Moral Minority: the Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism

MORAL MINORITY POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas J. Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze po liti cal and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels— local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and pop u lar culture. MORAL MINORITY THE EVANGELICAL LEFT IN AN AGE OF CONSERVATISM DAVID R. SWARTZ UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112 www .upenn .edu/ pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Swartz, David R. Moral minority : the evangelical left in an age of conservatism / David R. Swartz. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Politics and culture in modern America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8122- 4441- 0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Evangelicalism—United States—History—20th century. 2. Christianity and politics—United States—History—20th century. 3. Christian conservatism—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Politics and culture in modern America. BR1642.U6S93 2012 261.70973'09045—dc23 2012014396 CONTENTS Introduction 1 PART I. AN EMERGING EVANGELICAL LEFT 1. Carl Henry and Neo- Evangelical Social Engagement 13 2. John Alexander and Racial Justice 26 3. Jim Wallis and Vietnam 47 4. Mark Hatﬁ eld and Electoral Politics 68 5. Sharon Gallagher and the Politics of Spiritual Community 86 PART II. A BROADENING CO ALI TION 6. Samuel Escobar and the Global Reﬂ ex 113 7. Richard Mouw and the Reforming of Evangelical Politics 135 8. Ron Sider and the Politics of Simple Living 153 9. The Chicago Declaration and a United Progressive Front 170 PART III. LEFT BEHIND 10. Identity Politics and a Fragmenting Co ali tion 187 11. The Limits of Electoral Politics 213 12. Sojourning 233 Epilogue 255 Appendix. The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern 267 Notes 273 Index 359 Ac know ledg ments 375 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Evangelical activists, proclaimed the Washington Post, sought to “launch a religious movement that could shake both po liti cal and religious life in America.” Th is prediction referred not to eff orts in 2000 to elect George W. Bush to the White House, nor to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s during which the president once famously told a gathering of evangelical pastors, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.” Rather, the Post was reporting on what has become a mere footnote in the history of evangelical politics: a gathering at a run- down YMCA Hotel on South Wabash Street in downtown Chicago led by a young, unknown evangelical named Ron Sider. Th e year was 1973, nearly a de cade before the height of the Moral Majority, and the assembled activists were strategizing about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through po liti cal action. Th at intended direction, however, was to the left , not the right. In front of a national audience, Sider and his colleagues condemned American mili- tarism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon’s “lust for and abuse of power.” Th e YMCA itself was a fi tting venue for this new evangelical progressivism. Its spare interior suggested simple living, and its urban location indicated a commitment to the nation’s poor. As Calvin College professor and congressional candidate Paul Henry declared that evangelicals “dare no longer remain silent in the face of glaring social evil,” the echoes of stray gunfi re from outside rang through the hall. Aft er several days of intense discussion, the group emerged from the YMCA with “Th e Chicago Declaration,” a manifesto for a new evangelical left . Th e following de cades proved the Washington Post both right and wrong in its forecast. Anticipating most news outlets by half a de cade, the Post correctly suggested that evangelical participation in the po liti cal sphere was intensifying. In fact, the incipient progressive movement launched in Chi- cago, along with a rising religious right, itself seeking to mobilize a signifi cant 2 Introduction sector of apo liti cal pietists in the 1960s and 1970s, helped politicize the nation’s 75 million evangelicals. But in the end it was the religious right that built a viable movement that would come to shake po liti cal and religious life in America. And so the Post also got its prediction profoundly wrong, mis- identifying which evangelicals would ultimately move the nation’s elector- ate, and in what direction. Th is miscalculation, however, should not obscure just how plausible the Post prediction was from the perspective of the early 1970s. Th e evangelical left , especially from the 1973 Chicago meeting through the early years of the Jimmy Carter administration, seemed promising indeed amid the cacoph- ony of a diverse and fl uid evangelicalism that was po liti cally up for grabs. Competing po liti cal interests, institutions, and activities— ranging from the right, center, and left — rolled across the evangelical spectrum amid the fer- ment of the Cold War. Th e Post, observing the scene at the Chicago YMCA, could suggest with a straight face that these “young evangelicals,” as they were dubbed in the 1970s, might be the wave of the future. A close look at metropolitan Chicago in those years reveals the full dimensions of politics and piety at work in the nation. Outnumbering both evangelical progressives at the YMCA and right- wingers in the suburbs, many evangelicals in the early 1970s nurtured a passive cultural conservatism. Moody Church, for example, located on the northern edge of downtown just a short bus ride away from the YMCA, had long sustained a single- minded focus on soul- winning. While inclined toward po liti cal conservatism and punching their ballots for Republicans if they voted, Moody members did not mobilize po liti cally. Th ey instead sought to nurture personal holiness as quiet, upstanding citizens. Not surprisingly, its members had been aghast at the events of the 1968 Demo cratic presidential conven- tion in Chicago. Th ere, the participatory democracy and peaceful protests of the New Left had devolved into outrageous displays of anti- Americanism, free love, violence, and drugs. Th e disorder of Grant Park, which marked the disintegration of a long- presumed liberal consensus in American politics built around poverty relief, civil rights, and economic growth, would go on to infl ame right- wing evangelical mobilization in subsequent years. Both Moody Church and Grant Park, so geo graph i cally proximate to the coming- out party of the evangelical left , cast long shadows over the YMCA. Participants at the gathering, however, sought to transcend these stark polarities of the emerging culture wars by merging progressive politics and personal piety. Or, put negatively, befi tting the meeting’s oppositional tone, Introduction 3 they sought to repudiate the passive conservatism of Moody Church and the anarchic profanity of left ist protests. In an era oft en, but mistakenly, con- sidered the Reagan Revolution- in- waiting, many evangelicals stood for antiwar, civil rights, anti- consumer, communal, New Left , and third- world principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fi delity. Th e rise of the evangelical left raises important questions about the con- tours of twentieth- century American politics. From where did this progressive evangelical social consciousness and conscience emerge? What motivated these young activists to repudiate the Vietnam War when most of their pastors preached obedience to authority? What motivated some of their leaders to preach simple living and to criticize unfettered capitalism? And last, but hardly least given its initial promise, why did the evangelical left not take substantial shape electorally? Why, in the dawn of the twenty- fi rst century, is evangelicalism now so closely identifi ed with conservative, rather than progressive, politics? Th is book seeks to answer those questions by chronicling the rise, decline, and legacy of the evangelical left . Part I describes the emergence of the evangelical left in the years leading up to the 1973 Chicago Declaration. Chapters on the ascent of neo- evangelicalism, civil rights, Vietnam, electoral politics, and intentional community, each or ga nized around biographical sketches of key delegates at the YMCA meeting in Chicago, highlight important so cio log- i cal, cultural, and ideological changes within evangelicalism following World War II. Th ese changes— and the fi gures they produced— off ered a sharp alter- native to the superpatriotism of sectarian fundamentalists and the more typical mid- century posture of passive conservatism among many main- stream evangelicals. Carl Henry, a journalist and theologian, embodied the growing cultural maturity of evangelicals. Following the Scopes Trial in 1925 and defeats in mainline denominations during the 1920s, many fundamentalist evangelicals largely withdrew from social engagement. Henry, however, repudiated fundamentalism’s closed subculture in a 1947 treatise entitled Th e Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

Load more