Minority Report: Update on the Christian Left

In the Sunday NYTimes Book Review, David R. Swartz's new book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism is reviewed by Molly Worthen (who will be a member of a panel at the S-USIH conference in a month).  Overall, Worthen finds much to praise about Swartz's book, not least that it is one of the few books to ask what happened to the religious left following the Vietnam War.  Readers of this blog know I am interested in this question as well and having ordered Swartz's book look forward to seeing how he addresses it.

Of particular interest to the ongoing discussion over Andrew's forthcoming book on the culture wars is where the evangelical left found itself.  According to Worthen, Swartz provides valuable discussions of the internal disputes that fractured the evangelical left (politics of identity as well as theology) and the political platform of the Democratic Party which made support of abortion rights a difficult position for Christians on the left to accept.  Certainly Christian Left leaders such as Jim Wallis and a few American Catholic bishops and priests devised a strategy that used the "consistent ethic of life" as a rallying call.  But then, as Andrew will probably tell us, such theological consistency was no match for culture war issues that pitted the dire warnings from the left against apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the American family, American freedom, and American education that came from the right.

Worthen takes issue with Swartz's claim that actions by the Evangelical Left both pushed Christians into the conservative movement AND provided a strategy that conservatives used to solidify support for their culture war positions.  As many folks have written and debated here, such strategies came from a plethora of sources: the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, William F. Buckley's minions, and the cold war.  Worthen insists that (as Swartz also intimates) the "evangelical left was too divided...to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement."  In other words, "the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970s."

What I find somewhat confounding as an intellectual problem is what happened to religion in the radical polarization of American politics.  In a way, both left and right accepted the message in the sign above--they both believed that Vietnam, Watergate, and the drift of the cold war in the late 1970s presaged a day of reckoning for Americans.  The two sides differed (so I argue in God and War) over their theological interpretation of the United States.  Wallis and others on the Christian Left appeared to advocate a post-American era (the title of the first magazine he published); this was not merely a counter exceptionalist narrative but an scathing critique of the foundations of the nation itself.  The Christian Right also believed the nation was in peril, but were more than willing to defend it and find a great deal of righteousness is the foundations of America itself.  On this point, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on asking fellow clergy to sign the Hartford Appeal are instructive--the upshot was that he began to see a growing schism among clergy between those who believed the nation could be saved and those who seemed to believe it was hopeless and lost.  One can see this conflict in sharp relief in the days just before the First Gulf War when Wallis went to the Middle East to stop the war, and Neuhaus wrote a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal defending it.  The bottom line was this: the right would defend going to war for the nation; the left believed killing in the name of the nation perpetuated a tragedy made evident in Vietnam.  For me, this is where the culture wars literally bled into real war.

Where is the historiography of the New Religious Left?

In light of the comments on my post on John Courtney Murray and John Ford, and Tim's post on Rick Santorum's Catholicism, I thought of all the various books I have read and read about and skimmed through having to do with the rise of the Christian Right. Having just completed a book that deals with debates over war among religious intellectuals, I realized how lopsided the scholarship seems to be on recent American religious history. And so, I have a query for our community: what books, essays, lectures capture this history of the religious LEFT since the 1970s?

Let me provide some context for my question. I have referred in the past to a comment that Martin Marty made on Krista Tippet's APM show (now called 'Being') in which he suggested that rarely had a religious group given up so much power with so little resistance as the liberal Protestant establishment had in the post-WWII period. Marty illustrated his point by explaining that when he began to write for the Christian Century in the late 1950s he was told to avoid saying much that was positive about Catholics, yet by the early 1960s, that editorial policy had been reversed as the U.S. slid into an ecumenical awakening. As Robert Wuthnow documented in his useful history, The Restructuring of American Religion, by the early 1970s, the liberal religious establishment no longer had coherence and in its wake a conservative surge had taken its place.

We have had many fine examples of scholarship on the rise of the New Christian Right, among such works are those by Dan Williams (a participant at the S-USIH conference), Bethany Moreton, Darren Dochuk, Lisa McGirr, Kim Phillips-Fein, Patrick Allitt, Michael Lienesch, and even Gary Wills, to name just a few. There are books by leaders of the Christian left--Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis (pictured above being arrested), William Cavanaugh, Cornel West--that serve as examples of their critique of the right, of the nation-state, of war, but were are the historical assessments of their work? James Davison Hunter has recently produced a book, To Change the World, which I have not yet read and it seems to survey and critique Hauerwas's position on issues of church and state interaction, but I consider Hunter as much a participant of the era he surveys as anything else.

Again, where are books about the religious left that are comparable to those on the religious right?

New Apostolic Reformation...and false idols?

In a recent Fresh Air episode, Terry Gross interviewed Rachel Tabanchnick, a journalist who has done some diligent research on the New Apostolic Reformation--the group who sponsored Rick Perry's recent prayer day and a movement that Sarah Palin has apparently been part of. Listen to the episode here.



Among the leaders of NAR is John Benefiel, who has stirred up some dust by declaring that the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol. The clip above replays that particular statement.



As is clear from other posts I have written here, I have an interest in civil religion and the construction of a national faith. So hearing Benefiel single our the Statue of Liberty for being a symbol that detracts from worship of a "true" faith is not too surprising. Likewise, his claim that freedom derives only from God and through Jesus is also not unusual, as Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals (until relatively recently) had been leveling similar critiques about secular society for quite some time.



I am curious, though, to hear if others have seen a critique of the NAR from Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals. Watchers of the Christian Right have certainly contributed to the heightened scrutiny of this group, but have Jim Wallis or Stanley Hauerwas and those among evangelical and fundamentalist Christian intellectuals--loosely defined--weighed in? I ask this because the NAR strikes me as another version of Pat Robertson's army from the 1988 primary season and perhaps Christian intellectuals will have a response ready this time. And second, it seems to me that the intent of NAR to unify the disparate denominations of Protestants into a single church might not appeal to megachurch leaders but sounds similar to some of the critiques Haerwas has made about liberal and conservative Protestantism.



What do others make of this movement and its relationship to Christian intellectuals?