Evangelicalism, Continental Philosophy, and the Deconstructed Church

by Gerardo Marti

While completing my manuscript on race and music in multiracial churches (more on that at a later time), I've had opportunity to focus on some intriguing contemporary developments among Evangelicals which has drawn the attention of a few people across disciplinary lines. As an outgrowth of this research, and thanks to a wonderful invitation from philosopher Jack Caputo, I spent much of last week at Syracuse University participating in The Future of the Continental Philosophy of Religion conference.

The conference in Syracuse was quite an event, a gathering of around 300 philosophers from the US and UK who specialize in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze and the like along with more recent thinkers like Zizek and Meillassoux (you can check out the conference program). I was pleased to hear Catherine Malabou, Thomas Altizer, and Merold Westphol interacting in sessions. With Harvey Cox, Clayton Crockett, and Philip Goodchild in the mix, it was really quite an occasion.

I was invited to present in a session on Peter Rollins, what I called "the phenomenon of Peter Rollins," as a means to explore one development in the Continental Philosophy of Religion. When I was invited to present, my response to Jack Caputo was something like,"You realize I'm a sociologist and not a philosopher, right?" They were quite willing to introduce a multi-disciplinary dialogue that described not only with the ideas of Peter Rollins but what he may represent as actions and movements in our broader religious context. With thirty minutes to share, I tried to unpack my best understanding of how Peter Rollins lies along a long path of renegotiating conservative Christianity that has been brewing for almost two decades.

Most of us know that the spectacular success of Evangelicalism in the 1970s through the 1990s created a self-sustaining Evangelical world—and that these successes created a backlash. Evangelical leaders came to seek ways to overcome the churched/non-churched divide. But the journey hasn’t been smooth.

As Evangelicals became attentive to creating a closed “Christian culture,” many disaffected evangelicals left their churches, becoming critics rather than compliant members. Listening to criticism from outside, atheistic thinkers resourced their critique. There emerged a number of Christian readers of secular philosophy who were pleased to take up an aggressive questioning of the certainty, “truth,” and the resulting morality and politics that came with it. Much of the underlying tone of such criticism draws on a hermeneutics of suspicion with its post-Marx, post-Nietzsche, and post-Freud sensibilities. Notions and paradigms promoted by these new "Christian" writers and thinkers is buttressed and often inspired directly by Continental Philosophy.

Attention to "postmodern thinkers" complimented a broader surge of interest in “postmodern philosophy” among Evangelical seminarians and church leaders. Christian publishers are still catching up to this hunger, producing more books building on recent philosophical work (e.g., Philosophy and Theology series from Continuum / T&T Clark and Church and Postmodern Culture series from Baker Publishing Group). In practice, a growing number of evangelical church leaders are moving from simple “Bible Study” to openly engaging Continental Philosophy through their books and concepts in small gatherings. On my twitter feed yesterday, I mentioned Gianni Vattimo's work, and that initiated a stream of follow-up discussions with fellow tweeps who pay attention to theology and religion.

This engagement with such deeply intellectual work represents a significant shift. Mark Noll in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind articulated the historical basis for anti-intellectualism among Ameircan Evangelicals. Now we are seeing more educated Evangelicals who are finding their religious frameworks “lag” behind the theoretical or epistemological/ontological sophistication of their schooling. They have fundamental critiques of what they see as “modern” ways of reading the bible (hermeneutics), organizing the church (ecclesiology), and assessing morality and devotion (spiritual formation) and are forming new types of Christian gatherings to express their developing values.

Continental philosophy "works" because it involves thinkers whose work invokes a sustained social critique. Continental philosophy is concerned with structures, underlying structures of society (often drawn from Marxist orientations) and underlying structures of the psyche (often drawn from Freudian orientations). A pursuit of uncovering the working of underlying, non-conscious, structures, cultivates observations that eventually can move to practical efforts in what to talk to people about (preaching), what humans are to become (evangelism and discipleship), how community is to be lived together (ecclesiology and “loving one’s neighbor”), and how to act in the world (duty to God and others). These writings provide resources for being prophetic to the church and to the world.

These intra-Evangelical critics have been helped by the “religious turn” in Continental Philosophy and the greater availability of religious thinkers in this vein as primary and secondary works were made more available at the same time as the disaffection and pursuit of alternative frameworks happened among evangelicals. This includes writings from and about Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Rene Girard, Jon-Luc Marion, Emmanual Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Nancy -- Slavoj Žižek,, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Gianni Vattimo). Jack Caputos’s appropriation of Derrida, Levinas’s rejection of Heidegger, Marion’s religious reinterpretation of phenemenologists, and more emerge amidst this re-thinking, aggressively incorporating insights from philosophers who engage in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger.

In the conference, I dared to raise Peter Rollins to a more significant level by placing him in a broader socio-historical context. Trained in post-structural philosophy, with a PhD from Queens University in Northern Ireland, Rollins intellectually stimulating style of speaking, writing, and consulting fits efforts to flesh out Christianity in new ways that are sensitive to societal shifts and emerging sensibilities. In other words, the happenings around his person are a manifestation of changes across mainstream Christianity. So while Peter Rollins is an interesting person in and of himself, I moved away from assuming that compelling ideas from a single, charismatic leader initiates social change. Instead, Peter Rollins unique “ministry” (which I place in quotes) is an interesting and timely development of American Christianity that finds resonance in the cumulative contradictions of modern Evangelicalism.

Overall, I suspect that Continental Philosophy is underpinning a profound reworking of theological questions including what is the church (ecclesiology), what it means to be human (anthropology), and how life is to be lived (ethics) -- at least for a significant segment of American Christians. Peter Rollins’s appropriation of Continental Philosophy fuels provocative practices in the form of preaching and new types of groups among those who resonate with his message. And it’s the practice of new religious gatherings (like "Pub Churches") that especially attracts the interest of this sociologist. If anyone can contribute any insight or corrections on this, I'm happy to interact on it.

Glenn Beck and Paul Revere: The Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse Retire

Paul Harvey

I know many of you were SO excited last Friday when you saw that Glenn Beck had signed up to be a contributing editor here. Well, a lot has changed in the last week. As you doubtless know, Beck's show on Fox is coming to an end a bit later this year. But much more importantly than that, he is resigning from being a contributor to RiAH. So sad, but we'll wish him all the best. He sent along this explanation for both actions to the Wall Street Journal (sorry, not sure if this is a free link or behind a paywall, but here's the money quote):

Beck said he took a job at Fox News two years ago because he felt “if I could prove my case that something wicked this way was coming, something in America was wrong, America would listen, and they have.”

Beck said that Paul Revere “got off the horse point at some point and fought in the revolution and then he went back to silversmithing.” “I believe we’re heading into deep and treacherous waters,” Beck said about America”s future. He said he is developing other content for Fox for TV and other media. “I will continue to tell the story and I’m going to be showing you other ways for us to connect. But I have other things to do.

"Fox is one of the only places you'll find the truth. Spread the word," he said in concluding his remarks announcing the end of his show and the end of his RiAH contributions. Unlike Paul Revere and his Raiders, Beck is not actually returning either to silversmithing or to producing classic early 70s AM hits such as "Cherokee Nation," but reportedly back to other television shows, probably through his own network.

For a full-length analysis of this new development in religion, consumerism, and the media, I have only one question: Where have you gone, Kathryn Lofton, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you (and more seriously just for a second, the link takes you to a wonderful observer-participant reflection posted at Immanent Frame on K. Lofton's Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, by Daphne Brooks of Princeton University).

But back to our story, here is the video announcing Beck's change of plans:



For those who want a reprise of pretty much all of the major themes that Beck has followed in his pursuit of truth, you can find them here, channeled through Jon Stewart (ht John Fea):

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A Nation of Outsiders

Paul Harvey

Sometimes I like to take note of books here which don’t fall into the category of American religious history in some formal sense, but which address religious/cultural themes in ways that are fresh and innovative. Today we have such a text, just published with Oxford: Grace Hale’s A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. Kaye Hymowitz reviews it here for the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post discusses it here.

The author has been at work on this book a long time, and it’s worth the wait (I read a previous rough draft of the book manuscript a couple of years ago and am going off that; I think nothing drastically changed between then and its publication this year). I admit I preferred the original title of this manuscript before it got changed for the book. Originally it was titled Rebel, Rebel: Outsiders in Twentieth Century America. I loved the multiple signifiers of Rebel there. Oh well, it looks like the publishers wanted one of those “how” subtitles that so many books have now.

More important are the wide-ranging connections Grace Hale draws between romanticism, a sense of alienation and outsiderism, and cultural politics through the twentieth century. The “New Left” and the “New Right” (both very old now) both receive extensive attention, as do writers ranging from Norman Mailer and Elizabeth Bishop to Bob Dylan to William F. Buckley. Hale writes compellingly of the central role musical desires for “authenticity” played in shaping 1960s culture. “Romanticism and a sense of social justice were inseparable,” Hale says, and that romanticism came not just from some sense of alienation from conformist 1950s America, but from much older roots in the Romantic period. As Hymowitz writes in the review:

The new rebels looked to the country's outsiders to clarify their own feelings of alienation. In this respect, postwar rebellion had roots in 19-century romanticism. In their "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth and Coleridge had tried to locate hidden human truths in the experience of "people on the margins," Ms. Hale argues—children, peddlers, miners, even the insane. Kerouac wrote in the same vein though with less literary art: "The only people for me are the mad ones," announces the hero of "On the Road," "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk . . . desirous of everything at the same time." Other rebels, including folk singers like Pete Seeger and, soon enough, back-to-the-land hippies, believed that they spied in rural America the rootedness and authenticity that was being devoured by suburbia and mass culture.

Of great relevance for this blog are the last two chapters, one on the Christian right generally (with a broad conceptual map of what constitutes Christian right there, including William F. Buckley, Jerry Falwell, Jesus People, and others from all over the spectrum), and another more specifically on Operation Rescue.

Book description from Oxford:

At mid-century, Americans increasingly fell in love with characters like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's Johnny in The Wild One , musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These emotions enabled some middle-class whites to cut free of their own histories and identify with those who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed to possess instead vital cultural resources and a depth of feeling not found in "grey flannel" America.

In this wide-ranging and vividly written cultural history, Grace Elizabeth Hale sheds light on why so many white middle-class Americans chose to re-imagine themselves as outsiders in the second half of the twentieth century and explains how this unprecedented shift changed American culture and society. Love for outsiders launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From the mid-sixties through the eighties, it flourished in the hippie counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the Jesus People movement, and among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as strengths. It changed the very meaning of "authenticity" and "community."

Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict-the struggle between the desire for self-determination and autonomy and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic life.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Outsiders and Rebels
Part I: Learning to Love Outsiders
Chapter 1: Lost Children of Plenty: Growing Up as Rebellion
Chapter 2: Rebel Music: Minstrelsy, Rock and Roll, and Beat Writing
Chapter 3: Black as Folk: The Folk Music Revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and Bob Dylan
Chapter 4: Rebels on the Right: Conservatives as Outsiders in Liberal America
Part II: Romance in Action
Chapter 5: The New White Negroes in Action: Students for a Democratic Society, the Economic Research and Action Project, and Freedom Summer
Chapter 6: Too Much Love: Black Power and the Search for Other Outsiders
Chapter 7: The Making of Christian Countercultures: God's Outsiders from the Jesus People to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
Chapter 8: Rescue: Christian Outsiders in Action in the Pro-Life Movement
Conclusion: The Cost of Rebellion

God-Fearing and Free: Reviews of a Cultural History of the Cold War.

Paul Harvey

A brief note, and a couple of excellent contrasting reviews, of a new book sure to draw a lot of attention: Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War, just out with Harvard U. Press.

This isn't your father's Cold War book, nor a foreign policy/diplomatic history such as Melvyn Leffler's For the Soul of Mankind. Nor it is one of those "all those crazy duck-and-cover drills, my weren't those funny" books -- not that I dislike those books, and students love them, but that territory has been covered. Rather, this is a searching cultural history of American thought and culture during the Cold War, focusing especially on the liberal elite Cold Warriors who provided much of the discourse from that period.

The link above takes you to a description, table of contents, etc. for the book. Here, I wanted to call your attention to two thoughtful reviews; both praise the achievements of the book, but the first provides some critical reflections and dissent.

Molly Worthen, " 'Counter-Modernism' and Cold War America," extensively reviews the volume, finds much to like, but dissents from portions of what she calls a "learned but highly theoretical intellectual history," one she finds too detached from the real world of policymakers.

By contrast, in The New Republic's online book review section The Book, Michael Kimmage finds God-Fearing and Free a "brilliant and original work of scholarship" in the best tradition of American Studies -- in other words, he likes most precisely what Worthen finds most problematic. The book discusses at considerable length the theme of "innocence," one a staple of American studies scholarship and one revived here to great effect.

I can't wait to dig into this text in more detail; in the interim, these two thoughtful reviews provide much food for thought.

"Pre-History" of Protestant Debates About Abortion

This guest post comes from my colleague and fellow University of Tennessee American religious historian, Mark Hulsether. Mark's work focuses upon the intersection of religion, culture and politics post-1945 in the U.S., and his most recent book, Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States considers the new religious right, religious aspects of ethnic and sexual diversity, and the impact of media on popular religion. Hopefully, we will see more from Mark in the future.

A Comment on the “Pre-History” of Protestant Debates About Abortion Before Roe V. Wade

Mark Hulsether

Reading the thread below about Dan Williams’ new book, God’s Own Party, I was interested in the discussion about abortion—that is, about rethinking how much the issue of abortion was important for traditions of politicized evangelicals prior to the mid-1970s. When I wrote on this issue years ago, I drew on Robert Booth Fowler’s book, A New Engagement, which was based largely on a content analysis of Christianity Today (CT) from 1966 to 1976. Abortion doesn’t stand out there all that much—although it is in the mix—and in Fowler’s brief section about it, most of the citations are from 1973 forward.

But I’ve done little primary research on this and I look forward to being instructed by Williams.

The reason I am writing is to mention a possible similar dynamic—if we hypothesize that evangelicals presupposed opposition to abortion before the 1970s and simply didn’t talk about it too much until after 1973—on the leftward side of the coin constituted by Protestant right on one side, in dialog with Protestant left-liberals on the other.

In my book on Christianity and Crisis magazine (C&C), I have a section about its evolving views on abortion, along with its exceedingly bitter debate about Roe V. Wade and successor policies. If you like vivid and intense conflict in your reading material, this section has it, for example one scholar who said that his colleague’s work was like “giving dum-dum bullets to the Mafia.”

Anyway, C&C (which I’m using as a rough-and-ready barometer of left-liberal debates, somewhat like Fowler used CT) said little about abortion before 1973, although there was a dust-up in 1967.

What the debate after Roe V. Wade did was in large part to bring to the surface fault lines and submerged disagreements that had been there for some time, although evolving in complicated ways by the 1970s.

The pattern at C&C about LGBT rights has interesting family resemblances, too.

So I’m saying that it might be useful to learn from the patterns and to think about trends on both “sides of the coin” in explicit or implicit dialog with each other.

The Roots of Contemporary American Political and Religious Conflict

Randall Stephens

[Cross-posted from the THS blog]

Last year I used Rick Perlstein’s lively, entertaining, and insightful Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America for a course I teach on America in the 1960s. The students loved it. Perlstein’s dramatic narrative pulled us in.

At the outset Perlstein observes that by 1972 a sharp division existed between "'people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for' and 'people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for' . . . Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them 'red' or 'blue' America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate--or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate--has been the narrative of every election since." The book is compelling on a number of levels. Yet it lacks an appreciation for ways that America had been deeply divided in other eras.

Is the culture war that feeds our current political debates all that new? Hasn't America been split between warring factions for eons? Enter Barry Hankins. His new book Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today's Culture Wars, spans over that rowdy decade and offers insight into ongoing political and religious conflicts.

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s, an era of relative religious stability, Hankins suggests, may have been the aberration. The pitched battles over immigration, alcohol, Darwinian evolution, obscenity laws, and public morality that riled Americans in the 20s "were a prologue to our own age," says Hankins. Like our era that period was "a time when religion was culturally central, participating fully in politics, media, stardom, social life, and scandal." Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Daddy Grace, and Father Divine elbowed Charlie Chaplin, Al Joslon, and Clara Bow for newspaper headline space. (BTW, Matt Sutton gives it a great blurb.)

Hankins leads off with Warren Harding’s moral failings, "more repulsive than evil" in the words of a biographer. "There is a sense in which Harding’s story is the story of America during the Roaring Twenties," he remarks. The baptist president's religious life was thin, to put it mildly. His administration’s contempt for law, its moral degeneration, and the scandal that swirled around it defined the nation as well. Hankins similar treatment of moral crusades, scandalous religious leaders, and heated contests between liberals and conservatives has a contemporary ring to it.

History written through the eyes of the present, I’ve noticed, draws students in to the debates. Hankins does this well throughout Jesus and Gin. Hence, he notes that Edward J. Larson’s account of the Scopes Trial, "Summer for the Gods could not have been written between 1930 and 1980 for in that period the Scopes legend was taken for granted." In many ways the book is a comparative history that moves with ease between the Christian Right of the Reagan years and the late-Victorian moralizers of the 20s. (Though Hankins does note that there is no simple liberal-conservative split in the age of flappers and speakeasies.)

Hankins fittingly ends his with a rumination on "How the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for the Culture Wars of Our Own Time." The major struggles of our era have roots that go back decades.

Like Perlstein’s sweeping history, Hankin’s book draws attention to the deeper political and religious clashes that shape current debates. Both are great reads and both would work well in the classroom.

Runnin' Down the Dream

Paul Harvey

Glenn Beck is restoring honor: that is, restoring Martin Luther King's movement back to its true conservative, white roots. Stephen Colbert explains (starting at 2:53 below -- although earlier in the segment the Vatican endorsement of the Blues Brothers as a good film for Catholics is worth watching for sure). As Colbert explains, the date (August 28 -- the anniversary of King's speech) is divinely inspired because "whenever I tell people what he's doing, they always say, 'holy sh##t!'" As Jake and Elwood would say, he's on a mission from God. Actually, this Blues Brothers dialogue is more appropriate for pretty much any Beck-related post:

Jake: You lied to me.

Elwood: Wasn't lies, it was just... bullshit.

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Christian Bash-a-thon 2008

by Matt Sutton

As a graduate student I read R. Laurence Moore’s brilliant Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. Moore argues that religious groups have historically gained cultural power by positioning themselves as outsiders, even when they were/are not. Apparently the tradition of playing oppressed minority despite all evidence to the contrary is still going strong. The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (I didn’t realize that such a group existed) has compiled a list of “top ten Christian-bashing incidents” of 2008. Coming in at #10 was the Jack Black video that I blogged about here. In the top three spots are:

#3: Barack Obama Defames Christianity
According to research into President Elect Obama's own statements about faith, and an examination of Obama's position on moral issues, CADC has determined that by any biblical and historic Christian standard, Barack Obama is not a Christian, although he claims he is a "devout Christian."

[You can also see their list of seven reasons why Obama is not a Christian here]

#2: Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin Is Attacked
Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, came under sharp attack by some in the mainstream media because she self-identifies as a Christian. The Washington Post published a cartoon by Pat Oliphant mocking Palin because she has a background as a Pentecostal/Charistmatic Christian. A suspicious arson fire at Sarah Palin's home church recently caused over $1,000,000 in damage.

#1: Radical Homosexuals Assault Prop 8 Marriage Supporters in California
During and after the November campaign stories flooded in of pro-Prop 8 signs being taken, people verbally and physically assaulted, church property and private automobiles vandalized, and person's jobs and pastor's lives threatened simply for exercising their right to campaign and vote in support of traditional marriage.
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Apparently we should quit picking on Sarah Palin, pick on Barack Obama a whole lot more, and work to protect our most vulnerable and oppressed members of society, our pastors, from hate crimes. Hmmm…..

Child Poverty in Christian-Land

Paul Harvey

Colorado experienced nationally the largest growth rate in child poverty from 2000 to 2006, according to a study released yesterday: 180,000 children — 15.7 percent of the state total — were living in poverty in Colorado in 2006, a 73 percent increase since 2000.

Reading this study, I did a quick and admittedly unscientific web search to see what, if anything, religious right organizations in the Colorado Springs and Denver area (the epicenter, nationally, for these groups), from Focus on the Family to the megachurches to the dozens of other parachurch groups, had to say. The answer doubtless will shock you: nothing much, aside from generic statements about how marriage is good for kids and children in married families are less likely to be raised in poverty.

Fair enough; I would not dispute those statements, and there's a good argument that strengthening families is a good policy measure to combat poverty. Of course, in this world "strengthening families" has nothing to do with providing decent health insurance for the nearly 50 million uninsured, or providing the kind of post-natal support and parental leave common in European countries, or addressing critical state priorities in education, and on and on.

(Just to cite one random example: Higher education is one of the single greatest drivers of economic growth and lifting people's prospects, yet Colorado has ranked 49th in per capita higher education funding recently, just to cite one randomly chosen example. After a recent referendum in state tax policy allowing for the retention for a few years of "excess" tax revenue, I think we're all the way up to 44th now. Of course, the religious right locally opposed this change in tax policy).

I also know what we've gone through politically here in the last election cycles, and sure to be the case in this one as well: a frenzied focus on homosexuality, "the gay agenda," and especially gay marriage, sure to be worsened this time by the California Supreme Court decision and a statewide ballot measure banning gay marriage (similar to the one in Ohio in 2004). Again, scan the websites of these Colorado groups and you would assume that gay marriage will put the Republic in clear and present danger -- just as, in a previous generation, they portrayed miscegenation and the grave threat of interracial marriage, prior to the Loving case in 1967.

The disproportionate attention paid to these sideshow wedge issues has worked in firing up the base, but for how much longer? Even while evangelicals nationally appear to be waking up, belatedly, to a broader range of issues beyond the firebombs, Colorado's evangelicals still sound the same calls for culture wars.

Update: For evidence of my final statement above about some Colorado evangelicals, see this post from a local (Colorado Springs) pastor who sees complaints about poverty to be evidence of the "covetousness" of the impoverished. He writes: As Christians, we must look at the Bible's objective standards of poverty rather than at the federal government's poverty guidelines.

In other words, lack of access to affordable and decent food, health care, and education is perfectly biblical.

By contrast, we must "fight the good fight" on the central battleground for our times -- that being, of course, fighting the "homo-agenda." Onward, Christian soldier.