Those Pesky Evangelicals

I came across an opinion piece posted by Sullivan this morning dealing with evangelical politics and the Bush Presidency. The piece is shameless and utterly wrong for so many reasons. As an evangelical, I feel compelled to fisk the rather self-righteous author of the piece. The author, former speech-writer for Reagan and Nixon, Jeffrey Hart, begins with a bang.

During the 2000 Republican primaries, in the third televised debate, the candidates were asked by a panelist to name the political philosopher who had most influenced them. Most replied in a conventional way, Tocqueville always a safe bet. No one would say Machiavelli, of course. But George W. Bush answered "Jesus Christ."

The first image we’re given of the Bush Presidency in this piece is that admittedly awkward quote. Christ wasn’t exactly a philosopher of the normal variety. But Hart takes this to mean something rather different:

Too bad, because Jesus teaches little or nothing about politics. His focus is inward, to the purity of the soul.

Barely two paragraphs in and we already start to see the crux of the problem. Hart sees Christ as the “nice teacher” who was interested in spreading love. And sure, Christ was the teacher. He was primarily focused on the soul. But to assume then that Christ’s message was not FULL of political import is to miss the point. Indeed, Christ did not preach politics, but his words carry into every area of our lives, including politics. If you accept Christ as your savior, but notice no difference in how you live, then you need to re-consider exactly what you accepted. It wasn’t the Christ of the Bible. So Hart is already off base, but let’s see where else he goes.

Next, he asserts that the President is not conservative. I at least half agree. Hart argues,

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.

So what is not conservative about the roots? Hart never bothers to actually answer this, except maybe to himself and a few others who already agree with him. He takes us through three awakenings which, he argues, show us the un-conservative roots of Bush’s policy. First he deals with the Great Awakening, moved forward by Edwards and Wesley.

Both of these men possessed professional theological training, Wesley at Oxford, Edwards at Yale. They were to be the exception on that point. Such American Evangelicalism typically has a homemade quality because of its "faith" in Scripture, a "faith," as it is today, often based on wild misreadings of the text of Scripture itself.
Though Edwards was an educated man, his preaching of sin, damnation and the possibility of salvation through Jesus drew large crowds, often filled with emotion and showing it in sometimes bizarre ways, rolling on the ground, fainting, having spasms. The same with Wesley's immensely popular preaching here and in England. The emotions raised by this first Awakening are held by historians to have energized the beginnings of the American Revolution.

Make sure you catch that. Wesley and Edwards were educated men, but the rest of the rabble following after them were uneducated, and unclean. They got excited about the Bible and they had this weird little voodoo called “faith.” They didn’t know how to read the scripture either and it’s their fault that all Christians today have it wrong.

If Hart said this about any minority in America, he would be flayed alive for it. But never mind which groups it’s chic to mock. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. We move to what Hart sees as the next “big” movement, the Civil War era.

The second Awakening occurred during the period leading up to the Civil War, and energized the Abolitionist movement in New England. From there it spread west along the wagon trails after the war. Its Cromwellian strains can be heard in Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," where the Lord is stamping out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored -- in the South. But Lincoln and Grant were not New England Evangelicals, far from it, and fought to save the Union.

This is classic bait and switch. He admits that the evangelicals were largely responsible for the work of the Northern Abolition movement. Then, it went west and south. And you know what happened in the south, right? Slavery. And it was up to Lincoln and Grant, as sophisticated Northern “secular” types to fix those crazy southern religious types who wanted slaves.

In other words, even though it was northern evangelical Christians who led much of the Abolitionist movement, it was still the fault of evangelicals (in the south) that the Civil War had to be fought. And it was thanks to mighty secular giants that we were freed from the religious evangelicals that wanted to enslave the Africans. Hart has completely twisted history for his own purposes. He’s sounding more like a liberal (or this days, libertarian) by the minute.

But now we get to where Hart attempts to make his point that evangelical belief is at odds with conservative practice.

After the Civil War, Evangelicalism rose in the West with the poor farmers and eventuated in William Jennings Bryan and his Cross-of-Gold campaigns for cheap silver. But though the Democrats nominated him for president three times -- 1900, 1904 and 1908 -- Bryan was an ignorant man, considered by Theodore Roosevelt a mere "trombone" orator of no worth at all. He brought the Democratic Party into disrepute and never came close to winning.

Hart pulls out an obscure reference to one figure who isn’t even that important in evangelical history, to prove that a Democrat was once an evangelical. Wow, that is conclusive proof that evangelicals are at great odds with conservative teaching! Thank you Mr. Hart. But wait, there’s more. Why stop at arguable historical opinions when you can jump straight into insults from there?

The present or Third Awakening of Evangelicalism believes all sorts of bizarre things, such as the imminent end of the world, the second coming of Christ, the sudden elevation of the just to heaven and the final struggle of Good versus Evil in Jerusalem: Armageddon. We thus have the immense popularity of the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
The whole thing is based on two visionary books of the Bible, Thessalonians and Revelations. Cast in poetic imagery, these often are highly allegorical, for example alluding to events of the late Roman Empire, and hardly to be taken literally. The term "Armageddon" does not even refer to Jerusalem, but is an English translation of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew har geddon, "at" or "near Geddo." This was a large town at a considerable distance from Jerusalem. That it was the juncture of two caravan routes where brawls were likely could have led to its metaphorical use as a metaphor for battle.
In any case, Ariel Sharon can rest easy on this point, and you yourself can safely make a date for lunch without fear of being wooshed up to heaven. People have kept a lot of lunch dates since those visionary books were written 20 centuries ago.

I’m as big a critic of Dispensational theology as the anyone out there, but Hart blatantly wades out into waters that he doesn’t understand here. And it shows, horribly. Of course, Thessalonians is hardly prime fodder for end-of-the-world Christians. They prefer Daniel and even the OT Prophets much more. Even more importantly, equating evangelicals with those of doomsday cults that predict an exact end of the world is pretty disingenuous and if Hart knows any better, he should be ashamed. But, Hart eventually leaves insults behind and attempts to get back to the point of his piece.

The reason that religious populism in the form of Evangelicalism cannot work is that it is very difficult to cross from the world of the five senses, in which we live, to the realm beyond it, if any, with which the higher religions of course are concerned, since they posit a God who was there before the beginning. If we did not believe in the evidence of our senses, we would walk into walls and fall down stairs.

This is, of course, stupid. Hart is arguing that if we believe in a God beyond the senses, then we obviously discredit science and learning. This is the same sort of religious bigotry that is so prominent in extremely liberal (and once again, libertarian) circles. In his mind, there is no room for faith. You cannot believe that God exists and also believe in what can be seen. It’s funny that secularists, because of their inability to comprehend God, assume that those of us who do comprehend God must not be able to comprehend the physical world. Hart continues with the real beef that he has.

If we recall Leo Strauss's formulation that "Athens and Jerusalem" -- science and spiritual aspiration -- are the core of Western civilization, American Evangelicalism is a threat to both, through ignorance of both.

Yet, Hart has failed to show that evangelicalism truly matches this perception. How have evangelicals become a threat to spiritual aspiration? Hart gives no reason. He simply asserts it and moves on. Of course, in his mind, there need be no reason. It simply is. As for the threats that evangelical faith poses to science? Well, this will hardly come as a shock.

During the 2004 presidential election perhaps the most scandalous of these arose as an issue in the campaign, stem-cell research. In August 2001, Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for such research involving fertilized cells created after 2001. This severely inhibited research which had indeed proved promising. Bush claimed to have issued his order for "moral reasons," but all the moral reasons seem to support the research.

Some Christians have issue with the idea of an aborted fetus being used for spare parts, and Hart sees this as evangelicalism threatening science? Is science so fragile that a few questions asked of it are going to end the scientific process?

But this takes us to the real issue at hand. Hart and those who agree with him blast Christians as bigoted control-freaks bent on forcing their will on the people. Yet, it is they that cannot stand a dissenting voice. Dare to speak against what Hart holds near and dear, and you truly are a danger to the American way. No wonder Sullivan likes what he has to say. And we’re supposed to believe that it’s the evangelicals who broke no dissent?