David Gushee On The Evangelical Left

In Chapter 3 of his new book - The Future of Faith in American Politics - Dr. David Gushee answers the question Who is the Evangelical Left?

Gushee argues that the most visible voices of the evangelical left include Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren and in the black evangelical community Jesse Jackson and Obery Hendricks. Gushee also lumps Jimmy Carter, Richard Pierard and Randall Balmer into the evangelical left.

Here's Gushee's description of the Evangelical Left:

The evangelical left generally reflects the heavily biblical methodology and theology of other evangelicals. Like most evangelicals, their primary source of authority is the Bible...For better or worse, they tend to move directly from their interpretation of biblical passages and motifs to moral exhortation and policy advocacy. They do not stray from the categories of orthodox Christian theology. They reflect the characteristic evangelical emphasis on evangelism and conversion to faith in Christ and they draw on evangelical piety by calling on their readers to "follow Jesus" in committed discipleship, iwth the particular lifestyle and ethical configurations that ocrrespond with their reading of the scriptures.

The evangelical left is left because it reads scripture and interprets the demands of Christian discipleship to require what in our contemporary and American and Christian contexts are considered left-leaning moral commitments. Characteristically, the evangelical left argues that the teachings of the Bible, especially the prophets and Jesus, require Christians to be concerned about poverty, war, racism, sexism, and the environment.

What's right with the Left?

According to Gushee, the E-left is best at stating what it is for, rather than what it is against. Gushee traces the origins of the E-left back to Dr. King. In his famous 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, Dr. King referred to poverty, racism and war as the "triple evils" of American society. These are the three issues that remain at the heart of the moral vision of the evangelical left.

So, what's wrong with the Left?

Gushee claims that te E-left seems reticent to take on the issues of abortion and homosexuality. He notes that Jim Wallis "never actually articulates a position on what the legal status of abortion should be...but there is no evidence in his writings that {Wallis} would support the overturning of Roe v. Wade." Gushee suggests that the leaders of the E-left do not take "fully seriously the sanctity of ALL human life, including those lives developing in the womb." "Evangelical left authors proclaim that they are pro-life, but this does not seem to cash out in a real significant way on the abortion issue." Gushee believes that such leaders as Wallis & McLaren may risk forfeiting their prophetic voice because they make every effort to steer clear of taking a definitive position on the homosexuality issue. Gushee also criticizes the leaders of the E-left for basically being closet pacifists who cloak their opposition to virtually every war in just-war language.

I personally rarely use the word "evangelical" to describe myself (more on that in a later post) but as a Jimmy Carter-kinda Baptist my theology would likely place me in the E-left camp. First, I appreciate that Gushee acknowledges that these evangelicals like Campolo do root their faith in the authority of the Bible. And we do believe that social justice and evangelism are but two sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, those in the E-left may have allowed the Right to claim the abortion issue for themselves. That's a dialogue that more left-leaning evangelicals need to be having. How can we reduce the abortion rate? Thankfully, some evangelical and Catholic Democrats in Congress have already moved forward on that issue.

Gushee chides the E-left for not pushing to overturn Roe. But perhaps overturning Roe v. Wade is not the solution - if such a solution was even possible or practical. Is it even reasonable to believe that Gushee can work to overturn Roe and meet his other objectives? The types of originalist Supreme Court justices that would need to be appointed to overturn Roe would likely (VERY LIKELY) not be sympathetic to Gushee's more liberal social justice concerns!

I do agree with Gushee that Wallis & McLaren risk forfeiting the opportunity to speak prophetically by more or less avoiding the homosexuality issue. Pardon the sexist language, but these guys need to "man-up" and be more open and honest about what they really believe. Some have done so but others have not.

My next post will focus on The Emerging Evangelical Center. I also have a few church-state concerns to address.

This is post #3 in a series on David Gushee & The Emerging Evangelical Center

Dialoguing With David Gushee, Part 1
The New Evangelicalism & The Evangelical Centrist

David Gushee & Centrist Evangelicalism, Part 1

Church-State expert Melissa Rogers has written two must read blog posts.

In the first post - Baptists and Other Evangelicals - Rogers responds to a quote from David Gushee in a recent ABP article. Gushee declared that:

"Most moderate Baptists are center or center-left evangelicals, they just don't know it,' Gushee said. 'I want to help moderate Baptists reclaim the term 'evangelical' and re-associate with other evangelicals who are kindred spirits, if they only knew it.'"

And Rogers responds:

I agree that Baptists are well-served when we re-connect with other evangelicals where those connections have frayed (and when we establish new connections). I'm attending Ron Sider's upcoming conference for precisely that reason. We have a good deal in common with those who not only share our faith but who also stand firm against partisan spins on the gospel, political power plays (both inside and outside religious circles), and take-no-prisoner tactics and attitudes. We can easily fold into some of the efforts of these kinds of non-Baptist evangelicals, and it would be a good thing if we did so.

But I also think it's important for Baptists to articulate our own voices on some public issues. Why? Because I believe our voices are in some ways distinctive from the voices of non-Baptist evangelicals. For example, Baptists traditionally have been careful to defend both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. The work of the Baptist Joint Committee is the best example of that commitment. Our commitment in this area hasn't been limited to working on church-state issues, however. Rather, it has influenced the ways in which we talk about our engagement in public issues as a general matter. It also has led us to encourage policy solutions in other areas (say, for example, in overcoming poverty) that attack problems in effective ways without engaging the government in promoting or subsidizing religious activities. Some other evangelicals do these things as well, but it's a real marker of traditional Baptists, and I think this kind of perspective can make a valuable contribution to our current conversation about religion's role in American society.

In the second post, Rogers offers snippets from Gushee's latest op-ed on "centrist evangelicalism" and then provides a few interesting thoughts. Check it out.

Last week, I wrote a post about this so-called "Emerging Evangelical Center" of which Gushee champions. Needless to say, I'm skeptical (read the post). Over the next week or two, I will blog more about this "New Evangelicalism" as I read through Gushee's new book, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center.

The "New Evangelicalism" & the "Evangelical Centrist"

Greg Warner of the Associated Baptist Press has a published the first installment of a two-part series that examines whether an "evangelical center" will emerge to rival the waning Christian Right.

Relying mostly on quotes from Baptist theologian Roger Olson, Baptist ethicist David Gushee and Anabaptist activist/author Jim Wallis, Warner's piece is indeed quite interesting. Check it out first.

Here's a snippet:

(ABP) -- If the Religious Right is losing its influence, as many pundits predict, will it be replaced by the "other" evangelicals -- a center-and-left coalition with a broader social agenda and a kinder, gentler brand of cultural engagement?

Advocates say centrist evangelicals are a bona fide constituency that is re-emerging after three decades spent underground -- or at least ignored by the media and society at large. Though these other evangelicals have no dominant spokespersons and no representative organization, at least not yet, they say they are every bit as worthy of the "evangelical" label as their counterparts on the right -- and every bit as numerous.

In fact, Christians can "be more evangelical by being less conservative," argues Baptist theologian and author Roger Olson. And he's written a book to tell them how.

"Evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves!" added Christian activist Jim Wallis, for three decades the social conscience of the evangelical left. "This evangelical center is getting so big."

Ok, so what exactly is an EVANGELICAL CENTRIST?

I'm not sure. Greg Warner doesn't exactly define that term.

David Gushee (whom Warner defines as a centrist Baptist) would seem to define an EVANGELICAL CENTRIST as a person who is "fed up with the right's 'slash and burn' approach." You know, folks from my generation - the guys and gals that "are turned off to the culture war mentality and all the anger" according to Gushee. Or perhaps an EVANGELICAL CENTRIST is simply a evangelical with a social agenda that reaches beyond abortion and homosexuality? You know, evangelicals that care about poverty, war and peace, immigration reform, torture, Africa and Creation Care.

Terms like "centrist" and especially "progressive" are extremely problematic. Later in this article, Warner uses the term "progressive" to describe theologian Robert Olson's employer Baylor University. So, what does progressive in this context mean exactly? I go to Baylor. I like Baylor. But what makes Baylor "progressive" ? I doubt any member of the Board of Regents or Administrator at Baylor University would use the tag "progressive" to describe Baylor. Defining terms is a difficult task indeed but it's a task which must be accomplished. I digress...

Jeff Sharlet is a regular contributor to magazines like Harper's and Rolling Stone and for the past few years has served as the editor of The Revealer of NYU's Center for Religion and Media. In Jeff's most recent column, he argues that conservative evangelicalism is neither dead nor moving to the CENTER. Jeff also offers some great advice for journalists on the "God Beat." He writes:

Christian conservatism is neither dead, as widely reported by the secular press, nor becoming more “moderate.” Rather, many strands of Christian conservative thinking are broadening to encompass concerns long relegated to the back burner. This broadening makes the vision no less conservative, but rather differently conservative. It is, however, less predictable, less partisan, and in the terms of discussion allowed by establishment media, that makes it less influential. That may well be true according to the narratives of campaign strategists, but the loss of influence at the ballot box could easily translate into a greater influence on what evangelical intellectuals are fond of calling “the culture,” by which they mean a concept of the public sphere from which they feel excluded. They recognize that any American sphere that doesn't include them is a rather small bubble, indeed. The bullies among them want to muscle in and take it over. The most interesting activists among them want to pop it.

So how do we measure their influence? I have no idea. In the establishment press, you’re free to reject conventional wisdom if you have a new paradigm to propose. I don’t. My proposal is more modest: an end to paradigms. Instead, let’s gather data. Not survey responses but stories, the kind that don’t necessarily have morals, that don’t always come to a “point.” Just like this first column for ReligionDispatches, a manifesto for messiness in writing about religion, politics, and media. Journalists, editors, scholars, my comrades on the God beat: Please, don’t tidy up the narrative of religion in America to conform to the demands of election season op-ed pages. Reveal it for what you, better than any individual believer or unbeliever, know it to be: wildly pluralistic, profoundly unstable, ingeniously conformist, weird, funny, tender, banal, and infused with wit, gloriously difficult to define.

Christian conservatives = no less conservative but rather differently conservative.

That's an analysis that I can buy.

I'm glad these "evangelical centrists" like Rick Warren are less partisan and have embraced a broader social agenda. I'm glad that they don't blame the Jews, the Lesbians, the Pagans, and everyone else for 9/11. Kudos to them. But at the end of the day, how many Rick Warren types are going to vote for a Pro-Choice, Pro-Gay Rights Democrat in November? Abortion and homosexuality have been the bread-and-butter issues of the Religious Right for a reason - they sell. Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas represent much of what Christian conservatives believe to be wrong with America.

What's changed? So, maybe some "evangelical centrists" have bought Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth hook, line, and sinker. Great. But will the interest of Christian conservatives in a plethora of social issues outweigh their commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade and rolling back gay rights when confronted with the ballot box in November. I have my doubts.

Over at the Talking Points Memo Cafe, Richard Parker asks how many of these new moderate or "compassionate evangelicals" like Rick Warren actually believe that both the Government and the Church are part of the solution? Apparently, Warren does not.

Parker compares the "new evangelicalism" of "centrists" like Warren, Czik and others to the shift that white evangelicals went through in the 1950s, when a younger generation of evangelicals such as Billy Graham were thought to foreshadow "the death of an older conservative and often vitriolic fundamentalism, that had once been openly anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and unapologetically racist." But as Parker points out, Billy G. wasn't exactly progressive. He never publicly supported Dr. King or condemned George Wallace in Alabama. Billy kept quiet in the aftermath of Selma where a young John Lewis had his head repeatedly bashed with a billy-club. Parker writes:

While that was then and this is now, consider the current claims made for a kinder, gentler “compassionate evangelicalism” today. What, for example, exactly are these Great Awakeners ready to do about the problems of the environment and global poverty? Have Richard Cizik and the NAE been calling for government-mandated fuel efficiency standards or higher gasoline taxes or required production of hybrid vehicles? Has Rick Warren, who has “embraced” the problem of global poverty, told us how he’s going to solve it?

He has apparently decided how he's not going to solve it. Here’s Warren two weeks ago rebuking a conservative columnist who called Warren a “statist like Jim Wallis” (Wallis—because he actually votes for Democrats, is married to an Anglican priest, and was raised in a Northern evangelical denomination—is still treated like a leper by the most of his ostensibly “new evangelical” colleagues):

“Actually, I completely disagree with Jim Wallis’s big government approach to poverty," Warren wrote. "The answer is not aid, but trade, not subsidies but freer markets, not wealth redistribution but wealth creation. not the government but local congregations. Saddleback’s P.E.A.C.E. plan is the exact opposite of outdated and ineffective liberal social government programs that have failed.

"We believe the answer is the Church, not bigger government.

And Parker concludes:

Even the much-vaunted rise of young evangelicals’ disillusionment with the GOP—according to Pew’s recent polls—turns out to be anything but a sharp turn away from conservatism. Young evangelicals began the Bush years as stronger GOP supporters than their parents, according to Pew; all evangelicals have declined in their support of Bush—but consistently are much more supportive than the rest of the country; young evangelicals are in greater numbers telling pollsters that they’re independent that Republican---but almost none are moving to become Democrats or call themselves liberal. And most evangelicals, young and old, remain active supporters of the death penalty, opposed to abortion, and while more “concerned” about poverty, AIDs and the like than in the past, are remarkably unclear on what exactly should be done to solve those problems.

In conclusion, I prefer to take the "Let's Wait and See" approach of Bill Leonard, dean of Wake Forest University Divinity School. I won't be foolish like Jim Wallis and proclaim that the Religious Right is dead or that we're living in a post-Religious Right era. And I won't claim that this "new evangelicalism" whose members Greg Warner dubs as "evangelical centrists" are truly less conservative than the older generation. A lack of hate-mongering does not make one a "centrist" or a "moderate" or a "progressive."

So, let's "wait and see."

But in the meantime, perhaps we should determine what an "evangelical centrist" actually is, who is included in this category, and how this "middle way" is in practice "new" or "transformative" ???