Posted on 12/30/2003 10:37:38 AM PST by ahadams2
Who's afraid of the religious left?
After Saddam Hussein was captured, David Frum wrote for National Review Online, "it's becoming increasingly difficult to doubt that God wants President Bush re-elected." While I'm not a believer as yet, doubt is certainly not difficult for leftists; even the faithful are all Doubting Thomases on this one.
Salon magazine recently interviewed Rev. Albert Pennybacker, head of the Clergy Leadership Network. The organization is described as "a cross-denominational group of liberal and moderate religious leaders seeking to counter the influence of the religious right and to mobilize voters to change leadership in Washington." Pennybacker and Co. are working feverishly to ensure the current Bush ends up like the previous one—a one-term president. Predictably, part of their motivation is anger over the Iraq war.
"We can't avoid the hard reality of what war means," said Pennybacker of pastors and religious leaders. "When a parent says to me or any of us: 'Why did God take my child?' the answer is: God didn’t take you child, the policies of this government took your child."
But it's not just Iraq that has Pennybacker's ordination papers in a twist. Bush's environmental and economic policies upset him as well. "When people lose jobs, we see it as pastors and religious leaders. It means that families are shortchanged. It means that domestic violence increases. It means that alcoholism increases." The answer to all of this, says the reverend, is to send Bush packing.
In terms of the simple politics of it, Pennybacker's position is too commonplace to warrant attention. Regardless of one's position on the war or the desirability of another term for the sitting president, what is worth noting is Pennybacker's revisionist history and uninformed understanding of the religious left and right.
With much of Bush's support coming from the religious right, Pennybacker says for progressives and lefties, "I think now it's wake-up time. One of the gifts of the present administration is the summons—or the call to arms—for progressive religious people." Pennybacker presents the religious left as a slumbering giant. But his reading of history is 180 degrees wrong. It was the right that was snoring, only waking up a quarter century ago.
The left was in political and theological dominance for most of the last 100 years. Beginning in the late 19th century and moving into the early 20th, the mainline protestant denominations were taken over by liberals, both theological and political. (Without discussing it here, suffice it to say that the two go hand in hand.)
In his 1981 classic, A Christian Manifesto, Francis A. Schaeffer notes that by the 1920s, objections to liberal infiltration was "too late as most of the old line denominations had come under the dominance of liberal theology at the two power centers of the bureaucracies and the seminaries. ... From then on, the liberal theologians would increasingly side with the secular humanists in matters of life style and the rulings of sociological law."
They supported Woodrow Wilson and FDR's expansionist federal and internationalist policies. As Lloyd Billingsley points out in The Generation that Knew not Josef, they became apologists for Soviet repression. They pushed, with secular progressives, for Prohibition in the teens and 1920s; though conservative religionists supported the Great Experiment as well, it was the entrenched socialists and leftists—both religious and not—that put it over.
J. Gresham Machen, a stalwart conservative minister and public intellectual, was pilloried by his denomination (Presbyterian USA) for his refusal to support Prohibition and other federal overreaches. The Presbyterian liberal establishment even denied him professorship at Princeton Seminary for his recalcitrant conservativism.
In response to this growing leftist hegemony in both the religious and secular spheres, in the early 20th century conservative Christians put the wagon in reverse. They retreated from the public sphere in general, focusing mainly on pietistic, not social or intellectual, concerns. The retreat was finalized after the debacle of the Scopes monkey trial. Fundamentalists went virtually unheard from for the better part of the next 50 years. The next discernable belch from the right came in the late 1970s and early 1980s—the clumsy rise of the Moral Majority.
Meanwhile, the religious left had been as busy as always. Christian journals such as Jim Wallis' Sojourners and the Other Side regularly parroted the leftist line. Their commitment to "social justice" led progressive religionists to back the brutal Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and destructive welfare-statist policies at home. Intellectuals like Ron Sider proffered warmed-over socialism as the only proper Christian response to poverty. The best the right could muster in response was David Chilton's well argued Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (a play on Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger), published by a small independent publisher, the Institute for Christian Economics.
Contra Pennybacker, the religious left has never been asleep; rather it was its tireless support of the secular progressives' agenda that finally roused the religious right to attention.
Schaeffer explained the danger here. The outcome of the fight between the left's theological liberalism and the traditional religious views of conservative evangelicals "will determine our position on every crucial issue we face today. It will determine our views on the value and dignity of people, the base for the kind of life the individual and society lives, the direction law will take, and whether there will be freedom or some form of authoritarian dominance."
Unsurprisingly, with such a stark presentation of the unfolding scene, Schaeffer was one of the principal goads for waking the religious right—A Christian Manifesto sold over 300,000 copies—and his principal concerns revolved around final questions of social justice and civil liberties. They simply differed from the left's notions of those things.
This is absurdly revealed in Pennybacker's interview. In discussing the wooing of black votes in the South, he argues that black churches are primarily concerned with social justice, while more right-wing churches are mainly concerned with personal piety. But his argument is refuted by the very threat he says the right represents. If conservatives are mainly concerned with personal piety, then they should be of little worry for the leftists in the public sphere. The left's rise to power in the last century happened precisely because conservatives were more concerned with personal piety than social justice—but that has changed since the early 1980s. The catch for leftists today is they refuse to admit that fighting for lower taxes and against abortion are also issues of social justice. The religious left assures its self-righteous standing by insisting upon its social-justice monopoly.
This is the absurdity of the religious left. Faith cannot be merely private if it is to also be public—e.g., used to motivate specific political ends, like the unseating of President Bush. Yet the main contention from prominent liberal Christians like Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is that the religious right errs exactly to the extent that its faith is public. So the religious left simultaneously demands that its faith be made public and the right's be made private. In other words, we get our way and you don't, based solely on our own valuation of our ideas.
The religious left isn't a sleeping giant. It's a cranky kid in a tizzy that after a century of getting its way in the sandbox, someone else has arrived and is building more impressive castles.
Joel Miller is editor of RazorMouth.
Proverbs 3:12 For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth...
What Chastisement awaits America and do you think that Chastisement will be a laughing matter?
Yeah, "Razormouth" is basically run by "our boys" (Calvinist Presbyterians)... although there is a Calvinist Baptist and non-denominational Calvinist contingent also (much like the GRPL).
FYI to all concerned, I have returned from my Holiday travels and hope to respond to some of my backed-up pre- and post-Christmas "flagged" threads on the morrow. Best, OP
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.