Former senator calls for return to morality

Crowd of nearly 550 shows up at fundraiser to listen to Zell Miller

Zell Miller made the case for Christian education Thursday night as he spoke to a Kalispell crowd of nearly 550.

"There is a war being fought," Miller told the crowd. "I'm not talking about the war in the Middle East, but the war being fought at home, a war for our children's souls."

Miller is the former Democratic U.S. senator, Georgia governor and author who, answering an unusual invitation to cross party lines and deliver a keynote address at the 2004 Republican National Convention, threw his support behind President George W. Bush's re-election bid.

Thursday evening at the WestCoast Kalispell Center Hotel, he zeroed in on values of decency and a God-centered society in his speech at Stillwater Christian School's annual fundraiser, For Such a Time as This.

Miller drew from the theme of his most recent book, "A Deficit of Decency," to call for returning the "basis for morality, God's truth" to formal education. It has been stripped from public schools, he said, over the past 50 years until that system is skeletonized.

"Public education is not doing the job it needs to do," he said.

"Education is much more than the transfer of information. Someone once said education is not the filling of a pail, it is the lighting of a fire. Fires are lit at Stillwater Christian School."

The public is "grasping for spirituality" today, he said. He quoted President Bush when, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he said, "the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of the times."

Those founding fathers, Miller said, wrote the Mayflower Compact and the Preamble to the Constitution with the implicit understanding that Christianity would be the foundation for the new nation.

He brought it home to his own family where, a few years back, a series of crises opened his eyes to the fact that "God was my spare tire, not my steering wheel." He got back to his Southern Appalachian roots and pushed himself to take a stand for his faith. In the process, he said he discovered his lifelong political party was no longer upholding the nation.

"[We have] a prolonged and seemingly unending period of a lack of decency," Miller said, decrying the trend toward moral complacency that dulls the conscience. "A fish doesn't know it's wet. We're numb and we can't even feel it."

Miller argued that educators need to pass on traits of faith, character, humility, responsibility, duty and more.

"There was a time and place where a sense of duty was enough," he said. "That time was not long ago in America."

Duty, he said, includes calling out a warning when it's needed. He spoke his own caution against the nation's moral decline after the "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl. In that speech, Miller quoted the Old Testament prophet Amos who relayed God's admonition that "I shall send a famine in the land … of hearing the words of the Lord."

"In times like this," Miller said, "silence is not golden, it is yellow."

He said 16,000 e-mails, phone calls and letters in the first 24 hours after that speech told him he was not alone in his belief.

On Thursday, Miller advocated holding fast to specific moral values on the personal and national level, lamenting that "crude, unacceptable conduct is now overlooked by the courts as free speech. But there is no such freedom of speech for the Ten Commandments."

He is encouraged by the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito and ticked off a series of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions over recent decades that chipped away at the country's moral foundation. Still, he said, there is a long way to go.

He wrapped it up by citing French statesman and author Alexis DeTocqueville: "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good it will cease to be great."

Earlier, Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns had introduced Miller. The two former Marines got to know each other during Miller's 5 1/2 years in the Senate, where Burns said Miller earned his friendship and respect.

"He is a true statesman. He stood out because he really stood tough and defended his own values and his own virtue," Burns said of Miller. "He had an understanding of America … that character does count."

Oliver North, the retired Marine who testified at the center of the Iran-Contra storm, has been lined up as next year's speaker for Stillwater Christian. North already committed to being in Kalispell for the school's May 10, 2007, event.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com