THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS LEFT IN AMERICA

• First, some historical background.  For decades, even since colonial times in America, a Protestant elite has ruled America.  These leaders were from “main line” Protestant churches, a phrase borrowed from the affluent suburbs lining the Pennsylvania Railroad west of Philadelphia (see John Schmalzbauer’s review of D. Michael Lindsay’s book in the Wall Street Journal,18 October 2007 issue).  These mainline churches included the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Methodist and American Baptist Churches, among others.  In fact, these elites were more than just church members, for they comprised an entire network of social and family relationships that dominated the economy and political culture of America.  Names like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt dominated their respective eras.  They built schools like the University of Chicago and Union Theological Seminary, bastions of theological liberalism by the early 20th century, thereby institutionalizing theological liberalism.  During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, the modernists (i.e., theological liberals) won control of these denominations.  The fundamentalists (later called evangelicals) formed competing schools, publications and denominational groups.  D. Michel Lindsay has written a book (Faith in the Halls of Power) that charts the present-day evangelicals who now form a new Protestant leadership class in government, business, the media and higher education.  This book is the result of interviews with 300 prominent evangelicals, including two former presidents, 100 corporate executives, two-dozen cabinet secretaries and White House officials and a dozen Hollywood filmmakers and actors.  This new network has created Bible study and prayer groups, the International Arts Movement and Act One and significant philanthropic organizations that underwrite the financial costs of these organizations (e.g., the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Fieldstead Foundation).  Evangelicalism is no longer on the fringe of America; it is right in the center of so much of it!  Politically, the typical evangelical is a Republican and rather conservative when it comes to social issues.  However, that seems to be changing.

• Second, this leads me to comment on the rise of a new phenomenon among evangelicals (broadly defined)—the “Religious Left.”  It is represented by publications called the Wittenberg Door and in books like God’s Politics by Jim Wallis.  Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal reports on this relatively new movement.  It is evident in the politics of presidential candidate Barack Obama and in the somewhat revitalized labor union movement.  For example, John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO told union leaders that “the unions need aggressive participation by the Church in our organizing campaigns.”  The AFL-CIO therefore launched “Labor in the Pulpits,” a program that encouraged churches and synagogues to invite union leaders to preach the virtues of organized labor and tout its political agenda.  Nearly 1,000 congregations in 100 cites nationwide now take part annually.  Indeed, Sweeney preached in the National Cathedral, urging congregants to join anti-globalization protests in the capital.  Malanga reports that “Under the auspices of Labor in the Pulpits, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian clerics have composed guidelines for union-friendly sermons and litanies, as well as inserts for church bulletins that promote union legislation.  One insert asked congregants to pray for a federal minimum-wage hike and also—if prayers didn’t work, presumably—to contact their congressional representatives.  Another urged congregants to lobby Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—controversial legislation that would let unions organize firms merely by getting workers to sign authorizing cards, rather than by conducting secret ballots as is currently required.”  In addition, there is the Chicago-based, union-supported Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) that arranges for seminarians to spend summer months working with union locals.  Some 200 seminarians have helped unionize Mississippi poultry workers, aided the Service Employees International Union in organizing Georgia-based public-sector employees, and bolstered campaigns for living-wage legislation in California municipalities.  Malanga also reports that the labor movement has spawned some 60 new religious left groups.  In Los Angeles, clergy helped crush several 2005 statewide ballot initiatives that unions opposed, including one that gave union workers the option of not paying dues that would fund union political activities.  Labor-religious coalitions have worked especially well in having 125 municipalities pass living-wage laws.  The IWJ is supported by the National Council of Churches, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church, among many others.  The alliance between labor and the religious left also has the support of the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy is conservative on social issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia) but decidedly left wing on economic issues.  Malanga correctly observes that “leading clergy of the religious left depict the free market as a vast exploitative force, controlled by a small group of godless power brokers.  Clergy describe Wal-Mart, for example, in terms that its thousands of suppliers, millions of employees, and tens of thousands of customers would hardly recognize.”

• Finally, the theology of the religious left is firmly rooted in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, the leader of the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century, whose book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, is thoroughly relevant to the religious left today.  The first half to this seminal work interprets Jesus Christ as a revolutionary:  “It is an essential doctrine of Christianity that the world is fundamentally good and practically bad, for it was made by God, but is now controlled by sin.  If a man wants to be a Christian, he must stand over against things as they are and condemn them in the name of that higher conception of life which Jesus revealed.”  In other words, sin is fundamentally external and salvation is salvation from the externals (e.g., poverty, lack of education, etc.), for humans are fundamentally good.  The second half of the book is an indictment of the “present crisis,” by which he meant the inequities and injustices of industrial capitalism.  So, he argued, clergy must “be the master of politics by creating the issues which parties will have to espouse.”  (Incidentally, to read him today is to read someone thoroughly disgusted with Judaism and totally distrustful of Catholics.  His brand of Protestantism was on the march and nothing could stop it.)  Rauschenbusch represented the triumph of a theological liberalism that saw the good works of rebuilding society as salvific in its impact.  For anyone who has read the New Testament, that is almost heretical.  The tragedy of today in even some parts of evangelicalism is that we are trying to get our people busy doing things in serving people, but we forget that the fundamental flaw of the human condition is spiritual:  Humans are in rebellion against God and sin is internal, innate, and not external.  One example of this was a conference I attended this summer where financial stipends were awarded to churches that had programs to help AIDS victims and those that were combating poverty.  Although I agree with both efforts, to hold these programs up as representative of the gospel is to miss the point and to, in fact, actually embrace the tenets of the Social Gospel.  History repeats itself and I am very fearful that the new “religious Left” is repeating the fatal flaw of the Social Gospel so inherent in theological liberalism.

See Alan Wolfe’s review of Rauschenbusch in the New York Times Book Review (21 October 2007) and Malanga’s article in the Wall Street Journal (16 October 2007).