Born Again Politics

Today's New York Times reports the passing of Charles W. Colson. 

I don't usually think about Charles Colson, but I was just thinking of him yesterday.

Among the primary sources I was considering for my U.S. intellectual history reading list was Mary McCarthy's shrewd shredding of the smaller-than-life players in the Watergate scandal, The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974).  However, McCarthy's sharp, smart text ended up on the cutting-room floor.  I crossed it off just yesterday morning; I need that spot for something else. 

I don't plan on replacing McCarthy's slim volume with Colson's bloated Born Again.  Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile to consider the significant impact that Colson's conversion narrative -- not just the book, but the entire post-prison trajectory of his life story -- seems to have had on the fractious, fractured, transformed and transforming political alliances and alignments growing out of the 1970s.

I say that Colson "seems to have had" a significant impact simply because I don't want to appear to be putting forward some kind of "great man theory" to explain the rise of the Religious Right and its growing identification with the Republican party.  How would I explain this moment in American cultural history?  I must defer to the expertise of my fellow bloggers -- along with a few frequent commenters here -- who have the shifting political, social and cultural landscapes of the 1970s in much sharper focus.  

But Colson might serve as a fitting symbol for all that coalesced in the political rise of the Religious Right.  And I suppose that Colson must have recognized this fact at the time.  Just as Saint Augustine's conversion to chastity did not seem to diminish his polemical skills, so Charles Colson's conversion to charity -- and by "charity" I mean both "philanthropy" and "Christian love" -- did not seem to dull his political instincts.

I am not questioning the sincerity or thoroughness of either conversion; I simply note that savvy sinners, once converted, can make for very savvy saints.  And Charles Colson was a savvy spokesman for what seemed to be a new kind of politics.  He was someone with a compelling story of personal conversion who became one of the standard bearers leading a swell-tide of religious conservatives, mostly Evangelical, seeking to convert their sense of moral solidarity into political clout.  Colson was apparently committed to using at least some of that clout to (re?) privatize and (re?) Christianize the task of alleviating social ills, and he sought to redirect public funds to that purpose.

"Every man's death diminishes me," wrote John Donne, the converted libertine.  And that is my sentiment as well.  I hope no one imagines that my reflections about the nature or significance of the political movement which Colson symbolized and in some ways helped to shape arise from some kind of ill will -- or, on the other hand, allegiance -- towards the man or the people who mourn him.  I simply want to understand how his life and life-work fit into a larger cultural narrative.

Did Colson and his fellow standard-bearers usher in something new in the American political landscape?  Or was this an older politics born again? Was this Progressivism chasing its own tail?  Or was this a hollowed-out Populism, hard-bitten, left behind, and biting back?

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?