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This article was originally published in the March 9, 1992 issue of Christianity Today.

The walls of U.S. Representative Henry Hyde's outer office sport all the trappings of democracy and reveal much about this 67-year-old veteran of conservative politics. Visiting constituents can look to their left in Room 2262 of the Rayburn Building just south of the Capitol and see a giant map of the Illinois Sixth Congressional District, which extends from Chicago's O'Hare Airport south and westward past Wheaton College. They can stare ahead at two gargantuan blowups of thank-you notes to Hyde from kindergarten classes to which he sent flags. They can look to the right and see a large photograph of the Capitol, with the words of Alexander Hamilton, "Here, Sir, the people govern."

It is not clear, however, whether Hamilton said those words proudly or sarcastically. (He was not overly fond of what "the people" tended to decide.) A look at Henry Hyde's inner office also suggests more ambivalence than first meets the eye. His two Illinois-obligatory busts of Abraham Lincoln are outnumbered by three statuettes of Don Quixote, whose impossible dreams were not of, by, and for the people. Standard photos of Hyde handshakes with smiling Presidents are overshadowed by a large portrait of a weary George Washington at Valley Forge: "His force of character kept 11,000 men together during a terrible winter," Hyde says.

The inner office also displays photos of Douglas MacArthur, and of Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings. Hyde was a determined defender of Ronald Reagan at the hearings, and his office walls have many photos of "the best" President of recent decades. Hyde's office also has room for the two bulldog bookends of twentieth-century British politics, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and a portrait of Thomas More, the sixteenth-century English lord chancellor. Catholic attorneys such as Hyde often hang a print of that great Holbein painting because More is considered the patron saint of lawyers; but Hyde has a bust of More as well: "He gave his life for a principle."

A congressman, Hyde says, "has to decide to be somebody or do something," and the former is, unfortunately, far more prevalent. "Congress is a following institution, a poll-taking, weather-vane kind of enterprise. You will not see an awful lot of profiles in courage," he says.

That might not be so terrible if American society were in such good shape that courage could be a luxury. But, as Hyde notes, "the overturning of the spirituality that undergirded society, and the ascendance of secularism, of materialism, of the denial of spiritual values, seems to be the regnant philosophy today in America."

Hyde is known as an antiabortion crusader, but he generally fights society's ruling ethos not just on one issue but across the board. The leaders of media and academia, he says,

Admire and implement the Enlightenment ethic, the notion that [theological] revelation has nothing to teach us. In their view, the obstacles to a good society are simply ignorance. "If only we could educate everybody," they cry, "not only would racism, sexism, and crime disappear, but we'd have a wonderful life—Utopia itself!" Ask them about sin, and they reply, "Sin? There's no such thing. Society is the cause of evil and crime."' Somehow, it appears, society has "'failed" the rapist, the dope dealer, the mugger, the murderer. Society's to blame, not the individual responsible for his choices.

There have been three great styles of twentieth-century American oratory—northern Irish, southern white, and black evangelical—and all three are disappearing under the pressure of media mavens who teach public figures to speak in clipped sound bites. Hyde's rolling cadences represent an unapologetic throwback to a better class of rhetoric. For example, while lots of conservative politicians like to mention the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and on the back of a penny, only Hyde issues the challenge: "A nation 'under God' means a nation under God's judgment, constantly reminded by our smallest coin that the true measure of ourselves comes from beyond ourselves."

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