Religion and Radical Politics/No Longer Exiles/Church, State, Morality, and Law
Cochran, Clarke E.
Catholic, but Catholic in inspiration only, not by denomination." Both types of periodical, he said, are necessary, but to ignore or even to blur the distinction between them, he insisted,...
...For insider status it appealed to its perceived place within the dominant religious heritage of the nation and to its supposed influence with the Reagan and Bush administrations...
...CHURCH, STATE, MORALITY, AND LAW Patrick Hannon Christian Classics, $19.95, 159 pp...
...That is to say, "they involve no other initiative than that of the particular persons or groups who have started them...
...Perhaps the clue to all of B uechner's books is that he makes us wonder about how we can find spiritual truth in the comic incident...
...CLARE COLLINS is a writer who lives in Pawcatuck, Connecticut...
...Commonweal 16 July 1993:27...
...NO LONGER EXILES The Religious New Right in American Politics Michael Cromartie, ed...
...The three works under review exemplify this development...
...Papers by four of the top students of the movement--George Marsden (church history), Robert Wuthnow (sociology), Booth Fowler (political theory), and Corwin Smidt (political science)drew responses from other scholars and Religious Right activists...
...In the "wonderful"--a pun intended-Book of Bebb (a series of four novels about Bebb) there are again many references to misunderstandings, to linguistic inadequacies...
...In 1979, when I first taught a course on religion and politics, pertinent academic and general literature was rare...
...Religion and Radical Politics fails both as partisan history and socialist theory...
...The only effective way, however, to be such an insider is to share the world of the poor where they live...
...Not only are Left, Center, and Right represented, but the discussions are deeply rooted in historical research, contemporary public debate, and academic discourse...
...The material Hannon brings to this question is pertinent, but his ultimate position is so right-down-themiddle and his review of the sources so unremarkable, that there is no snap to his discussion...
...Buechner knows that he cannot simply offer fixed messages...
...Clarke E. Cochran ~ hat a difference a decade makes...
...Just as the stories get interesting, Craig moves on to another historical figure who either succeeds or fails at recognizing the importance of racial inclusiveness in the movement, who illustrates the importance of acknowledging the primacy of class struggle, or who anticipates a strong Marxist analysis of the oppression of workers and the political action necessary for their liberation...
...How can he make us wonder about the relation of language and faith...
...By 1993, the American Political Science Association had formed a Religion and Politics Section, and keeping up with the literature now requires full attention and a substantial budget for books and journals...
...These are all important matters, and Hannon hits the right notes, although without originality or verve...
...It is the right time now to recognize that he is one of our significant artists---one who is at least as important as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy...
...they disturb us in the same way works by Spark and Greene do...
...Ethics and Public Policy Center, $18.95, 145 PP...
...The four primary contributions provide a capsule history of the movement (Marsden), solid assessments of its successes (Wuthnow and Smidt), and an iconoclastic argument that it failed (Fowler...
...It was of marginal political sophistication and offered little guidance concerning the emerging Religious Right, the primary attention-getter in those days...
...His narrative history is continually overlaid and interrupted by lessons to be drawn from the lives he recounts, lives that he reduces to vignettes in order to carry a moral lesson...
...Yet the Catholic Center, similar to their brothers and sisters on either side of the cultural war, just may find happiness in local action...
...Hannon, professor of philosophy at Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth, wishes to answer this question for Irish and American Catholics, as well as for Christians generally...
...The question of belief is at the heart of Buechner's work...
...It is too realistic to view itself as a Democratic party insider, though it does hope to find occasional welcome at the White House back door...
...Yet Craig interrupts this fascinating story with institutional histories...
...Both types of periodical, he said, are necessary, but to ignore or even to blur the distinction between them, he insisted, inevitably leads to confusion...
...It connects a liberation tradition that has sought to be faithful to the demands of the gospel as good news for the poor with the aspirations of people for a democratic socialist future...
...Yet Craig is a professor of religion and philosophy, not a historian...
...he offers earthy, crazy words which can be taken in many ways...
...Particularly telling is the longest and most appealing narrative, that of Claude Williams's efforts to organize miners and tenant farmers in Arkansas and elsewhere during the 1930s...
...Religion and Radical Politics aims to recall seminal radical social activists inspired by and committed to the gospel...
...They are Center, however, less out of conviction than because they end up suspended between forces pulling to the Right (prolife, family values) and to the Left (economic justice...
...This leaves the Center, often occupied by Catholics in their voting and politicalsocial attitudes...
...His books offer coincidences, secrets, and dreams which resist fallen words...
...JOSEPH HYNES teaches modern literature at the Universi O, of Oregon...
...We owe a debt of gratitude to all of them and to their predecessors, but to no one more so than the indomitable Edward Skillin, who joined the staff in 1934 and, now in his eighties, is still commuting to the office every day and was until recently jogging to early Mass...
...Irving Malin lthough Frederick Buechner has written twenty-six books, half fiction and half nonfiction, he has not received the critical attention he deserves...
...As Craig remarks at the beginning, Christian hope is sustained by memory, and the memory of the radical Christian tradition in American culture and politics is presently dim...
...In his first novel, A Long Day's Dying (published at the age of twenty-four in 1960), he gives us a Jamesian style--he has not yet found his true voice--which attempts to demonstrate that human understanding is limited...
...At the same time, however, it now possesses the opportunity to draw strength 26...
...B ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL--AGAIN RELIGION AND RADICAL POLITICS An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States Roger H. Craig Temple University Press, $34.95,320 pp...
...Finally, it simply peters out without a solid conclusion...
...If the Christian Left is to be an insider at all, it must do so within the paradox of salvation history, understanding that despite all appearances, God is on the side of the poor, weak, and outcast...
...For the convenience of the reader Van Allen has listed chronologically the members of Commonweal's staff from 1973 through 1993...
...In the "culture wars" of Ireland and the United States, the fundamental philosophical question is how religious commitment and religious language can appear in public discourse without sounding alien and uncivil on the one hand, or conventional and commonplace on the other...
...Craig contends that only a "constructive social ethics based upon historical knowledge and understanding can make an important contribution to ethical analysis...
...Paradoxically, the same is true for the Religious Left...
...Although critics condemned the novel as precious and contrived, they didn't notice the playful aspects of Buechner's method...
...He believes that faith, like fiction itself, is surprising, edgy, always elusive...
...During the 1980s the Religious Right perceived itself simultaneously as inside and outside the American mainstream...
...It remains, however, worth browsing through to discover the shape of a neglected past, whose narratives can be followed up in the biographies he draws upon...
...In other words, to act locally...
...GEORGE G. HIGGINS is an adjunct lecturer at The Catholic" Universio, qf America...
...Along the way, he tells the story of feminist agitators, sharecropper organizing, black preachers of social justice, and Christian socialists, including Jesse H. Jones, Frances Willard, Mother Jones, Reverdy Ransom, Howard Kester, and Claude Williams...
...He, indeed, compels us to define exactly what a "religious novelist" does...
...Yet the Religious Right also saw itself as an outsider with respect to the secular cultural elites that it viewed as dominating education, the media, and popular culture...
...But, thanks be to God, we have had Commonweal since 1924, and it is still alive and well...
...No Longer Exiles, together with Matthew Moen's The Tran~['ormation (~['the Christian Right, provides an accessible, concise fix on the status of the movement...
...The Religious Right, Left, and Center alike grasp today for a firm hold on political reality...
...From the very beginning, Commonweal's lay editors have drawn their inspirationin the most courageous and intrepid manner--from Christian wisdom, and, almost always, have done so with extraordinary civility...
...Periodicals of the second type, as Maritain points out, "do not engage the church--even if, as is to be desired, they draw their inspiration in the most courageous and intrepid manner from Christian wisdom...
...Maritain's essay was not the last word on the "problem" of the Catholic press, but it is still very timely, especially in a country like our own where the majority of Catholic publications are "specifically Catholic or religious" and only a handful fit into the second of the two categories referred to above...
...Like his earlier volume, it is so structured-by topics, some of them neuralgic--as to be, in effect, not only a synoptic history of the magazine during the past two decades but also of American Catholicism during this turbulent post-Vatican It period...
...More importantly, the complete range of interaction has come into view, and breathless concern with the Religious Right has given way to sober and balanced analysis...
...Please excuse the following series of examples...
...Having deserted the Democratic party in the 1980s, they returned to the fold in 1992...
...As Wuthnow and others in No Longer Exiles argue, this means that the focus for these contests will be local and state governments, not Capitol Hill...
...He is also a Catholic deacon...
...Enough of such ideological freight will slow any narrative to a crawl...
...That preoccupation created its own set of perceptual distortions, so that even in 1984 few thought of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the context of religion and politics...
...What little existed was often decades old and confined largely to law, church history, religious studies, social ethics, and sociology of religion...
...Years of feverish research and commentary followed, especially from 197984...
...The present follow-up volume, which anticipates Commonweal's forthcoming seventieth anniversary, brings his study up to the present...
...This means, of course, that they are comprehensive, informative, and dull...
...The Left of the spectrum in this set of books is anchored by Robert H. Craig's uneven blend of historical storytelling and radical advocacy...
...Parenthetically I might note that September will see the publication of another book also dealing in part with the history of Commonweal--an in-depth scholarly biography of the late George Shuster, one of the magazine's early associate editors (George Shuster: On the Side of Truth, by Thomas E. Blantz, University of Notre Dame Press...
...16 July 1993 Commonwealfrom formerly complacent traditionalist Christians, who must fight political and cultural battles without White House support...
...He has written on such religious writers as 0 'Connor and Percy...
...In doing so, he traverses basic moral philosophy, the natural law tradition, Vatican lI's teaching on the church in the modem world, dissent and the magisteriurn, the 1960s Devlin-Hart debate on the legal enforcement of morality, and the roles of the laity and the hierarchy in applying Catholic moral theology in the policy marketplace...
...IRVING MALIN teaches at CCNY...
...The Christian Left has always seen itself as an outsider with regard to American capitalism and materialist, consumer culture...
...His novels are alarming because they walk a thin line...
...it is merely a way to demonstrate that Buechner's artistic method relies upon the uncertainty of how we "know" meanings...
...how we can move from easy interpretations to sudden revelations...
...The strength and weakness of Religion and Radical Politics lie in the portraits of these individuals, their struggles of faith and conscience, clashes with other movement figures and with conventional society and church, and their organizing and protest activities...
...Muste and Dorothy Day...
...WORDS FAIL ME THE SON OF LAUGHTER Frederick Buechner HarperSanDancisco, $19, 274 pp...
...Rodger Van Allen's earlier study of Commonweal, The Commonweal and American Catholics, published by Fortress in 1974, coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine...
...Van Allen's concluding tribute to Skillin as a sterling Christian gentleman and as the keeper of Commonweal' s corporate conscience and the guardian of its institutional memory is richly deserved...
...how the mystery of faith is found in the faulty language we use repeatedly...
...How is a Catholic expected to vote on certain types of issues involving morality and taw...
...Locally the ground is cleaner, the troops more maneuverable...
...Bebb is mysterious...
...lndeed, writing as one who was introduced to Commonweal in his teens, I would argue that the magazine is today as good as or better than ever-and that's saying a lot...
...Best is the Cromartie volume, No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics...
...If we can't know--or don't want to know-the ability of a monkey to "think"--then how can we dare grasp human and superhuman messages...
...Buechner is a religious novelist, but, as he writes in The Clown in the Belfry (1992), he refuses to be dogmatic or propagandistic...
...Had it not been for him, Commonweal might have folded long ago--and what a terrible loss that would have been to American Catholicism...
...Craig begins the story with midnineteenth-century Christian labor movements and concludes it with the pacifism of A.J...
...MSGR...
...The local organizing described in Religion and Radical Politics is more challenging and effective than grand Christian socialist ideological movements...
...Academics and pundits made "religion and politics" synonymous with "New Religious Right" or "New Christian Right," which more often than not was simply identified with the "Moral Majority" of the Reverend Jerry Fallwell...
...Catholic political thinkers and activists will discover no firm place among centrist Democrats or Republicans...
...Regrettably, we do not have enough publications of this kind in the United States...
...CLARKE E. COCHRAN is professor q/'political science at Texas Tech Universi O, in Lubbock, Texas, where he teaches and writes on religion and politics, social welfare atut health polio', and political philosophy...
...They are a distinguished company...
...After the election of Bill Clinton, the Religious Right has moved closer to the fringe...
...What shape creative, centrist religiouspolitical action may take in the local community has yet to be defined...
...Surely the mixture of late Jamesian style applied to the interpretation of a monkey's "understanding" is amusing...
...In the following passage the ambiguities signify that his words are REVIEWERS PATRICK JORDAN is managing editor qt Commonweal...
...How can he express ambiguities that disturb believers and nonbelievers...
...Church, State, Morality, and Law, attempts a particularly Catholic answer to the question of civic responsibility in the midst of religious-political pluralism...
...The style, if you will, is elaborately constructed to deconstruct our confidence as interpreters: "The extend of Bone's [the spiritual guide of the novel] monkey's knowledge or, more exactly, of his ability to retain or to assimilate what he saw was a matter for much conjecture and a question often considered but seldom expressed as if from fear, that once asked, it might be answered...
...I want to stress Buechner' s methods by offering examples of his comic interpretations of interpretations, of his surprising new hermeneutics...
...How can he surprise secular readers...
...In 1990 the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a neoconservative Washington think tank sympathetic to, but not captured by, the Religious Right held a conference to assess its past and speculate Commonweal 16 July 1993:25t...D ,'~iiiiii:iii:: :.i:?~!iiiiiii!i!i ~: ~i: i84 - ~i:~ ~ i ::~ii~iiii!i: "Doesn't my dossier mention my stand on mandatory fuel allocations ?" about its future...
...The Religious Right is now old enough for retrospection and projection...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
