My Brief but Happy Brush with Bill Buckley

This past Wednesday, William F. Buckley died. He was 82. Best known as a bastion of conservative thinking, he was a novelist, newspaper columnist and master sesquipedalian (that’s a Buckley-like word, which I freely admit I had to look up!). To understand the success of the Ronald Regan era, one probably needs to go back to Buckley.

My only real acquaintance with Buckley came as a result
of stumbling upon his television show Firing Line one day
back in the early or mid 80’s. I was flipping through the channels when I came upon him interviewing an interesting looking old man. That old man was Malcom Muggeridge, a British journalist who had converted to Christianity late in life and to Roman Catholicism even later. What made me stop turning the channels was nothing more than the physical appearance of Muggeridge. But it was their conversation about Christianity that fascinated and transfixed me.

As I recall, I myself did not identify as a Christian then. I was young, and had at the time other more fleshly interests than what struck me as the ethereal and cerebral interests of Muggeridge and Buckley. But still I was transfixed.

That was the only episode of Firing Line I ever watched, my only real and sustained brush with Buckley. But it turned out to have a profound effect on my own conversion, though it would only be in retrospect that I would locate it within my own Christian narrative.

And I am remembering now something Muggeridge said of conversion, something that resonated with me then and resonates with me still. He said to Buckley, as I recall (although I could be running together in my memory that interview and one of Muggeridge’s books),

Some, like the Apostle Paul, have a Damascus Road experience…No such experience has been vouchsafed me; I have just stumbled on, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, falling in the Slough of Despond, locked up in Doubting Castle, terrified at passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death; from time to time, by God’s mercy, relieved of my burden of sin, but only, alas, soon to acquire it again.

Like Francis Schaeffer, there is much in Muggeridge that I passionately disagree with. For example, he seemed to me to be a kind of theological determinist, to believe that particular instances of horrific suffering and evil are part of the script God has written for the world and the particular human beings afflicted by those particular instances of horrific suffering and evil likewise God scripted. Yet also like Schaeffer, he was instrumental in my early Christian formation. And were it not for Bill Buckley and Firing Line it seems unlikely that I would ever have come into the timely orbit of Muggeridge, and unlikely too that I would have been introduced to the likes of Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, Chesterton and others to whose work I would be introduced by Muggeridge himself. I’m quite grateful that I was introduced to the work and thought of these folks at the time I was introduced to it. And so I'm glad I stumbled upon Bill Buckley lo those many years ago. Thank you, William F. Buckley, Jr. Thank you.