Monday musings: The importance of a name

The swift boat veterans want their good name back.

Four years ago, “swift boat” floated into the American lexicon as a synonym for political attack. Whether you voted for or against John Kerry for president, you most likely came to associate “swiftboating” with an ad campaign to discredit Kerry’s military service in Vietnam and, more to the point at the time, to bring down his political campaign.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, funded in large part by T. Boone Pickens, came out against Kerry. Their ad campaign led Americans to think about hardball politics, not heroic defense of democracy, when they hear “swift boat.” And now, political pundits are wondering when the “swiftboating” of ’08 is going to begin. Just like the “-gate” in “Watergate,” the term has taken a political life of its own.

But some Vietnam vets who served on those boats are trying to change all that. “Swift boat veterans—especially those who had nothing to do with the group that attacked Senator John Kerry’s military record in the 2004 election—want their good name back, and the good names of the men not lucky enough to come home alive,” the New York Times reported this morning.

“You would not hear the word ‘swift boat’ and think of people that served their country and fought in Vietnam,” Jim Newell, who spent a year as an officer in charge of one of the small Navy vessels, told the Times’ Kate Zernike. “You think about someone who was involved in a political attack on a member of a different party. It just comes across as negative. Everyone who is associated with a swift boat is involved in political chicanery.”

“It’s completely inappropriate,” Michael Bernique, a highly regarded swift boat driver added. “The word should connote service with honor, which is what was conducted. Anything that demeans that honor is shameful.”

Although I was born about three years too late to serve in Vietnam, I resonate with their feelings. This has nothing to do with John Kerry or swift boats, but with a couple of other names that mark my own identity. I’m talking about “Christian” and “Baptist.”

Too often, these labels of faith carry baggage into the marketplace of ideas. People who drop the names “Christian” and/or “Baptist” fail to live up to the ideals of Christ and the heritage of Baptists. Their words and actions lead people away from Christ and in the opposite direction of Baptist churches because people see them and think, “If that’s what being a Christian is like, I don’t want any part of it” or, “Why would anyone want to associate with Baptists like that?”

Who knows whether the swift boat veterans will succeed in reinterpreting their label from “political dirty tricks” to “ honorable military service?”

But the question for each of us who happens to be Christian and possibly Baptist carries even greater consequences: Will you live a winsome, compassionate, grace-filled life so that others will want to know Christ because of you?