Who are these people? In 2004 the Pew Trust sponsored a two-day seminar for leading journalists, calling the gathering “Toward an Understanding of Religion and American Public Life.” Religion historian Mark Noll, an evangelical who has authored several books on the subject, led a discussion about contemporary evangelicals. He explained their core religious beliefs, and noted that these religious commitments by themselves have not resulted in a cohesive, institutionally compact, or clearly demarcated group of Christians. There is, in reality, a large network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, and personal connections, as well as varying levels of belief and practice that fall under the evangelical label.[53] Noll pointed out that although certain Supreme Court rulings had caused evangelicals to become increasingly politically active, Roe v. Wade had been the tipping point. Before Roe, evangelicals were no more political than Billy Graham, thus either apolitical or unobtrusively political, and not active in politics. After Roe, self-appointed leaders within the evangelical movement became militant activists. “Baptists [ministers] Jerry Falwell and Timothy LaHaye, and the lay psychologist James Dobson, entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and 1980s,” said Noll. They “created the new religious right and have made conservative evangelical support so important for the Republican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.” Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, albeit unsuccessful in even coming close to getting the Republican nomination, further politicized a large segment of the evangelical community, Noll added.
Noll candidly acknowledged the authoritarian nature of evangelicals. Speaking as an evangelical and a historian of evangelicalism, he noted its incompatibly with the give-and-take of politics because of the rigidity of its beliefs. Noll said he wants evangelicals to learn “new ways of being present in the public space without believing that [they] have to dominate the public space” (emphasis in original transcript). Evangelical Christianity, he explained, is an intolerant religion, unable to say “your religion is fine with you; my religion is fine with me.” Rather “evangelical religion is offensive. It claims forthrightly that there is one, and only one, way to God,” and that is their way. The world has evolved, and Noll realized that evangelicals, so far, have not.[54]
Several attendees at the Pew conference referred to the work of a University of North Carolina sociologist, Christian Smith, who has studied how rank-and-file evangelicals think. One conferee said of Smith’s work that it showed that the rank-and-file is “a lot nicer than their leaders!”[55] Smith’s work supports the notion that the religious right’s political thinking and behavior may be less than uniform, and that the leaders of the Christian right do not necessarily speak for evangelicals as a whole.[56] While this may be true of the segment of the population investigated by Smith and his collaborators, their sample appears unrepresentative.[57] In the end, I found that the observations of Mark Noll—who deals with a wide array of evangelical brothers and sisters, day in and day out—as well as those of politically attuned observers such as Cal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator, and former president Jimmy Carter seemed more insightful and revelatory. All of these individuals have been critical of Christians in politics while remaining true to their faiths.[*]
Cal Thomas, a conservative Christian who once served as vice president of communications for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, has joined journalist and evangelical minister Ed Dobson in making “a strong case for the church to lay down its impotent weapons of political activism.”[58] Based on his experience at the heart of Christian right politics, Thomas said he believes that all the evangelical energy now devoted to politics could be better directed toward living and sharing the gospel. He has concluded that neither “our individual or collective cultural problems can be altered exclusively, or even mainly, through the political process.” Thomas found that “the marriage of religion and politics almost always compromises the gospel,” for “[p]olitics is all about compromise.” The conflation of church and state has resulted in the church’s getting “its theological pocket picked.” “Whenever the church cozies up to political power,” he continued, “it loses sight of its all-important mission to change the world from the inside-out.”[59]
Not surprisingly, Thomas does not approve of the political tactics employed by Christian conservatives. For example, when fund-raising, “they identify an enemy: homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or ‘liberals’ in general,” he explained. Then, these enemies are accused, falsely, of being out to “get us” or “impose their morality on the rest of us or destroy the country.” An action plan is offered—“We will oppose the enemies and ensure that they do not take over America”—and a plea for funds follows.[60] The focus is inevitably negative, and often the claims are outrageous, such as Pat Robertson’s claim that God wanted him “to help usher in the Second Coming.” Robertson denied making such a statement, and when Thomas produced a copy of the fund-raising letter in question, he was immediately vilified. Thomas noted that Robertson and others “must constantly have enemies, conspiracies, and opponents as well as play the role of righteous victim in order to get people to send in money.” Understandably, Thomas is troubled by the irony that the Bible calls on Christians to love their enemies, “whether they be homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or liberals.”[61]
Former president Jimmy Carter speaks with unique insight about mixing politics and religion. In Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, Carter wrote that this nation’s leaders once “extolled state and local autonomy, attempted to control deficit spending, avoided foreign adventurism, minimized long-term peacekeeping commitments, preserved the separation of church and state, and protected civil liberties and personal privacy.” However, today’s leaders—he does not mention Christian conservatives because it is obvious to whom he is referring—have placed far more divisive issues at the center of their platform: “abortion, the death penalty, science versus religion, women’s rights, the separation of religion and politics, homosexuality.” These debates, he noted, have divided the nation and threatened America’s traditional values. Carter said he believes the most important factor in that divisiveness is that “fundamentalists have become increasingly influential in both religion and government, and have managed to change the nuance and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree.” He added, “Narrowly defined theological beliefs have been adopted as the rigid agenda of a political party.”[62]
53.
Mark Noll explained evangelicalism as the “belief that lives need to be changed”; the “belief that all spiritual truth” is found in the Bible; dedication to active lives in service of God, or to “evangelism” (spreading the good news) and “mission” (taking the gospel to other societies); and conviction that Christ’s death on the cross provided reconciliation between a holy god and sinful human beings. See Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Center Conversations: Understanding American Evangelicals, A Conversation with Mark Noll and Jay Tolson” (June 2004) at http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2115/pub_detail.asp.
56.
Christian Smith,
57.
Smith polled over twenty-five hundred church-going Protestants in a 1996 telephone survey that he reproduces in the book. He acknowledged the weakness of this type of polling, and the results are now dated. Nonetheless, the surveys have some rather alarming findings. For example, a survey focusing on the South revealed that 87 percent of self-identified evangelicals believed that the United States was founded “as a Christian nation”; 92 percent saw “a serious breakdown of American society”; 68 percent believed “morals should be based on an absolute, unchanging standard”; 69 percent disagreed with the notion that religion is a private matter “to be kept out of public debates over social and political issues”; 55 percent believed “Christian morality should be the law of the land even though not all Americans are Christians”; 68 percent believed the “federal government should promote traditional values in our society”; and 77 percent believed “the mass media is hostile to [evangelical] moral and spiritual values.” (Ibid., 200.) In a survey of religious identity and influence, only 35 percent of the evangelicals
Smith and his collaborators also interviewed evangelicals face-to-face from select locations, but it was a very small sample that had not been selected randomly; in addition, these kinds of interviews are not always as candid as anonymous responses. In short, this is not a scientifically representative selection of all evangelicals, but rather a largely anecdotal collection of information gathered from evangelicals willing to talk with sociologists. As another social scientist, familiar with this work, explained, “The sampling procedure is critical, since Smith says his interviews tell us what evangelicals really think and want. That is a big claim and it means he has to have a representative sample. The evidence strongly suggests he does not. This team apparently did two studies using face-to-face interviews. One involved 130 church-going Protestants in six different locations around the U.S., and the second involved 187 evangelicals and others in 23 states. Neither of these is a national sample. If you look at the map in the book, you can see that most of the interviewees (in the second, larger study) came from places near large universities. You can even guess the academic affiliation of many of the sociologists involved by looking at the map. One consequence is that the Deep South, which has the largest concentration of evangelicals in the country, is pretty underrepresented. One might well find that evangelicals who live in university communities have higher educational attainments, etc., than other evangelicals. A second issue is how the researchers found the particular evangelicals in their locale to interview. We aren’t told, but in the Acknowledgments Smith thanks the pastors who ‘in many cases’ granted the researchers access to the interviewees. So it is quite plausible that the investigators contacted the pastors of conservative Protestant churches in their area, and the pastors selected—at least to some extent—the evangelicals to be interviewed. That makes it potentially a very biased and misleading sample.”
*
The observations of evangelicals like Noll, Thomas, and Carter are corroborated in studies such as John C. Green’s