Mike Pence: Ambition tempered by faith

INDIANAPOLIS—Who is Mike Pence?

As an Indiana journalist, I’ve seen him close up for many years.

He is a sincere evangelical believer. He’s ambitious, which is necessary in politics, but his ambition has been tempered by his Christian faith.

Pence went through a time when he repented of wrongly motivated political ambition and came out a different person.

He ran negative campaigns against Democrat Phil Sharp for Congress in 1988 and 1990. Pence, in some sense, was running real hard in the flesh. He was running closer to the Donald Trump approach to politics in those days: confident and too sure of himself. Conservatives were fine with his approach, and he received plenty of votes, but Pence was convicted of personal sin, as much in his heart as in his campaign tactics.

He lost both races, but he won a bigger victory. Pence repented. He asked forgiveness of Sharp and others. He became successful with a statewide radio talk show and became friends with liberals. He became Indiana’s leading example of civility across ideological and party lines in the 1990s.

Those who bemoan the nasty tone of politics can look at Pence as an example of how to fix the problem. He also wasn’t moving to the middle ideologically either, the way moderates recommend when the debate gets nasty. Pence was about as conservative as they come on the issues, and he did not see moving to the middle as the way to become friends with liberals. Instead, he thought the key was to take a genuine interest in people as human beings.

Those talk radio years were a kind of political wilderness to Pence, maybe a good wilderness—like Paul’s time in the desert or Moses in his wilderness.

He would often speak to friends about what he was learning, something any Christian struggles with, whether on the right or left or middle of the political spectrum. He was learning to trust Christ for his political future. When Pence was in Congress, he was articulate enough that his name would be mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. Or it was thought he might move up to be speaker of the House. He was clearly destined for a climb up the political ladder.

Pence would talk about how he had learned the hard way not to try to plot his political future. He seemed to have learned Psalm 75:6-7 with a depth I found to be unusual among all the ambitious people I had met as a journalist:

“No one from the east or from the west or from the desert can exalt themselves. It is God who judges: He brings one down, he exalts another.”

Or the way Daniel (2:20-21) put it:

“Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever: for wisdom and might are his: And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings. …”

Those were not clichés to Pence. He clearly sensed a calling to politics and government service, and he obviously ran for governor of Indiana because he was missing the kind of executive branch experience that was part of the résumés of successful presidents. Yet he had come to some new level of trusting the Lord as a way of refining the ambition that can be a virtue and a vice, depending on the heart response.

Pence’s conservative friends during his tenure on the airwaves were having the time of their lives, moving President Bill Clinton to the middle after the historic 1994 mid-term elections, seeing Clinton go along with welfare reform and other moves to the right.

One of those friends, Rep. David McIntosh, who represented Indiana’s 2nd District, ran for governor of the state in 2000, opening up a seat in Congress. Pence ran for that seat, winning easily and quickly becoming the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives.

What set Pence apart was his temperament and his cordial personal relationships with people holding very different opinions than his. He could talk about civility in a humorous way and didn’t seem to take himself too seriously. Pence liked to say he was a conservative, but he wasn’t in a bad mood about it. Too many conservatives, he would add, looked like they had been sucking on lemons.

A Christian conservative brings some pretty bad news to the general populace. We are sinful. Government needs to cut spending. (Ouch.) Stay married to your wife. It’s good for you and your children, even when it gets hard. (Uhhh.) Don’t commit adultery. Stay away from pornography. (Eye roll.) Repent. Confess. Rise early in the morning for time alone with the Lord. (Groan.)

Pence developed an upbeat way of bringing bad news in a fallen world.

Meanwhile, back home in Indiana, Mitch Daniels was becoming the most effective conservative governor in the history of the state (from 2004 to 2012). He managed with brilliance, even pulling Democrats to his side. As Daniels’ second term was ending in 2012, Pence decided to run for governor, and other potential Republican candidates quickly got out of his way. He and Daniels would both receive mentions as potential presidential candidates. They differed in their tactics on social issues, but they were remarkably close politically and spiritually. Their combined political talent has been unusual for a small state like Indiana. Seldom have we had two conservative names popping up so often as viable presidential candidates.

The national mood on same-sex marriage was shifting quickly last year, and social conservatives asked Pence for a religious freedom measure. Republicans had super-majorities in both the state Senate and House in 2015. They did not have to talk to Democrats about the matter. They could do what they wanted. Had they been forced to negotiate some kind of measure with Democrats, Republicans might have had a better sense of the popular mood about the issue and avoided what became a political calamity for Pence and the state.

Politically, Pence was recovering from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act controversy and was facing a challenging governor’s race this year from his 2012 Democratic opponent, former state House Speaker John Gregg. It would have been uphill battle for Gregg, though, in a strongly Republican state. Though he didn’t have the managerial brilliance of Daniels, Pence was building on the Daniels free-market legacy and attracting new business to the state, getting the unemployment rate down to 5 percent.

Now Pence has a new challenge, as a running mate to a very unconventional presidential candidate. Those years in the political wilderness may be more vital than ever now. Most of Pence’s friends in the Christian faith will give him the benefit of the doubt, even if they are in the prophetic wing of the evangelical movement and think it unseemly for him to be tainted with anything to do with Donald Trump.

Any success Pence has had in politics has come when he has trusted the Lord and sought divine direction for his next step. Obviously, he senses divine direction on this one.

Like Daniel with those Babylonian rulers, or Joseph with Pharaoh, Mike Pence will need those times alone with the Lord now more than ever.