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Moral Framing and the Rhetoric of Red Letter Christians A

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Moral Framing and the Rhetoric of Red Letter Christians A Disciplined by Democracy: Moral Framing and the Rhetoric of Red Letter Christians A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Samuel Isaac Boerboom IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Kirt H. Wilson, Adviser March, 2010 © Samuel I. Boerboom 2010 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my entire graduate student cohort at the University of Minnesota for providing an exceptional work and learning environment and for supporting both my research and teaching. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Casey Kelly and Mike Lee for their remarkable collegiality. I would also like to thank Beth Bonnstetter, Amy Pason, Jessica Prody, Justin Killian, Thomas Johnson, Meg Kunde, Tim Behme, Tony Nadler, Matt May, Jason Isaacson, and everyone else for their friendship. Many thanks goes to the faculty of the University of Minnesota for being laudable stewards of my academic development. I would also like to deeply thank Bea Dehler and Joan Lund for their resourcefulness and for making me feel truly welcome in the department. I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their guidance on this project and for shaping my development as a researcher. Ed Schiappa nurtured my appreciation of sophistic rhetoric and pragmatism. Ron Greene stoked in me a deeper understanding of rhetoric and ethics. Penny Edgell helped me to appreciate religion as an embedded and rich social and cultural phenomenon. Finally, to my adviser Kirt Wilson, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks for his careful reading of my project and for his many suggestions, all of which benefitted the project in significant ways. I cannot imagine anyone I would rather have had serve as adviser for this project. Kirt helped advance my understanding of textual practices in ways that I hope to someday be able to fully appreciate. For his roles as mentor and as friend, I will be forever grateful. I would also like to thank my family for their material and emotional support during my time as a graduate student. Finally, the deepest appreciation is reserved for my wife, Amanda, whose dedication to my pursuit of my doctoral education is unsurpassed. For her patience, her kindness, her humor, and her sacrifice, I will be forever indebted. ii Abstract In this dissertation I study both the textual reception and rhetorical production strategies of the Red Letter Christians, a discourse community whose identity is linked to these very same strategies. I contend that the Red Letter Christians engage in biblical reading strategies that make them distinct from other politically liberal or progressive religious groups. The Red Letter Christians employ a moral frame based on their particular reading of the Bible. Embedded in the notion of “conservative radicalism,” such a moral frame asserts a dedication to timeless principles and truths authenticated by the gospel accounts of Jesus while it simultaneously upholds a passionate defense of social justice and the activist need to engage in political action in the present. Such a moral frame is biconceptual, expressing both conservative and progressive dimensions of moral social action. Due to the biconceptuality of the Red Letter Christian moral frame, Red Letter Christians often stress the importance of humility and non-partisan dialogue. Critics of the Red Letter Christians from both the political left and the right argue that such discourse is often incomprehensible and obfuscates the political positions the group defends in their rhetoric. I assert that in spite of their common reception as a religiously liberal group, the Red Letter Christians offer a model of discourse that at its best authenticates and otherwise justifies a model of post-partisan discourse that re-imagines religion’s role in public political discourse. iii Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction……………………………………………………………….......................1 The political rise of the conservative evangelical movement ……………...........4 Growth of progressive evangelicals……………………………………............11 The Red Letter Christians………………………………………………............17 Interpretive persuasion…………………………………………………............22 Research questions………………………………………………………..........30 Preview…………………………………………………………………............30 Chapter Two A Hermeneutic Vision of the Heart…………………………………….........................33 Theorizing a hermeneutic vision………………………………………….........37 The RLC hermeneutic vision……………………………………………...........40 The general example and model of Jesus………………………………............42 Jesus and the kingdom of God………………………………………….............44 Evangelism and the year of Jubilee…………………………………….............51 The Old Testament Hebrew prophets……………………………………..........54 Jesus the Jewish prophet…………………………………………………..........56 The style and form of Jesus’ message………………………………….............58 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the prophet…………………………………...........60 The implied RLC reader…………………………………………………..........63 Notable exclusions………………………………………………………...........65 Conclusion………………………………………………………………...........67 Chapter Three Moral framing and the campaign against poverty...........................................................70 Moral framing……………………………………………………………..........73 Prophetic politics and the RLC’s biconceptual moral frame……………...........79 Bipartisanship and the search for common ground……………………….........84 Expressions of the moral frame on poverty…………………………….............89 The ambivalence of political action……………………………………............92 Moral frames and RLC political witness……………………………….............99 The public language of poverty reduction…………………………….............103 Conclusion…………………………………………………………….............107 iv Chapter Four Rejecting idolatry and pressing for the common good: Moral framing, war, and health care reform.....................................................................................................................109 Strategizing the peace…………………………………………………............113 The examples of Iraq and Iran…………………………………………...........121 The moral imperative of health care reform……………………………..........130 RLC health care advocacy…………………………………………….............139 Conclusion…………………………………………………………….............143 Chapter Five Blending evangelical tradition and progressive politics: The reception of RLC discourse by their evangelical and liberal critics...........................................................................147 Reception and cultural debates…………………………………………..........152 Conservative evangelicals and the evangelical mainstream……………..........156 The elusive evangelical center…………………………………………...........161 Reconciling opposites …………………………………………………...........171 The RLC and the left…………………………………………………….........176 Conclusion…………………………………………………………….............182 Chapter Six Conclusion…………………………………………………………….........................187 Changing of the guard …………………………………………………...........189 White evangelicals and the Obama effect……………………………….........193 What about younger evangelicals?....................................................................198 Evangelicalism as cultural style………………………………………............200 Future directions………………………………………………………............204 Notes..............................................................................................................................208 Works Cited...................................................................................................................209 1 Chapter 1 Introduction There must have been something in the air in 2006. The midterm elections signaled a profound dissatisfaction with the policies of then-President George W. Bush. Even the president’s most ardent supporters—Christian Evangelicals—were unsettled. For the first time at least some of these religiously-minded voters were beginning to have doubts about the moral example of the “pastor-in-chief’s” presidency, despite the fact that Bush’s presidency had been one of the most publicly evangelical of any in United States’ history (Zoll, 2006). At the heart of this dissatisfaction lay a disconcerting question—“what does it mean to be an Evangelical Christian?” A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically (2007a), attempted an experiment to answer the above question. In his book he suggests that one-third to one- half of all US citizens adhere to some form of biblical literalism. Jacobs states that “a literal interpretation of the Bible—both Jewish and Christian—shapes American policies on the Middle East, homosexuality, stem cell research, education, abortion” (p. 6). In an attempt to understand the influence that textual literalism holds over the electorate, Jacobs, a self-described “agnostic Jew,” decided to live for a year according to a literal interpretation of the Bible’s teachings. After his attempt, Jacobs concluded that “living literally” was not only difficult, but was largely antithetical to the way that most US citizens lived their lives. Consequently, Jacobs concluded that while the concept of biblical literalism reflects believers’ fidelity to the word of God, they still pick and chose which parts of sacred scripture “fit their agenda.” Jacobs’ experiment was not the only of its kind. In 2008 Benyamin Cohen, the son of a rabbi, authored My 2 Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith . Cohen’s book, like Jacobs’, re-examined what the Bible means for its believers at the start of the 21 st -century. The Reverend Ed Dobson, a former pastor of a Grand Rapids megachurch
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