January
2008
On the Religious Horizon: A Welcome Renewed Focus on Compassion and Justice
Published in the San Luis Obispo Tribune News, New Year’s Day 2008.
One hundred years ago—in 1908—Baptist minister and Social Gospel pioneer Walter Rauschenbusch rocked the conscience of the nation with a book called Christianity and the Social Crisis. Rauschenbusch was part of a larger movement within the church that took seriously the “thy will be done on earth” part of the Lord’s Prayer. For them being faithful to the gospel meant trying in serious ways to challenge gross economic inequality, abusive working conditions, the exploitation of women and children, and the militarism and imperialism that were then beginning to dominate U.S. relations with the rest of the world.
For the past thirty years or so, most Americans who think about the social voice of Christianity at all have assumed that the voice belongs to leaders from the Religious Right: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Kennedy, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, etc. Now the tide is shifting again, and a new balance is being struck in which the other strand of American Christianity—the one exemplified by Rauschenbusch but also by Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and many other justice heroes—is again being heard loud and clear.
Younger evangelicals in particular reflect an important new current within this shifting tide. To many of them, demonizing homosexuals seems not to be very much in the spirit of Jesus, whereas organizing against looming ecological catastrophe, protesting torture as official U.S. policy, and demanding humane conditions for workers everywhere within the globalized economy does seem to express Jesus’ commitment to the vulnerable and despised among us.
This is not to say that the older evangelical concern with personal salvation—“being right with God”—has disappeared, but rather that being right with God has taken on the additional dimension of ensuring that all is right for those whom God also loves and who deserve equal justice and full human dignity.
This new wider lens for evangelical engagement actually represents a return to an important mainstream tradition that was nearly eclipsed during the second half of the 20th century as a result of the tragic identification of many white evangelicals with diehard segregationism, the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by hard right leaders, and the morphing of the whole evangelical movement into the role of handmaiden to a resurgent Republican Party.
What happens next will depend in part on how this new turn within evangelicalism is received by traditional moderates and liberals: Mainline Protestants, Unitarian-Universalists, progressive Catholics, and progressive Jews. For decades these latter groups have mainly retreated to their various corners while the Religious Right was busily taking over the airwaves and dominating public discourse.
The best possible outcome would be for the latter groups to engage openly and generously with the progressive younger evangelicals on principles and values which all share: respecting the dignity of every person, honoring the special claims of children and the elderly, preventing ecocide, combating torture as an instrument of state policy, and finding peaceful solutions to world conflicts while stopping nuclear proliferation. The worst outcome would be for the traditional liberals to patronize the evangelicals, demanding that they accept the whole liberal agenda as a precondition for dialogue.
A successful bridging of the religious chasm within the wider culture “war” is critical to the future of America and the world because it can release the hammerlock of hard right ideology on U.S. politics and policies. Even a small shift in the political orientation and voting behavior of U.S. evangelicals will have measurable impact on this country’s long-term direction. For this redirection, long sought by many both within and without the religious world, we might well consider offering both our prayers and our hard work.