Jesse Helms and the Spirit of Noah

“For God … did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly,” — 2 Peter 2:4, 5.

JESSE A. HELMS was the greatest man to enter the American political arena in the modern era. Mr. Helms was a vigorous opponent of every manifestation of leftist thought in American public life. He also picked a number of fights abroad, making enemies with almost every major communist tyrant left in the world by the end of the last century. Perhaps most important of all, Helms utilized his seat in the U.S. Senate to loudly decry the grossest forms of immorality that had begun to be accepted here at home. Outstripping every other leader of the American Right, Mr. Helms bore the contemptous lash of an increasingly apostate generation that was not even worthy to have called him a fellow. The senator of North Carolina from 1973 to 2003 died yesterday at the age of 86.

Mr. Helms was more than an influential sentator that redefined the way money influenced American politics. For many misguided Americans, Mr. Helms was as close to the spirit of Noah as they would ever encounter. In a society determined to call evil good and good evil, it was often Jesse Helms, not preachers in the church, that became the lightening rod to remind them from whence they had fallen. Mr. Helms’s stands against homosexuality and immoral art subsidized by the NEA garnered him visceral opposition from those most tenanciously bent towards unrestrained wickedness. It was because of the ferocity of this opposition that Mr. Helms was compelled to employ new methods to finance his senate campaigns. Although elected to represent North Carolinians, Mr. Helms’s causes transcended state lines. His enemies were frequently outside of North Carolina and even sometimes outside America itself. Mr. Helms’s appeals then to allies living outside the state to would-be donors to his re-election campaigns was a matter of necessity.

Jesse Helms was not a racist or even a segregationist. His early opposition to forced busing and his later disagreements with the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and racial quotas were complex policy positions that were more rooted in his convictions about limited government than his feelings about black people. His opponents, however, seized upon these positions during elections in order to defeat him. Mr. Helms never opposed racial integration absolutely, as was the manner of many in the South before him. What he opposed was the role that many liberals felt the federal government had to take in order to initiate it. Unlike many in the American South, those that actually knew Mr. Helms best knew least about any personal spirit of racial acrimony. More than his own words or votes in the U.S. Senate, the crass and vicious challenges Mr. Helms received from Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 did more to attach this dreaded stigma of racism to his name.

The rough nature of the campaigns Mr. Helms waged has also been employed by his opponents to doubt the real character of the man. But even a superficial investigation of the television ads and statements by Mr. Helms himself reveals that “the dark side of Jesse Helms” is to a large degree a mythological construct by the Left, a caricature fantastic even for today’s American politics. Senator Helms’s television ads, even the “white hands” one in 1990 opposing racial quotas, were usually only concise, plainly-spoken advertisments that made liberal policies and their advocates unattractive. The frequent charge that they were mean-spirited or “attack ads” simply does not square with the examination of the facts.

We know very little about Mr. Helms’s theology. Like many in churches throughout the United States, it was likely superficial to a large degree. Mr. Helms usually could not speak long about religion before delving into American triumphalism. We admit that is regrettable. It is inappropriate for churches to set up voter registration tables in the Church of God, a practice Mr. Helms thought admirable. But that was a problem in many conservative evangelical circles, especially those connected with the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement.  But we believe he is in heaven.  An excerpt from his memoirs suggests that Jesse Helms’s musings about God transcended its relationship to the electoral success or failure of the American political Right:

For nearly two thousand years, the Christian religion warned that among the greatest sins we can fall into are those of presumption and despair. Because I believe this, I feel a duty to reiterate, however inadequately and unworthily, the great moral and political truths that have sustained America as an independent nation for two centuries — truths that are now gravely endangered in a climate of apathy and skepticism.

A famous writer once said of Christianity that it had not been tried and found wanting; rather, it had been found difficult, and left untried. He was right, of course.” — p. xvii, Here’s Where I Stand, 2005.

The Genesis account of the life of Noah gives to us almost nothing by way of explanation of what Noah did for the 120 years from the point God told Noah He would destroy the wicked world of his day to the time Noah actually climbed aboard the ark and the deluge commenced.  However, under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, the Apostle Peter informs us in his last epistle that Noah took up preaching. This “preacher of righteousness” (2 Pet. 2:5) upheld God’s standard to a wicked generation, winning over no one except the seven other members of his own family. In a similar manner, Mr. Helms rebuked the evil of his day though America was far worse when he left the U.S. Senate in 2003 than it was in 1973.  Even on this very day, Mr. Helms is gone, but many all across the internet are still cursing the witness of Mr. Helms. While this happened to some degree with Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley, and Jerry Falwell – other leaders of the American Right — the intensity level is heightened, we believe, with Mr. Helms.

As with the witness of Noah and Jesse Helms, so the parallel of the antediluvian people with our modern society is an easy one to make as well. The Lord Jesus tells us that before the flood, Noah’s generation continued in their disobedience right until the rain began to pour: “And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all,” (Luke 17:26, 27).  

Wonder if we are in the last days? Look at the shameful way Jesse Helms was treated by this world. The greatest leaders of America are passing off the scene at an accelerated clip. The days of Noah are here. The destruction of this nation, and perhaps even of this world, is imminent. Only one question remains: are you reconciled to God through personal union with the Lord Jesus Christ, represented in the Old Testament as the ark of safety? Know the answer to that burning question my friend, and do not allow any other concern to distract you until you know for sure.