambulance chaser" whose cases helped drive up healthcare and insurance costs. Edwards has defended his legal work as just one more example of his embrace of powerless people against corporate interests.
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Heading into Election 2008, the Monitor profiles the candidates through the lens of their core convictions – through their values, worldviews, and, when applicable, religious faiths. |
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