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Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Politics and Culture in Modern America), by David R. Swartz
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In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind?
In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right.
In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.
- Sales Rank: #442397 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-09-07
- Released on: 2012-09-07
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
the hidden side of the evangelical movement
By Kevin Miller
This account of the rise and demise of the evangelical left in the 1970s is more than a cogent recovery of a nearly forgotten alternate Christian vision to the Jerry Falwell-led Moral Majority that exploded onto the national scene in 1979 and helped propel Ronald Reagan into political office. Through archival research into primary documents and letters, and augmented with original interviews of still-living framers of this social-justice evangelical coalition, Swartz shines a light on the less-publicized but always present minority impulse within the movement toward a holistic gospel ethic that would translate into a prophetic political stance on the social and moral and political issues of the day. The work provides a requisite historical antecedent for anyone trying to make sense, for example, of the 25 percent of white evangelical Americans who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 elections and the similar percentage supporting Obama in the weeks just prior to the 2012 presidential elections.
Clearly a scholarly investigation, the writing is almost journalistic in its flow and ability to tie together apparently unrelated figures and players in the struggle for the soul of evangelical identity and praxis. Here's a sample from just one paragraph in the book:
"They came from diverse traditions, nurtured different impulses, and pursued disparate projects. In the early 1970s, however, they began to find each other. In 1970 African American evangelical Bill Pannell traveled to Costa Rica to tell Latin Americans about the black experience in the United States. In 1972 Mouw helped organize the annual Calvin College Conference on Christianity and Politics, which brought prominent neo- evangelicals to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they learned about the political implications of Dutch Reformed theology. Anabaptist Ron Sider and Samuel Escobar of the Latin American Theological Fraternity brought their visions of global justice and simple living to InterVarsity circles. John Alexander, who continued to preach racial justice, added contributing editors to The Other Side's masthead. Wheaton College students joined Jim Wallis at rallies against the Vietnam War. Senator Mark Hatfield gained headlines as a contrarian. Sharon Gallagher and the Christian World Liberation Front enjoyed growing prominence as practitioners of a third way of intentional spiritual community. Carl Henry, already well known, continued to repudiate quietism in the pages of Christianity Today. Provoked anew by animus against Richard Nixon, the continuing war in Vietnam, and persistent racial strife, progressive evangelicals of different types began to make common cause."
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Evangelical Left
By Marty Troyer (The Peace Pastor
The right story told at the right time can make all the difference. Knowing this, great storytellers take as much care in selecting the right story as they do in crafting its telling. David Swartz, author and historian at Asbury University, has done just that in his newly released book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism.
This is a story many of us didn't know we wanted and needed to read, a story many didn't know existed. It's a story "chronicling the rise, decline, and legacy of the evangelical left."
But it's so much more than that. It's the story of what it looks like to merge progressive politics with deep personal piety; the story of "holistic concern for both evangelism and social action;" the story of a full 1/3 of evangelicals who do not find their voice in the religious right; the story of an awakening to social concern and the presence of social evil; it's the story of evangelical politics which very much could have taken a profoundly progressive shape; it's the story of a deeply diverse evangelicalism unwilling to fit neatly into caricatures; and its the story of what it might look like to love both God and neighbor with equal abandon.
This is a good story.
The bulk of the book seeks to sort from whence such a progressivism comes, weaving individual and organizational narratives into the whole, with chapters on Carl Henry and Neo-Evangelical Social Engagement, John Alexander and Racial Justice, Jim Wallis and Vietnam, Mark Hatfield and Electoral Politics, Sharon Gallagher and Spiritual Community, Samuel Escobar and the Gblobal perspective, Richard Mouw and Evangelical Politics, and Ron Sider and Economics. Each chapter, itself a story, is fantastic.
His chapter on John Alexander and Racial Justice was particularly helpful for me in Houston, as I've tried to navigate our own entrenched racialized landscape. Indicative of the larger story, this chapter develops a slow-coming shift from defining racism in strictly personal terms to a broader socialized definition. In addressing racism in the US and in evangelical churches, they found that "converting souls by itself could not sufficiently level the terrain." It was time to start "tackling racism on a structural level."
Like all good stories, Moral Minority allows you to see yourself it its pages. After all, the Houston church today continues to dialogue (or debate!) on incredibly similar lines. This is our story, unfolding (again) before our eyes. And in doing so, it becomes deeply meaningful.
Swartz, in what was for me quite helpful, concludes that "Evangelicalism is not inherently conservative, nor universally fixed to individual solutions to social problems." He goes on to inspire hope that we may find "fundamentally unstable" the current evangelical alliance with all things politically conservative. All of this leaves me craving a new question, What if the church were more known to be for Houston than it was known for what it was against? Perhaps we still can be.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Challenges Faulty Historical Aassumptions, Shallow Ideology, and Easy Partisanship
By George P. Wood
In America, white evangelicals are politically conservative. Seventy-nine percent of white evangelicals who voted in 2012, for example, cast their presidential ballot for Republican Mitt Romney, matching George W. Bush's share of white evangelical voters in 2004. So connected in the public mind have evangelicalism and conservatism become that it's hard for many to imagine any other state of affairs. Indeed, many white evangelicals themselves have a hard time imagining how any Christian could vote for a Democrat.
Forty years ago, that state of affairs was easier to imagine. On November 25, 1973, a group of moderate and liberal evangelicals issued "The Chicago Declaration of Social Concern," which began with these words:
"As evangelical Christians committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and the full authority of the Word of God, we affirm that God lays total claim upon the lives of his people. We cannot, therefore, separate our lives from the situation in which God has placed us in the United States and the world."
The declaration went on to acknowledge, "we have not demonstrated the love of God to those suffering social abuses." It critiqued American evangelicals' quiescence regarding "the social and economic rights of the poor and oppressed," "the historic involvement of the church in America with racism" in terms of both "personal attitudes" and "social structures," "the materialism of our culture and the maldistribution of the nation's wealth and services," "the misplaced trust of the nation in economic and military might," and the "prideful domination" of men and "irresponsible passivity" of women.
It ended on a nonideological, nonpartisan, and eschatological note:
"By this declaration, we endorse no political ideology or party, but call our nation's leaders and people to that righteousness which exalts a nation.
"We make this declaration in the biblical hope that Christ is coming to consummate the Kingdom and we accept his claim on our total discipleship until he comes."
The Washington Post described the impulse behind the Chicago Declaration as "a religious movement that could shake both political and religious life in America." Three years following the declaration, Newsweek declared America's bicentennial as the "The Year of the Evangelicals," and Americans--including a plurality of white evangelicals--elected Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist and Democrat, as president. But four years after that, white evangelicals formed the Moral Majority and voted for Republican Ronald Reagan, cementing the connection between white evangelicalism and political conservatism that persists to this day. Ironically, it was the religious right, not the evangelical left, which matched Newsweek's description shook political and religious life in America.
David R. Swartz tells the story of the rise, fall, and recent renaissance of the evangelical left in his book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism. He begins in media res with the "Chicago Declaration," then turns to chapter-length studies of individual signers whose involvement sheds light on the story.
The first of these studies is Carl F. H. Henry, whose 1947 manifesto, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, critiqued the political passivity of white fundamentalists and called for a neo-evangelical engagement of culture and politics, though he himself did not specify what that engagement might look like. Others did, however, including John Alexander of Freedom Now (later, The Other Side), who challenged American racism on biblical ground. Then there was Jim Wallis of The Post-American (later, Sojourners), who condemned America's war in Vietnam. Mark Hatfield, the moderate Republican senator from Oregon, lent verbal support to, but did not sign, the declaration; he illustrated the possibility of evangelical influence on politics. And Sharon Gallagher of Berkeley's Christian World Liberation Front and Right On advocated for intentional community and feminist issues.
The opposition of the evangelical left to political quiescence, racism, war, poverty, and patriarchy reflected a number of influences, sometimes contradictory. Samuel Escobar challenged white evangelical indifference to global poverty, igniting a passion for international social concern. Richard Mouw, influenced by Dutch Reformed theology, argued that the church should reform America's cultural institutions and political structures. Ronald J. Sider, coming from an Anabaptist perspective, argued that the church should model a countercultural community based on peace and simple living.
The diversity of concerns and theological backgrounds underlying the "Chicago Declaration" was both its strength and a cause of the undoing of the evangelical left. The declaration united progressive evangelicals around certain goals, at least in the abstract: anti-racism, anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-patriarchy, etc. In succeeding years, however, when participants tried to craft a united practical strategy to attain those goals, their diversity of concerns hardened into identity politics, and their theological backgrounds exposed deep rifts in assumptions about how the church should exercise its salt-and-light influence in the world.
Additionally, the American body politic tired of the "malaise" of Jimmy Carter and worried about the radicalism--both cultural and political--and violence of the left. The non-evangelical left became increasingly secular and pro-choice, distrusting the religious inspiration and pro-life commitments of their evangelical comrades. Consequently, during the 80s and 90s, much of the evangelical left entered the wilderness, distrusted by both their fellow evangelicals and their fellow leftists. The presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama seemed to have revived the evangelical left, however, giving it occasion both to oppose war and to propose a redistribution of the nation's wealth and a restructuring of its health and welfare systems. Though the majority of white evangelicals still lean to the right politically, a noticeable subset of younger evangelicals are leaning in the opposite direction. What this shift portends for the future of white evangelical politics is, at the present moment, anyone's guess.
My own political commitments as an evangelical are conservative. But I appreciate David R. Swartz's study in the political diversity of American evangelicalism during a formative period of our nation's recent history. Good history writing such as his challenges faulty memories, shallow ideology, and easy partisanship.
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