The Evangelical Left

Pro-Life, Pro-Left‘Moral Minority’ by David R. Swartz

By MOLLY WORTHEN

Published: September 28, 2012

In 1968, Mark Hatfield, one of America’s most prominent evangelical politicians, wanted to abolish the draft and clandestinely wore a Eugene McCarthy pin under his lapel. A Republican senator from Oregon, Hatfield had fans in evangelical churches around the country. When organizers of the 1973 National Prayer Breakfast invited him to address Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other conservative luminaries (the Vietnam War was a “national sin and disgrace,” he told them), he based his remarks on a text written by a renegade seminarian named Jim Wallis — a former member of Students for a Democratic Society who believed that being “pro-life” meant hating war and poverty as much as abortion.

The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism



By David R. Swartz



Illustrated. 376 pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $47.50.

.If the historian David R. Swartz is right, Hatfield, Wallis and their supporters were not just forgettable anomalies in the inexorable rise of the Christian right. The early 1970s were not “the ­Reagan ­Revolution-in-waiting,” he contends, but an unsettled era when evangelicals’ ambivalent political impulses had not yet hardened and left-leaning activists had prospects nearly as bright as their peers on the right. Today, in the midst of Capitol Hill gridlock and the slugging matches of partisan super PACs, “Moral Minority” jogs our historical memory and challenges our imagination: not so long ago, the American political landscape was very different.



Swartz tells his story through profiles of activists, politicians and evangelists who tried to convince fellow believers that the Gospel demands social justice. His subjects range from progressive academics like the Baptist civil rights activist and philosopher John Alexander, who roused student consciousness through his fiery teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois, to Wallis’s grungy Christian commune in Washington and the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley. Other people pushed evangelicals beyond their Anglo-American male comfort zone: black evangelists electrified the evangelical conference circuit; evangelical feminists decried patriarchy; Latin American preachers held Americans accountable to the needs of poor Christians in the global South. “Moral Minority” is a vivid topography of a little-understood corner of evangelical thought. It is not an account of a political movement — because there was no movement to speak of. This is a story of failures and might-have-beens, but it is just as illuminating as a history of political success.



Many of Swartz’s subjects, with their formidable facial hair and self-published protest literature, fit right in with the radicals of the secular New Left. Yet they were also typical evangelicals. For the most part they attended conservative Christian colleges and seminaries; they fielded speaking invitations from national missions conferences; evangelical bookstores stocked their treatises defending gender equality and their cookbooks advocating “simple living.” When George McGovern accepted an invitation to speak at Wheaton in 1972, he received a standing ovation.



So why did the evangelical left seem to dissolve into irrelevance? Swartz argues that evangelicals’ mass enlistment in the conservative Republicanism of the “culture wars” was not the inevitable consequence of doctrine or history: Jesus did not leave behind a clear party platform. But while members of the Christian right set aside doctrinal differences to rally around a shared cultural agenda, the left fell victim to internal identity politics and theological disputes. Black and female evangelicals argued that the left’s leadership was too white and too male. Anabaptists who emphasized nonviolence clashed with Reformed evangelicals who had ambitious plans to transform American culture. Meanwhile, secular liberals, eager to make abortion rights a nonnegotiable plank of the Democratic platform, drove anti-abortion Christians into the arms of savvy Republicans.



Progressive evangelicals tried to halt this migration: “The energy of the pro-life movement must be removed from the ideological agenda of the New Right,” Wallis warned in 1980. As conservatives transformed the fight against abortion from a “Catholic issue” into the defining battle of the culture wars, Wallis and others countered with another idea borrowed from Catholics, the “consistent life ethic” opposing poverty, war and the death penalty as well as abortion. Yet left-wing evangelicals’ measured arguments were no match for cries that abortion is murder and family values are under siege. It seems they were not so mainstream after all: efforts at fund-raising fell flat, and by the mid-’80s half of the subscriptions to Wallis’s magazine, Sojourners, went to Catholics.



Swartz suggests that progressive evangelicals’ forays into politics and their condemnation of “satanic” and “demonic” influences in America’s foreign policy and domestic inequalities had the unforeseen effect of encouraging their conservative rivals: “The evangelical left modeled a structural mode of thought, a dualistic application of moralism, a precedent of co-belligerency and an activist approach to social change. . . . The evangelical left hastened the arrival of the religious right.”



The argument is provocative but overstated. The culture warriors of the ’80s did borrow protest tactics and political techniques from the left, but their models were more likely the successes of the civil rights movement rather than small-scale operations like Evangelicals for McGovern. More important, despite apocalyptic beliefs that appeared to entrust justice to Judgment Day rather than to worldly politics, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists had been organizing political rallies, building mailing lists and collaborating with Catholics in the name of anti-Communism since at least the ’50s.



Two cultural developments propelled the rise of the religious right: a backlash against midcentury social upheaval and a deep reservoir of anti-Communism. Conservative leaders stoked these feelings and gave them political force partly through grass-roots organization, but also by popularizing an appealing narrative. They baptized the founders as modern evangelicals’ God-fearing forebears. They amplified the cold war image of America as the Christian libertarian nation divinely anointed to hold the godless Communists at bay. The evangelical left was too divided — and too out of touch with the Sun Belt, the emerging center of political strength — to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement.



The problem was not that these activists overestimated the average evangelical’s capacity for compassion, but that they underestimated evangelicals’ fear of social change and socialism. Swartz notes one group that accused Hatfield and Wallis of “Soviet-style Communism,” but he does not make enough of this. Despite left-wing evangelicals’ efforts to distance themselves from the Marxist and Maoist excesses of the secular New Left, their communes, their opposition to the war, their criticisms of capitalism — not to mention their support of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — allowed critics to brand them as “socialist,” the kiss of death in American politics. Progressive evangelicals too often ended up trapped in a narrative written by their opponents, one that cast them as anti-American ­subversives.



More than anything, the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970. “Moral Minority” is a helpful complement to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Rule and Ruin,” an account of the demise of moderate Republicanism over the past 40 years. Both books are careful works of scholarship, but it is hard not to read them as eulogies for a political culture that might have been: a Republican Party that might have chosen to attract new voters by promoting progressive social policies rather than pandering to the resentment of Southerners and “white ethnics”; an evangelicalism more evenly split — as Catholic voters are — between the parties, and open to a wider range of solutions to our problems.



Swartz concludes on a positive note: 70 percent of evangelicals now tell pollsters they don’t identify with the religious right, and younger evangelicals often have more enthusiasm for social justice than for the culture wars. The Democrats have woken up to the importance of religion: President Obama has sought the advice of Jim Wallis. Still, a statesman like Mark Hatfield seems less a useful role model than a political animal of a distant and extinguished age. A creature from such an alien climate could never survive today.