A New Paradigm of Political Leadership

A Review of Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop's Faith-Based Challenge (Continuum Press, 2004)

By Thomas E. Ambrogi

Bennett J. Sims is bishop emeritus of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (1972-83) and founding president of the Institute for Servant Leadership (1983-99). His book, Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop's Faith-Based Challenge , is a passionate call to the churches to urge forward a totally new paradigm of political leadership, moving from dominance to servanthood in the uses of power at every level. And this before it is too late, before the human species destroys itself in nuclear and environmental catastrophe.

This is not just another in a long line of Bush-bashing books, as the rousing title might suggest. . . Sims has said: “What I plead for in this book is not so much another person as President as another Path into tomorrow.” It is a real-life journal of politically committed spirituality. . .

This is not just another in a long line of Bush-bashing books, as the rousing title might suggest. There is, in fact, very little detailed political analysis here, no pointed critique of the aggressive first-strike policies of George W. Bush, with a faith-based challenge to get to the polls to remove him and the covey of imperial Vulcans who surround him. Sims has said: “What I plead for in this book is not so much another person as President as another Path into tomorrow.” It is a real-life journal of politically committed spirituality, what he calls in one place “a personal and political odyssey.”

After a dozen volatile years as Bishop of Atlanta, Sims founded the Institute for Servant Leadership at Emory University in 1983. He was for years intrigued by the juxtaposition of Leader and Servant, especially in Jesus' bewildering formula for preeminence among the disciples in Mark 10:43-44: “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.” The two words are mutually exclusive, even sharply contradictory. Leading means taking charge, not bending in servitude. And out of these tensions, Sims shaped a new style for himself to be a bishop, and a new design for heads of state to exercise creative leadership in a community of nations.

Sims sees hopeful signs where many others might have to squint hard to see them. He can sometimes be more hortatory than substantially analytic, but his enthusiasms are ultimately founded in the faith-based nature of the challenge he lays down. We are privileged, he says, “to live on a great hinge of history that is shifting the balance of global leadership from warfare to negotiation as the way to peace.” Although he mentions Jonathan Schell only in passing near the end of the book, I kept hearing strains of Schell's remarkably hopeful conviction, in The Unconquerable World, that there is a rising tide of imaginative nonviolent strategies being used in conflict resolution, what Bennett calls “a world-preserving use of power in relationships of equality.”

A fascinating thread throughout the book comes from Sims' years of reading in archeology and paleontology. He alludes frequently to Riane Eisler and to social anthropologist William Ury, and he is especially impressed with Ury's research that disproves the once widely held assumption that humanity is genetically programmed to violence. From all the evidence, Sims concludes, “the childhood of our humanity understood power not in terms of domination, but in terms of responsibility – responsibility to the whole of society.” This scientific evidence then supports Sims in his celebration of Gandhi's use of nonviolence as a world-transforming power.

Perhaps the primary message of this provocative book is the author's conviction that only Servant Leaders will save the world. “Servant Leaders,” he says, “are the people who can pull the world back to sanity – back from the teetering brink of weaponized self-destruction under bellicose unilateral American leadership.” And that, in the end, is “Why Bush Must Go.”

Thomas E. Ambrogi is an interfaith theologian who leads workshops around North America addressing empire building and human rights concerns. A former Jesuit priest and professor of theology and the applied social sciences, Tom lives at Pilgrim Place, an ecumenical center for retired church professionals in Claremont, Calif. He may be reached at tambrogi@aol.com.