Since the 2004 elections, evangelicals’ relations with the Republican Party have been, to say the least, uneasy. The botched nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the Bush administration’s lack of interest in pushing for a federal marriage amendment, the initial popularity of Rudy Giuliani as a GOP presidential contender — on these and other issues, the relationship has been less like that of a happily married couple and more like that of quarreling lovers.
Now a group of prominent evangelical leaders have released a critical statement about religion, politics and public life. Here is how Rebecca Trounson of The Los Angeles Times described the document:
In an often strongly worded statement released this week, more than 70 pastors, scholars and business leaders said faith and politics have become too closely intertwined and that evangelicals err when they use their religious beliefs for political purposes.
About a quarter of U.S. adults call themselves evangelical Christians, polls show, and for the last 30 years, the “religious right” has been a reliable base of support for the Republican Party. But Christians from both ends of the political spectrum have made the mistake of politicizing their faith, the group declares in the document, called “An Evangelical Manifesto.”
When that occurs, “faith loses its independence, the church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form,” the document says.
The passage contains juicy phrases — “useful idiots,” “the regime at prayer,” etc. So what, exactly, are the authors referring to? How can faith be politicized? Do the authors think that more evangelicals should vote Democratic and influence that party? All of these questions are naturals.
Yet Trounson does not attempt to answer them, much less pin the authors down about the details. She should have asked the authors to cite examples in which evangelicals acted like “useful idiots,” presumably for the GOP, or “the regime at prayer.” Instead of pursuing these specifics, she stuck to generalities. Her story was the worse for it.
Granted, “An Evangelical Manifesto” lacks specific examples of evangelical political misbehavior. It urges an “expansion of concern beyond single-issue politics,” but fails to sketch out how this might be accomplished or what form this would take. A Communist Manifesto this is not.
Yet Trounson could have been specific about why few conservative evangelical leaders signed the manifesto. Why didn’t they? Were they bothered about the manifesto’s call to go beyond single-issue politics? Were there powerful evangelicals who were not offered input on the document, or a chance to sign or not sign it?
Unfortunately, Trounson does not say:
Many of the most prominent conservative evangelicals did not sign. A spokesman for James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, said Dobson had concerns about the document and decided not to add his name.
It’s worth mentioning that “An Evangelical Manifesto” is not primarily a political document. The statement contains long sections about the need to reaffirm evangelical identify (or Evangelical identity, as the authors urge) and reforming their behavior. Yet on the sections that had political implications, Trounson failed her readers by not fleshing out the possibilities.
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Comments (14) |
May 14, 2008, at 6:46 pm
It would have been helpful to have a link to either the manifesto or the article to discover just who signed the document. About the only thing we learned is that Dr. Dobson did not sign it.
May 14, 2008, at 7:40 pm
Mark:
In your post you asked what “useful idiot” means. It’s someone who can be counted on to react to a hot-button issue by showing up to vote for or against it, and who can further be counted on to vote in other races on the same ballot in ways that the authors of the issue intend.
Another way of referring to them is “the base.”
May 14, 2008, at 7:56 pm
Were you an author of the document, Dave? If not, then we’re not terribly interested in your definition. Besides, Mark didn’t ask for a definition. He asked for the authors to cite examples in which evangelicals acted like “useful idiots”.
May 14, 2008, at 8:39 pm
Here’s the sign-in page: http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/sign.php . The first column are the “charter signatories.” (Anyone can add their name.)
This is the direct link to download the full pdf.: http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/docs/Evangelical_Manifesto.pdf
May 14, 2008, at 9:12 pm
“Useful idiots” is the term Stalin used for liberal clergymen and others who visited his murderous totalitarian state in search of enlightenment and praised it when they returned home. For example, Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, praised the USSR in a book, Liberty under the Soviets. His argument is roughly the same as that given above. Why be concerned about a “single issue” (i.e. freedom of speech), when the USSR was right on so many other issues, mostly economic ones similar to those championed by liberals today?
Today, that term might certainly be applied to religious people who vote or want to vote for the Democratic party in spite of its inflexible defense of legalized abortion. Applying it to those who vote Republican is nonsense. The Republican party isn’t advocating any form of systematic, legalized murder. Unlike the Democratic party, once the champion of slavery, segregation and lynching, it never has.
Voting for Democrats to win influence? How absurd. Even fairly successful pro-life Democratic politicians haven’t been able to budge the party one inch in the 35 years since Roe. Giving your vote away in the hope they will change simply demonstrates to them that they need not change.
There are examples of how we should be responding. In the 1990s the drive to “control” gun ownership out of existence was at least as powerful as the drive to legalize abortion in the late 1960s, and yet the latter not only failed, placing liberals on the defensive, the laws are now moving in the other direction.
Why did the National Rifle Association succeed so fabulously while the National Association of Evangelicals and others failed so abysmally? I’m planning to write a book on the topic, but the short of it is that the NRA is competent while the entire Evangelical subculture make it incompetent at anything other than running ‘nice’ churches. It’s not that Evangelicals are doing politics and failing because God isn’t behind them. It’s that so many of them do politics as badly, much as they do numerous other things badly, i.e. dealing with scandals involving preachers. The “scandal of the Evangelical mind really is that there is no Evangelical mind.”
Finally, keep in mind where this is all headed—a culture and a legal system that is deeply hostile toward Judeo-Christian views about marriage and sexuality. Trying to hide behind the walls of a church will get you nowhere. One state has already barred a long established Catholic adoption agency from arranging adoptions because they won’t handle homosexual adoptions. Next in line will be prohibiting pastors who won’t marry homosexuals from performing legal marriages. At that point there will be no place for ‘unpolitical’ preachers to run. At that point it will be too late.
In short, just because you don’t get involved in politics doesn’t mean that politics won’t get involved in you.
There are a number of parallels here with the “church struggle” in Germany under the Nazis, particularly in the sexual sphere. But there’s no space to go into that here.
—Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
May 14, 2008, at 10:24 pm
Chris Bollinger wrote:
That may seem like what he asked to you but wasn’t at all clear to me.
May 14, 2008, at 10:26 pm
Mike Perry (#5):
This board is not for political rants, though sometimes posters get away with them. We are supposed to be addressing journalist issues and religious issues that intersect with journalist issues.
A word to the wise.
May 14, 2008, at 11:16 pm
Dave,
Chris is right: I wanted the authors of the Manifesto to define this term and elaborate on others. For what it’s worth, your definition was helpful to me.
On the issue of Mike Perry’s comments, you are right: he needs to stick to our coverage of the coverage, not the issue as such.
May 14, 2008, at 11:45 pm
I think the very purpose of the manifesto is playing out in the reporting and commentary including here. I read the Manifesto as a strongly worded statement about what being an Evangelical means including that Christ is put ahead of everything else including political power.
Naturally those who live off politics analyze it in political terms and try to decide what it means for a particular election. And they try to map the document to the positions politicians take. Mark, I think that by calling for more reporting on the political possibilities inherent in the document you failed to grasp the essential message that the signers are asserting what it truly means to be an Evangelical first and foremost. And in doing so, they make explicit statements about what that means in political terms: that religion deserves its proper place in the public square:
In the corporate terms I’m familiar with: it’s a vision statement not a project plan with specific deliverables.
May 15, 2008, at 1:44 am
The key unspoken issue in the Manifesto is actually found in the first couple pages. The authors assert that only evangelicals have a right to define what evangelicals are and believe. No one else.
The problem is, Protestantism is essentially organizationally dysfunctional. No one speaks for the movement. And the same is true for evangelicals. Just a loose confederation of countless congregations in a shifting series of affiliations and alliances.
What do they, as a group, believe? And who are they?
In essence, it seems to me that the Evangelical Manifesto is abortive from page one. These pastors who signed on do not have the authority or right to “define” what evangelicals are and believe. They do not have the authoritative voice for the movement. So who is to say that anything else in the Manifesto is anything more than a nice set of guidelines that individual congregations may adopt - or not, as they choose?
This issue of lack of cohesive purpose or identity in the movement is the key problem with the entire premise of the Manifesto and it undermines everything the Manifesto seeks to accomplish.
It seems ridiculous that reporters would not be covering that tension and contradiction. And the first place to start would be the numerous Christian leaders who DID NOT sign the Manifesto.
May 15, 2008, at 8:03 am
I’m less sure about the need to ask those who didn’t sign, why they didn’t. Yes, a coterie of names were conspicuous by their absence, in large part because they have a fairly well defined political brand.
The document struck me as less aimed at those individuals or even their politics, than in exemplifying a longer conversation within conservative protestantism, that between engaged models and of a more quietistic sort. From the Modernist/Fundamentalist battles of the early and mid-20th C, there is a strain of evangelical thought that rejects worldly engagement.
Yet.
The signatories and even the document itself are of mixed minds about the level of engagement. Some clearly are in the quietistic camp (cf. the anti-Constantianism line above), others have a long-time record of cultural, if not political engagement (e.g. the ‘useful idiots’ line; see the c.v. of Dr. Richard Mouw).
As to the politics: with the conservative political brand struggling, it is not surprising that some are looking for a way to unwind the religious involvement with that brand. So the question to explore is the degree to which the signatories are motivated by defeat, alternate political affiliation, or a more quietistic theology.
May 15, 2008, at 10:03 pm
For “useful idiot” see Wikipedia. In this context, it is “someone who is perceived to be manipulated by a political movement”, and it seems to me that the term is as easily applied to a conservative as to a liberal.
The Manifesto stands on its own. If the authors had wanted to give examples, they would have. To my mind, explicit examples are wholly unnecessary, and I see their declining to name names as gracious. I don’t see grounds for criticizing the reporter, who may well have asked for examples and not gotten an answer.
“How can faith be politicized?” Are you kidding me, Mark?
“Do the authors think that more evangelicals should vote Democratic?” No. As the news report concludes, “It’s mainly a warning to people not to confuse their personal faith with political convictions.” Other GetReligion writers have long criticized the media for only seeing the aspects of religion that are relevant to politics. The Manifesto is making a similar point, that Christians should be wary of seeing their own faith in terms of politics. This post seems to be another example of Mark’s opinion to the contrary.
May 16, 2008, at 4:58 am
Without giving examples or, if that were “ungracious”, at least describing what intertwining they are rejecting, the document seems worthless.
No matter what the intention of the authors is (and I wonder about those that signed it later on - shouldn’t they be able to understand it completely?), the document is at least being used (e.g. by the reporting) by people holding one opinion to disqualify those that disagree on issues. Along the lines of using Christian-speak for “let’s all unite”-rhetoric is okay but for pointing out injustices like abortion is not.
In this case, the manifest’s authors would have become (whether willingly or unwillingly) the useful idiots.
May 16, 2008, at 12:17 pm
Anyone who says that “pointing out injustices like abortion” is not okay is speaking against what the Manifesto says. The authors are careful not to speak against taking a position on issues, and they also are careful to direct most of their criticism equally against conservatives and liberals.
Their first concern regarding politics is that, when we engage with politics as we definitely can and should, we must keep in mind that there are other things more important.
Secondly, when engaging with politics, it is important to see society holistically rather than focusing on “hot button” issues to the exclusion of all else.
This criticism, with its specific mention of abortion and marriage, seems pretty clearly to be aimed at the Religious Right establishment. However, I’m sure there are liberal causes (anti-war, perhaps) that can be held with the same lack of perspective. But again, they are not criticizing an anti-abortion position per se; rather, they are criticizing an all-out bareknuckles devotion to politics and a focus on specific narrow issues as the only ones important to society.
If you think that doesn’t apply to you, then they’re not talking about you. It seems pretty clear to me that it does apply to some prominent people, but that is a matter for their consciences and those of their supporters. If you think a statement like this is not useful unless it points out specific political positions and/or personages to oppose, then you just don’t get it.