What was it about the people of Indiana that prompted them to keep electing politicians who didn’t want the jobs for which they ran?
This has become a trend.
Perhaps it started with Mike Pence, who ran for governor in 2012 because he knew he needed executive branch experience if his dream of running for president was ever to become more than a fantasy. Pence spent his four years in the governor’s office desperately looking for ways to engage in discussions about national issues and elevate his profile while paying only cursory attention to the state’s business.
Or maybe it began when Todd Rokita tried to hold onto his well-paying private sector gig with a health care brokerage firm after he was elected Indiana attorney general. Rokita begrudgingly surrendered the health care job when it became a focus of criticism. But he has continued to turn being attorney general into a side hustle while he scrambles to find yet another office for which to run or sets himself up for a spot bloviating for Fox News or Breitbart.
Not even six months after taking the oath of office as Indiana’s governor, Mike Braun was telling people he didn’t like the job and was thinking about mounting a 2028 campaign for president, his political intimates told political reporter Adam Wren. Braun has since denied that he was bored with being governor, but his public demeanor does little to knock down the story. Braun seems to approach going to work in the state’s top office with the same sort of enthusiasm the rest of us reserve for heading to the dentist for a root canal.
And then there’s Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith.
As Indiana Citizen’s Sydney Byerly reports, Beckwith has continued to maintain his position as pastor for Life Church in Noblesville while also occupying the lieutenant governor’s office at the Statehouse. On his LinkedIn profile, he lists both positions as full time.
(Disclosure: The Indiana Citizen and TheStatehouseFile.com are partners and Byerly is a former student of mine.)
Beckwith, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is a special piece of work. Not long ago, he made news by offering up an explanation of the infamous three-fifths compromise in our Constitution—the clause that made enslaved Black people unwilling accomplices in their oppression—that only a member of Jefferson Davis’s Confederate cabinet could endorse.
To say that Beckwith’s interpretation of our history and Constitution was mistaken is like saying the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg was a minor mishap.
He now has turned those same powers of analysis and discernment to defining his service to the public as lieutenant governor.
When conservative radio host Steve Deace asked Beckwith the difference between being a pastor and a politician, our lieutenant governor said:
“I don’t think there is much.”
Beckwith elaborated.
“My pastoral hat, I find out what God says about things, and I tell people. As a politician, my job is to find out what God says about things and to tell people. And you’re shepherding people. I mean, a pastor’s job is to shepherd the flock, to protect the flock, to defend the flock from evil. A politician’s job is the same way.”
Oh, boy.
Where to start with a mess like this?
First, a church draws its authority from the divine. It exists to serve and worship God.
Government in our state and society, on the other hand, draws its authority from the consent of the governed. That is what makes America a nation of free people.
This means government must be responsible to all the people it represents, not just the folks who voted for any particular elected official —or worship the way he does—but everyone, regardless of faith.
Indiana has citizens who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist and, for that matter, Christians who don’t share Beckwith’s selective interpretation of the Gospels.
Somehow, I suspect they won’t be persuaded that a man who boasts he’s using their tax dollars to proselytize to them is at all concerned with giving them a fair hearing, much less representing their interests.
Indiana law doesn’t prevent someone from turning the state’s second-highest office into a moonlighting gig.
But that doesn’t make it right.
Hoosiers deserve public officials who actually want to do the jobs to which they were elected.
