A Difficult Marriage: American Protestants and American Politics
Kazin, Michael
MOST POLITICAL biographers choose a subject whom they either admire or loathe. They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring...
...The movement that has battled legal abortion since the early 1970s may endure just as long...
...In 1925, he helped prosecute John Scopes for violating a new Tennessee law that forbade the teaching in public schools of "any theory that denies the story of Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible...
...No issue enrobed in the rhetoric of moral absolutism is easy to resolve...
...To deplore that fact only avoids the task of engaging it...
...Billy] Graham honestly believes," he scoffed, "that conversion to Christianity will solve the problem of the hydrogen bomb because really redeemed men will not throw the bomb...
...But then a great transition took place...
...MICHAEL KAZIN's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan has just been published...
...Billy Graham was no extremist, but his energetic companionship with every president from Eisenhower onward seemed a perfect example of how leaders of mass revivals were also willing to prostitute themselves to the powerful...
...But for most white Americans, an explicit Christian politics increasingly seemed all but the exclusive preoccupation of the right...
...The Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ certainly lean leftward in their politics...
...After a prodigal youth, Malcolm X (ne Little) became an eloquent minister himself, although of a different faith...
...Even at the dawn of the industrial revolution, utopian communities that adhered to the Bible grew larger and lasted longer than did their secular counterparts...
...When the federal government jailed Eugene V. Debs for speaking out against World War I, one minister from Ohio hailed the radical leader as the "vicarious victim of Society's sins . . . his life is a continual crucifixion...
...left was home to many pious activists who linked their causes with one or another form of the Social Gospel...
...Wallis begins by calling for a prophetic vision that would begin with the "God question"—`How are our kids doing?'" He then moves on to brisk condemnations of terrorism, empire, war, poverty, racism, and corporate greed—all with apt quotes from Scripture...
...In the words of historian Gordon Wood, "As the public became democratized, it became evangelized...
...Inspired by the Second Vatican Council, thousands of priests and nuns marched for civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War...
...Evangelical Protestants fervently maintain that the relationship that counts is a personal one—between the believer and the Almighty —and most Catholics increasingly embrace that credo too, despite their more communitarian traditions...
...Christian conservatives loudly condemn these changes, but they have 50 DISSENT / Winter 2006 been powerless to reverse them...
...And when they seek to censor children's cartoons and Super Bowl halftime shows, they look rather silly for trying...
...Bryan participated in the case because he equated Darwinism with Social Darwinism and eugenics...
...This conviction has always given social movements a strong taste for moralism in extremis...
...But it remains as strong as in Bryan's day and will probably endure as long as the nation itself...
...Today, we need a moral equivalent of conservative religiosity, one that can inspire both believers and nonbelievers on the left to do the kind of determined, often self-sacrificing, work that the right receives from its adherents, in and out of presidential election years...
...For two centuries, to be a believer has been part of what it has meant to be an American...
...Without sexy talk and images, most television networks would have little to show that makes a profit...
...At the same time, such freedom fighters as Walker and Frederick Douglass initiated a black tradition of religious protest that has survived and prospered into the present...
...In the history of the modern West, outside of a few European cities, socialism was never truly competitive with Christianity...
...They would broaden the meaning of morality and talk far more about social justice than about individual behavior...
...many of these figures backed the living-wage campaigns that blossomed in dozens of cities and suburban counties...
...Such an alternative, he wrote, must "inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper...
...To counter the right's focus on abortion, Wallis endorses the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's concept of "a seamless garment of life," in which the countless victims of war and poverty would be treated to the same compassion the right sheds on the "unborn...
...But over the past four centuries, most devout Protestants have never doubted that, like John Winthrop and his tiny flock, their faith can and should change the world: they are convinced, as the historian D.G...
...They viewed Jesus, in the words of one North Carolina populist, as "the great emancipator and the great equalizer" and shared his contempt for haughty backsliders in clerical dress...
...and Susan Jacoby in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, the best study of its subject in decades...
...I N THAT FIGHT, as in all attempts to revive the self-confidence and sharpen the purpose of the American left, one needs to talk about the world in unapologetically moral terms...
...But neither can marshal the size, unity, or determined focus of the Southern Baptist Convention or the unofficial alliance of nondenominational megachurches that are the public face of the Christian right and, in many places, provide indispensable support to the Republican Party...
...There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below...
...Although the mass media failed to cover their effort, a postelection poll conducted by Zogby International found that close to 40 percent of voters had heard from one or more groups identified with the religious left...
...you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold...
...In the quarter-century after the Second World War, the liberal intelligentsia—among whom secular Jews and lapsed Catholics had achieved unprecedented status—viewed the close link between political crusading and evangelical faith to be an anachronism, vital mainly among "extremists" on the right...
...Both authors make valid points about the paranoia of some believers and their inability to grasp that the separation of church and state has preserved the religious toleration that is a signal achievement of American society...
...Meanwhile, activist Protestant ministers on the left, such as William Sloane Coffin, Jr., first an influential chaplain at Yale and later senior minister at New York's Riverside Church, interpreted their faith almost solely as an ethic of "social action" and "social responsibility...
...in their ranks gathered many socialists and most Social Gospelers, as well as nativist prigs who wanted to shut down German American beer gardens and Irish taverns...
...To his credit, Wallis doesn't write off rightwing evangelicals as depraved...
...Prohibitionists boasted the largest and broadest movement during the era of reform, and Billy Sunday could boast a legitimacy across party lines that neither Bryan nor Debs could match...
...the latter, both from necessity and pride, founded their own churches...
...The great revival appealed as much to blacks as to whites, spawned thousands of new Protestant churches, and made the passion of evangelicalism the common discourse of most Americans...
...Single-issue religious activists on the right are no fools...
...In 2004, the Democratic Party worked with such organizations to distribute a "faith-based" message about the economy, the environment, and other issues...
...As he delivered the peroration, Bryan stepped back from the podium, pulled his hands away from his brow, extended them straight out from his body, and held the crucifixlike pose for perhaps five seconds...
...As historian Albert Raboteau writes, "[B]y criticizing white America, blacks assumed a position of moral authority that made them the true exemplars of Christianity in America...
...Mencken called the "fundamentalist Pope" continues to be evoked in the raging battle between scientists of evolution and their enemies...
...The right-to-life and antigay movements continue to mobilize impressive numbers, and they are buoyed by recent polls showing Americans deeply at odds over abortion and that a majority of voters over thirty are opposed to homosexual marriage...
...The CPUSA was also glad that a number of well-known Protestant clergymen lent their names and prestige to defending the Soviet Union against charges of tyranny...
...And it would be hard to find a more lucid testament to the power of virtuous living to liberate the minds of the oppressed than in his Autobiography...
...In the course of writing about Bryan, I also began to appreciate a reality that transcends his own story...
...They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring leader of the black freedom struggle or drove Stalin to order the deaths of millions who refused to conform to his terrible designs...
...Reinhold Niebuhr, the most respected theologian of the postwar era, argued that no manner of collective awakening could rid the world of sinful institutions or behavior...
...Some issues are all but impossible to negotiate away...
...The right thus achieved a muscular ecumenism whose political influence soon surpassed that of its counterpart on the left...
...As in the days of bondage, African American preachers often insist that their experience makes them particularly aware of the concerns of the Almighty, and the reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, as well as Louis Farrakhan, remain the most visible spokespeople for black demands...
...But that still begs the question: why was the secular left unable to change those conditions or to provide an emotional alternative as durable as religion...
...Despite the recent flowering in the United States of Islam and Hinduism, more than 80 percent of Americans still identify as Christian, and those who regularly attend church, unless they are black, vote overwhelmingly for Republican candidates...
...Of course there was a counter-current...
...history is the fact that a crusading faith and a democratic polity emerged together and at roughly the same time...
...Yet, the social movement that did most to generate the many-sided tumult of the 1960s stirred a political awakening in a decidedly evangelical key...
...The aggressive candor of Frank and Jacoby is certainly preferable to the dishonest pandering of the last two Democratic nominees for president, who mouthed banalities about "respecting people of faith" and asking "What would Jesus do...
...The more I learned about Bryan's life, the more I came to appreciate that neither he nor most of his followers saw any contradiction between the words he had spoken in 1896 and his last stand almost thirty years later...
...THOUSANDS OF black churches also continue to speak out, in self-consciously prophetic tones, against poverty and militarism...
...The simultaneous upsurge of black nationalism was also indebted to the power of religious tradition and protest...
...This anti-Darwinist reformer was not the relic of a benighted past that many modernist intellectuals—whether of the right DISSENT / Winter 2006 47 or left—assumed him to be in the years from the rise of the New Deal to the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s...
...DISSENT / Winter 2006 51 Meanwhile, in America, a modest attempt to revive the Christian left is underway...
...His point, of course, is that conservative evangelicals are misreading the Bible...
...they must be fought out, preferably by winning elections rather than the rulings of courts...
...A century ago, William James called on those who "devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium" to find a "moral equivalent of war...
...Even a confirmed atheist can appreciate the needs that religion has always filled— both emotional and communal...
...An evangelical Protestant who is also a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement...
...churches have always preached that iniquity is primarily a matter of private behavior, which the state can help to correct...
...God's Politics, subtitled Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, is a series of brief, energetic sermons on a variety of political issues...
...Almost two centuries later, the failure of the Marxist dream has made religion, by default, the most powerful mode of comfort and explanation available to those who once seemed the natural constituency for the left...
...A half-century later, from across the Atlantic, George Bernard Shaw ridiculed this marriage between the secular and the spiritual...
...Something close to a culture war was on— between Christians as well as with "secular humanists...
...But liberal Protestants and their secular allies now thought of God as little more than a good conscience...
...But all embraced a religion that promised to cleanse a sinful world...
...The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it...
...Such evangelical crusaders as David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe branded bondage a sin, which John Brown predicted could be "purged" only with "blood...
...Protestant activists often scoffed at the opposition they received from wealthier, established churches...
...before switching into their standard stump speeches...
...For more than a decade, hoping to prove that Newton's third law applies to politics, adherents of a progressive brand of religion have been trying to counter the influence of the Christian right...
...Sharing the same theological grounding, he addresses them as fellow citizens, as well as fellow Christians, with whom one must debate if one wishes to defeat them...
...How should progressives respond...
...Secularists might also regard those on the other side of the cultural divide with a bit of empathy...
...Those who insisted on collective sin and collective redemption rarely found themselves in the majority—as white liberal ministers often discovered when they pressed demands for affirmative action and opposed U.S...
...For all its zeal and political clout within the Republican Party, the Christian right has been less successful at changing American culture than in altering the ideological complexion of the White House and Congress...
...Led by such charismatic Baptist ministers as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Shuttlesworth and devout lay organizers such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis, the freedom movement forced segregationists on to the defensive, DISSENT / Winter 2006 49 where they were unable to counter its use of the prophetic tradition and its moral claims...
...In fact, evangelical Protestantism has always been an integral part of American political history...
...Wallis interprets the Bible as a text that highlights what he calls "a pro-consistent ethic of life...
...In keeping with this credo, every U.S...
...But in American history, popular movements, imbued with a revivalist ethos, have been the surest way to force the state apparatus to do the right thing...
...The New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society were all built on that wisdom, which sprang from the labor and farmer insurgencies of the Gilded Age...
...Under John Sweeney, a devout Catholic, the AFLCIO reached out in the late 1990s to progressive clergy from a variety of faiths...
...Harry F. Ward, a Methodist who taught for years at the Union Theological Seminary, even considered Stalin's regime to be furthering the Kingdom of God...
...the good book contains far more references, Wallis points out, about helping the poor than about forbidding homosexuality, He also scolds "false Christians," such as General William Boykin, the protégé of Donald Rumsfeld who, in the fall of 2003, claimed that America's "Christian army" was at war with the "idol" of Islam's false god: 52 DISSENT / Winter 2006 Brother Boykin, I believe you are a product of bad theology and church teaching . . . .Why were you never taught in Sunday school about the real meaning of the kingdom of God and the universality of the body of Christ...
...In the past two presidential elections, white, working-class churchgoers favored George W. Bush by margins of close to 20 per cent...
...Most U.S...
...Among white Protestants, the left still lacks a sturdy institutional base as well as widely recognized spokespeople and an army of organizers...
...The hope for a worldly Pentecost inspired the crusade for black freedom— although many secularists and non-Christians also participated in it...
...At the same time, tax revenues should not be used to finance charter schools run by churches, mosques, or synagogues...
...Only in the latter did Catholics dominate, with a social vision derived in part from labor encyclicals...
...Even the Communist Party, while officially atheist and with a membership that was almost half Jewish, forged a temporary alliance with Father Divine, the black minister who preached that he was the incarnation of the Almighty...
...God cannot be pleased" was the first sentence that Representative Elijah Cummings, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, uttered at a press conference held to protest the Bush administration's inept response to hurricane Katrina...
...And why have you never heard that only peacemaking, not war-making, can be done "in the name of Jesus...
...Such measures tacitly recognize that Christianity is the majority faith in America...
...Then, in the wake of Kerry's defeat in 2004, he published a book that aimed to challenge the right's monopoly on religious politics—and it became a best-seller...
...And how can one avoid denouncing pious bigots who predict that gay people are going to hell and who think that God speaks through George W. Bush, albeit with a smirk and a stutter...
...But, as the legal scholar and activist Noah Feldman argues, they "impl[y] nothing about the exclusion of any religious minority . . . there is nothing shameful or inherently disadvantageous in being a religious minority, so long as that minority is not subject to coercion or discrimination...
...However, I just finished writing a biography of a man about whom, as a secular leftist, I feel passionately ambivalent: William Jennings Bryan...
...they understand that candidates and officeholders are more likely to respond to a constituency that makes one big, if controversial, demand than to an inchoate movement with a bundle of earnest wishes...
...At the same time, some also oppose gay marriage as a threat to their spiritual community...
...Bryan died five days after its conclusion...
...Hadn't these people abandoned politics after embarrassing themselves at the Scopes trial...
...For the abolitionists, it was never enough to cite details about the endemic brutality of the slave system that made a small minority of white southerners rich...
...Thus, into the 1940s, the U.S...
...They are not yet, however, a force on the wane...
...Socialists in the early twentieth century routinely cursed capitalism as an evil system that enthroned money-changers and mocked the Sermon on the Mount...
...He and his admirers viewed both plutocrats and Darwinists as ungodly forces who favored substituting "the survival of the fittest" for the Sermon on the Mount...
...IN THE HEYDAY of "the age of reform"—from the 1890s through the 1930s—the evangelical style suffused nearly every insurgency —from the Knights of Labor and the Populists through the women's suffrage movement and the Congress of Industrial Organizations...
...Despite all the attention that Christian leftists such as King and the Berrigans received, they were struggling against the main tide of American religious history...
...Delightful...
...Both inside and outside the United States, religious belief is strongest among people who are economically insecure and who live in societies where social inequality is most acute...
...This means quoting liberally from the prophets and the Sermon on the Mount, while downplaying the prohibitions set down in Leviticus and the instructions in the Pauline letters to obey authorities and put one's faith in salvation rather than worldly action...
...A decade later, Roe v. Wade opened the floodgate of abortion rights and provoked a huge backlash across the conservative theological spectrum among people who were already outraged by the eroticism of the counter-culture and the bold actions of feminists and gay liberationists...
...Science delivers knowledge that is breathtaking in its scope...
...Emulating the first Christians, they were neither surprised nor particularly unhappy when conservative ministers turned their backs on what Bryan called "the clamorings of the people...
...The spiritual majesty was gone...
...Marx famously observed that religion "is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world...
...This is obvious in the case of the Puritans, who left their homeland in the seventeenth century to build a New Jerusalem, a New England they hoped would avoid the sinful hypocrisies and injustices of the old one...
...BUT THERE MAY be a more responsible and politically fruitful approach to the problem: to welcome the free, public expression of faith but continue to oppose active state support for religious institutions...
...But if a churchgoer is distressed about abortion, one can't just tell her that debt forgiveness and cheap AIDS drugs would save more lives...
...three-quarters of these men belonged to a church, most to an evangelical one, while serving in the White House...
...For millions of African Americans, the civil rights movement was, writes historian David Chappell, "similar in form to the traditional revivalist promise that sinners would attain God's grace, if they attended a meeting and repented...
...Jim Wallis and other Christian progressives understandably want to change the subject...
...The idea that anyone, regardless of learning or social background, could "come to Christ" dovetailed with the belief in equal rights emblazoned both in the Declaration of Independence and the rhetoric of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln...
...The ruling could put the United States schools on the same basis as Russian schools," charged an Irish Catholic congressman, a Democrat...
...One can respond to such realities, as Marx did, by denouncing the conditions that created them...
...Many American Marxists sang from the same hymnal...
...Soldiers in "the dry army" claimed they were fighting a war against a diabolic force that aimed to destroy humanity Billy Sunday, the celebrated evangelist who was a star propagandist for the Anti-Saloon League, called his foe "the worst business this side of hell" and challenged the drinkers in his audience to repent their habits on the spot...
...The most influential spokesperson for black power was the son of a Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist...
...But it is not surprising that most people do not welcome the prospect of a distant future in which, as the astronomer Brian Greene predicts, "all matter will have returned to energy" and "a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos...
...But after Roe v. Wade, most Catholic activists were found on the right...
...Bryan and his generation of Christian progressives thought of a good conscience as a gift from God, one only a knave or fool would turn down...
...The Berrigan brothers, one a Jesuit and the other a Josephite, dedicated their lives to aggressive acts of civil disobedience...
...Across the nation, African American preachers depicted Jesus and his disciples as men with dark skins, who challenged the authority of a mighty pagan empire headquartered in Europe...
...After all, his speech at the Chicago convention was festooned with metaphors from both the Scriptures and the history of Christianity...
...The American Civil Liberties Union financed the other side, a legal team headed by Clarence Darrow, and the Scopes case quickly became known as "the trial of the century...
...PERHAPS THE MOST significant reason for the tenacity of public religiosity in U.S...
...yET AMERICANS believe as strongly in individual freedom as they do in Christian morality, and only the former meshes routinely with the amoral operations of commerce...
...The public wrath of pious Americans took many on the left, including a good many liberal churchgoers, by surprise...
...The Interfaith Alliance, established in the early 1990s, has become a reliable, if predictable, voice for liberal positions on constitutional issues, as have such groups as People for the American Way, which draws some of its support from liberal churches...
...DISSENT / Winter 2006 53...
...Walking this middle path would mean tolerating "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and allowing student Bible clubs to meet after hours in public schools...
...Hart puts it, that religion is "inherently useful in solving social problems because it yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate both a concern for justice and the welfare of all people...
...There are two ideas of government," he declared...
...In a sweltering Chicago hall, Bryan, a masterful orator, broke with the laissez-faire traditions of his party and articulated a new kind of liberalism that left-wing Democrats would embrace through the next century and into the present...
...And why were so many Catholics making common cause with Southern Baptists, who had traditionally viewed the papacy as the citadel of the anti-Christ...
...The new image began to take hold in the early 1960s, when evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics protested, with one voice, against the Supreme Court's ruling, in the case of Engel v. Vitale, that a state could not require schoolchildren to pray and then, a year later, in 1963, when the high court struck down mandatory readings of the Bible and recitations of the Lord's Prayer...
...It ended with the famous words, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns...
...A leveling faith has dominated American religious life since the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, which Tocqueville witnessed...
...Debunking of the Christian right is a necessary task—as demonstrated by Thomas Frank, in his best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas...
...The first act was his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1896, which helped him win the nomination for president...
...Now, as in 1906, such an alternative will draw, in part, on the language of the Bible and the supernatural beliefs of most Americans, who live in a nation marked by a vigorous diversity of faiths that would have astonished James, the great philosopher of religious experience...
...Prominent liberal Protestant clergymen came to the same conclusion, albeit by different routes...
...For too long, progressives have hoped and demanded that governments solve the problems that beset our society—and complained when conservatives starve or eliminate programs that benefit millions...
...As an African American whose people have not yet recovered from a form of slavery that was based upon destruction of the family," the Reverend Walter Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., explains, "I believe we do not need any more confusion about what a marriage is and what a family is...
...But the Anti-Saloon League organized for just one "moral" issue, and it succeeded in amending the Constitution...
...His image as what H.L...
...Gay men, lesbians, and unmarried couples of all orientations enjoy a freedom unimaginable fifty years ago...
...For years, Wallis has edited Sojourners, a slick bimonthly magazine, and held town meetings to promote a "Covenant and Campaign to Overcome Poverty," sponsored by his group Call to Renewal...
...Too bad the old sage was not around to prevent some of his most ardent disciples —from Lenin to Pol Pot—from turning "scientific socialism" into as heartless a faith as that of the medieval Crusaders...
...Unfortunately, this stance works better as homiletics than as politics...
...To insist that no humanitarian issue should overshadow the others is poor advice for organizers...
...A century ago, the prohibitionists were a varied lot...
...After the early years of the Second Great Awakening, most white Christians turned their backs on its transracial promise and refused to continue worshipping alongside blacks...
...president from George Washington to George W. Bush has proclaimed his faith in God and his warm support for religious institutions...
...Medieval America always in intimate personal confidence of the Almighty" But in the United States, religious fervor has proved to be quite congenial with modernity...
...Even during their glory days in the early twentieth century, Social Gospel adherents were often on the defensive in a spiritual culture where individualism reigned...
...the conflict over prohibition lasted a full century—from the initial 48 DISSENT / Winter 2006 growth of the movement in the 1830s until repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1933...
...In similar fashion, the prohibitionists did not merely expose the payoffs that saloon-keepers gave to cops and politicians or blame "the liquor traffic" for causing workplace accidents, wife abuse, and suicides...
...The Christian left does, however, have Jim Wallis...
...The synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and the ideology of grassroots democracy was found in no other nation—at least not with such passionate conviction and for such a long period of time...
...They could not conceive of a moral language that neglected the Bible or viewed it as no more than a captivating historical text...
...Bryan was a prominent figure in American life for three decades, but he is remembered today for just two acts that formed chronological bookends of his floodlit career...
...The marriage between politics and piety in Christian America has always been full of conflicts and misunderstandings...
...Wrote Tocqueville, "Next to each religion is a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity...
...interventions abroad—and saw their congregations dwindle...
...It was thus, in his view, a "brutish" philosophy, the handmaiden of inhumane, aggressive power...
...Today, Bryan's second act is more famous, or infamous, than his first...
...He teaches history at Georgetown University and is a member of the Dissent editorial board...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
