Christopher Hitchens does not have a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire or an army of devoted Irreligious Left followers.
The Rev. John Huffman is an evangelical Christian and pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, Calif.
After seeing some of the more lurid representatives of evangelicalism on television, his daughters came to him and asked, “Dad, are you one of those?
To set the record straight, a horrified Huffman and over 70 other evangelicals have signed an “Evangelical Manifesto,” a document they call “a declaration of evangelical identity and public commitment.” They unveiled it today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
I give it one cheer (or one amen, if you prefer), but no more than that.
There’s a good bit to like about the Manifesto. For one thing, it repudiates the politicization of religion. It also forthrightly rejects theocracy, Christian or otherwise.
“We are not uncritical of unrestrained voluntarism and rampant individualism,” the signers say, “but we utterly deplore the dangerous alliance between church and state, and the oppression that was its dark fruit. We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth.”
The signers also criticize pretty directly the excesses of the Religious Right and call for “an expansion of concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage.”
“Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith; and it would be no improvement to respond to a weakening of the religious right with a rejuvenation of the religious left,” the Manifesto asserts. “Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church – and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons.”
The document adds, “Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power, what is right outweighs what is popular, just as principle outweighs party, truth matters more than team-playing, and conscience more than power and survival. The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness.”
The signers add, “In a society as religiously diverse as America today, no one faith should be normative for the entire society, yet there should be room for the free expression of faith in the public square. Let it be known unequivocally that we are committed to religious liberty for people of all faiths, including the right to convert to or from the Christian faith. We are firmly opposed to the imposition of theocracy on our pluralistic society.”
All that’s good and well, and we certainly welcome those affirmations. After 25 years of intolerant abrasive “Christian nation” claptrap from the Robertsons, Falwells and Kennedys of the world, those words are most welcome. It’s telling that the names of James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and the other leaders of the still-powerful old-school Religious Right are nowhere to be found on the Manifesto signature list. (Huffman said Dobson’s Focus on the Family board didn’t want him to sign on.)
Isn’t it amazing that Dobson and Company can’t bring themselves to sign a rather mild rejection of the Constantinian merger of religion and government 1,700 years after it took place. Talk about slow learners!
But there are also reasons that church-state separationists will find the Manifesto troubling. It reflects an evangelical paranoia and a theocratic undercurrent that rankles.
The signers insist, for example, that they are deeply concerned about the “striking intolerance evident among the new atheists” and the danger of a “coercive secularism” that might force religion out of the public square. Adopting the language of right-wing Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, they warn against the “partisans of a naked public square, those who would make all religious expression private and keep the public square secular.”
This strikes me as completely bogus. Christopher Hitchens does not have a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire or an army of devoted Irreligious Left followers. Sam Harris heads no Anti-Christian Coalition with chapters around the country seeking to block religious voters from going to the polls. Religious persons freely speak out on public affairs in this country, and there is no serious effort to stop them.
I’m also concerned about the mindset of the Manifesto signers. In the document, they describe a world with “such evils as genocide, slavery, female oppression, and assaults on the unborn” that “must be resisted.”
Wait just a minute! Conscientious people, whether religious or not, agree that genocide, slavery and female oppression are wrong, but “assaults on the unborn” is an evangelical euphemism for abortion. Blithely listing a woman’s right to end a problem pregnancy as equivalent to genocide or slavery reflects a rather astonishing worldview.
And it’s a worldview that isn’t shared by the majority of Americans (Christian or not), who regularly tell pollsters that they broadly support reproductive choice. (Maybe the Manifesto drafting committee should have included more women. Of 75 signers announced today, only six are female.)
The abortion issue reminds us of the difficulty that sometimes arises when religious voices come to the public square armed only with scriptural mandates that others don’t accept. Manifesto signers think the Bible bans abortion, but many other Christians don’t see it that way. And non-Christians, of course, don’t much care what the Bible says, or doesn’t say, about abortion. How do we discuss issues that intertwine so deeply with religious doctrine in a way that includes everyone?
At a minimum, evangelicals will have to make their case on abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues in language that all Americans can understand – and argue about. It can’t just be: the Bible says, I believe it, that settles it. That might work in a theological debate at an evangelical seminary, but it won’t work in a pluralistic America.
The bottom line: The Manifesto will have served a wholesome purpose if it opens up debate within the evangelical community about the proper role of religion in a democratic and pluralistic society. That discussion has been sorely lacking for decades. Where in the world have these Manifesto folks been, and why has it taken them so long to step forward?
But if the Manifesto merely masks a continuing evangelical drive to dominate the public square and legislate a ban on abortion, restrictions on the civil rights of gay people and a church-state relationship where separation is more a façade than a reality, it’s just more of the same-old, same-old.
We’ll be watching carefully to see what happens.
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