WHEN THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WAS LEFT.
Faith Full
by E. J. Dionne, Jr.
The New Republic
Issue date: 02.28.05
Preachers," the critic declared, "are not called upon to be politicians but to be soul-winners." As it happens, this is not some secular liberal denying faith's legitimate influence on politics. The words are Jerry Falwell's. His scorn-- he made the statement in 1965--was directed at the church-based civil rights movement in the South. Falwell knew that, without the black church, there would have been no civil rights movement. It bothered conservatives like Falwell that the civil rights preachers were, well, so
judgmental, so eager to associate their cause with God's. "If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!" a young reverend named Martin Luther King Jr. declared in December 1955 at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. "If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth!"
How strange it is that American liberalism, nourished by faith and inspired by the scriptures from the days of abolitionism, is now defined--by its enemies but occasionally by its friends--as implacably hostile to religion. The greatest victory of the religious right is
not its success in turning out the vote of religious conservatives. The Christian Right has damaged liberalism most by calling forth a liberal reaction against religion's public role. Too many liberals have been complicit in the conservatives' redefinition of "moral values" as always involving sex, and "religious activism" as always referring to the activities of Falwell and his friends. Confronted with a new religious right from the 1970s on, many liberals were at least as eager to attack the "religious" as to turn back the "right."
Yes, liberalism has always included a strong strain of secularism, a proper wariness about the abuses of religious authority, and a particular fear of the Catholic Church. "Rationalism" was seen as the enemy of "obscurantism," "reason" the antithesis of "faith." The separation of church and state was an important liberal victory for freedom of conscience--even if it is forgotten that disestablishment was a cause pursued with passion by devout believers loyal to denominations that found themselves in the minority.
But, precisely because the United States did not experience the religious wars as Europe did, American liberalism was always more tempered in its attitude toward faith than the European variety. By and large, religious Americans returned the favor, embracing the regime of liberty and pluralism. The current conflict between liberalism and religion is thus a break from U.S. history, an anachronistic replay of Europe's nineteenth-century battles between the schoolteacher and the priest.
American liberalism cannot be understood apart from an understanding of its religious sources. No less a rationalist than John Dewey, himself nurtured in New England Congregationalism from which he drifted, could call the great fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan "the backbone of philanthropic social interest, of social reform through political action, of pacifism, of popular education." Today, Bryan is best known for his passionate opposition to Darwin and evolution. But it was Bryan, says historian Michael Kazin, who "transformed his party from a bulwark of conservatism ... into a bastion of anticorporate Progressivism." He preached "a simple pragmatic Gospel: Only mobilized citizens, imbued with Christian morality, could save the nation from 'predatory' interests and the individuals who did their bidding." As historian Garry Wills has noted, Bryan could point with pride to the success of the many causes he had championed "in their embattled earlier stages." The catalogue is impressive: women's suffrage, the federal income tax, railroad regulation, currency reform, state initiative and referendum, a Department of Labor, campaign fund disclosure, and opposition to capital punishment.
Bryan's progressivism was not eccentric among believers. The Social Gospel arose in the early twentieth century from the reflections of religious social workers confronting the contradiction between the promises of God's kingdom and the conditions in the slums. Christian social activists were among those who cheered Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 when he declared, "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." The Lord, in this instance, was presumed to be on the side of TR's Progressive Party, a cause to which The New Republic's editor Herbert Croly was also devoted.
The progressive spirit was alive within Catholicism no less than within Protestantism. The Catholic Bishops' 1919 Program of Social Reconstruction was a primary source of New Deal ideas and laid the basis for the close cooperation between the Church and the trade-union movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The link between religion and social reform was not artificial; it was the natural outgrowth of religion's skepticism of materialism and its search for what was called in the civil rights years a "beloved community." The religiously inspired could not help but question the impact of industrialization on family life--and on the morals of those forced into impoverished urban neighborhoods. What's striking about the American religious reformers is that they did not, on the whole, lapse into nostalgia for rural life. They were occasionally utopian, but most were realistic, and, as Bryan's record shows, creative in the reforms they proposed.
If religious reformers nurtured liberalism's communitarian wing, American liberalism also strengthened the advocates of toleration and pluralism within the religious community. The great reforms in the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council were championed by American bishops, inspired by John Courtney Murray. The American theologian helped overturn the Church's previous orthodoxy that, in some catechisms, had declared liberalism "a sin," and Murray deserves part of the credit for Pope John XXIII's achievement. American liberalism may thus have helped ease Europe's conflicts between believers and secularists. That makes all the more peculiar our recent importation of European-style religious politics.
Religious thinkers influenced liberals' views on foreign policy as well as social justice, perhaps none more than Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian and frequent contributor to this magazine. He transformed American liberalism by teaching liberals about Augustine and original sin. It was in these pages that Niebuhr famously cited a British journal to the effect that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian Church. (Niebuhr himself is usually credited with the line, but he was no plagiarist.) Liberalism was easily attacked for resting on a soupy optimism about human nature and for a self-righteous idealism that had little self-awareness. With the rise of the Nazis and the Stalinists in the '30s, this optimism could not hold. Niebuhr imbued liberalism with realism--about the world in general and human nature in particular--which brought him his share of critics. But he rescued the liberal creed from sentimentalism. He was tough on liberals who thought they could stay out of the world's conflicts (which is why the hawks love him), but also tough on liberals who would engage in crusades and disguise self-interest behind noble, utopian claims (which means that the doves underrate him). Niebuhr, a brilliant aphorist, provided liberals with a credo: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary." Hope for democracy is tempered by an awareness of sin that only reinforces the democratic imperative. No wonder Arthur Schlesinger Jr. announced the creation of a notional organization called Atheists for Niebuhr. No wonder Abraham Joshua Heschel, another giant in the mid-twentieth-century dialogue between religion and liberalism, would write upon Niebuhr's death that "the world will be darker without you." On this, as on other matters, Heschel was right.
It would be decidedly un-Niebuhrian to believe that the American love affair between religion and liberalism could continue on uninterrupted by contention. It was, to begin with, a love affair between liberalism and
certain kinds of religion. There was an old Christian Right--its history is documented by the historian Leo Ribuffo--that had nothing in common with liberalism, at times veering toward anti-Semitism and fascism. There were liberals and socialists who never lost their antipathy to religion as an opiate of the masses, and some, like Paul Blanshard, who never gave up their mistrust of the Roman Church. There were conservative Christians who, as Niebuhr wrote in this magazine in 1960, held to "the old individualistic Calvinism, which assumed the private virtues of industry, honesty, and thrift made public policy in dealing with rising industry unnecessary." There were segregationists who believed the separation of the races as decreed by God.
But there can be no denying that a rupture occurred between liberalism and traditional religious progressives in the '60s. That decade saw the rise of a new skepticism about social control and a new emphasis on personal autonomy in moral matters. Until then, most religious progressives believed that self-improvement and self-control were intimately linked to the cause of social reform itself. They were prepared to use the state not only to regulate rapacious capitalists, but also the behavior of individuals. Their great experiment in this regard was Prohibition, which failed, but the link it embodied between self-improvement and social improvement endured in progressive causes from trade unionism to civil rights. Yet, since the '60s, as Peter Steinfels has said, "American liberalism has shifted its passion from issues of economic deprivation and concentration of power to issues of gender, sexuality, and personal choice. ... Once trade unionism, regulation of the market, and various welfare measures were the litmus tests of secular liberalism. Later, desegregation and racial justice were the litmus tests. Today the litmus test is abortion...." And, one might add, stem-cell research, gay marriage, and Hollywood culture.
This rupture, and not simply shrewd organizing by Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove, accounts for the rise of the religious right. The abortion issue in particular creates a new estrangement between pro-life liberals (particularly Catholics like Steinfels) and the broader liberal cause. The liberalism of Niebuhr's day lived comfortably within an old-fashioned world evoked movingly by Niebuhr's daughter Elisabeth Sifton in her book
The Serenity Prayer. Contemporary liberalism is conflicted about that world, and for good reason, given the huge advances in freedom over the last 40 years for women, homosexuals, and, of course, African Americans. Niebuhr, himself a strong civil rights advocate, helped pioneer many of these changes. But it is undeniable that the new moral issues split the very religious institutions that, in an earlier time, were largely sympathetic to liberalism's demands for social reform. One wonders: What would William Jennings Bryan do? Would he be furious at Rove for hijacking evangelicals into the party that supports corporate power and wants to reverse the progressive tax code? Or would Bryan, reluctantly perhaps, join with Republican social conservatives to defend his values and his faith?
That wwwjbd question may seem beside the point to latter-day liberals. They would note, correctly, that a significant share of the religious community is already allied with liberalism, or at least the Democratic Party: a large majority of Jews, nearly half of Roman Catholics, a growing number of mainline Protestants, a significant minority of evangelicals, and most followers of non-Judeo-Christian religions. As for right-wing Christians, they are no more likely to support liberal causes than they were in Niebuhr's or Heschel's day. And secular voters represent a slowly rising share of the electorate.
This is true, but it fails to address the tug of social conservatism on many Americans who are otherwise open to the very kind of liberalism that Bryan (or, for that matter, Niebuhr) represented. It fails to deal seriously with religious moderates whose social views are broadly tolerant but who share with conservatives an unease about the direction of the culture--people who may be sympathetic to gays and lesbians but have no use for wardrobe malfunctions or trashy television. It fails to take seriously that there is loss as well as gain when too sharp a line is drawn between those in politics who emphasize social change and those who emphasize self-improvement. You do not have to be a neoconservative to believe that the public interest does depend, at least in part, on private virtue.
Many have longed for a new Reinhold Niebuhr to inspire a new generation of religious liberals. I have shared in that longing. But it is doubtful that even Niebuhr could be Niebuhr now, and, in any event, can you think of a talk show that would book him? But the ground might be prepared for a sort of second coming, a renewed dialogue between liberalism and faith communities. Liberals could begin by abandoning prejudices about people of faith. Liberals, after all, regularly call on others to abandon their own prejudices. Liberals should feel no obligation to defend all aspects of commercial culture. When TV networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, shouldn't liberals ask why it is that the very free market so revered by the right wing promotes values that the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?
Even when they espouse "choice" on abortion, is it so difficult for liberals to describe the choice itself as tragic and to insist that the surest way to reduce the number of abortions is to improve social conditions, especially the condition of the poor? The vast majority of religious Americans, including many who call themselves conservative, still feel a calling to the poor, still understand that families have interests that the market may not defend, and still worry, as Bryan did, about concentrated power--economic as well as political. These, too, are moral issues.
Conservatives like the religious landscape just the way it is, which is why liberals should take on the, yes, prophetic challenge of rearranging it. Kazin, for one, suggests this would be worth the effort. In the United States, he writes, "[T]he Left has never advanced without a moral awakening entangled with notions about what the Lord would have us do."
E. J. Dionne, Jr. is a columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
