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?

Evangelicals and Santorum Together: the Lure of War

A few days ago, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum told Frank Luntz, who moderated a forum hosted by the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, that evangelicals need a candidate who "can take the bullets." Santorum's reference to violence was not meant literally--he didn't volunteer to fight in Afghanistan...or Iran (for that matter). However, Santorum wants to remind folks that he understands war--if only rhetorically. In fact, it might be the former senator's bluster on military matters that has increased his appeal among conservative evangelicals. After all, his stance on social issues--the family, homosexuals, and abortion--echoes all other GOP candidates. He has been, though, more forthright--perhaps even reckless--when it comes to thinking out loud about war.

Following questions on homosexuals and abortion, the Santorum and his wife answered a question posed by Luntz about military service. The Santorums agreed that they would be proud to have their children enter the military and fight for the United States, though Santorum was quick to correct what he viewed as a prevailing misperception that he hoped for war with Iran. Rather, he clarified, "If Iran is not stopped from developing a nuclear weapon...there will be 'war that we have never seen the likes of in this country, and it is not a matter taking out this regime, it's not a matter of preemptive war, it's a matter of taking out this nuclear ability that would change the face of our country.'" Syntax aside (and perhaps logic as well), why is Santorum speaking about war with Iran changing the face of our country? The face of Iran, the Persian Gulf, perhaps, but our country?

A war, or at least talk of one, can change our country, of course. And speaking to a gathering of conservative evangelicals about such change was probably a sensible idea. As Andrew Bacevich observed in a book on the post-Vietnam romance many evangelicals developed with the military: "In the aftermath of Vietnam, evangelicals came to see the military as an enclave of virtue, a place of refuge where the sacred remnant of patriotic Americans gathered and preserved American principles from extinction." As their neocon allies also cheered in the late 1990s, a martial attitude would correct America's long delusional obsession with the culture wars.

Santorum is Catholic and his endorsement by evangelicals is not as shocking as it once might have been. But among the reasons for this rapprochement between these groups has been the steady development among conservative religious leaders of unified view of war--for more on this see the writing of Catholics George Wiegel and Michael Novak and, yes, Richard John Neuhuas. Of course, liberal religious leaders also found common ground on the issue of war; in the middle of the Vietnam War, groups such as CALCAV spoke out against the dangers of war for the nation. However, for conservatives that war served as an awakening of a different kind, distilling a moral language that would discriminate "patriots" from critics. Conservatives of various religious denominations concluded that the soul of America was worth sacrificing for, even if they would not volunteer to perform that service personally.

What conservatives of the 1970s rediscovered was the sublime nature of war in the abstract. Corey Robin pointed out on his blog recently that conservatism does not, by principle, tend to avoid war and violence, but, by practical necessity, seeks to channel its emotional power into a philosophical rush. War in the abstract--war in the sense of giving oneself over to something greater or, better, of commanding the ultimate sacrifice for something greater--is the conservative's oversoul. The realities of prosecuting a war, of paying for it, cleaning up after it, of dealing with the grief it causes, can be dismissed to the functions of the state. The nation can command sacrifice, the state only manages the paperwork.

So while Mitt Romney prattles on about his business acumen, and Newt Gingrich bellows about his big ideas for big problems (including, apparently, intergalactic empires), Rick Santorum might be the conservative to speak about the meaning of sacrifice in terms that the faithful will understand. And what about Ron Paul...well, I think more than just the GOP could stand to hear his analysis of war and the nation.

Evangelical Fracture? I don't think so

Every so often, with about the same regularity that pundits proclaim the Religious Right dead, someone proclaims an evangelical crack-up. The general idea is that evangelicalism, which has always been somewhat loose as a religious style, has finally reached the point in its internal tensions that it is no longer possible to speak of evangelicalism as a unified movement or as a sustained and coherent religious tradition. Most recently Timothy K. Beal proclaimed a fracturing of evangelicalism in a piece for the Chronicle Review. But unlike the usual punditry, this is harder to dismiss. Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western University and the author or editor of twelve books on religion. His argument would seem to bolster those political watchers who, from afar and with far less credibility, proclaim the end of a unified evangelicalism and therefore of the Religious Right. Could it be that those have proclaimed the imminent demise of evangelicalism have been correct all along? I don't think so.

Beal's claim is actually somewhat odd, coming as it does in the context of a wider discussion of the burgeoning interest in evangelicalism among nonevangelical readers and outside the university. For Beal, at least as he talks about it in this piece, evangelicalism is mainly a recent phenomenon, stemming from the public reemergence in the 1940s of people who formerly identified as fundamentalists. The upsurge in evangelical religion, which has grown intense in the last forty years, has created in Beal's interpretation a corresponding upsurge in interest in studying evangelicalism from scholars who are not necessarily evangelical and who are not necessarily historians of religion. This upsurge further corresponds with a rise in interest in the subject of evangelicalism among the general reading public. Beal also notes that many of those writing on the subject are first-time authors (I suppose my own work would apply here), which suggests the general movement of the field and the growing momentum to the study of evangelical religion in multiple disciplines.

But the problem, as Beal sees it, is that "as soon as evangelicalism becomes a subject, it splinters and splits." The multifariousness of evangelicals suggests to Beal that "there is no such thing as evangelicalism," if by evangelicalism we mean a unified movement of like-minded people. Rather, it is a collection of various groups, many of whom disagree strongly with one another and regularly air their differences. I'll skip the bibliographic portion of the essay to get to the conclusion, where he addresses what I think is the obvious question: How, if there is no such thing as evangelicalism, can the Religious Right, many of whom are as he admits "self-described evangelicals," how can such a conflict-ridden group muster the political power in the United States that they have obviously achieved? Here Beal draws on Jon A. Shields's book, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, which presumes not a unified body of belief that unites evangelicalism but instead argues that evangelicals have embraced "deliberative norms" that the Left normally champions. "These norms, which include the practice of civility, the cultivation of dialogue, the use of moral reasoning, and the rejection of appeals to theology," Beal writes in a gloss of Shields, "enable the Christian right movement to maintain a degree of effective unity despite the many theological and political differences among its adherents."

I have to admit that this is provocative, but I don't buy it. Beal seems to suggest that evangelicalism, to have a clear meaning, would require a require a common set of doctrinal commitments--that evangelicals should think alike. But I don't think evangelicals need to think alike theologically in order to be have a shared identity. They need to think the same way, in a way that grows out of a shared history or tradition. As Richard Lints, an evangelical theologian, explained in his 1993 book, The Fabric of Theology, "The movement's unique identity is defined to a considerable extent by cultural, institutional, and personal factors." Rather than common beliefs, there are "social structures that hold the movement together and give its constituents a common sense of identity." These social structures, he implies, arise most significantly out of a shared history.

To my mind this is a much more satisfying way of understanding evangelicalism that helps account for its tendency to continue as a self-described "evangelical" movement even as people proclaim evangelicalism's imminent crack-up. Evangelicals share the historical loss of the mainline denominations and the subsequent loss of control over American law, politics, and culture. Evangelicals seek a return to that control, perhaps chastened somewhat by the belated recognition of the diversity of American life and of the retrograde moral impulses of some of their movement in the past. Evangelicals' internal differences about a host of doctrinal issues do not undermine that fundamental belief that they share a historical burden as evangelicals: they are people who seek to spread God's word through evangelism and who seek to bring their theological understandings to bear on public life in response to their shared past of public marginalization that they seek to overcome.

Update: I have edited the original post to remove the offending (and unfair) sentence quoted by the first commenter.

Evangelical Fracture? I don't think so

Every so often, with about the same regularity that pundits proclaim the Religious Right dead, someone proclaims an evangelical crack-up. The general idea is that evangelicalism, which has always been somewhat loose as a religious style, has finally reached the point in its internal tensions that it is no longer possible to speak of evangelicalism as a unified movement or as a sustained and coherent religious tradition. Most recently Timothy K. Beal proclaimed a fracturing of evangelicalism in a piece for the Chronicle Review. But unlike the usual punditry, this is harder to dismiss. Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western University and the author or editor of twelve books on religion. His argument would seem to bolster those political watchers who, from afar and with far less credibility, proclaim the end of a unified evangelicalism and therefore of the Religious Right. Could it be that those have proclaimed the imminent demise of evangelicalism have been correct all along? I don't think so.

Beal's claim is actually somewhat odd, coming as it does in the context of a wider discussion of the burgeoning interest in evangelicalism among nonevangelical readers and outside the university. For Beal, at least as he talks about it in this piece, evangelicalism is mainly a recent phenomenon, stemming from the public reemergence in the 1940s of people who formerly identified as fundamentalists. The upsurge in evangelical religion, which has grown intense in the last forty years, has created in Beal's interpretation a corresponding upsurge in interest in studying evangelicalism from scholars who are not necessarily evangelical and who are not necessarily historians of religion. This upsurge further corresponds with a rise in interest in the subject of evangelicalism among the general reading public. Beal also notes that many of those writing on the subject are first-time authors (I suppose my own work would apply here), which suggests the general movement of the field and the growing momentum to the study of evangelical religion in multiple disciplines.

But the problem, as Beal sees it, is that "as soon as evangelicalism becomes a subject, it splinters and splits." The multifariousness of evangelicals suggests to Beal that "there is no such thing as evangelicalism," if by evangelicalism we mean a unified movement of like-minded people. Rather, it is a collection of various groups, many of whom disagree strongly with one another and regularly air their differences. I'll skip the bibliographic portion of the essay to get to the conclusion, where he addresses what I think is the obvious question: How, if there is no such thing as evangelicalism, can the Religious Right, many of whom are as he admits "self-described evangelicals," how can such a conflict-ridden group muster the political power in the United States that they have obviously achieved? Here Beal draws on Jon A. Shields's book, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, which presumes not a unified body of belief that unites evangelicalism but instead argues that evangelicals have embraced "deliberative norms" that the Left normally champions. "These norms, which include the practice of civility, the cultivation of dialogue, the use of moral reasoning, and the rejection of appeals to theology," Beal writes in a gloss of Shields, "enable the Christian right movement to maintain a degree of effective unity despite the many theological and political differences among its adherents."

I have to admit that this is provocative, but I don't buy it. Beal seems to suggest that evangelicalism, to have a clear meaning, would require a require a common set of doctrinal commitments--that evangelicals should think alike. But I don't think evangelicals need to think alike theologically in order to be have a shared identity. They need to think the same way, in a way that grows out of a shared history or tradition. As Richard Lints, an evangelical theologian, explained in his 1993 book, The Fabric of Theology, "The movement's unique identity is defined to a considerable extent by cultural, institutional, and personal factors." Rather than common beliefs, there are "social structures that hold the movement together and give its constituents a common sense of identity." These social structures, he implies, arise most significantly out of a shared history.

To my mind this is a much more satisfying way of understanding evangelicalism that helps account for its tendency to continue as a self-described "evangelical" movement even as people proclaim evangelicalism's imminent crack-up. Evangelicals share the historical loss of the mainline denominations and the subsequent loss of control over American law, politics, and culture. Evangelicals seek a return to that control, perhaps chastened somewhat by the belated recognition of the diversity of American life and of the retrograde moral impulses of some of their movement in the past. Evangelicals' internal differences about a host of doctrinal issues do not undermine that fundamental belief that they share a historical burden as evangelicals: they are people who seek to spread God's word through evangelism and who seek to bring their theological understandings to bear on public life in response to their shared past of public marginalization that they seek to overcome.

Update: I have edited the original post to remove the offending (and unfair) sentence quoted by the first commenter.