Stop the Presses! Or Not.

Darren Grem

How much of a role younger, white evangelicals will play in the November elections remains to be seen, but they're certainly flying around in pre-season reports. Reporters seem devoted to the notion that younger, white evangelicals are either apolitical or now ready to slap Obama stickers right next to the magnet Jesus fish donning their vehicular posteriors. To be sure, there's some Pew research to back these notions up in a very basic, general way, although it comes with some big caveats. Often overlooked in fly-over accounts was that the Pew Center concluded that younger, white evangelicals were "Less Republican, [But] Still Conservative," noting that they weren't much different than most conservatives (or Americans, for that matter) who are fed up with the Bushies. In turn, they remained more conservative than counterparts their age on questions concerning Iraq, law and order, abortion, and (I would proffer) free market capitalism. As such, though the opportunity is there, Obama probably shouldn't expect a windfall of younger, white evangelicals falling into his camp. John Green said as much, pointing out: ". . . Relatively few of the evangelicals who have moved away from the Republican Party have become Democratic, most have become independents." The numbers don't lie. In 2001, 55% of young, white evangelicals held Republican affiliations and, in 2007, only 40% do (still, that's a decently large minority). In the same period, Democrats only picked up a measly three percentage points while independent affiliations rose by six percentage points. I guess that means that if I ran as, say, a Bulldawg Party candidate, I'd be getting more younger, white evangelical votes than Obama.

What does this all mean come November? I'm willing to bet a case of Milwaukee's finest that it won't be an election maker or breaker since Bush has handily alienated more Republican constituencies than just plus-30 evangelicals and more swing voters than their Facebooking counterparts. Try as he might, McCain probably won't be able to overcome that fact. I'm also willing to argue that, in the long run, it won't be the cultural shift that some folks think it will be. To be sure, younger evangelicals might not jump in as short-list, "issues voters" as fervently as their parents' generation, but whether they will continue a drift leftward or middle-ward remains to be seen, especially as they get into their thirty and forty-somethings, have families, get corner offices, and start paying property taxes. As I believe John Turner has mentioned on this blog before, in four to eight years, we might be seeing report after report about the "revival of the Religious Right."

Meanwhile, James Dobson has officially thrown his two-cents in. I'll see your hermeneutics and raise you, sir!

"Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe"

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Another day, another breathless report of the evangelical incursion. This time, our journalistic source is an admirable one: Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite) writing for the May 9, 2008 issue of The Chronicle Review. Of familiar pitch is the exclamatory that “evangelicalism is rebounding,” the statistical joy at evangelical Ivy League elitism, and the inevitable ethnic revelation (“I found that 90 percent of the members of the Yale chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are Asian-American”).

After five paragraphs of such rehearsal, the article transitions to a narrative useful for any students of evangelicalism and fundamentalism seeking quotations on the mind(s) of those Christian men (and women, though fewer of those are imagined) pressing into hallowed halls. Lindsey serves up a summation of “evangelical scholarship” and its meeting of the “intellectual mainstream.” Included in the primer is an exuberant presentation of evangelical scholars, scholarship on evangelicals, and evangelical scholarship. The piece presumes an anxious readership, liberal and loathing of the menace that seems to have more money, more organizational power, and more disregard for plural postulates than the dominant academic mainstream. To that cohort, Lindsay supplies a comforting reminder and some clarification. His point is quelling: most of the evangelicals who have invaded liberal arts lands are of a cosmopolitan bent, and eager to keep the apple cart (his metaphor) upright. The question is whether the apple cart, frightened of its new handler, may collapse under the weight of presumptive infection. Lindsay says, rightly: probably not.

Rumors of the Death of the Culture War

PAUL HARVEY

Those rumors are exaggerated, according to Peter Steinfels, who asks "what will this retreat of the religious right mean for the future of the culture wars?," and answers "Combat may wane, at least a little, at least for a while. But there are good reasons to doubt any lasting truce, let alone a real peace."

Also, John Wilson issues the first of a promised two-part series reflecting on a few of the worthier (amidst a pile of unworthy) titles treating Christians and Politics. He calls attention to a forthcoming work of which I was unaware: Steven Waldman's Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America -- with more discussion of that to follow in a future post.

Son of Power, Faith, Fantasy; or Leveling the Praying Field

PAUL HARVEY

Princeton Univ. Press recently was kind enough to send me a copy of E. J. Dionne, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Many readers here likely will recognize Dionne as a fine political journalist and frequent talking head and NPR commentator.

My perusal of it has been too brief to comment further except to note this review by Scott Appleby of Souled Out together with Amy Sullivan, Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (the source of "leveling the praying field" above). Appleby overplays (to my mind) the alleged scorn in which the Democrats formerly held faith, but that's a quibble.

A brief excerpt:

Strikingly, both authors announce the demise of the religious right and proclaim the advent of a new era of religious engagement in the direction of what might be called faith-friendly liberalism. “American politics is at a turning point,” Dionne asserts. “Evangelical Christians are an increasingly diverse group,” broadening their political agenda to include environmental issues and a commitment to international human and religious rights, as well as to economic policies that address poverty. . . . This would indeed be a marked departure from the recent past, when, in Sullivan’s words, “a showdown between the religious left and religious right was like a tricycle going up against a Mack truck.” The disparity reflected a three-decade head start by religious conservatives flush with cash, coupled with the Republicans’ “incredibly sophisticated methods of reaching religious voters.” Meanwhile, according to several veteran Democratic operatives cited by Sullivan, “the only method the party had for identifying Catholics was to guess based on surnames.”

Are Sullivan and Dionne to be believed, or is this the triumph of wishful thinking over political reality? Sullivan admits to setting out to prove her Dem-dissing pastor wrong, and Dionne, burdened by what he poignantly describes as “the agony of liberal Catholicism,” could be forgiven for mistaking the creativity of a few Catholic politicians and the enthusiasms of younger Catholics as benevolent signs of more liberal times to come.

The "decline and fall" narrative here, as well as the "rise of" story, both leave me a little skeptical, perhaps as a result of my location in C. Springs as well as the enormous evangelical turnout for Huck last week. Nonetheless, Dionne appears particularly worthy of further reading and thought because, unlike most of the writing of this genre, he deals seriously with Catholicism. Note especially Chapter 6: "What Happened to the Seamless Garment: The Agony of Liberal Catholicism," a question we've discussed here before in reference to Dorothy Day, the evidently missing Catholic version of Jim Wallis, et al.

I welcome responses from any readers of this latest from Dionne -- feel free to send here.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

PAUL HARVEY

Spiritual Politics, from the Greenberg Center, covers the latest developments on religion and the presidential race. Mitt says goodbye (with blasts such as "The attack on religion and faith is no less relentless" -- umm, no less relentless than what, exactly?), and Huck says hello, hello hello. Meanwhile, Obama's got a Catholic problem, and Dobson blasts McCain (while also taking a shot at Obama's and Clinton's "anti-family policy positions" -- I guess wanting more families to be able actually to have health insurance is anti-family -- or something. Whatever).

Exit Polls, Trees Falling in the Forest, and Southern Baptists

PAUL HARVEY

What if they didn't give an exit poll when everybody came? In today's New York Times, Peter Steinfels asks, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a born-again Christian votes in a Democratic primary and no exit poll records it, does it matter?"
Meanwhile, moderate Baptists of all stripes are trying to get their groove back -- this time in the New Baptist Covenant. My college buddy Bill Underwood, current president of Mercer University, was there, along with notable recent Baptist presidents Clinton and Carter and representatives from a variety of black Baptist denominations and the North American Baptist fellowship. See also 30 Baptist Groups Build Bridge Toward Unity.

In recent years, moderate Baptists have been like the scrawny kid at school who keeps getting beaten up by the big boys. This one appears to have more promise, as "recovering" Southern Baptists seemed to have moved on from an obsession with "the controversy" and gotten on with the business of creating coalitions beyond the historic divisions:

Historian Walter Shurden, recently retired director of the Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University and one of the early organizers of the convocation, said the event could become "a major step in racial reconciliation and gender recognition of Baptists in North America."

"It's the most significant Baptist meeting in my life, after playing in the Baptist yard 55 years or so," he said. "I've never been to a Baptist meeting where there was the equality as well as the presence" of multi-racial, multi-gender participation. "It bears the marks of the ministry of Jesus."

The Contemporary Catholic Left? or, Will the Catholic Jim Wallis Please Get Noticed?

BY ART REMILLARD

When people picked up Time magazine’s December 12, 1960 edition, they saw the penetrating eyes of Jesuit John Courtney Murray looking back at them. The feature article, “U.S. Catholics and the State,” centered on his book, We Hold These Truths. “In months to come,” the article’s author predicted, “serious Americans of all sorts of conditions—in pin-stripes and laboratory gowns, space suits and housecoats—will be discussing [Murray’s] hopes and fears for American democracy.” Murray was one of a handful of highly visible American Catholics—such as Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Fulton Sheen—who helped bring the faithful from margins to the mainstream. Murray in particular was, indeed, a thinker and theologian who “serious Americans” took seriously.

This leads me to Randall’s mention of Jim Wallis. For the sake of argument, let me suggest that Wallis is something of a current evangelical version of John Courtney Murray. In their respective times, both earned fame and attention for their ability to clearly articulate their faith and relate it to prominent political concerns. But I wonder: Is there a Catholic version of Murray today? Sociologist, author, and political commentator Andrew Greeley may fit the mold. Consider his recent book, A Stupid, Unjust and Criminal War: Iraq, 2001-2007 (“Now tell us what you really think, Father?”). While I haven’t read it, the book appears to be a timely rebuke of the war and a challenge to Catholics to forthrightly oppose it. Despite his prolific writings, I don’t know that Greeley is as recognizable as Wallis, or for that matter, his conservative counterparts Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Do presidential candidates court Greeley in an attempt to secure the “Catholic vote”? Perhaps they do. But I haven’t seen it. The only other examples I have come from the realm of popular culture. In a Frontline documentary on the AIDS crisis, U2 front-man Bono discussed the relationship between his faith and activism. “I put Catholic guilt to work,” he quipped. Speaking to Rolling Stone, however, Bono called himself a “Christian,” but offered the following qualifier. “I don't use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I'm the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut.” His humility is refreshing. But unlike many noteworthy religious figures, Bono isn’t tossing tons of theology into the public mix. How about Martin Sheen? Having been arrested over 60 times at various protests, the actor often expresses admiration for Catholic social teaching. He once speculated, “I don't think you can be Catholic and not have some frame of reference for social justice.” I suspect, though, that more people know Sheen for his acting than his activism. So I’m going to withhold his “J.C. Murray Trophy” for the time being.

From Newsweek to Comedy Central to this blog, Jim Wallis et al. are hard to avoid. Yet, the Catholic equivalent is nowhere in sight. I’ll admit that I don’t closely follow trends in contemporary Catholicism. So I might simply be out of the loop. But I also don’t spend prodigious amounts of time following the evangelicals either. So please, dear blog readers, educate and correct me. Who is the current John Courtney Murray and/or Catholic version of Jim Wallis? And if there isn’t one, what does this say about American Catholicism today?

Jim Wallis on Jon Stewart

BY RANDALL STEPHENS

On Tuesday night, January 22nd, Jim Wallis, evangelical author and editor of Sojourners, appeared on "A" Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Wallis plugged his new book The Great Awakening. He emphasized the role of social ethics in forming a new moral consensus. "God's Politics called on people to take back their faith after it had been 'hijacked' by the Religious Right" writes Wallis. "Millions of Christ­ians have done just that, and now the question is what are we going to do with our faith, now that we have it back? My new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, addresses that question."

The bubbling up of a new Christian politics is not just the wishful thinking of a few blue-state evangelicals. It's evident in the emerging church movement, the recent pronouncements of Rick Warren, and in publications geared toward born again twenty somethings like Relevant Magazine. The politics of personal and sexual morality are not exciting the masses like they used to.

Stewart questioned Wallis on the prospects of the "religious Left." There may be some who fear that a hegemonic religious Left will be as off-putting as the much pilloried Christian Right is now. (This is a point that historian Stephen Prothero has recently made.) With so much attention being paid to the evangelical crackup, the future of evangelicalism, Left and Right, seems surprisingly uncertain.

Weekend Reading

Pastor Bob Cornwall notes and comments on Garry Wills's American Christianities, and reprints Martin Marty's commentary on the same (focusing on Wills's treatment of abortion in Catholic theological history). Alan Wolfe reviews Wills in The New Republic (subscription required). Here is the precis of Wills's book, from the Seminary Coop book website. Further blog entries here and comments are welcome, it'll be a while before I can have a look at the book.

A landmark examination of Christianity's place in American life across the broad sweep of this country's history, from the Puritans to the presidential administration of George W. Bush. The struggle within American Christianity, Garry Wills argues, now and throughout our country's history, is between the head and the heart: between reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. Why has this been so? How has the tension between the two poles played out, and with what consequences, over the past 400 years? How "Christian" is America, after all? Garry Wills brings a lifetime's worth of thought about these questions to bear on a magnificent historical reckoning that offers much needed perspective on some of the most contentious issues of our time. A religious revolution occurred in America in the 18th century, one that saw the emergence of an Enlightenment religious culture whose hallmarks were tolerance for other faiths and a belief that religion was a matter best divorced from political institutions-the proverbial "separation of church and state." Wills shows us just how incredibly radical a departure this separation was: there was simply no precedent for it. To put this leap in perspective, Wills provides a grounding in the pre-Enlightenment religion that preceded it, beginning with the early Puritans. He then provides a thrillingly clear unpacking of the steps, particularly Madison's and Jefferson's, by which church-state separation was enshrined in the Constitution, and reveals the great irony of the efforts of today's Religious Right to blur the lines between the two. In fact, it is precisely that separation that has allowed religion inAmerica to flourish since the disestablishment of religion created a free market, as it were, and competition for souls led to the profusion of denominations across the length and breadth of the land. As Wills examines the key movements and personalities that have transformed America's religious landscape, we see again and again the same pattern emerge: a cooling of popular religious fervor followed by a grassroots explosion in evangelical activity, generally at a time of great social transformation and anxiety. But such forces inevitably go too far, provoking a backlash as is happening right now with the forces of Creationism and the anti-abortion fundamentalists. Garry Wills closes with a penetrating dissection of the Religious Right's current machinations and the threat they pose to the enlightened religion that has proved to be such a fertile and enduring force throughout American history. But in the end, Wills's abiding message is to be vigilant against the triumph of emotions over reason, but to know that the tension between the two is in fact necessary, inevitable, and unending.

The Religious Right is Still Not Dead (John Turner)

John Turner sends the following on our discussion of the religious left/right, and on America as a Christian Nation:

Building on John Fea's fine post, I've noticed since last year's midterm elections obituaries not just of key figures in the Religious Right, but of the Religious Right itself.

Earlier this year in TIME, Jim Wallis proclaimed that "The Era of the Religious Right Is Over." Wallis argued that evangelicals are deserting conservative politics in droves, driven by progressive issues like global warming, HIV/AIDS, and Darfur.

The deaths of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy provide further evidence for such obituaries. Pat Robertson's influence continues to slowly wane. Ted Haggard fell from grace. Even Jim Dobson doesn't seem quite as formidable as he did only a few years ago. It is, perhaps, the end of an era.

This is not, however, the first time that pundits have proclaimed the passing of the Religious Right. This usually occurs in conjunction with Democratic electoral victories, such as those in 1992, 1996, and 2006. Ironically, as recently as 2004, the Religious Right looked stronger than ever by mobilizing opposition to gay marriage. The Religious Right's perceived strength seems to wax and wane in tandem with that of political conservatism more broadly. If the Democrats do indeed win a convincing victory in 2008, the Religious Right will seem like the relic of a bygone era.

There have been predictions of the rise of the Evangelical Left since the early 1970s – perhaps it will truly come to fruition. And perhaps young evangelicals will continue to move in progressive directions on issues like abortion and homosexuality. Progressive evangelicals, however, are still a long way from constituting anything approaching a mass movement.

It's hard to predict the future, but even without Falwell and Kennedy, prognostications of the Religious Right's permanent decline seem premature. Religious Right organizations remain well-organized, wealthy, and dedicated. When organizations fade or implode, they are quickly replaced. The Christian Coalition replaced the Moral Majority; Focus on the Family filled the vacuum when the Christian Coalition lost its momentum. I wouldn't be surprised to read about the resurgence of the Religious Right in 2010.

Barack DuBois

And those DuBois hits just keep on coming -- Edward J. Blum asks What Barack Obama (and the Democratic Party) Can Learn About Religion From W. E. B. DuBois? Ed's answer: more than you think! Here's a snippet, click on the link for the full piece:

Barack Obama and W. E. B. Du Bois have a lot in common. Both had absent
fathers whom they likened to dreamers; both relied on their mothers; both earned
advanced degrees from Harvard University; both traveled extensively throughout
the world; both ran for United States Senate (Du Bois lost his bid as a labor
candidate from New York in 1950); both elicited questions of racial
authenticity, of whether they could represent African Americans since they had
mixed-ancestries and were highly educated; and both shared a desire to wrestle
religious ideas and language away from conservatives. Perhaps, as Barack Obama
and more broadly the Democratic Party attempt to engage religious issues, it
will behoove them not only to look back to what Du Bois had to say about faith,
but also to create a pantheon of spiritual liberals to revere as part of the
quest to demonstrate historical and religious legitimacy.

Religion and the Common Good

The RELIGION AND AMERICAN HISTORY blog welcomes its first contribution by our first contributing editor, John Fea of Messiah College. John is an historian of early American history whose best-known work thus far is a fine piece: "The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian's Rural Enlightenment." The Journal of American History (September, 2003), 462-490. He's completing a book for the University of Pennsylania Press about Philip Vickers and the Enlightenment in rural America, and is also working on an edited volume entitled Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation for Notre Dame University Press. John was in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts from 2000-2002; I'm an alum of the same program, 1993-95. In 2002 he joined the History Department of Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. John has also been very active in public presentations, op-ed pieces, and speaking engagements, listed here. Most recently we spent an enjoyable weekend together at the Lilly Fellows Program reunion, held in Indianapolis, where John gave a presentation about the relationship of the evangelical scholar to the academy.

John will be sending along contributions as the spirit moves--and I hope it will move often! His first post concerns an issue I took up a few days ago, and that is current discussions of religion and the common good, especially those coming from a possibly (big IF there) renascent evangelical center/left.

---------------------------------------------------

7-7-07: Our lucky day!

Religion and the Common Good

I want to thank Paul H. for inviting me to contribute to his blog. I look forward to the conversation.

I have noticed of late that the “common good” seems to be making a comeback in American political discourse, especially among Democratic presidential candidates. Edwards, Obama, and Clinton are calling people to sacrifice their interests for the larger national community and they are using religious discourse to do it. This was certainly evident among all three candidates last month at the CNN/Sojourners “Presidential Forum on Faith, Values, and Poverty” and it has been a staple of the Obama campaign ever since he announced he was running.

A few weeks ago I made a modest case in an op-ed piece that the Democrats are tapping into the longstanding relationship between Christianity and civic humanism in American history. They were returning to the “small r” republicanism of the revolutionary era and doing a better job than their Republican rivals of reflecting the Founders’ understanding of the relationship between religion and the citizen’s role in public life.

This idea has been developed in Lew Daly’s excellent essay in the recent Boston Review, “In Search of the Common Good: The Catholic Roots of American Liberalism.” Daly makes a compelling case that New Deal liberalism was the product of Catholic social teaching, particularly the views of Leo XIII as channeled through the Catholic progressivism of Father John Ryan. Catholics of Ryan’s stripe, Daly reminds us, were responsible for bringing immigrant Catholics into Democratic fold, a shift in loyalty that began with the populism of William Jennings Bryan and reached its height, of course, with Franklin D. Roosevelt. His essay is worth a look.

None of the current Democratic frontrunners are Catholic, but it seems that Father Ryan’s understanding of a “common good” rooted in the dignity of workers, a critique of what John Paul II used to call “savage capitalism,” the defense of the family, and the importance of the “moral law” as a check to autonomous individualism just might resonate with values voters in 2008 and provide a much needed theological and intellectual boost to their religious rhetoric.