A new Evangelism for the US
Today's Evangelicals are as concerned with ecology and human rights as
with personal morality
Bernice Martin
As the second Iraq War turned from a quick liberation into a bloodily
contested occupation, long-standing liberal fears about the supposed
theocratic ambitions of a reactionary American Evangelicalism were
supplemented by suspicions of an apocalyptic fanaticism infecting the
White House. The fears were always exaggerated and sometimes hysterical,
particularly over foreign policy where actions attributed to the malign
influence of Zionism, Jewish and Christian alike, are as easily
recognized as the standard expression of realpolitik in America’s
strategic interest, alongside a long tradition of liberal imperialism.
Two developments are crucial in relegating all this to historical rather
than current concern. The first is that whoever wins this year’s
Presidential election will not be a hostage to the Religious Right, as
George W. Bush has half-plausibly been seen as being. The second is a
seismic shift in the nature of American Evangelicalism, particularly
among the younger generation.
The terms of engagement in America’s “culture wars” have been subtly
changing since the 1990s with the economic, intellectual, social and
political coming of age of many Evangelicals in the Bible Belt. This has
been brought about by the rise of the oil and real-estate industries,
and the occupational and geographical mobility of a considerable part of
the younger generation of Evangelicals. They have flocked not only to
Evangelical private colleges but also to the Ivy League universities
(partly through radical access initiatives after the 1960s) and on to
New York, Silicon Valley and even Hollywood as lawyers, bankers, IT
professionals, academics and filmmakers.
They constitute a new cosmopolitan Evangelical stratum, as concerned
with ecology, AIDS (and not with policies exclusively dependent on
abstention) and with human rights worldwide as with traditional
questions of personal morality. They are also less solidly Republican.
They bring their Christian principles into the boardroom and the caucus
in exactly the same way their secular and liberal peers advance their
own interests and values. And they are as embarrassed by some of the
opinions of the Evangelical masses, and the polarizing media celebrities
who mobilize them, as are secular liberals. There is a new Evangelical
intelligentsia and it is a power to be reckoned with: Books and Culture,
the Evangelical answer to the New York Review of Books, is its public
face. Very similar developments have occurred in the Pietist regional
peripheries of Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. The American case
has been well documented by D. Michael Lindsay in Faith in the Halls of
Power: How Evangelicals joined the American elite (2007): his
Evangelical movers and shakers include the Dean of the Julliard School
of Music and the Director of the National Human Genome Research
Institute. The post-1960s Religious Right looks more and more like a
defensive transitional moment in the development of the wider movement.
Journalistic commentary, and much academic analysis, have yet to catch
up with this change among American Evangelicals, particularly the rising
leadership. Barack Obama, devout, black and decidedly not of the
Religious Right, may be one of its beneficiaries.
God’s Own Country: Tales from the Bible Belt by Stephen Bates is one of
the more substantial examples of the exposé of the Religious Right. Like
many authors in this genre Bates nods and winks at the reader to share
his view of these folk as queer fish at best and dangerous loonies at
worst. (Imagine the response to a book on British Muslim hardliners
written that way.) Bates, a former Religious Affairs correspondent of
the Guardian, records his travels around the Bible Belt, attending a
Baptist Convention here, a megachurch there, a Christian broadcasting
channel elsewhere, gathering interviews with most of the standard
Evangelical celebrities from the late Jerry Falwell to Tim LaHaye,
co-creator of the apocalyptic fantasies of the Left Behind series. Bates
places highly spiced portraits against a historical backdrop. He tells a
good story, and the history, taken from some of the best Evangelical
historians, is generally accurate, though skewed towards the
journalistic vignette. Bates revisits the main battlegrounds of the
“culture wars” from the Scopes trial to the Iraq war, abortion to Bush’s
“faith initiatives”, but tells the story from the liberal narrator’s
perspective (Bates is a progressive Catholic), convicting the
Evangelical warriors of crassness and reaction out of their own mouths.
He never analyses the social forces and constitutional ambiguities that
underlie the battle narrative, or recognizes that he has taken a number
of disparate patches out of the patchwork quilt of American
Protestantism and presented them as if they were all of a piece. You
would not guess that most Evangelicalism lies on the soft end of the
spectrum with a stress on “heartwork”, personal moral conversion and
sincerity, as in Methodism and many of the megachurches, which is where
George W. Bush and the Billy Graham ministries fit. It is rigorous
moralism, strict biblical inerrancy, messianic nationalism and
apocalyptic fervour that are mainly represented by Bates: he sums it up
as “hardline reactionary Protestantism”.
Nor would you guess that even those with official beliefs in the
Apocalypse don’t usually let it affect their day-to-day lives – they pay
their mortgage and insurance even if they read violent fantasises about
the cosmic war after the Rapture, or pore over prophecies of the End
Times a-coming. Few groups hold equally strongly all the extreme
positions Bates illustrates, and some of the contradictions ought to
have sounded a warning: for instance, he recounts one anti-Semitic
incident as a piece of representative chauvinism but does not square it
with the “dangerous” Christian Zionism and uncritical support of Israel
that have been his theme elsewhere. The maddening thing is that if he
had not had a commission to write a popular exposé with the expected
alarmist subtext, this might have become a serious analysis. He admits
the apocalyptic fears over the Iraq war were groundless, he notices that
not all Evangelicals are on the religious and political Right, he cites
evidence of the changes among the younger generation. He even interviews
Rich Cizik, who has put ecological degradation, climate change and world
hunger on the Evangelical agenda. Yet Bates still gives no weight to any
of this, and ends on the theme of Evangelical paranoia. He also deplores
the growth of worldwide Pentecostalism as the export of toxic American
Protestantism, in terms that the findings of field research shamed
liberal academics into dropping some fifteen years ago. This lazy
distortion, like the book God’s Own Country, perhaps missed its popular
moment.
Charles Marsh is no more concerned than Bates to analyse the social
processes that might account for the culture wars, because his is a call
to Christian repentance. Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel
from political captivity is a theological denunciation from within
Evangelicalism of the way some Evangelical leaders betrayed the faith to
support the Bush Presidency and its Iraq adventure. Marsh, currently
Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia, grew up in the
South in the 1960s, and his experiences led him to criticize the
small-town Evangelical certainties of his background. He places himself
in the tradition of progressive Evangelical Christianity represented by
Jim Wallis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is his model of Christian witness to
the political sphere. Christianity’s task is to embody the message of
divine redemption and reconciliation rather than to become an apologist
for political power of whatever stripe. Marsh begins from a critique of
Evangelical sermons preached at the outset of the war in Iraq which
blasphemously equated national ambitions, middle-class values and
justification of the war with “the will of God”. He rehearses the
history of the emergence of Evangelicals into the political sphere in
the 1960s to defend “Christian values” against the incursions of
secularism, and, like Bates, he sees the influence of Francis Schaeffer
as problematic. Where Bates exaggerates, attributing theocratic
ambitions to Schaeffer and his followers, Marsh concentrates on the
theological distortions built into the Evangelical political programmes
of that time and since. They fetishized the family, though Jesus called
his disciples to leave their families and become the new community of
faith acting as the leaven in the lump. They demonized their opponents
when they should have been preaching God’s unconditional love for all.
They formed inturned, self-satisfied ghettos, consumed by battles for
status, recognition and affluence, disguised under a veneer of
sickeningly theatrical piety. Worst of all, they confused ruthless
American nationalism with the will of God. Marsh calls for repentance,
patient waiting for grace, and a period of serious reflection in
American Evangelicalism. He exemplifies a growing strand in the
Evangelical weave.
The other two books under review are historical overviews. Hugh Heclo,
Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University, offers an
elegant and thoughtful essay in Christianity and American Democracy,
together with responses by two political scientists and a historian from
a 2006 seminar at Harvard; while Patrice Higonnet’s Attendant Cruelties:
Nation and nationalism in American history is a long, reckless essay by
a French historian who has taught at Harvard University since 1964 and
believes he sees with unique clarity the mote in America’s eye.
Heclo argues that not only does American democracy have a Christianity
problem, but Christianity has a democracy problem. There is an inherent
tension between religious commitment and political allegiance – Marsh’s
point, of course – and reconciling them is always a fudge of some kind.
Heclo rehearses, lucidly and economically, the history of America’s
different modes of fudging the issue. He documents the input of
Christian ideas into the development of the democratic concept of the
individual.
The pervasive moralization of politics that the different waves of
Protestant revival brought into play affected models of politics in
contradictory ways, with Calvinistic emphases on original sin dampening
democratic optimism, while the adage that “everyone is his own priest”
encouraged democratic involvement in regulating society. Heclo traces a
process of coming together between Christianity and democracy up to the
1950s, followed by a process of separation. We are back to the culture
wars: “It is unrealistic to think that full-throated religious talk and
political action can be kept at bay on policy issues dealing with
essential articles of faith”. He has in mind Catholic as well as
Evangelical no-go areas here, particularly over the constitution of the
human person. But equally, “even if it is sometimes difficult for
Christians to treat their religious identity as subordinate to the
secular democratic process, most of the time accommodation just about
works if a public conversation can be kept going”. In the supplementary
commentaries Mary Jo Bane gives a nuanced account of the changes in the
Catholic role in the story; Michael Kazin argues that “pluralism is hard
work” and emphasizes the differences between Christians as the source of
difficulties; and Alan Wolfe gives a more optimistic gloss than Heclo on
the current situation, emphasizing the extent to which the this-worldly
individualism of the 1960s has affected all sides in the culture wars,
though he warns that this brings its own dangers for democracy by
weakening authority and the sense of collective responsibility. Hugh
Heclo’s book shows clearly that America’s culture wars are just a
specific case of the general problem of religion in democratic pluralist
polities.
Patrice Higonnet’s volume is the jeu d’esprit of a historian nostalgic
for unapologetic Marxist writing and the excitements of the 1960s. He
begins from the premiss that patriotism is the good, inclusive,
benevolent form of national identity, while nationalism is its evil,
exclusive, aggressive (and capitalist) other side. The US Constitution
is ambiguously poised between the two, and America has lurched from one
to the other in the course of its history. It has incorporated countless
immigrant communities and given them access to the American dream, but
it also extirpated the native Americans, on the model of Israel in
Canaan, embedded slavery and only lately and reluctantly ended racial
segregation, and has indulged in imperialist adventures starting with
the annexation of the American continent itself.
The title of Higonnet’s book is taken from a speech by Theodore
Roosevelt, justifying what the military today calls “collateral damage”
in the pursuit of America’s imperial aims. The narrative is fluent and
the rhetorical flourishes provocative and sophisticated, but one senses
a naively utopian underlying vision of the innocent society animating
the righteous animus of the author. Attendant Cruelties is punctuated by
little italicized passages referring to titbits of French history that
have some parallel to or analogy with the events being recounted, though
these illuminate little except the writer’s erudition because they are
not part of any systematic comparison of the two great Enlightened
powers. The ghost of Alexis de Tocqueville hovers, but Higonnet has
little of his feel for the distinctiveness of American Protestantism,
for good as well as bad, as a constitutive element of the American
nation, and anyway, Patrice Higonnet’s focus is on presidents as the
fulcrum of power politics. His automatic contempt for the Religious
Right makes the last section little more than an anti-Bush diatribe and,
unlike Christianity and American Democracy, Attendant Cruelties is
unlikely to clarify the complex relation of religion, politics and
national identity in today’s global pluralism.
Stephen Bates
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY
Tales from the Bible Belt
388pp. Hodder & Stoughton. Paperback, £12.99.
978 0 340 90926 3
Charles Marsh
WAYWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
Freeing the Gospel from political captivity
243pp. Oxford University Press. US $25.
978 0 10 530720 7
Hugh Heclo
CHRISTIANITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
299pp. Harvard University Press. £16.95.
978 0 674 02514 1
Patrice Higonnet
ATTENDANT CRUELTIES
Nation and nationalism in American history
384pp. New York: The Other Press. US $25.95.
978 1 59051 235 7
Bernice Martin is Emeritus Reader in Sociology at the University of
London. She is completing a book on Pentecostalism with David Martin.
May 2008
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3757543.ece
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