22 February 2005
Sharlet: Daschle defeater John Thune cites spiritual influence of a man who cites spiritual model of Osama Bin Laden. In this Q&A Christianity Today conducted with Senator Thune (R, SD), he says that the “C Street ministry” of Doug Coe helped keep him on the Christian path when he was a Representative. As it happens, I’ve witnessed that “ministry”; here’s what I wrote about it in Harper’s: “The day I worked at C Street I ran into Doug Coe, who was tutoring Todd Tiahrt, a Republican congressman from Kansas…. ‘We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping,’ [Coe said.] ‘All right, how do we do that?’ Tiahrt asked. ‘A covenant,’ Doug answered…. ‘Like the Mafia,’ Doug clarified. ‘Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face…. Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their ‘brothers’: ‘Look at Hitler,’ he said. ‘Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.'”

Interview with Thune 2005

Do you find fellowship with other legislators?

I do. There are several different Bible study groups on Capitol Hill. I’ve not had an opportunity yet in the Senate to really get immersed. But when I was a member of the House, there were a couple of organizations, one called Christian Embassy that is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ whose mission it is to reach out and reach and disciple people in the legislative branch, the executive branch, and in the military at the Pentagon. And also the C Street ministry, which initially came from Doug Coe. Coe was influential at Chuck Colson’s conversion too. But those are a couple of ministries that are active out there. And there are other members of Congress who come to those events. There are a number who are very serious about their faith. I do have a chance to interact with them.

In the campaign, you sharply criticized those who blocked the President’s judicial nominations. What’s ahead?

To shut off a filibuster, you have to have 60 votes in the Senate. We still don’t have 60 votes. But we have new leadership on the Democratic side. I hope members of the Senate who previously had been held hostage to their party’s leadership will now feel more freedom to vote their conscience. I don’t know, maybe they did. But it seems to me that some of these guys who represent states that are more conservative than their national party, might now be thinking twice and might be more inclined to support not only legislation but also judicial nominations that are more in line with their state’s interest and their state’s fundamental beliefs and values.

Skipping back to foreign policy, why might Christians have a special interest in seeing democracy spread in the Middle East?

Christians obviously want to see people come to the Christian faith, but they want to see people have the choice to be able to choose. Religious freedom, political freedom, political liberty, and economic freedom all tend to go hand in hand. Liberating Iraq from decades of tyranny and dictatorship, bringing about political freedom, will create an atmosphere of where religious freedom will come to Iraq. And that opens the door, obviously, for the Christian faith there as well.

Christians look around the world and want to see people who are in a position to be able to make decisions, to have the freedoms that we enjoy in this country. That is, like the President says, our birthright. Our Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers said, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” And those rights are endowed by our Creator, they’re not bestowed by any government.