Evangelical politics
Foley, Michael W.
PREACHING, PIETY, & RADICAL REFORM Evangelical politics II MICHAEL W. FOLEY E VANGELICALRELIGION, long a bastion of right-wing politics, has a new face today. Or rather,...
...The failure of the Briggs initiative is one sign that evangelicals have begun to heed that message...
...While the Assemblies of God have ioined in the NAE's purges, the Christian Holiness Association, representative for the holiness tradition, has softened inerrancy language over the last several years...
...Sojourners's expos~ was carded by the national press, made front page headlines in Conlan's home state and contributed substantially to the collapse of the Plan...
...antiChrist...
...senators and eleven congressmen...
...His "700 Club" is carded by 200 TV and 150 radio stations and beamed by satellite to 23 countries...
...The remark came not from a political conservative but out of a sizable evangelical drift toward the center, toward mainstream America and the good life and decidedly away from the right-wing politics of Billy James Hargis and Jerry Falwell, away even from the fundamentalism of the recent evangelical past...
...Fuller has refused to purge its questioned faculty, and the Southern Baptist Convention, despite the election of ultra-conservative Adrian Rogers to its presidency, flatly turned down inerrancy formulations--formulations which would have amounted to a creed for an essentially anti-creedal tradition...
...But again, that stance is not without positive political consequences...
...An intrusive state now prompts the voluntary conformity of the new evangelical center...
...Will the new evangelical center, including a large portion of the new evangelical social conscience, simply come to reflect the mores of a complacent America--as its taste already reflects the insipid blend of Hollywood and House Beautiful that afflicts our popular culture...
...The PTL television network claims to be "the most viewed daily television program in the world...
...The "reformation of mankind" would become the province of the heathen and the heretic...
...It is simply that there are so few viable alternatives in American politics...
...Most radical of the new evangelicals are those nourished on the promises of a social conscience launched by Christianity Today at the close of the fifties and bitterly disappointed by the politics of the Vietnam war...
...But direct mail advertising and a vigorous use of the new Christian broadcasting outlets make up the chief outreach for an organization devoted to fighting such evils as the banning of prayer in public schools, abortion on demand, the teaching of evolution and "secular humanism" in school and through the media, and the "betrayal" of "Christian allies in Taiwan and Rhodesia...
...Out of that meeting grew "Evangelicals for Social Action," which hopes to foster both local and national efforts on behalf of social issues ranging from world hunger to nuclear disarmament to community development...
...he goes to prayer breakfasts as did Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford before him...
...A Southern politician wedded to the Trilateral Commission rather than Dixie, his Americanism is as comfortably secular as that of any of his predecessors...
...Sojourners has organized a nationwide lobby for the Hatfield moratorium amendment to the SALT II treaty, involved itself in tenant organizing in Washington~s ghettos, and petitioned city government for laws to slow down "gentrifiction" in a situation where housing is already pathetically scarce for Washington's poor...
...The new social awareness among conservative Christians has called many back to their reformist origins...
...But recently conservative Christians have begun plunging money into the creation of alternative networks of Christian-owned and -operated radio and TV stations and production and marketing outfits...
...Indeed, in a passage carefully excised by modern editors of his works, Finney argues that "One of the most serious impediments that have been thrown in the way of revivals of religion and one that no doubt deeply grieves the Spirit of God" is the church's neglect"of its own appropriate wo¢k," namely,"the reformation of mankind...
...At worst, Finney's millennialism has been converted into a crabbed apocalypticism...
...But the sociological phenomenon that made evangelical, and eventually pentecostal and holiness, Christians "respectable" is also pushing them into the cultural mainstream...
...Finney envisaged that work in concrete political terms, the creation of the kingdom on earth...
...He represents, in fact, a new sophistication about power and a move on the part of conservative Christians toward the cultural and political center of American life...
...The center for a new alliance of evangelical social contern, traditional Anabaptist themes, and Catholic and mainline radicalism is Sojourners magazine...
...Christian Voice, newly formed lobbying ann of American Christian Cause, is a good examMICItAEL W. FOLEY i$ a correspondent for Sojourners magazine...
...I stand on the gospel...
...T ODAY AN UNEXPECTED renaissance of nineteenth-century evangelical social concern has captured a growing segment of conservative Christianity...
...Jimmy Carter may not stand as a paradigm of the new evangelical politics, but he represents a shift that is widespread among conservative Christians...
...There is no doubt that the move to the center among evangelicals is sincerely motivated and generated by serious questioning on the part of conservative Christians...
...The gospel offers a radical reversal of dominant attitudes toward wealth and power...
...Graham's own desire "to be close to the centers of power" was severely chastened by the Watergate revelations, and his new-won critical stance is a reflection of the position recently gained at some cost by tens of thousands of his fellow conservative Christians...
...All of the groups mentioned claim biblical sanction for their position...
...The continued presence of the right, the vitality of the evangelical left, suggest that the world of conservative Christianity will be in ferment for some time to come...
...Sunday was perhaps not the f'trst evangelist to identify his faith with "100 percent Americanism," but he was certainly the most influential...
...That the churches have not rallied to the defense of Herbert Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God in its financial disclosure crisis is also indicative...
...it does not . monopolize the Christian right, and it was not without significant predecessors...
...Conlan lost a re-election campaign in Arizona, and Bill Bright's Embassy quietly closed down...
...Pat Robertson's "700 Club," centerpiece of his Christian Broadcasting Network, reaches 5 million viewers...
...But the communal life-style promoted by these new evangelicals is more reminiscent of the Catholic Worker than of the middleclass charismatic communities that sprang up in the seventies...
...Other groups and journals also reflect a growing crystalization of what some would call the evangelical left, though parties to the new attitudes generally reject the term...
...But aside from the Lutherans, most of these groups have ties to a more radical past...
...And Charles Colson's conversion and prison experience has grown into a vigorous prison ministry and increasingly sharp criticism of the American penal system...
...opposition to the ERA, national health insurance, and gay rights legislation...
...These are not political issues," so we are told in a flyer that claims the authority of conservative S~nators Orrin Hatch and Roger Jepsen arrlong others, not matters of "liberal vs...
...The magazine has also tackled the question of biblical "inerrancy" and has rejected as divisive the position of Harold Lindsell and others engaged in their "battle for the Bible...
...It is not far from here to the claim of Billy James Hargis that "'Christ is the heart of the J Conservative cause...
...Kresge, and John M. StlJdebaker, preached a gospel of complacency to the rich and conformity to the poor...
...There is no clear answer to these questions...
...But Finney's hope for the kingdom come on American soil is not the vision that compels the new evangelical social conscience...
...none of them feels any special affinity for so mainline a group as Christians for Socialism...
...In the frustrations and the flurry of the post-Civil War period the millennial hopes of the abolitionists were exchanged for a more bourgeois vision...
...A growing network of interdenominational contacts--an evangelical ecumenism that serves both liberal and conservative tendencies--provides the broad base of support for the organization, whose Congressional Advisory Committee includes four U.S...
...Out of this odd alliance of fundamentalism and pietistic morality, political despair and the quest for a place in the mainstream, anarchism and a reverence for the gods of success was born contemporary American conservatism, in all its contradictions...
...Baptist separatism became the doctrine of the separation of church and state in American polity...
...He is no demagogue...
...The doctrine of the separatign of church and state, politics and religion must hold even under the hefty guns of right-wing moral outrage...
...And perhaps most radical among conservative Christians are the black pentecostal theologians at Mason Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, who have been adapting liberation theology to the black experience in America...
...In 1976 Sojourners magazine, then just gaining national recognition as a voice for an unexpected side of the evangelical conscience, exposed a nationwide conservative Christian "Plan to Save America...
...But any genuine political renewal among Christians, argues Wallis, will have to be rooted in Christian worship life and in a life lived resolutely with the poor...
...But it has done so with more capital and more sophistication than was ever evident in the "Christian AntiCommunist Crusades" of the fifties...
...T HERE ARE a good many sympathizers among conservative Protestants who do not go all the way with the young Turks...
...Robertson is an intelligent, soft-spoken conservative with enough charm and business sense to have built a television empire over the last twenty years...
...He runs a graduate school of communications with an evangelical bent and spends $50 million a year on CBN and his headquarters station WYAH in Portsmouth, Virginia...
...Both the sophistication and the shift to the cultural center can be seen even in the right wing...
...Though demagogues like Jerry Falwell and John Briggsr are still with us, the new evangelical right is as groomed for the public as "Good Morning, America" and as politically wily as its public relations mentor, Richard Viguerie...
...Politically, the failure of an evangelical consensus contributed heavily to the defeat last fall of California's Briggs initiative (which would have banned homosexuals and open supporters from the public schools...
...Like the vast majority of evangelical spokespeople of the recent past, Christian Voice roundly condemns "a National Council of Churches which speaks for 'all' Christians in the halls of our Congress, calls for public sex education of the young, and advocates national redistribution of wealth (a la Karl Marx...
...While Bright'sHere'sLife, America (the "I've Found It" campaign) was not explicitly political, Bright's vision of the conversion of America included getting "good Christian men and women" into office who would turn the nation around by putting it on "a sound military and economic basis...
...Others might judge it a culturally captive Christianity...
...When the right outline their program," says Wallis, "then I become the conservative...
...We conservatives are fighting for GOd and Country...
...The gospel, and the church, is thus driven toward a very critical stance toward our government and society...
...The first evangelicals were at the margins of their society...
...The rhetoric of success, the flashy style and the new media image of contemporary "born again" evangelicals, a revaluation of sex and a quiet dropping of traditional taboos all attest a decidedly altered atmosphere among "conservative" Christians...
...PREACHING, PIETY, & RADICAL REFORM Evangelical politics II MICHAEL W. FOLEY E VANGELICALRELIGION, long a bastion of right-wing politics, has a new face today...
...There are signs, for instance, that Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell is losing his' 'battle for the Bible...
...The oppositionist stance of abolitionist and populist was transmuted in the churches into an abstract repudiation of "modernism" and a pietistic moralism...
...t) is a product of the Berkeley People's Christian Coalition with feminist Sharon Gallagher as chief editor...
...29 February 1980:107...
...The bourgeois virtues have faltered, 100 percent Americanism is suspect, and moralism in politics is increasingly reserved for the left...
...He has also contributed to Politics Today, America and the CoEvolution Quarterly in between cooking, carpentry, and caring for six children, four his own, on a Catholic Worker farm in the foothills of the Sierras...
...Republican...
...He does not thump his Bible in the folksy or thunderous style of Bible Belt politicians of old...
...Concerned with cultural issues as well as politics, the magazine has a more apocalyptic and fundamentalist slant than others on the "left...
...That campaign 'was intended to culminate in the development of evangelically motivated political cadres nationwide, who would propel Conlan and other like-minded Christians into public office...
...Still, the danger remains...
...Chastened by decades of evangelical identification with national chauvinism, influenced by Anabaptist separatism and Barthian crisis theology ~ la Jacques Ellul, radical evangelicals and pentecostals maintain a critical stance towards political programs and panaceas...
...I ask 'What does all this have to do with belonging to Christ?' and 'How is it that the virtue of compassion has been systematically excluded from the thinking of a whole generation of Christians?' " Wes Michaelson, another Sojourners editor, adds that it is not a matter of the gospel "transcending politics," as if the Commonweal: 106 gospel "had no historical specificity...
...Or rather, several new faces...
...When Billy Graham declares that he was wrong to give his unqualified support to U.S...
...Bill Bright, founder of Young Life, had opened his lavish "Christian Embassy" in Washington, and Bright, Conlan, and others were raising funds for a national campaign of evangelization, first visible in the "I've Found It" media blitz...
...Conservative Christian politics is alive and kicking today, however, not only in Christian Voice, but in the remarkable growth of the Christian broadcasting phenomenon as well...
...The Other Side, originally devoted to taking up the race question among evangelicals, shares Sojourners's commitment to resisting the arms race and to developing a life-style in response to world hunger...
...His politics, which dictate the programming and pervade Pat Robertson'sNews'letter, are the usual conservative amalgam: a tough military and foreign policy, including recognition of Rhodesia and stepped-up arms sales to anti-Communist governments...
...But as Dayton remarks, "Marginality, both cultural and economic, has produced its opposite in successive generations--the push toward 'respectability,' a strong desire to be close to the centers of power, and a longing to enjoy the 'good life.' " This process was already at work among older evangelical denominations in the last half of the nineteenth century...
...Both men bitterly denounce theSojourners editors to this day...
...Christian Voice is a new organization...
...And many of the ambiguities of both liberal reformist and evangelical politics then and now spring from that vision, which included temperance legislation and women's suffrage, abolitionism and the rehabilitation of prisoners, social work and evangelization among the poor...
...The quirks of Christian conservatism are much in evidence: Robertson vaguely expects the "end times" around the corner, supports Israel and opposes a Palestinlan state on "biblical" grounds, feels deficit spending and credit buying undermine the Puritan work ethic, which he sees as the source of America's "moral fiber...
...The Sojourners Fellowship's worship-style is charismatic, and several charismatic communities, 'including Franciscan Father Richard Rohr's "New Jerusalem Community" in Cincinnati, are part of Sojourners's"circle of communities...
...The identification of holiness and pentecostal groups with the poor was close...
...conservative, or Democrat vs...
...The holiness churches especially, with roots in the abolitionist movement and in early feminism are turning back to a concern for structural social evils...
...Shouting evangelists like Jerry Falwell and homespun preachers like Oral Roberts have used the media for decades, often with explicitly political messages...
...Political conservatism, especially in its moralism, is no longer respectable in the American mainstream...
...But the destruction of populism in the 1890s and the crushing of American socialism in 1918 and' 19 broke the social hopes of evangelical Christianity...
...Instead, George Wilson of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Stan Mooneyham of World Vision have created a movement for financial disclosure among evangelical churches and charitable organizations...
...A smooth talker, he keeps his talk show moving, from personal testimony to political discussion to gospel music with a twist of Lawrence Welk, Robertson gives his viewers a big dose of what Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard see as "an alternative Christian culture...
...And, despite the stated emphasis on the renewal of the church, the magazine focuses on political issues, It regularly features exposes of torture and repression in Latin America, the Philippines and Korea, and its editorial policy includes a militant rejection of nuclear armament and a positive commitment to "biblical" feminism...
...Christian Voice has taken up anew the defense of that special blend of fundamentalist moralism and right-wing causes that has characterized Christian conservatism for decades...
...none of them wishes to see itself as a Christian rapproachment with liberalism or socialism...
...A number of rightwing Christian groups, including the Third Century Foundation and the Christian Freedom Foundation were consolidating around the political leadership of then-senator from Arizona Commonweal: 104 John Conlan, a clever politician with presidential hopes...
...But evangelical church historian Donald Dayton also points to a sociological rhythm evident in the evolution of conservative Christianity...
...Repudiated by the respectable, theologically suspect, economically poor-to-middling (with a few excep29 February 1980:105 tions),'politically radical, they stood outside the mainstream and launched, their crusades on unfamiliar waters...
...I pie...
...Conservative Christianity" is itself a mixed lot, comprising evangelical descendants of the great revivals among such mainline denominations as Methodists, Presbyterians, and United Church of Christ, distinctly revival-based churches like the various community churches and bible churches and "interdenominational fellowships" that dot the landscape, holiness and pentecostal traditions, and conservative Lutherans and Baptists like the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern B,'iptists...
...Charles Finney's "new measure" evangelism was closely allied to both abolitionism and the early women's movement...
...Or will it manage to forge a distinctly evangelical counterpoint to the empty political debates of the seventies...
...In 1972 Ron Sider, a minister in the Brethren of Christ (a holiness denomination) and professor at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, was instrumental in gathering together evangelicals and mainline church people for the "Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern...
...weapons policy in the fifties and sixties, it is clear that something more than cultural conformism is afoot among the newly affluent conservative Protestant churches...
...Co-Editor Jim Wallis sees the fast ministry of the group to the church, "to the renewal of our fast love, of her life and her worship...
...From the beginning," says Wallis, "we have found our lives and our ministry shaped at the juncture of politics and religion...
...These are moral issues--good vs...
...evil, Christ vs...
...As Lawrence Godwin argues in his persuasive re-evaluation of populism, with these events the hard-won collective ~,ision of the rural and working-class poor was shattered, to be replaced by the mute opposition to "big government," "big business," and eventually "big labor" of the "silent majority" and by an indigenous American anarchism in its individualist and capitalist forms...
...Radix (formerly Right On...
...And pentecostal, holiness and evangelical circuit riders became circuit lecturers for the Farmer's Alliances on the eve of America's first and greatest populist revolt...
...At its best, the new evangelical social conscience is as open to constructive social change as it is critical of American civil religion, as self-critical as it is devoted to prophecy in the public midst...
...A rlew generation of evangelicals has begun to question the old alliance of conservative piety and conservative politics...
...M EDIA-WISE or not, the fight-wing politics of conservative Christianity has always been an odd amalgam, especially in light of evangelical history...
...The alliance thus forged between piety and reformism was so strong that Eugene V. Debs could declare in the 1890s that "the best socialist is a Holiness man...
...Predicated on strict "inerrancy" lines, the Lindsell position, which is that of the National Association of Evangelicals, has attempted to force itself on liberal-leaning Fuller Theological Seminary, on the Southern Baptist Convention, and on other conservative Christians at the margins of "evangelicalism...
...And the kingdom is not going to be realized in any political system...
...Reflecting on Sojourners's stress on simple living, one evangelical remarked, "Those folks must be suffering from anorexia...
...Where the politics of conservative Christianity has until recently ranged from the frantic anti-Communism of a Carl McIntyre to the complacent and conservative Americanism cloaked in piety that has served so many Southern politicians, today's political spectrum includes a "born again" president whose piety seems to some as peripheral to his policy as was Richard Nixon's, liberal critics like Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and a growing circle of "radical evangelicals" who have borrowed both tactics and a good many issues from the New Left of the sixties...
...Liberalism," as Christian Voice justly fears, has indeed the upper hand, whether in the muted moral reformism of the steadfast liberal and new evangelical or in the refusal of moral categories among "neo-conservatives...
...Wesleyanism spawned the abolition movement in England, and the holiness churches grew out of a series of breaks with the compromises of nineteenth-century Methodism...
...support for nuclear power...
...Billy Sunday, financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., S.S...
...Founded in the late sixties as The Post-American by a group of evangelicals kicked out of their conservative seminaries and Bible colleges for antiVietnam war activities, both the journal and the fellowship that supports it have matured into an incisively critical counterpoint to the dominant ethos of evangelical religion...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 4
