God’s Own Party, cont.

by Steven P. Miller

In Dan Williams’ God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, we now have a go-to narrative analysis of the roots, rise, and resilience of the Christian Right. While Williams builds on earlier scholarship—especially William Martin’s memorable and anecdote-rich With God on Our Side—his book is an exceedingly original contribution based on deep (and I mean deep) research leavened by the wisdom of almost a decade’s worth of reflection. Williams writes with grace and clarity.

Williams describes a “ninety-year quest” (9), which started with the culture wars of the 1920s and intensified with the surprisingly (and overly) confident evangelical activism of the late 1940s and 1950s. (The early National Association of Evangelicals comes across as a proto-Moral Majority—something that those of us with our heads stuck in that Seventies decade should keep in mind.) After authoritatively covering the somewhat more familiar territory of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Williams, to his great credit, follows through with a deft ordering of the recent past. The power, glory, and spectacle of the George W. Bush years yielded to the uncertain trumpet of 2008 (which, in turn, was complicated by the blaring trumpet that is Sarah Palin).

Below are a few preliminary—and somewhat random—thoughts on how God’s Own Party informs what might be called the new evangelical history. (Later, I hope to do the same for Darren Dochuk’s no less eagerly awaited From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, which will appear in December.)

First, I affirm the use of “Christian Right” (as opposed to Religious Right) to describe an evangelical Protestant movement that, largely for strategic reasons, has included a broader range of actors. That said, a lot remains to be learned about the relationship between the Christian Right and the Catholic right. On this and other topics, Williams offers intriguing leads for future researchers (Attn. graduate students).

Williams gives “fundamentalist” vs. “evangelical” quite a bit of analytical heft, noting (echoing John’s study of Campus Crusade for Christ) that those identities were well defined only by the late 1950s before showing (my interpretation here) how they became less relevant by the 1980s, as the Reagan coalition took shape. Irenic Billy Graham and surly Bob Jones, Jr., had more than a few overlapping friends and positions, but Williams is very clear about their differences, especially concerning civil rights issues. He argues that “fundamentalists became ‘conservatives’ in opposition to the Kennedy administration” (59)—that is, well before New Right activists sidled up to Jerry Falwell, et al.

It’s hard to know just what to make of “Nixon’s evangelical strategy” (89), as Williams aptly calls it. His Nixon was an ambitious, but superficial manipulator of evangelical politics who went so far as to try to install his man (Veterans Administration official Fred Rhodes) as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. H. R. Haldeman and the once-born version of Charles Colson were equal parts ruthless and bumbling. Yet, as Williams notes, the salad days of the “silent majority” came after the fall, when Christian Right activists embraced its populist tone (“moral majority”). That’s “Nixonland” for you, I guess.

I sense an emerging scholarly consensus that abortion was a driving force behind the growth of the Christian Right from a very early date, even if W. A. Criswell tacitly endorsed Roe v. Wade and even if Jerry Falwell initially said little about the matter. Most such expressions of moderation occurred before the phrase “abortion on demand” became established, first as a concept, then as a statistic. To be sure, one might interpret that “concept” as a “rhetorical device.” But I think Williams is wise to avoid a cynical interpretation of evangelical pro-life politics. (For Francis Schaeffer, to cite one example, Reaganism was a proxy for opposition to abortion—not the other way around.)

Williams’ work is a story of (to quote an earlier version of the title) “Republican faith,” and it becomes clear in this book that, as early as the Eisenhower years, the GOP was the logical vessel through which to pursue conservative evangelical politics. This reality, as I read Williams, points to the overall pragmatism and patience of the Christian Right, not to its naivete or lust for power (as is sometimes suggested). If the Christian Right endures, as Williams believes it will, it will do so in large part because it made itself into a major wing of a major party.

The Naked Public Square, Revisited

by Steven P. Miller

Research for my next book has led me to read or view several evangelical classics “again, for the first time.” To be honest, despite my modest panel cred as a scholar of modern evangelical history, in some cases it’s just been for the first time. Perhaps there is no shame in confessing to never before having watched Whatever Happened to the Human Race? or the documentary version of The Late Great Planet Earth (the latter of which is less Orwellian than Orwellesian, Orson Welles being the host for this extended shuttle run between Jesus Movement apocalypticism and Seventies anti-growth liberalism). I’m a little more sheepish, though, about waiting until last week to read Richard John Neuhaus’ The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America cover to cover.

The significance of The Naked Public Square perhaps goes without saying, and I had heard the gist of its thesis a thousand times: The artificial divorce of religion from American public life imperils American democracy, not to mention millions of American believers. Conservative columnist George Will called it “the book from which further debate about church-state relations should begin.” Will seems to have received his wish.

My research interests lie in the major impetus for Neuhaus’ jeremiad—the arrival of what he called “the religious new right.” For Neuhaus, that phenomenon had “kicked a tripwire alerting us to a pervasive contradiction in our culture and politics. We insist that we are a democratic society, yet we have in recent decades systematically excluded from policy consideration the operative values of the American people, values that are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief” (37). Note the use of “us” and “we,” an interesting slip since elsewhere in the book Neuhaus chides mainline Protestants for their reflexive use of the royal (that is, the custodial) “we” when denouncing the rest of American society. Neuhaus clearly wanted to tame what he, in the mid-1980s at least, saw as the potential for excess among those “evangelicals and fundamentalists who have lately come in from the cold of their sixty-year exile” (260).

Neuhaus thus positioned himself as a hostile critic of the new class left and a friendly critic of the religious right. In retrospect, his was an impossible balancing act. Even in the book, friendly criticism often morphs into legitimization (albeit somewhat condescendingly so). This is why I feel comfortable calling this book an evangelical classic. This also might be why Time magazine included the Lutheran-turned-Catholic on its 2005 list of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” Charles Colson, who also made the cut, once likened The Naked Public Square to Augustine’s The City of God. A more sober comparison might be with Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center.

As I read his book, Neuhaus wanted to create a kind of vital religious center, even though he criticized Schlesinger-style liberalism for presuming a secularized brand of American democracy. As I read the remainder of Neuhaus’ career, though, what he helped to create was a more vital religious right, which during the next two decades set the tone for how Americans discussed religion and society. One reason, no doubt, was that mainline Protestants either did not heed Neuhaus’ call or did not offer a salable alternative to it. But surely another reason was, quite simply, that Neuhaus positioned himself as a political conservative. Neuhaus could still paint himself as an unaffiliated soul in the mid-1980s, yet he made several moves pointing toward an enduring home on the right: downplaying economic justice issues (as if to leave that sector of the public square to the economists’ decidedly secular curves), suggesting that “pluralism” really was just a synonym for “secularism,” and likening opposition to abortion to support for civil rights.

Nowhere was Neuhaus’ reach more evident than in the subtitle R. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister chose for their introduction to the American Quarterly’s powerhouse September 2007 issue on religion: “Is the Public Square Still Naked?” Griffith and McAlister note how Neuhaus’ thesis eventually resonated even in liberal political circles (most influentially, within the Obama campaign). “We will not be rescued by religion,” Neuhaus warned toward the end of his book, yet the watered down version of the other 263 pages often has amounted to an assumption that religious-folks-are-good-and-therefore-good-for-public-life (260). This formulation resembles Martin Marty’s famous (and pithier) “religion-in-general.” Neuhaus’ book, however, suggests why generic “religion” arguably now has a more evangelical feel that it did in postwar America. “How strange is this historical moment,” Neuhaus declared, “in which talk about the public role of religion is thought to be conservative” (156). As it were, he helped to make the strange seem normal.

The Divided Mind of 19th-century “Evangelical Nationalism”

by Steven P. Miller

Recently, I had a flashback to my first major conference presentation. It was at the 2003 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association. Amid my excitement—read: nervousness—I was a less than stellar listener as my fellow panelists held forth. Still, I listened well enough to be surprised when the panel commentator routinely referred to a “Tappan” who had served as a Baptist missionary in post-Civil War North Carolina. I was pretty sure Cornell historian Derek Chang had mentioned neither Arthur nor Lewis in his paper. The commentator had meant to say “Tupper”—as in American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS) minister and Shaw University president Henry Martin Tupper, one of the protagonists in Chang’s original and important new book, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century. Original, in no small part because another main character is Fung Chak, an ABHMS missionary who oversaw its Chinese Mission School in Portland, Oregon. Important, because Chang uses his case studies to offer insightful reflections on, in the words of his introduction, “Evangelical Christianity and the Problem of Difference.”

A while ago I mentioned offhand that Gary Gerstle’s civic-racial nationalism heuristic might be useful for teaching American religious history. My point was that we should keep religion at the center of discussions about historical understandings of American-ness (not the most original of proposals, to be sure, as other contributors to this blog have been doing so for quite some time!). Chang’s book is a welcome additional step in that direction. I especially like his emphasis on the inclusive, as well as the exclusive, side of 19th-century custodial evangelicalism, which he encapsulates in the term “evangelical nationalism.”

Here’s more from The University of Pennsylvania Press: Through its domestic missionary wing, the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, Baptists ministered to former slaves in the South and Chinese immigrants on the Pacific coast. Espousing an ideology of evangelical nationalism, in which the country would be united around Christianity rather than a particular race or creed, Baptists advocated inclusion of Chinese and African Americans in the national polity. Their hope for a Christian nation hinged on the social transformation of these two groups through spiritual and educational uplift. . . . Citizens of a Christian Nation chronicles the intertwined lives of African Americans, Chinese Americans, and the white missionaries who ministered to them. It traces the radical, religious, and nationalist ideology of the domestic mission movement, examining both the opportunities provided by the egalitarian tradition of evangelical Christianity and the limits imposed by its assumptions of cultural difference. The book further explores how blacks and Chinese reimagined the evangelical nationalist project to suit their own needs and hopes.

Goshen College Gets (Civil) Religion

by Steven P. Miller

Mennonites usually appear in the headlines when someone has confused them with their close (but very different and more interesting) relatives, the Amish. This week, though, The New York Times, MSNBC, and other media outlets chose to cover a novel event in my part of Mennoworld: the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at my alma mater and temporary place of employment, Goshen (Ind.) College. This was a first for the 116-year-old institution, affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA, a historic peace church.

My alma mater is extremely sensitive to criticism, which usually comes from groups to the theological right of this traditional bastion of Mennonite liberalism (Put it this way: I’ve heard stories of evangelists declaring that the sewers of Goshen are “clogged with fetuses”). Still, Mennonites are fond of having conversations (as opposed to conflicts), and in that spirit I will venture forth with a few observations/teachable asides about L’Affaire Anthem.

The criticism of the new anthem policy within Goshen circles has some interesting parallels to how the “young evangelicals” of the early 1970s interpreted Robert Bellah’s famous “civil religion” thesis. That is, they focused almost exclusively on the priestly, rather than the prophetic, side of American civil religion. Such an approach might work as theology, but it does not suffice as history. In the classroom this semester, I have tried to get my students thinking about the multiple meaning of American-ness (and claims to American-ness) by using a modified form of Gary Gerstle’s civic vs. racial nationalism rubric, which I’ve long thought also is relevant to the study of American religion.

I’m intrigued to hear criticism of the anthem policy coming from other than Mennonite circles. It’s as if Goshen had some sort of obligation to be the foil for Christendom. Where did these high expectations come from? My best guess is the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a vocal fan of Mennos who hitched his highly influential post-liberal vision to the spirit of the very Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.

As the above thoughts might suggest, I’m not terribly bothered by the new policy—a fact that puts me in the minority among my alumni friends. In deciding to play the anthem before most sporting events, the college unquestionably is abandoning a source of Mennonite distinctiveness. On the other hand, no one who attends a Goshen baseball game—and hears an announcement of the school’s core values (three of which are “Global Citizenship, Servant Leadership and Compassionate Peacemaking”), followed by a musical version the anthem, followed in turn by the Peace Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi—will mistake the place for Patrick Henry College. Besides, our nickname is not “Crusaders,” not “Flames”; it’s “Maple Leafs.”

All You Need is Love (or, A Book I Should Have Read Three Years Ago)

by Steven P. Miller
I was doing many things back in 2006—namely, defending a dissertation, then beginning the laborious task of revising it. I was not, I regret, reading Debby Applegate’s thrilling and richly contextualized biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America—and wouldn’t finally do so until last week. Paul talked a while back about a “boomlet in religious biography.” Applegate’s Pulitzer Prize winner puts the boom in boomlet. The book provides a window into the human (very human) side of perhaps the greatest of the many great reversals in American Protestant history: the transition from Lyman Beecher’s providential God, who already was warming up to the idea of human improvement, to his son Henry’s Gospel of Love, from which derives that warm fuzzy feeling I get every time I attend a Presbyterian Church, USA service. In short, Applegate offers a riveting coming-of-age story for liberal Protestantism. In the sense that Beecher was at the center of so much of mid-nineteenth century American history, the book also is a mini coming-of-age story for the nation itself. (Applegate proudly writes in the old-school—that is, pre-theory—American Studies tradition, which practically begs for such sweeping generalizations.)

Ward’s status as the man at the center got me thinking. Purportedly, more than a few conservative Protestants in this country are nostalgic for an earlier golden age of evangelical culture and influence, which likely occurred sometime in antebellum America. Likely, that is, just as Beecher started mucking everything up with his Gospel of Love and, if you believe the evidence in the book (from which Applegate, in an odd replication of the euphemistic ways of her Victorian subjects, skirts around outright conclusions), his propensity to express that love in diverse fashions. Maybe Beecher wasn’t a hypocrite, but rather a good anything-goes liberal, suggests this shallow reading of Beecher, which Paul smacked down when it surfaced in a Books & Culture review. But, if you think about it, shouldn’t fans of the old-time Christian America wish that, say, Ted Haggard’s own extramarital endeavors had caused as much of a stir as did the charge that Beecher seduced Elizabeth Tilton? Perhaps what evangelicals should really be nostalgic about is a period when an adulterous minister was the subject of a national scandal precisely because that minister had real influence outside of his home base. On the cusp of the Beecher-Tilton scandal, New York elites genuinely believed that revelations about Beecher’s exploits “would tend to undermine the very foundation of social order” (408). Say what you what you will about Ted Haggard, but he can only wish he had ever been a pillar of the social order. Besides, Beecher’s story would make a much richer movie. Anyone know if one is in the works?