Trouble in the Amen Corner

President Nixon is having his troubles with the men of God. There is a great irony in it. While Nixon himself has not invoked Scripture or the Lord's name in his pronouncements to great excess, he has, more than any other modern President, given his Administration a patina of piety. Now the political crimes of Watergate seem all the more noxious because of that banner of righteousness.

The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale and the Rev. Billy Graham were for a time well publicized White House habitues. The East Room Sunday worship service was a Nixon creation. The President was an enthusiastic patron of the various prayer breakfasts round Washington.

His young men and women were known in the early years for the aura of scrubbed righteousness that they cast over the White House. They were Boy Scouts, 4-H-ers, teetotalers and nonsmokers, and some of them even shunned coffee. There remain to this day three separate prayer and Bible groups meeting in the White House.

There is a Tuesday morning prayer breakfast, which just last week heard Senator Lawton Chiles talk about Solomon's request to the Lord to give him a heart capable of listening to the people, of discerning right from wrong. About 20 people attended, including Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. Now and then, men from the White House protective service, including policemen and Secret Service agents, have a prayer meeting. There also is a young women's group that with some regularity meets to study and discuss the Scriptures.

Thus it is interesting that part of the force now pushing Richard Nixon against the wall is the voice of a religion that he so assiduously cultivated over the years. The remarkable conversion to Christ of Charles Colson is considered a cloud of unknown proportions over Nixon's presidency. After weeks of inner anguish and a night of prayer, Colson confessed to a Watergate crime with which he had not even been charged. According to his spiritual mentor, Senator Harold Hughes, he will now tell all the truth he knows.

Billy Graham, who successfully prospected for sin from Korea to Denmark but strangely could not find it for five years in the White House where he prayed, has been saddened by what he belatedly read in the Watergate transcripts. The Rev. Dr. Peale, who has gaudily advised the multitudes in the powers of positive thinking, has uncharacteristically fallen silent over all that negative thinking revealed in the Oval Office. But the Rev. John Huffman, who was Nixon's sometime pastor in Key Biscayne, has not been as forbearing as the more famous ministers. He pointed out that the transcripts were the President's own account of what happened, not the Washington Post's, and he called on Nixon to "repent publicly and accept the forgiveness of Jesus Christ."

Some 26 Quaker meetings have endorsed a letter deploring the "collapse of moral leadership in the Executive Branch" and urging members of Congress to cleanse the Government. T. Eugene Coffin, pastor of the East Whittier Friends Church, where Nixon is on the membership roll, has refused to say anything critical of the President, but he is said to be a distraught man. Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit who is a White House adviser, is still trying to straighten things out with some members of his faith for his defense of the language and thoughts found on the tapes.

That Nixon is having this kind of difficulty despite his intense efforts to be recognized as a devout and respected believer was probably foreordained. Almost every President has had such trouble to some degree, just as every President has felt compelled to speak piously in public, regardless of what he may have truly felt inside. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, was denounced from the pulpit for his conduct of the Viet Nam War when he went to church in historic Williamsburg, Va.

These spiritual matters are complicated by the dimensions of politics and power, and by some of the tough decisions needed in the presidential world. Father McLaughlin is right when he says, "We know little about power and what it does to the human personality. We have no study of the theology of power." There are also those who are sincere. Few who know him doubt the heart of Senator Hughes, and he is convinced "God can and will use Watergate as a rebirth of this nation."

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