This essay by Randall Balmer, adapted from his new book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament (can we get a subtitle check here?) is sharply critical of the Religious Right, but can’t seem to make up its mind on whether it wants the Right to move Left or just drop out of politics altogether and thus exemplifies what I think is a dilemma for religious “progressives” more generally.

Balmer, a self-described evangelical, says that religion functions best from the margins of power, existing as a counterculture that stands over against society’s established institutions. But then he urges evangelicals to get behind a program of evironmental protection, opposition to capital punishment, and left-leaning economic policies. But whatever the merits of these causes, surely supporting them requires seeking political power, right?

What it looks like is that Balmer really wants evangelicals to function from the margins and eschew political power only when the issue cuts against a liberal/Democratic agenda. Take his view on abortion, for example:

Both sides of the abortion debate acknowledge that making abortion illegal will not stop abortion itself; it will make abortions more dangerous for the life and health of the mother. The other complication is legal and constitutional. Especially at a time when the government’s surveillance activities are already intruding on the privacy and the civil liberties of Americans, we should consider carefully the wisdom of allowing the government to determine a matter properly left to a woman and her conscience.

I have no interest in making abortion illegal; I would like to make it unthinkable. The most effective way to limit the incidence of abortion is to change the moral climate surrounding the issue — through education or even through public-service campaigns similar to those that discourage smoking or drugs or alcohol or spousal abuse.

First of all, while any reasonable person would allow that making abortion illegal is not going to prevent all abortions, I’m quite certain that most pro-lifers think it would make a big difference. Also, with respect to his proposed public education campaign, last time I checked drug use and spousal abuse are in fact illegal. We don’t rely solely on education to get people not to beat their spouses.

But this just shows a certain double standard that’s often at work when religious progressives address these kinds of issues. If there really is a renascent religious left in the U.S.A., one of the things they need to figure out is where they stand on the question of embedding religiously inspired moral judgments in legislation. You can’t say that it’s categorically wrong to legislate morality in the case of abortion, but it’s o.k. when it comes to the environment or poverty. It’s not going to cut any ice to tell right-leaning Christians that they should shun political power while simultaneously grasping for power to implement a left-leaning agenda.

The dilemma is this: if you say that “thick” moral values can legitimately be the basis for public policy, as at least some left-wing communitarians and religious progressives say, then you open the door for conservatives to seek to write their values into law. But if, in order to prevent undesirable (from a liberal point of view) outcomes like banning abortion or same-sex marriage, you play the pluralism card and tell conservatives that “you can’t legislate morality,” then you’ve undercut the basis of religiously-inspired crusades for progressive causes. You can’t have it both ways and be consistent.