[Peace-discuss] Clash of Fundamentalisms in the News-Gazette

[C. G. Estabrook]

John Bambenek wrote:
> And I'm the one accused of being a bigot...
> 
> For once, frighteningly, I agree with Estabrook.
> 
> On 7/9/06, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> 
> No more true, of course, than either of the first two versions.
 >
 >> Robert Naiman wrote:
 >>
 >> There was a typo. I fixed it.
 >>
 >> =====================
 >>
 >> Democracy is foreign concept to Christian culture...


[I should think that you'll find it's not difficult at all...
On the subject, the following article from one of the country's leading 
Protestant theologians (and a friend) was published today.  --CGE]


Old-time religion

Long before the age of Falwell and Robertson, evangelical Protestants 
from William Jennings Bryan to Billy Graham were anything but right-wing 
zealots. Today, a new generation of evangelical leaders are 
rediscovering their progressive roots.

By Harvey Cox  |  July 9, 2006

IN THE SPRING OF LAST YEAR, President Bush flew to Calvin College in 
Grand Rapids, Mich. Because of its conservative religious reputation, 
his advisers thought it would be a safe and friendly place, but the 
visit did not turn out as expected. He was greeted by a petition, signed 
by a third of the faculty, and a large student demonstration. Both 
denounced the invasion of Iraq as not meeting the classical Christian 
criteria for a just war.

Indeed, as the president has tried to shore up support among religiously 
conservative voters in preparation for this fall's congressional 
elections, returning to such issues as a constitutional amendment 
banning same-sex marriage, he has found himself grappling with a new 
challenge. Evangelical Protestants are becoming increasingly concerned 
about a wide range of issues-the Iraq War, the environment, torture, and 
poverty, for example-which put them at odds with much of the Bush agenda.

This interest in what are often considered ``liberal" issues marks the 
rise of a younger and more moderate leadership among evangelicals. 
Paradoxically, these new leaders are more ``religious" than the old 
guard of the religious right. The difference, one could argue, is that 
they are more concerned about actually following Jesus, who had much to 
say about violence and the poor, but said nothing about gays or a strong 
military, and who was put to death by torture. The appearance of these 
new social concerns means that something important is afoot in the vast 
evangelical community of America. It is simply no longer accurate to 
identify ``evangelical" with ``religious right."

To those familiar with American religious history, this development will 
not come as a surprise. Christians who are theologically conservative 
have not always been politically right wing. In the 19th and early 20th 
centuries, evangelicals were in the forefront of such progressive 
movements as abolition and women's suffrage. And African-American 
churches, it bears mentioning, have always been theologically 
conservative and politically progressive.

Historically, the main worry of the most theologically conservative 
Protestants, who began calling themselves ``fundamentalists" in 1912, 
was religious, not political. They wanted to preserve such orthodox 
beliefs as the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, and the 
inerrancy of the Bible against what they called ``modernism," which 
included the critical historical study of the Bible and the theory of 
evolution. But these same people were often left-leaning populists and 
progressives in the political arena.

The best known self-styled ``fundamentalist" of the late 19th and early 
20th century was the three-time Democratic candidate for president 
William Jennings Bryan. Bryan is remembered today mainly for his role in 
the Scopes ``monkey trial" in 1925, the last year of his life. But even 
then, Bryan remained a progressive fundamentalist. (No biblical 
literalist, he believed that the seven days of creation mentioned in 
Genesis might refer to very long eons. ``The Bible is about the rock of 
ages, not the age of rocks," he remarked, slyly ribbing the 
literalists.) Bryan's positions on public policy issues were almost the 
complete opposite of those of today's religious right. His famous 
``cross of gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago 
brought crowds to their feet with its stinging attacks on Wall Street. 
He was so suspicious of militarism that he resigned from Woodrow 
Wilson's cabinet before World War I to protest what he saw as that 
president's undue belligerency toward Germany.

Some historians believe that after the ridicule poured on them during 
the Scopes trial American fundamentalists retreated in humiliation and 
almost disappeared. This, however, is a mistaken picture and makes it 
hard to explain their powerful rebirth after World War II. Where had 
they been? And how did they get where they are today?

The fundamentalists had not disappeared. During the 1930s and 1940s they 
simply regrouped, and began to form a nationwide religious 
counter-culture made up of thousands of independent churches, Bible 
institutes, summer camps, conference centers, radio ministries, and 
revival services. They advised their people to ``come out and be 
separate." Since society at large was so obviously plunging toward 
judgment and destruction, they usually eschewed any political 
involvement. Why patch up a ship that was doomed to sink anyway? The 
kind of reforms Bryan once advocated now seemed pointless to them. The 
best one could do was to save as many individual souls as possible.

But in 1940, a rift emerged among religiously conservative Protestants, 
marking a major change in the American religious landscape. An 
influential group under the leadership of the Rev. Harold Ockenga of 
Boston's Park Street Church formed the National Association of 
Evangelicals. Its purpose was to draw a sharp line not just against 
``modernists," but also against fundamentalists. These evangelicals held 
many of the same beliefs as fundamentalists, but there were important 
differences. Evangelicals firmly believed in the religious and moral 
authority of the Bible, but most did not consider it a dependable source 
for geology or history. The main point of contention, however, was that 
evangelicals did not want to withdraw from the larger society; they 
wanted to engage it. Longing for a rebirth of Protestant Christian 
influence on American culture, they went public.

If Bryan had been the most visible American purveyor of evangelical 
Christianity in the decades before his death in 1925, beginning in the 
early 1950s that mantle was passed to the Rev. Billy Graham. Starting as 
a raw-boned Tennessee fundamentalist, Graham matured over the next 
decades. He soon became the icon of the evangelical movement, but much 
more than that as well. Year after year, polls showed him to be the most 
respected religious leader in the country. As he shook off the hard 
shell of his early years, however, he also reaped scorn and abuse from 
fundamentalists for cooperating with ``liberal" denominations and 
Catholics in his many crusades; for insisting that his audiences, even 
in the South, should not be segregated; and, later, by calling for the 
abolition of nuclear weapons.

But alongside Billy Graham's coupling of evangelical theology with a 
broad social outlook, a narrow and contentious new kind of 
evangelicalism was also emerging in America. When a little-known Baptist 
preacher and self-styled fundamentalist named Jerry Falwell, at the 
urging of conservative Republican campaign specialists, organized what 
he called The Moral Majority in the late 1970s, the religious core 
principles of the original fundamentalist movement were nowhere in 
sight. One heard little about theological issues like the virgin birth 
or even the inerrancy of scripture. This was an explicitly political 
movement.

Anything but an advocate of ``come out and be separate," Falwell 
welcomed Catholics, Jews, and even Mormons, if they shared his political 
and moral convictions. His agenda was provoked not by religious heresy, 
but by what he and his followers described as a frontal assault on the 
traditional values of American society.

Some of the voices in this new and politically charged ``moral 
fundamentalism" took the battle to the streets and, like Randall Terry, 
founder of Operation Rescue, were arrested blocking abortion clinics. 
Now the enemy was no longer theological modernism, but a series of court 
decisions that banned prayer and Bible reading in public schools, 
legalized abortion, and reached a climax here in Massachusetts with the 
approval of gay marriage. Indeed one preacher called the fight over 
same-sex marriage not just another skirmish but the ``battle of 
Gettysburg." ``If we lose this one," he remarked, ``we lose the culture 
war."

At first the alliance Falwell forged with the most conservative wing of 
the Republican Party paid off handsomely for both partners. The 
religious right mobilized perhaps millions of voters for Republican 
candidates, and in turn, beginning with Ronald Reagan, Republican office 
holders rewarded the movement's leaders with briefings, phone calls, and 
access to the highest level of the administration, including the Oval 
Office. Even though by the 1990s Falwell's Moral Majority had faded, it 
was succeeded by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and James Dobson's 
Focus on the Family. Both are also driven by explicitly political agendas.

In recent years, however, the political alliance Falwell originally 
stitched together has been fraying. Republicans in office have not 
achieved the results-on abortion, school prayer, marriage, and other 
cultural issues-that the religious right expected. In May of this year, 
speaking about support for Republican congressional leaders in the 
midterm elections, and possibly in 2008, James Dobson grumbled, ``I 
think there's going to be trouble down the road if they don't get on the 
ball."

Meanwhile, a series of missteps and embarrassments-the religious right's 
heavy-handed intrusion into the Terry Schiavo case, the intemperate 
statements by Falwell (who attributed 9/11 to God's judgment on America 
for its gays and feminists) and by Pat Robertson (who advocated the 
assassination of the president of Venezuela on his nationwide television 
program), and the criminal investigation of Ralph Reed, the former 
director of the Christian Coalition-appear to have driven more moderate 
evangelicals away from the old religious right.

But as the religious right begins to lose its former vitality, something 
else has begun to emerge in the American evangelical world that could 
have even longer-lasting significance: the reappearance of a politically 
progressive evangelicalism.

The spirit of Bryan and his like is being born again. Some of this 
change is powered by the amazing growth of mega-churches throughout the 
country. These congregations, often 15,000 to 20,000 strong, are mostly 
evangelical in style if not in substance. Their preachers generally 
steer clear of controversial doctrinal questions and concentrate on 
practical spiritual advice for day-to-day living. Joel Osteen, pastor of 
the mammoth Lakeside mega-church in Houston, is more likely to preach on 
how to avoid procrastination than on abortion or homosexuality. Like 
other mega-church pastors, Osteen knows how to market his product, and 
has found that many younger people are simply not drawn by antigay 
preaching or by the other hot-button cultural issues so favored by the 
old religious right.

Last February, many evangelicals responded enthusiastically when Rick 
Warren, pastor of the immense Saddleback church in California organized 
a coalition to safeguard the environment based on explicitly evangelical 
religious beliefs, such as God's command to human beings to be faithful 
stewards and to nurture and care for the earth. Both Falwell and 
Robertson have refused to sign on.

The new face of American evangelicalism is not confined to the 
mega-churches. It is also appearing among younger evangelicals, like the 
ones attracted to Jim Wallis's Call to Renewal movement; in smaller, 
more traditional congregations; and among evangelical student groups on 
secular college campuses. It is especially evident on many Christian 
college campuses, like Calvin College, which handed Bush such a rude 
surprise last year. In April of this year the vice president of the 
National Association of Evangelicals, and other prominent evangelical 
leaders, joined with more theologically liberal church figures and with 
Jewish and Catholic leaders to issue a strong public condemnation of 
torture based on shared religious principles. Though not naming names, 
the statement was clearly critical of the current administration's policies.

One reason the future may belong to these new evangelicals is that they 
take the life and teaching of Jesus more seriously than the religious 
right, which bases its positions not on the gospels, but on what they 
call ``traditional values" and ``family values." But Jesus himself had 
little to say about family values; rather, he emphasized love of 
neighbor, and even of the enemy. And he often criticized the 
``traditional values" of his own time so harshly that the anxious 
guardians of those traditions viewed him as a menace.

To be sure, the old religious right is not dead yet. Its coffers are 
crammed with millions of dollars. It controls hundreds of radio and TV 
stations. It still exerts influence, especially on judicial 
appointments. Nonetheless, we may be witnessing the last hurrah of the 
old generation of fundamentalist and evangelical religious spokesmen. 
They can no longer speak with any assurance that they will be heard by 
all of the people once considered a faithful following.

What is happening in American evangelical Christianity is both a 
changing of the guard and the emergence of a younger constituency with 
different ideas. This does not mean they will all vote for Democrats, 
with whom they still disagree on several matters, but that they are 
concerned about a much wider range of issues. The progressive social 
impulse of early 20th century evangelicalism appears to be making a 
comeback in an America sadly in need of a vision that is both 
spiritually vital and politically forward looking.

Harvey Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has 
taught since 1965. His books include ``The Secular City" and, most 
recently, ``When Jesus Came to Harvard."
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company