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The New Left and Evangelical Radicalism Author(S): DAVID R The New Left and Evangelical Radicalism Author(s): DAVID R. SWARTZ Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 3, No. 2 (FALL 2009), pp. 51-79 Published by: Michigan State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41887630 . Accessed: 18/02/2015 07:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Michigan State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal for the Study of Radicalism. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:16:46 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DAVIDR. SWARTZ UNIVERSITY OFNOTRE DAME, DEPARTMENT OFHISTORY The New Left and Radicalism Evangelical 1968 Bill Milliken,a religiousyouth workerin the gang-infested Lower East Side of New YorkCity, met a fieryproponent of Students In fora DemocraticSociety (SDS). Santos condemned Christianityfor failingto address social problems.A particularlypointed conversation, in whichSantos told Millikenthat his "sweet,smiling Jesus" was tryingto make "house niggersout of us,"prompted the young evangelical to pace a Manhattanbridge in the middle of the nightand ponder a technocratic, "death-producing"America: Thesilhouettes ofgray buildings lost their beauty. Outwardly, the buildings had anaura of beauty- majestic, a picture of strength. But their beauty was only steel-and-concretedeep. Inside those buildings, a death-producing machine hadbeen created. A machinethat was run on thegears of a valuesystem that putprogress before people. Power-hungry, dog-eat-dog executives reaped the realharvest. The middle masses who worked for the kings had been shaped intorobots, pushing their assigned buttons so thatthe monarchs could grab thekingdom and the power and the glory. Despitethese misgivings and thesocial convulsions that exposed the failure of Americanpolitics - gratingpoverty, race riots,the violentDemocratic conventionin Chicago,the assassinationsof RobertKennedy and Martin journalforthe Study ofRadicalism, Vol.3,No. 2, 2009, pp. 51-80. ISSN 1930-1189. ©2009 Michigan StateUniversity BoardofTrustees. Allrights reserved. 51 This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:16:46 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 52 DavidR. Swartz LutherKing Jr.-Milliken remained a mainstreamevangelical by day.He remainedsympathetic to BillyGraham, an emblemof modern conservative evangelicalism.He volunteeredin the public school systemand triedto repairfrayed racial tensions between rival gangs. But at nighthe increasingly driftedto SDS meetingsin the East Villagewhere he "rapped"with Santos and otherleftists who spokeof "the beast that must be slain."Milliken began to agreethat "the power structure with all ofits technocracy and weaponry has too tighta gripon thepeoples lives."He lamented,"The cancerseemed to have spread everywhere."The failingstate ill-served by the ineffective ministrationsof liberal politics could be curedonly by "majorsurgery." He wonderedwhether "the only way to deal withthis kind of violence is with theviolence of thewhip. If Jesuswere here today, I wondered,how would he deal withthe money-changersof our time?With a whip?Maybe. Or a machinegun?"1 Thattheologically conservative evangelicals might in factharbor leftist sympathieswas incomprehensibleto mostmovement leftists, whose roots in politicalliberalism took a verydifferent trajectory than Millikens journey outof a traditionthat was equal partsapolitical and politicallyconservative.2 ChristianityToday , a magazinerepresenting a party-line strain of evangelicalism thatseemed to dominate in the 1960s, had editoriallyendorsed Barry Goldwater forpresident in 1964,condemned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as a disrupterof societal order, and consistentlysupported the Vietnam War. Evencountercultural evangelical "Jesus Freaks," lacking a hardrightist edge, failedto offeraid to theleft, instead flaunting an apoliticalimpulse. Berkeley s ChristianWorld Liberation Front (CWLF), a lapsedrightist Campus Crusade chapterwith close tiesto theJesus People movement,seemed to epitomize thehostility of evangelicalism toward the New Left.From 1969 to 1971,CWLF engagedin pitchedbattle with SDS. CWLF tookover several SDS meetings and competedwith SDS forrally sites on theCal-Berkeley campus. A July1971 articlein Ramparts, the brash muckraking monthly from San Francisco,in turnportrayed the faith of the CWLF as onlyfor "the fearful, the guilt-ridden and thechildish, for those unprepared to dive,to maketheir faith leap intoa politicalreality or mysticaldepth." Calling articles in CWLF s tabloidRight On "nothingbut half-bakedand awkwardattempts at politicalrelevancy," Rampartsargued that they were instead a frontfor the right, that "a takeover by right-wingsugar-daddies" was impending.3 This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:16:46 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheNew Left and Evangelical Radicalism 53 Notwithstandingthe mutualhostility between Right On and Ramparts, theirshared space, level of interaction, and commonpolitical critique serve to destabilizeseveral historiographies. A secularistperspective, as Douglas Rossinowhas shown,did notuniformly characterize movement radicals.4 Nor did ChristianityTodays "law and order"Republicanism typify a remarkably diverseevangelicalism at midcentury.These stereotypes, however, obscured a growingcadre of left-leaningevangelicals. Around 1971,members of CWLF beganto unionizefarm workers and advocatefor African Americans. Membersof evangelical communes such as thePost-Americans in Chicago and The OtherSide in Philadelphiaprotested the Vietnam War and nuclear powerplants. Students in leadingevangelical colleges such as Wheatonand in thestudent organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical ministrywith chapters at hundredsof stateuniversities across the United States,expressed resonance with the social critiquesof SDS. Evenif the New Leftwas unwillingto claimthem, some evangelicals willingly drew resources and inspirationfrom the New Left.Galvanized by a continuedracial caste systemin the South,by growingmilitary action in SoutheastAsia, and by disillusionmentwith America and itstechnocracy, an emergingevangelical leftdenounced the evangelical establishment for its inaction against structural injustice.As a minorityeven within progressive evangelicalism, the numbers of evangelicalssympathetic to New Leftsocial critiqueswere not large. Yet their - antiliberalideology, strident activism, and Manicheanrhetoric evidences ofa shareddiscursive strategy with the New Left- pointto a newevangelical politicalstyle and underscorethe inadequacy of historiographical boundaries ofboth evangelicalism and theNew Left.5 I. Evangelicalradicals echoed the New Leftcritique of liberalismas soft, compromising,and morallyand spirituallyvacuous.6 The persistenceof the racial caste systemamong southernconservatives, suggested evangelical radicalsand leftistsalike, pointed to deeperproblems with the nationthat liberalismseemed unwillingto confront.SDS, the seminalorganization of theNew Left,mocked liberal optimism that education, Americas essentialist creed of equality,and gradualistpolitics would graduallyend segregation This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:16:46 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 54 DavidR. Swartz and thegrowing military conflict in SoutheastAsia. Liberalismsponderous efforts,SDS contended,betrayed its complicityin an unholytrinity of big business,the media, and governmentbureaucracy. Leftists charged that "The System,""The Establishment," or "thetechnocracy," as they variously referred to theAmerican power structure, maintained impoverished commitments to unlimitedeconomic growth, technology, and Americanglobal dominance. Evangelicalradicals, like secular leftists, vociferously attacked the concept ofunlimited economic growth, an importantmarker of the liberal consensus. In the 1930s,British economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that if the governmentcorrectly regulated economic structures through managing the supplyof currency and theflow of government spending, a permanentand unlimitedpattern of economic growth could prevail over the cyclical patterns ofboom andbust that had characterizedmuch of American history.7 Although evangelicalradicals did offereconomic critiques of unlimited growth, their most insistentopposition came on moral grounds:at its base, Keynesian economicsmerely justified corporate greed. The Post-Americans denounced Proctor& Gamble,Ford, AT&T, and Westinghousefor perpetuating the "liberal-industrialscheme" of unlimited economic growth. "We protest," Jim Wallisdeclared in an exemplaryPost- American critique of liberalism, "the materialisticprofit culture and technocraticsociety which threaten basic humanvalues."8 CWLF s JackSparks echoed, "We are controlled... by an economicbureaucracy which has been a longtime building and whichrolls inexorablyalong, constantly increasing our alienationfrom ourselves, from freedomand fromeach other."9Canadian GeraldVandezande of the
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