A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • The Huckster and neo-populism

    As Mike Huckabee continues to gain on Mitt Romney in Iowa, he seems to be steadily moving from a second to first-tier (or at least 1 and a half tier) candidate. Whether this is a function of his performance in the debates or his Chuck Norris endorsement remains to be seen.

    Over the last couple of days I’ve read a couple of at least partly admiring profiles of Huckabee by liberal writers in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. These writers inevitably express shock that Huckabee doesn’t seem to be a monster despite being a crazy right-wing evangelical who doesn’t believe in evolution. But beyond his personal affability, these writers pick up on the fact that Huckabee has made some enemies on the fiscal right who’ve tagged him (rather implausibly) as a big-spending liberal.

    Personally I’m not too partial to Huckabee. He hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself from the Bush-GOP line on war, torture, and the national security state. Nor am I particularly a fan of his cultural politics.

    But what does make him interesting is that he seems to be groping toward a different economics than most of his competitors. His instincts seem to be for the working class and he’s raised issues of inequality and economic security that would otherwise not even register on the GOP’s radar. Now, this doesn’t seem to translate into a particularly coherent policy stance: for instance, he’s on record as supporting a national consumption tax in place of the income tax, which is a pretty regressive proposal. But his popularity still suggests that his rhetoric is resonating with voters.

    Michael Lind, a sharp left-of-center political analyst, argued recently that the economic “center” in American politics is shifting to the left. With the end of the Cold War, libertarianism and neoliberalism appeared to define the endpoints of the respectable spectrum on economic issues, but recent years, he says, have seen a resurgence of economic populism as a force to be reckoned with:

    Libertarians succeeded in promoting deregulation and the liberalisation of trade and finance. But, partly as a result of their success, the popular anxiety caused by globalisation doomed far more radical libertarian reforms.

    Even as libertarianism was losing its political lustre, economic populism came to life in US politics for the first time since the 1930s. Unlike the reactionary populism of Patrick Buchanan in the 1980s and 1990s, the middle-class populism represented by CNN’s Lou Dobbs cannot be dismissed as marginal. The decline of libertarianism and the revival of populism are already reshaping politics in the US and similar societies.

    What formerly was the left – welfare-state liberalism – is once again the ­centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist ­populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

    If this is right, Huckabee may represent the future of the GOP as it scrambles to catch up with these new realities. Most of the other candidates are peddling the same old low-tax, anti-regulatory gospel, but if voters, even Republican ones, are increasingly feeling the pinch of economic anxiety, they may not be buying.

    What was originally called the “New Right” – the blue-collar former Democrats who came into the Republican coalition in the 70s and 80s was never really distinguished by its fealty to laissez-faire. It was motivated more by cultural politics, crime, welfare, and other concerns associated with the middle and working classes. These concerns were able to fit under the philosophical tent of antistatism because it was thought that government bureaucrats were the primary villains responsible for undermining sound virtues by meddling in communities.

    Previous to this the intellectual Right was elitist, Anglophilic and often characterized by a high-church religiosity. By contrast, the “New” Right was populist, blue-collar and less committed to the virtues of laissez-faire and individualism. Christopher Lasch brilliantly criticized the co-opting of populism by laissez-faire Republicans in his The True and Only Heaven. Lasch largely accepted the populist criticism of the Left and the welfare state, but he argued that capitalism and the state work in tandem to rob ordinary working people and their communities of their capacity for self-government and self-determination. Reaganomics was not, in his view, the true ally of populism, but the apogee of liberal individualism which corrodes communities in the name of “choice.”

    If evangelical Protestants are the heirs of the old “New” Right, then the turn toward economic populism may make sense. The “economic royalists” of the GOP (as the New Yorker piece calls them) have enjoyed the support of evangelical voters without really giving them much in the way of actual power. But if these folks now constitute most of the base of the party, then the populist chickens may be coming home to roost. I don’t know if Huckabee is the right vehicle for a conservative neo-populism, but he’s at least providing an interesting challenge to the status quo.

  • Thanksgiving re-post

    I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I think it holds up pretty well:


    It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

    While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

    President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

    No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

    It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

    Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

    Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

    It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.

  • An end to the stem cell wars?

    If this holds up it’s surely good news since, in addition to whatever medical advances result, it means that the controversy over ESCR should evaporate.

  • The political Christian

    American Christians tend to be a bit schizophrenic about politics. They swing from utopian optimism (“Christianizing the social order,” “restoring America as a Christian nation”) to extreme pessimism when the inevitable disillusion sets in about the limits of what politics can accomplish. This recent post at the Christian Century blog by David Heim offers a more sober perspective:

    Skepticism about politics is always healthy. But it strikes me that [David] Kuo’s and [Gregory] Boyd’s comments reflect a broad, unhelpful tendency in American Christianity to oscillate between two poles: either a fervent engagement in politics for the sake of the gospel and the world, or an equally fervent detachment for the sake of the purity of the gospel and the health of the church. Isn’t there something between the two poles?

    Heim goes on to argue that Christians should see politics as a vocation that some have (and that all of us have some of the time) to participate in making improvements in the social order. He cautions against the churches corporately making pronouncements on specific political issues, but encourages individual Christians to be engaged in the public sphere:

    Meanwhile, however, individual Christians have their particular vocations. In a democracy, all people have the vocation of citizen and so are in some degree called to the work of politics. Beyond that, a certain number of individual Christians are called to a more specific vocation: to study, analyze or participate in the day-to-day workings of politics. They make arguments and pay attention to data. They look for affinities between the gospel and political philosophies and programs. They listen to what constituents say and arguments other people make. Their work is fallible, limited, pervaded by sin, always subject to revision—but so are lots of vocations.

    This decidedly non-utopian approach to politics would recognize that it’s about caring for the neighbor and making the social orde a place where all people can have a chance at leading decent lives. A backlash against “Constantinianism” has soured some Christians on any involvement in politics, but there’s no reason that a chastened political engagement that recognizes the fact of pluralism and the limits of what politics can accomplish isn’t a legitimate vocation for Christians.

    However, I think there’s still a role for the church acting corporately to equip its members for their various vocations in the world. While it doesn’t necessarily have the expertise to make judgments about particular issues, the church ought to form its members in a way that helps them approach politics with a gospel-shaped vision. For instance, I think it’s entirely appropriate for Chrisitans to evaluate public policy with an eye to how it affects the most vulnerable members of society. This kind of formation might come as a result of experience serving such vulnerable people by participating in the church’s corporal works of mercy.

    There’s also a long tradition of Chrisitan moral reflection that forbids certain means in the pursuit of even worthwhile ends. Just war theory is an example that applies to foreign affairs. In most cases these constraints probably won’t dictate a single policy, but they might rule out some options. Well-formed Christians are not going to support a military policy that targets innocent civilians, or acquiesces in torture.

    So, I agree with Heim that Christians can chart a middle course between Constantinianism and sectarianism. This involves seeking the good of the neighbor in a way that is shaped by an awareness of our own fallibility and the limits of politics, but is also formed by the gospel of God’s gracious love.

  • The evangelical crack-up: not all it’s cracked up to be

    An honest-to-goodness evangelical pours some cold water on David Kirkpatrick’s NY Times Magazine piece on the splintering of political evangelicalism. (via Jeremy)

    I’ve seen a number of outlets assume that evangelical dissatisfaction with Bush and the GOP must be dissatisfaction from the Left. While younger evangelicals may indeed have a newfound concern for issues like global warming and AIDS, this doesn’t mean they’re becoming liberal per se. And, as the threats of Dobson, et al. to bolt to a third party indicate, much of the dissatisfaction is from the Right.

    David Sessions, the author of the Slate article, makes the interesting suggestion that the growing popularity of Reformed theology in conservative evangelical circles may account for the newfound focus on broader social issues. Neo-Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper were very big on Christ as the Lord of all and that his reign should encompass the entire social sphere. This is in sharp contrast to a kind of Left Behind theology that emphasizes snatching souls out of a society firmly ensconsed in a hell-bound handbasket. In this respect neo-Calvinism has a lot in common with Catholic social thought.

    Lutherans, meanwhile, have historically been more skittish about this kind of thing. Obviously God is sovereign over all, but God relates to us in two ways. The two kingdoms doesn’t refer to distinct spheres of church and state, but to these two ways in which God relates to creation: redemption and conservation. The kingdom of the right, God’s “proper work,” is calling people to faith and repentance through the preaching of the Gospel. The kingdom of the left, meanwhile, refers to the way in which God upholds and conserves the structures of creation and society to provide for and promote human well-being in this life. Politics, for Lutherans, is not redemptive, but pertains to penultimate matters, to serving the neighbor in her concrete needs in this age. To Lutheran ears, the talk of “building God’s kingdom” that you sometimes get from both the evangelical Right and Left smacks of Calvinist-inspired Puritanism.

  • Abortion on film

    Interesting review of the new abortion documentary Lake of Fire in this article (scroll down). I can’t say that it exactly makes me want to see the movie, but the idea of attempting to make a movie on abortion that treats both sides fairly is certainly a laudable one (link via Ross Douthat).

  • Out in Africa

    Philip Jenkins, who arguably knows as much about Christianity in the global south as any “Northerner,” has an article on the African churches’ controversies over homosexuality at the New Republic (may require subscription to read).

    Jenkins argues that it’s misleading to see the intensity of the conflict over this as merely an extension of debates that have taken place in the West. Traditional denominations in Africa living in a context of competition with upstart Pentecostalism and with Islam have a strong incentive to toe a morally conservative line. Jenkins recounts a story from the late 19th century where Christian courtiers rejected the pederastic advances of the king of Buganda, who had come under the influence of Arab slave-trades, and were martyred for it:

    That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country’s Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive.

    The conservative stance can also be a way of burnishing African Christians’ anti-Western and anti-colonialist credentials, “making clear to their own members and their Muslim neighbors that they are not puppets of the West. Moral conservatism thus serves to assert cultural independence–a link that requires sexual immorality to be portrayed as a Euro-American import.”

    Of course, that doesn’t make it the right position, and Jenkins is quick to point out that there are more liberal elements on the continent, particularly in South Africa, where the ANC is not likely to be seen as toadying to the West. There is a plurality of voices there, not to mention in the rest of the Global South, and it is by no means confined to places like South Africa (“arguably one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.”):

    But South Africa is not the only place where gay-rights movements have gained a foothold. An Anglican group called Changing Attitude claims supporters in both Nigeria and Uganda, and the director of its Nigerian chapter, Davis Mac-Iyalla, has earned some notoriety as a liberal foil to Akinola. Some years ago, when Namibia’s then- president declared homosexuality a “behavioral disorder which is alien to African culture,” activists responded by creating a fairly overt gay-rights movement, the Rainbow Project.

    Jenkins’ conclusion is that Westerners should resist the temptation of seeing the African churches’ positions through the lens of our own controversies. Just as liberals have sometimes been prone to romanticize the “Third World,” conservatives have of late tended to see Africa as a bastion of “traditional values” holding out against the decadent West. But Jenkins advises caution: “gays in Africa face very real barriers to acceptance. And we do them no favors by viewing Africa’s culture war over homosexuality as a mere extension of the battle we are witnessing here in the United States, rather than as a fight which raises questions unique to African history and politics.”

    One might criticize Jenkins here for lapsing into a kind of moral relativism. He does tend to talk as though the churches in many parts Africa simply have no choice but to go along with the anti-gay line. This would presumably be of small comfort to gay people on the receiving end of some of the more punitive policies supported by some African churchmen. Still, I think it’s helpful to see both the plurality and the particularity of the situation, rather than as another manifestation of some kind of global “culture war.”

    UPDATE: Here’s a transcript (via The Topmost Apple) of a presentation by Jenkins on this topic with questions from a bunch of journalistic big-shots (Ken Woodward, E.J. Dionne, Jon Wilson of Books & Culture, etc.); a lot of fascinating discussion ensues.

  • A Christian nation?

    This interview with John McCain has caused a minor furor on account of his claims that the “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation” and his saying that he would hesitate to vote for a Muslim candidate for president.

    Now, assuming this accurately represents Sen. McCain’s views rather than being an attempt to shore up his flagging campaign with the conservative Christians who make up a significant chunk of the GOP base, it’s worth looking at this a little more closely.

    One of the problems with the interminable debate about whether the U.S. is a “Christian nation” is that all parties seem to identify the founding of the nation with the writing and ratification of the Constitution. Perhaps only Americans with our fabled lack of a historical sense could actually believe that the nation sprang full-grown as it were from the heads of a few bright bulbs in the 18th century. But in the real world, it’s not quite so easy to pinpoint the “founding” of a nation.

    This leads to pointless arguments over the religious devotion and orthodoxy (or lack thereof) of the Founders, as though determining this would somehow bind us to their particular views. It’s funny that this is the one area where liberals and leftists will slavishly defer to the views of the Founders who, in other contexts, are routinely described as elitist, racist, oligarchical, etc. (and not without justice!)

    But the fact is that nations come into existence, not by writing up a Constitution, but through a gradual historical process. Would anyone presume to pinpoint the date that France or England was “founded”? The same applies, though perhaps in a more telescoped fashion, to the U.S. The nation came into being over a period of time, as the original colonies were gradually forged into a single nation (a process that arguably didn’t conclude until after the Civil War).

    Looking at it this way, there’s at least one unambiguous sense in which we can speak of America as a “Christian nation”: the vast majority of the people who populated the nation were professing Christians. And I think we can make an even stronger claim, namely that the public life of the USA has been strongly informed by a Christian ethos, particularly infused with Puritan and revivalist overtones (for better or worse).

    Now, McCain is surely wrong if when he says that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation he means that the Constitution is explicitly founded on Christian principles. It may be founded on principles that have their roots in Christianity, but nothing in it explicitly presupposes Christian (or even theistic) belief. And, obviously, the Constitution explicitly rules out the U.S. being a confessional state with an established church along the European model. (Though it’s worth noting that individual states had established churches well into the 19th century; the 1st Amendment wasn’t originally understood as ruling this out.)

    Some people have criticized McCain for applying the verboten “religious test” to candidates for office in saying that he would be uncomfortable with a Muslim President. But the religious test clause has nothing to do with the actions of individual voters; it simply prevents anyone from being required to profess a particular religion as a condition for taking office. Voters are free to vote or not vote for any candidate for any reason whatsoever, as far as the Constitution is concerned. We may think that it’s wrong not to vote for someone on account of their religion (though I suspect most of us could come up with some religion that would disqualify a candidate in our eyes; I for one have a hard time imagining voting for a convinced Scientologist), but it’s not in any way Constitutionally forbidden.

    So, as in so many other cases, the answer to a question like “Is the U.S. a Christian nation?” has a variety of answers, and requires drawing distinctions in order to discuss it with any clarity. I think the answer is “yes” if we mean Was the U.S. population historically composed of professing Christians? And it’s also yes if we ask whether the public ethos and language in which we argue about politics has been strongly shaped by Christianity. But if the question is whether the Constitution explicitly established a “Christian nation,” the answer is pretty clearly “no.”

    At the end of the day, though, the question has to be: so what? If the U.S. is a nation historically shaped by Christian belief and whose institutions are rooted in principles that derive, at least in part, from Christianity, what follows for the practice of our common life now? That’s the question that appeals to the beliefs of the Founders simply can’t settle. At least some of them believed that religious devotion was necessary to sustain free institutions and republican government. Were they right? And does it require a homogeneity of religious belief or just a lowest common denominator civil religion? We can’t answer these questions by appealing to the 18th century. Arguing about whether the U.S. was established as a “Christian nation” in some sense is historically interesting, but largely politically irrelevant.

    P.S. I thought it was funny that in the discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr McCain says that he suspects Niebuhr “would have” opposed the Vietnam war. Um, he did.

    P.P.S. Fr. Chris has a post coming at this from a different angle; he also mentions how we could use some old-fashioned Niebuhrian skepticism and humility. Amen.

  • Wolterstorff on religion, liberty, and democracy

    The other day I was browsing my iTunes library and came across this talk by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on religious grounds for political liberty and democracy that I had apparently downloaded and then promptly forgot about. So I finally listened to it and it’s quite good. One of the points that Wolterstorff makes which, I think, bears repeating, is that “neo-traditionalist” critiques of liberalism (he specifically calls out MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank) often seem to be aiming at a certain theory of liberalism (e.g. Rawls’) and not life as it is actually lived in liberal democratic socieities. Wolterstorff argues that they consequently miss the mark a lot of the time and that a justification for liberal democracy can be given that isn’t committed to a theory like Rawls’.

    It’s a bit long, but also free.

  • A critical but substantive faith

    William Placher reviews Hitchens’ God Is Not Great at the Christian Century. He’s surprisingly appreciative, though he doesn’t shy from criticism (“The second frustration of reading this book [in addition to the factual errors], at least for a theologian, is that its author seems not to have read any modern theology, or even to know that it exists.”)

    Placher ends with a call for religious “moderates” (for lack of a better term) to make their presence felt:

    Many Americans today are scared of religion. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten the safety of major cities. George W. Bush assures us that God has led him to his Iraq policy. The local schools, under pressure, avoid teaching evolution. The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles is selling off property to pay victims of priestly sexual abuse. One trembles to think that many people get their picture of faith from the “Christian channels” on television. No wonder religion has, in many quarters, a bad reputation.

    I think many of us—I do not mean just trained theologians, but ordinary folks in churches, mosques and synagogues as well—have found ways to be religious without being either stupid or homicidal. We are, as the cover of the Christian Century puts it, “thinking critically, living faithfully.” Not enough of our nonreligious neighbors know enough about what we believe. We need to speak up.

    Repeatedly Hitchens cites some horrible thing that some religious folks did or said and then notes that mainstream religious leaders did not criticize it. Although I do not always trust his claims, I suspect that in this case he is at least partly right. Too many of us have been too reluctant to denounce religious lunatics, and because of our reluctance we risk arousing the suspicion that we are partly on their side.

    Hitchens ends his book with an appeal to his readers to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars, . . . to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.” Shouldn’t one of the lessons of this book have been that comfortable intellectuals should be more careful of using words like fight? Fundamentalists of one sort or another, after all, urge their followers to fight the evils of secularism and atheism. As the battle lines are drawn between the two extremes, it seems to me that folks like those who read the Christian Century need to put aside our obsessively good manners and shout, “Hey! Those aren’t the only alternatives! We’re here too!”

    I think that mainliners often have an easier time articulating what they don’t believe (we’re not like those fundamentalists!) than what they do. We’re supposed to be “living the questions” as they say. But if Placher is right – and I think he is – this isn’t enough. There needs to be an attractive alternative to the extremes of fundamentalism and strident atheism that is committed to the classic center of Christian faith. Without that the church becomes little more than a weird kind of social club (the Kiwanis with crosses as I believe Chris put it recently), or a cut-rate social service organization.