Piety and politics: evangelicals and fundamentalists confront the world.

Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World

ACCORDING TO Pastor Richard John Neuhaus, active Fundamentalists, as "typical Americans,' hate to be feared and want badly to be loved. It occurs to me that these people, hoping to strike warmth in their listeners' hearts, might have invented some other means than resorting to the self-ascriptive tag "moral,' which places them in the imprudent (and unlovable) category of self-described "beauties' and "geniuses.' On the other hand, the Fundamentalists' and Evangelicals' styles, while not (to my mind anyway) appealing, are distinctively their own, and probably no more susceptible of alteration than George Bush's grin or Jack Kemp's hair-do. As to the fear they inspire: Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1030 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005; $23.95 cloth; $12.95 paper), edited by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, is implicitly devoted to assuaging that response.

Not only, we are convincingly shown, are these latter-day pietistic movements nothing new in American history (being instead the inheritors of the Evangelical Protestantism that was this country's mainstream religion for most of the nineteenth century), they do not portend the formation of a theocratic state, or even mass conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity --though they almost certainly represent, as Martin Marty has put it, the emergence of a cognitive minority as a sociocultural majority. "On the map of American religion,' Neuhaus writes, "politicized Fundamentalism is a minority phenomenon. This minority, however, has kicked a tripwire alerting us to the much larger reality of unsecular America. As in 1962 Michael Harrington alerted public opinion to . . . "the Other America,' so the Religious Right has thrown open the closet door to expose the beliefs, fears, and aspirations shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans of almost every description.'

Calculating hysterics, like Norman Lear and his Newspeak People for the American Way, warn that the Christian Right is an army of belligerents, determined to thrust a narrow and aggressive morality upon the American polity and to replace a religiously neutral government with a theocratic one. In fact, as George F. Will points out, the Evangelicals are scarcely to blame for inflating abortion as a political issue: "The Supreme Court did that by striking down fifty states' laws that expressed community judgments about the issue. Those who opposed those judgments got them overturned by fiat, not democratic persuasion.' So, too, with the question of homosexuality: "Evangelicals did not set out to alter social attitudes about homosexuality. Government has begun teaching, through many measures, that homosexual and heterosexual relations represent only different "preferences' . . . among "life-styles.' Militant homosexuals are responsible for this . . .' As a great many contributors to the present volume recognize, the Fundamentalist-Evangelical assault is reactive: in Nathan Glazer's phrase, a "defensive offensive,' produced by what Will describes as "a provocative widening of the unavoidable gaps between values expressed in public policies and values cleaved to by large segments of the public.'

In regard to the charge that the Christian Right contemplates a political takeover of the United States, several contributors to Piety & Politics are at pains to dispel this perfervid belief. Jerry Falwell explains, with admirable patience, that Moral Majority, Inc., is not attempting to seize control of the government; that it is not a "censorship organization'; that it does not believe its opponents to belong to an "immoral minority'; and that it is committed to the continuance of a pluralistic culture--being, in fact, pluralistic itself. George Marsden argues that American Evangelicals share a set of beliefs that unite them across denominational traditions to the point where they can be said to have created a "transdenominational community,' a community embracing such disparate groups as the black Pentecostalists, the racial-separatist Fundamentalists of the Bob Jones variety, and peace churches of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition.

At the core of the Religious Right is its concern for the falling away from traditional values of private morality and public order, values which it quite correctly identifies as deriving from the Biblical tradition; as well as its suspicion that the U.S. political system (as it is currently staffed, anyway) can no longer "cope with the debilitating forces in American society.' Its diagnosis of the ills of that society, however, is tempered by the Biblical wisdom which teaches that "justice in political life cannot be based on . . . church discipline because earthly states are not churches' (James Skillen). For all its limitations and infelicities, therefore, the Fundamentalist-Evangelical movement represents the "American Way' far more faithfully and accurately than do Norman Lear and his crowd (who could not be guaranteed to recognize it after stumbling upon its bleeding corpse in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard in broad daylight, even if they had helped to put it there the night before).