Left Behind: the Evangelical Left and the Limits of Evangelical
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LEFT BEHIND: THE EVANGELICAL LEFT AND THE LIMITS OF EVANGELICAL POLITICS, 1965-1988 VOLUME II A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by David R. Swartz ______________________________ George Marsden, Director Graduate Program in History Notre Dame, Indiana July 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME II CHAPTER EIGHT The Chicago Declaration and the Promise of a United Progressive Evangelical Front.....................................................................357 CHAPTER NINE Identity Politics: The Fragmentation of the Progressive Coalition ..................................................................................................415 CHAPTER TEN From Carter to Reagan: Left Behind by the Right...................488 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Limits of Evangelical Politics: The Evangelical Left in the 1980s........................................................................................547 APPENDIX A ..................................................................................................622 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................624 v CHAPTER EIGHT THE CHICAGO DECLARATION AND THE PROMISE OF A UNITED PROGRESSIVE EVANGELICAL FRONT Many adherents of the third way, acknowledging that forming small communities of “loving defiance” against the technocracy held limited potential for stimulating large-scale change, tempered their strictures of idealism by the mid- 1970s. Provoked anew by animus against Richard Nixon, continuing war in Vietnam, persistent racial strife, and stirring “signs of a new order,” radical and progressive evangelicals joined together in a small, but promising movement structured around the first evangelical organization to campaign for a presidential candidate— Evangelicals for McGovern—and a striking document—the Chicago Declaration— that disclaimed the long-standing alliance between the Republican Party and evangelicalism. Urban, educated, and committed to progressive political reform, this coalition harbored hopes of capturing much of evangelicalism. Optimism among the emerging evangelical left soared as the secular press took note of their growing numbers, proliferating literature, and political activism. “If the connection between the Bible and the nation’s alienation is made,” commented Sojourners associate editor 357 Jim Stentzel on the possibilities of a progressive coalition, “things will start popping. Fifty million ‘born-again’ Christians could be one hell of a political force.”1 I. While disillusioned evangelical New Leftists garnered the bulk of attention in the late 1960s, a significant faction of reformist evangelicals also entered the intensifying evangelical conversation over American politics. Assuming a liberal Republican or moderate Democratic posture, these reformists increasingly spoke out against the war and American militarism and for school busing, the Equal Rights Amendment, and environmental protection. Seeking technical solutions to structural problems, the new reformist approach highlighted a persistent evangelical political ambivalence. Reformist evangelicalism flourished most obviously on college campuses. The most outspoken political progressives—Richard Pierard, a professor of history at Indiana State University; Robert Linder, an associate professor of history at Kansas State University; and Robert Clouse, also a professor of history at Indiana State; and sociologist David Moberg of Marquette University—taught at state universities. Each published several books decrying the evangelical alliance with conservative politics. Faculty at evangelical colleges, while constrained by conservative administrations, also criticized right-wing excesses. Roy Swanstrom, professor of history at Seattle Pacific University, irritated by right-wing anti-communist rhetoric, wrote in 1961 that too much “anti-Communist activity has been characterized by [a] lack of knowledge, 1 John Junkerman, “Voice of the Evangelical Left,” Madison Press Connection (November 5, 1979), 7, in Box IV3, Folder 2, “News Releases and Post-American, Sojourners Collection, WCSC. 358 by character assassination, and by calloused indifference toward those suffering from ignorance, poverty, and disease. Our first duty as Christians is the positive task of carrying out the implications of Christianity in every area of life.”2 At Wheaton and Calvin, amidst the persistent new evangelical cry for social action in the 1960s, a sizeable minority of students and faculty campaigned for Lyndon Johnson.3 By the 1970s Calvin had become a hotbed of progressive evangelicalism from a Reformed perspective with the Reformed Journal as its primary scholarly organ. Dozens of talented young professors converged at Calvin, several of whom ran for political office. At a series of symposia on politics in the early 1970s, few sided with right- wing or New Left politics, nearly all instead drawn to a reformist progressivism. This prominence of evangelical faculty points to several salient demographic characteristics of the emerging evangelical left. First, its members were educated. 85% of Reformed Journal readers and 86% of Sojourners readers held a college degree. The median educational level of The Other Side readers was two years of 2 Donald McNichols, Seattle Pacific University: A Growing Vision (Seattle: Seattle Pacific University, 1989), 111. 3 120 faculty members and students—nearly all northerners from mid-sized cities, not rural southern Democrats—signed a half-page “Johnson for President” advertisement in the student newspaper. A couple dozen protested a Barry Goldwater appearance at the college. On a campus on which Dewey beat FDR 410-71 in 1944 and Nixon beat Kennedy 924-34 in straw polls, Goldwater won over Johnson by only an 805 to 518 vote. Editors of the student newspaper, clearly cheering for Johnson, had predicted a Johnson victory over Goldwater in a straw vote on campus. See “Johnson for President,” Wheaton Record 87, No. 5 (October 23, 1964), 12 and “Mock Ballot Contradicts National Vote,” Wheaton Record 87, No. 7 (November 5, 1964), 1. The decline in votes for the Democratic candidate Kennedy was a reflection of evangelicalism’s anti-Catholicism. The presence of non-right politics also existed at Seattle Pacific in the 1960s. While a poll of 550 students showed a Republican preference over Democratic by a margin of more than three to one, there was an even larger group (50% larger than the Democratic adherents) of politically undecided students. See McNichols, A Growing Vision, 115. On the origins of LBJ supporters, see 1963-1964 Wheaton College Student Directory in WCSC. At Calvin College and Seminary, several important Reformed evangelical academicians also threw support to Johnson. See Henry Stob, “Goldwater Again,” Reformed Journal 14, No. 8 (October 1964), 3-4. For a Canadian version of a progressive Reformed evangelicalism, see issues of Christian Vanguard, which supported labor and other progressive causes. See Box 5, Collection 432, Vanguard Publishing Foundation, Heritage Hall Archives, Calvin College. 359 graduate work.4 Second, despite efforts to recruit African-Americans, its members were overwhelmingly white. 96% of Sojourners and 96% of The Other Side readers were white. Third, its members worked in the social service sector. Well over two- thirds of Sojourners readers held jobs in education, social service, religious, or other professional vocations.5 Fourth, its members disproportionately lived in cities.6 In short, progressive evangelicals seemed to be prototypical members of the “knowledge class,” the term given in the 1980s by sociologists of postwar American religion to describe the post-industrial proliferation in the mid-twentieth century of professional vocations whose workers manipulated symbols more than produced material goods. The merits of applying New Class theory to progressive evangelicals in fact emerged as a hotly contested debate in the 1980s and 1990s.7 While many, particularly Boyd Reese, have criticized it as too reductionistic, the discussion over New Class theory does highlight the demographic makeup of the young evangelicals who mobilized progressive evangelical politics. In a sharp departure from new evangelicals of the 4 “About You … About Us,” Reformed Journal 24, No. 3 (March 1974), 3-4; “The Truth about All of You,” The Other Side 14, No. 4 (April 1978), 6-7. 5 “Readership Survey, 1979,” 3-4, in Box IV3, Folder “News Releases and Post-American,” Sojourners Collection, WCSC. 6 Forty percent of Vanguard and 37% of Sojourners subscribers were urban, a much higher percentage than evangelicalism more broadly. On Vanguard, see “Reader Survey—A Preliminary Report,” Vanguard (May-June 1975), 4-5. On Sojourners, see Folder “Readership Survey, 1979,” Box IV3—“News Releases and Post-American,” Sojourners Collection, WCSC. 7 See James Davison Hunter, “The New Class and the Young Evangelicals,” Review of Religious Research 22, No. 2 (December 1980); Peter Berger, “The Class Struggle in American Religion,” Christian Century 98 (February 25, 1981), 194-199. Critiques followed by John Schmalzbauer, “Evangelicals in the New Class: Class versus Subcultural Predictors of Ideology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, No. 4 (December 1993), 330-342; Boyd Reese, “The New Class and the Young Evangelicals: Second Thoughts,” Review of Religious Research 24, No. 3 (March, 1983), 261-267;