Religious right: new? right?
Stackhouses, Max L.
UNDERSTANDING THE NEO-EVANGELICALS Religious right: new? right? MAX L. STACKHOUSE IT seems to me that non-Protestants especially should attend to the new public visibility of the...
...1981), she sees "cause for genuine rejoicing" in the new awareness among evangelicals that it is the "duty, of Christians to be involved in public decision-making...
...Consider, for example, the essays by the superb journalist Frances Fitzgerald...
...Robert Schuller and Jim Bakker are simply not new versions of Elmer Gantry...
...1981), he argues for a "third way" between these two betrayals...
...Indeed, one needs a guide to the players to know what is going on...
...For the most part, we are seeing religion with social implications, not simply reactionary politics wrapped in religiosity...
...This stream of theological thought was a decisive influence in shaping American views of democracy, human rights, and social progress...
...Eventually passing through the "Social Gospel" movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it emerged as the core of Protestant ecumenical, or "mainline" churches...
...On the negative side, the fundamen-talistic evangelicals too often think that they can assure God's righteousness by legislating civil statutes guaranteeing holiness...
...Her ecumenical spirit, populist instincts, and sustained experience in the South equip her to give careful attention to the actual documents put out by the Neo-Evangelicals and their critics, without adopting the polemics of several journalists who have been less attentive to what is actually being said by these groups...
...Most Protestants are, in this classical sense, evangelicals...
...Hence, each becomes lopsided and unbalanced when measured by the deepest traditions of faith...
...In her lengthy New Yorker article on Jerry Falwell (May, 1981), and her more recent essay in the New York Review of Books (Nov...
...In their view, the biblically-based backbone of American morality was being dismantled by an equally militant permissive relativism...
...1980), have already been drawn into ecumenical conversations...
...The third stream is properly called "fundamentalistic...
...Thus, these sociologists challenge those who see religion in these streams as products of ideological interests produced entirely by a convergence of social forces and the technology of television itself...
...They outline major themes of the different notables...
...On the whole, the movement is mildly dangerous, in my judgment...
...Discredited by the 1928 Scopes trial over evolution, this group withdrew from overt public engagement for several decades...
...Indeed, reactionary political forces have been able to exploit evangelicalism precisely to the degree that no one else would give them a hearing or a forum for deeply held convictions...
...Often, commentators on these movements import perspectives into their analysis which do not seem to be appropriate...
...Martin E. Marty;the noted church historian, knows the depth and breadth of the evangelical influence...
...Erling Jorstad's The Politics of Moralism Augsburg, $4.95, 128 pp...
...They detail the available statistics about who watches what, how much money is involved, and what the relative stability of the constituencies might be...
...What is now reappearing in militant and often fractured form is, in part, but the resurfacing of deep strands of Protestant thought that have decisively shaped aspects of the whole culture...
...In the final analysis, no Christian can make "finite human judgment derived from secular experience definitive of ultimate truth...
...He suggests practical strategies for this new ecumenism, and devotes several sections of the book to the proper role of religion in public life...
...IN AMERICA, this classical evangelical impetus split into three distinct branches...
...A second stream of evangelicalism can be called "pietistic...
...Since all these groups constantly speak of the transforming power of the Gospel, it is not beyond the realm of the possible that they will eventually be converted to its accents on compassion and mercy as well as to its emphasis on righteousness and zeal...
...On the positive side, he is convinced that the Neo-Evangelical critique of "secular humanism" is basically correct...
...It focused on the inerrancy and the literal infallibility of Scripture, and on a millenarian, "catastrophic" interpretation of history...
...Indeed, reactionary political forces have been able to exploit evangelicalism precisely to the degree that no one else would give them a hearing or a forum for deeply held convictions...
...The moral strategies call for genuine conversion of person, mind, and lifestyle, with the church as the prophetic model of community life, and the Protestant doctrine of Christian vocation as the guide to social action...
...The phenomenon is, in fact, quite pluralistic...
...What is now reappearing in militant and often fractured form is, in part, but the resurfacing of deep strands of Protestant thought that have decisively shaped aspects of the whole culture...
...The pietistic and fundamentalistic evangelicals did not fade away, however...
...Yet it rejects militarism, sexist authoritarianism, and materialism as means or end...
...Robert Webber, a graduate of Bob Jones University and a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, is concerned to show what is, and what is not, genuine evangelicalism...
...More substantive, although distressingly more glib in style, is Jeffrey Had-den and Charles E. Swann, Prime Time Preachers (Addison-Wesley, $11.95, 288 pp...
...stackhouse is professor of Christian Social Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School and author of Ethics and the Urban Ethos (Beacon Press...
...She is also very clear about the rights of such groups to speak out...
...The Fundamentalist Phenomena: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity, edited by Jerry Falwell (Double-day, $13.95, 269 pp...
...nor is it finished in its development...
...As Digby Baltzell has shown in his excellent Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (The Free Press, $19.95, 585 pp...
...And, since evangelicalism in its several forms has been so influential in shaping the general ethos of American culture, failure to grasp its inner content and general contours is likely to produce little more than increased alienation...
...GABRIEL FACKRE'S The Religious Right and the Christian Faith (Eerdmans, $8.95, 160 pp...
...MAX L. STACKHOUSE IT seems to me that non-Protestants especially should attend to the new public visibility of the Neo-Evangelicals, sometimes called the "new religious right...
...On the other side, he holds that ecumenical Protestantism, as represented by the World Council of Churches, has been tainted by Karl Marx's economics, Che Guevara's politics, and Bella Abzug's secular-pragmatic feminism...
...Thus true evangelicialism signals that it "belongs to the Kingdom which is not of this world and has no affinity with the powers which rule this world...
...Catholics and Ecumenical Protestants may find it relatively easy to engage those contemporary representatives of the pietist evangelicals who are finding new ways to address public issues from a profoundly biblical perspective...
...She is not alone in missing the links between deeper dimensions of Protestant thought and the particular ways these are utilized, and distorted, by the NeoEvangelicals...
...Both recognize that the key issue is the question of orthodoxy or heresy...
...It is...
...1981) and Parker J. Palmer, in his The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America s Public Life (Crossroad, $10.95, 169 pp...
...Often, commentators on these movements import perspectives into their analysis which do not seem to be appropriate...
...The latter two largely controlled church-related educational institutions, presses, "public religious statements," and the training of clergy...
...in but not of the world...
...He wants to draw it into a wider conversation...
...That is why their chief enemy is "secular humanism...
...1981) has provided a handy survey of the major figures in "Christian TV Biz," for those who are not familiar with the phenomena...
...1980), this is the tradition into which also many American Roman Catholics moved, not always with full awareness of the source of their views...
...1981), however, suggests that rapprochement with some contemporary fundamentalist evangelicals will be much more difficult...
...Theology, not philosophy or science, is considered to be the most universal mode of discourse...
...Wilson are viewed as slight distortions of deep commitments, deriving from profound insight and long tradition, the Neo-Evangelicals are treated as by-products of social or social-psychological forces which no one could really take seriously in terms of authentic religion...
...Jim Wallis, in his The Call to Conversion (Harper and Row, $9.95, 190 pp...
...Clear echoes of puritan and pietist evangelicalism as well as moments of fundamentalism can be heard in Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and Jerry Falwell...
...The economic resurgence of the Bible Belt, now called the Sun Belt, and the declining fortunes of great metropolitan areas where Ecumenical Protestant and Roman Catholic influence was greatest, brought about a new vigor, even a militancy, to commitments that had been there all along...
...In several languages, the word "evangelical" is best translated "Protestant...
...However critical ecumenically-oriented Protestants might be of these movements, many of us experience a certain frustration when we read or hear accounts of them by otherwise discerning Catholics, Jews, or secular journalists...
...He sees the truly orthodox, catholic, and apostolic tradition to have been betrayed by that sort of evangelicalism which has emerged into the ecumenical perspectives of Protestant ecumenism, and by the sort of fundamentalist evangelicalism which has organized itself into the "Moral Majority...
...The much celebrated message by Yale President Giamatti on the same topics has many of the same frailties, The wider implications of this observation are two-fold: If one intends to offer criticism of a movement, it is best to be sure that the target of critique is clearly in view...
...Although George M. Marsden, in his outstanding book Fundamentalism and American -Culture (Oxford U. Press, $19.95, 275 pp...
...1981...
...Those who think that these heresies are but ancient temptations have not studied the scripture, or the tradition, or the contemporary situation, deeply enough...
...Wallis, once a fundamentalist, begins by re-examining the concept of conversion...
...NORMATIVE EVALUATION of resurgent evangelicalism is still -in its first stages...
...Thus he calls for a new ecumenism among "Mainline, Evangelical, and Catholic" communions in his delightfully written The Public Church (Crossroad, $10.99, 170 pp...
...If ecumenical Protestants and Catholics attend to these developments discerningly, however, it is quite possible that we can draw them into a wider ecumenical conversation, become attentive to the call for rededication, experience a new sharing in the whole body of Christ, and seek together for ethical renewal of public life-a renewal that can give to a civilization which seems to have lost its moral rudder better guidance than any of us alone have thus far engendered...
...19, 1981), she uses implicit definitions of spirituality, morality, freedom, worship, and sect which derive from Roman Catholic thought or from secular political theory and do not neatly fit her subjects...
...And, since evangelicalism in its several forms has been so influential in shaping the general ethos of American culture, failure to grasp its inner content and general contours is likely to produce little more than increased alienation...
...This stream is primarily concerned with the personal and inward experience of salvation in Christ, and with the renewal of devotional, interpersonal, and church life...
...they developed extensive networks of highly committed local congregations, independent Bible colleges, "revival circuits," their own presses, and distinctive "non-cosmopolitan" styles of preaching...
...Only a few of the newer books on this movement seem to be alert to these historical roots of the Neo-Evangelicals...
...In her lengthy New Yorker article on Jerry Falwell (May, 1981), and her more recent essay in the New York Review of Books (Nov...
...and God's righteousness, not the calculation of the common good, is held to be the foundation of ethics...
...Instead, he finds himself backing into an "evangelicalism which smacks of Thomas Merton" by being forced to deal with the lost sense of intimacy and spirituality among the people and by attempting to rebuild a genuine sense of "congregation" at the local level in the depersonalized city...
...It means a primary concern with the "good news" as derived from Scripture, and often a suspicion of ethics or politics derived essentially from secular or humanistic (ancient or modern) sources...
...It is time, he says for a new "communion of communions...
...THIS ecumenical mutuality may, however, fare differently with different evangelicals...
...This cluster of new books gives us helpful insight into what may well be the most important new developments in American religion of this decade...
...She is not alone in missing the links between deeper dimensions of Protestant thought and the particular ways these are utilized, and distorted, by the NeoEvangelicals...
...They also are suspicious of those Protestants for whom the Enlightenment and subsequent sociological and psychological perspectives have defined the core of their commitments...
...Wilson are viewed as slight distortions of deep commitments, deriving from profound insight and long tradition, the Neo-Evangelicals are treated as by-products of social or social-psychological forces which no one could really take seriously in terms of authentic religion...
...Indeed, many "evangelicals" in this classical sense see their Protestant movements as the truly catholic ones since the Catholic church limited its catholicity by becoming too Roman...
...Disagreements will then become only the mobilization of force and counterforce under the tacit presumption that might will prove who is right...
...In large measure, this is also the tradition of the black churches, brought to new visibility by Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers, and to such Anabaptists as John Howard Yoder...
...These voices suggest the prospect of a mutually rewarding conversation with a kind of conservatism that is prophetically concerned to re-apply ancient values to new contexts...
...It is a genuinely ecumenical evangelicalism, in his view, as can be seen in the covenant of the Lausanne Conference of 1974, as well as by its openness to such influences as Anglicans, C.S...
...Carnell, Harold Lindsell, and Francis Schaeffer...
...For the most part, both the pietistic and the fundamentalistic forms of evangelicalism had been cut off from national influence by the predominance of puritan evangelicalism (as it became Ecumenical Protestantism) and by the increasing power of Roman Catholicism...
...Or it may be little more than another in the series of "Awakenings" which have periodically appeared in American life and which we note and pass through...
...The new visibility of this movement could, at its worst, move the society toward a perilous "Christian Ayatollaism" which we shall have to oppose with vigor, theologically and politically...
...Certain classic values and Christian themes are preserved by each of these great communions and neglected by others...
...Shriver's work, like Marty's, serves as an invitation to become engaged in a new mutuality of criticism and accountability...
...Simply to criticize these movements because they are likely to have social or political consequences which others do not prefer on political grounds is to leave the theological and ethical core of the matter untouched...
...STACKHOUSE is professor of Christian Social Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School and author of Ethics and the Urban Ethos (Beacon Press...
...These groups have set the groundwork for the next, necessary steps: ecumenical debate on how, and on what issues, and in what directions Christians should address the society at large...
...Doctors are to serve the sick, lawyers are to serve minorities, employers are to hire, train, and properly pay the poor, etc...
...1981...
...And they are driven to this confusion by understanding the Christian faith in terms which echo the heresies of Manicheism and docetism...
...The Moral Majority, in his view, has imported the secular-humanist ideas of Milton Friedman's economics, Douglas Mac Arthur's politics, and Phyllis Schaf-ly's views of the family into the Gospel, and so distorted it...
...He preserves its intense personal core, but extends its meanings, properly in my judgment, to public -witness about hunger, economic injustice, and the necessary transformation of the nuclear peril...
...1981) represent fresh efforts to articulate the core values of Christian piety in such a way that the transformed inner tissues of commitment become the source of wider public renewal...
...19, 1981), she uses implicit definitions of spirituality, morality, freedom, worship, and sect which derive from Roman Catholic thought or from secular political theory and do not neatly fit her subjects...
...In several languages, the word "evangelical" is best translated "Protestant...
...They confuse (as do those Jews, Mormons, and Catholics who cooperate with the Moral Majority) problems of sin and crime...
...Much that goes under these names is, in fact, neither "new" nor "right...
...The first is "puritan evangelicalism" which, from the days of Jonathan Edwards, became linked with the thought of John Locke and his successors, re-engaging in dialogue with secular sciences...
...The focus of this sort of evangelicalism is that the voluntary, believer's church is a divine institution...
...He calls for a true evangelicalism, presently articulated by such authors as E.J...
...Many in this stream have felt that it was not proper for Christians to take public stands on social and political issues...
...Premature rejection of it is likely both to polarize religious groups further and to miss the import of major elements in our common life...
...an act of human self-elevation . . . , and imperialism of human judgment...
...Many of the contemporary radio and television Neo-Evangelicals do not fit neatly into the hard-line camp...
...In his The Moral Majority, Right or Wrong (Cornerstone Books, $9.95, 190 pp...
...The Roman Catholic church, in his view, is so far from the center of discussion that he scarcely mentions it...
...Ronald J. Sider, author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hanger: A Biblical Study (Intervarsity Press, $4.95, 252 pp...
...However critical ecumenically-oriented Protestants might be of these movements, many of us experience a certain frustration when we read or hear accounts of them by otherwise discerning Catholics, Jews, or secular journalists...
...The South and the Midwest are peppered with them...
...MAX L. STACKHOUSE IT seems to me that non-Protestants especially should attend to the new public visibility of the Neo-Evangelicals, sometimes called the "new religious right...
...Contemporary confusions about the "separation of church and state" cannot be used as clubs to silence religious freedom and public witness...
...And Fackre acknowledges this "Pelagian" error, in modern garb, is exactly what many self-styled "liberal" and "progressive" Christians have accepted...
...maxl...
...It developed its main focus in the same time period that the Roman church was defining, officially, the infallibility of the pope...
...Peggy Shriver, director of research for the National Council of Churches, presents perhaps the best and most balanced approach to the political impact of the Neo-Evangelicals that has thus far been published...
...Premature rejection of it is likely both to polarize religious groups further and to miss the import of major elements in our common life...
...This ecumenical and, in some ways "liberal," voice has taken greater care than most to sort out the distinctions...
...Only two books which I have seen come close to the substantive issues, and they do so from different angles...
...One could also cite John Courtney Murray and Father Robert Dri-nan...
...That] sets humanity in the place of Deity...
...In spite of an overly "popular" style, Fackre knows the nuanced differences between the various stripes of Neo-Evangelical and points out again and again the areas in which, in language sometimes quaint to modern ears, they in fact accurately grasp one or another classical feature of Christian doctrine...
...1978), and Richard Mouw, author of Called to Holy Worldliness (Fortress $5.50, 156 pp...
...This essentially sociological account is important in another respect: the authors show that the ideas conveyed through the television media are themselves as influential as "social" causes...
...He cites the Kennedys, for example...
...Palmer, trained in the ecumenical traditions of theology, recounts his growing awareness of the fact that the idea of "public" witness is betrayed if it is first of all conceived as "political actionism...
...The much celebrated message by Yale President Giamatti on the same topics has many of the same frailties, The wider implications of this observation are two-fold: If one intends to offer criticism of a movement, it is best to be sure that the target of critique is clearly in view...
...June, 1982) is one of the very few contemporary efforts to "probe below the level of moral combat and political encounter to the substructures of theological belief...
...Consider, for example, the essays by the superb journalist Frances Fitzgerald...
...At certain points, however, his attempt to hear sympathetically is stretched to the limits, and, for the sake of faith, he sharpens his critical axes...
...Although the militarism of Cardinal Cooke, the chauvinism of Rabbi Korff and the scientism of E.O...
...Although the militarism of Cardinal Cooke, the chauvinism of Rabbi Korff and the scientism of E.O...
...It is from this tradition that such journals as The Other Side, Sojourners, and Katallegete are edited...
...And, when first radio, and then television, gave them access to wider audiences, they moved their witness to the airwaves...
...Frequently, this tradition interacted in America with Anabaptist thought, and has been in close conversation with the Friends, the Mennonites, some Pentecostals, and similar "counter-cultural" Christian movements...
...These authors help sort out the spectrum of television religion, and point out clearly that it is not one single thing...
...MAXL...
...Their analysis leads the reader to the brink of ethical and theological evaluation...
...Or it could signal a second great Protestant Reformation with which all shall have to wrestle...
...They obscure the difficulty of separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the tares...
...In The Bible Vote: Religion and the New Right (Pilgrim Press, $5.95, 160 pp...
...Although nationally known figures such as Billy Graham and Carl Henry might, on some counts, be placed in this group, the hard-line fundamentalists accuse even these of "selling out" because of their interactions with ecumenically-oriented protestants and Catholics...
...Most Protestants are, in this classical sense, evangelicals...
...The phenomenon, however, is not fully understood by any one of these authors or by the reviewer...
...Much that goes under these names is, in fact, neither "new" nor "right...
...1980), documents that the term "fundamentalism" did not enter the Western lexicon until the second decade of the twentieth century, this wing is rooted in efforts to deal with problems of authority in the face of "modernism...
...The church is properly engaged with society and culture, in that it is deeply concerned with human rights, ecological, racial, and poverty problems...
...It means a primary concern with the "good news" as derived from Scripture, and often a suspicion of ethics or politics derived essentially from secular or humanistic (ancient UNDERSTANDING THE NEO-EVANGELICALS Religious right: new...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
