Mark A. Lempke. My Brother’s Keeper

In October 1972, presidential hopeful George McGovern visited Wheaton College, a bastion of evangelicalism, to pitch progressive politics. “Jobs programs, battles against malnutrition, cuts to the military budget, and pollution controls”: these, he declared, had to be the Christian voter’s priority (157). As indicated by their boos, Wheaton students thought otherwise; societal restructuring, they protested, required personal, spiritual commitment to Christ and trust in the workings of the church, not of Washington. The Democrat deftly calmed the naysayers by insisting that he was on Jesus’s side, and that voting for the GOP was not the only godly choice (158). McGovern’s Wheaton sojourn highlights the central thrusts of Mark A. Lempke’s stellar book, My Brother’s Keeper. In the first place, the earnestness with which McGovern wielded his faith before the naysayers was genuine. Lempke skillfully demonstrates how. Raised by a preacher in a South Dakota family of Methodists, McGovern was a theologian at heart. After graduating from high school he wanted to attend Wheaton College, but his family’s limited means—made tenuous by the Depression—led him to the affordable Dakota Wesleyan University. After flying a bomber during World War II, McGovern returned to college for a formative final year. “The war changed McGovern profoundly,” Lempke notes, and as he watched the world enter the nuclear age, the studious GI sought mentorship from a pacifist professor and his social gospel teachings (26). McGovern immersed himself in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, whose ideas sharpened the apprentice’s “vision of what a Christian commonwealth could look like and . . . point[ed] a way forward from the horrors he had seen during the war” (28). By the time he graduated, McGovern was proclaiming his new idealism in an award-winning oration titled “My Brother’s Keeper” (30).

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