Author: Weaver-Swartz

Check out this review at Englewood of Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom, due out next month from Eerdmans. It includes lots of important young and minority voices including Malinda Berry, Peter Heltzel, Bruce Benson, David Gushee, Chris Boesel, and Ruth Padilla-DeBorst, among others. Here is Daniel Yencich’s critical summation to an otherwise very positive review:

For all the strength in its various essays, Prophetic Evangelicals is not without its questionable assumptions and unhelpful assertions. Though there are contributors who resist this trend, Prophetic Evangelicals as a whole seems most at home among those evangelicals who lean to the left, both politically and theologically. What this amounts to at times is a solid critique of conservatism (which is welcome!), but only a rather soft-handed prodding of liberalism (which, frankly, is not enough). Political conservativism and liberalism are both sources and perpetrators of great evil in the world today; a bit more balance in the prophecy against the two sides of the aisle would have been more helpful.

I’ve blogged before about the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Led by Richard Cizik and David Gushee, the NEPCG is releasing an important new book next month. Publicity copy for A New Evangelical Manifesto says that the book seeks to “think differently about how conservative faith relates to politics.” I expect that it will echo many of the same “consistent life” themes of the old evangelical left, but most of the names are new. I’m eager to read it!

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Introduction. David P. Gushee

Section I: A New Kind of Evangelical Christianity…
1. The Church in America Today (Brian McLaren)
2. Where the Church Went Wrong (Steven Martin)
3. A Disenchanted Text: Where Evangelicals Went Wrong with The Bible (Cheryl Bridges Johns)
4. My Journey Toward the “New Evangelicalism” (Richard Cizik)
5. A Theology That “Works” (Paul Markham)
6. God’s Vision for the Church—Kingdom Discipleship (Glen Harold Stassen)
7. Kingdom Community (Steven Martin)

Section II: Leading to Holistic Love of Marginalized Neighbors, such as…
8. Those Trafficked and Commodified (Jennifer Crumpton)
9. Those Suffering Preventable Diseases (Andi Thomas Sullivan)
10. Our Muslim Neighbors (Rick Love)
11. People of All Races (Lisa Sharon Harper )
12. Women (Jennifer Crumpton)
13. Children (Laura Rector)
14. The Dying (Scott Claybrook)
15. The Global Poor (Adam Phillips)

Section III: …And Redemptive Approaches in Public Life
16: Ending the Death Penalty (Timothy W. Floyd)
17: Making Peace (Paul Alexander)
18: Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (Tyler Wigg-Stevenson)
19: Overcoming Global Warming (Jim Ball)
20: Reducing Abortion (Charlie Camosy)
21: Resisting Consumerism (Jennifer Crumpton )
22: Standing Fast Against Torture (David P. Gushee)

 

In his July 14, 2012, column, “Can Liberal Religion Be Saved?” Ross Douthat mourns a lack of religious options. He indicts liberal religion for its relativism and secularism. He paints conservative religion as compromised by a heretical health-and-wealth theology. But this dichotomy betrays a lack of imagination. Obscured by the unrelenting culture wars, an evangelical left has sought for several decades now to pave a third way. Theologically conservative, but politically progressive evangelicals have allied with moderate Catholics around a “consistent life ethic.”  They have defied political orthodoxies in their attacks on abortion, capital punishment, poverty, nuclear proliferation, and spiritual malaise. In an era plagued by the dislocations of modernity and the relativism of postmodernity, mainliners and fundamentalists might do well to follow the lead of progressive evangelicals in emphasizing both social reform and personal conversion.

For similar thoughts by Rachel Held Evans, click here.

And here Diana Butler Bass points out that liberals are not the only ones losing adherents. Conservatives are too.

Michael Westmoreland-White responds with a “Duh!” to my claim that the evangelical left hasn’t thrived became of their discomfort with the very term evangelical. And he follows with a very helpful biographical narrative and expansion of the basic point. Go check it out here.

Is this surprising? When I was a teen in the 1970s, it was fairly easy to call myself “evangelical” and to identify with the Evangelical Left as it was then: Jim Wallis, Joyce Hollyday & the Sojourners Community; Tony Campolo; Ron Sider & Evangelicals for Social Action; Koinonia Partners in Americus, GA, founded in 1942 by Clarence & Florence Jordan & Martin & Mable England as an interracial Christian community–in the midst of segregation and racism; Jubilee Partners and The Other Side magazine (1965-2005); Virginia Ramey Mollenkott; Nancey Hardesty; Letha Dawson Scanzoni–Biblical feminism and the Evangelical Woman’s Conference (now the Evangelical and Ecumenical Woman’s Conference); the radical Black evangelism of Tom Skinner, John Perkins (and Voice of Calvary Ministries), and William E. Pannell–these and other people and organizations were the Left wing of American Evangelicalism, but clearly recognized as evangelical by their more moderate and even conservative sisters and brothers.

I LIKE the term “evangelical.” It literally means “gospel centered” & I, like most Christians, want to be “gospel centered.”. . . BUT “I am NOT “evangelical” in the sense the word aquired after the Furndamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s and definitely not in the sense of the Religious Right. And my theology, while having many influences from the Evangelical tradition as described above, has other influences too: from the Anabaptist tradition and the Anabaptist strand of the Baptist faith, from the more Christocentric strands of Protestant liberalism, from some forms of Neorthodoxy and the post-WWII “Biblical Theology” movement, from Liberation theologies and theologies of Hope, etc.  If one has to avoid all such influences to be genuinely “Evangelical, then I am NOT Evangelical.  If one must be conservative politically, then I, a Green-leaning democratic socialist and registered Democrat, fail the test.

One of the reasons for the failure of the evangelical left to thrive is that many are uncomfortable with the evangelical label. Associating the label with right-wing, militant rhetoric, many progressive evangelical now call themselves other things entirely, even though they might agree with Richard Mouw’s description of evangelical identity below:

The important question that we do need to ask about labels, of course, is whether they continue to communicate what they were originally intended to identify. In that regard, questions about the “evangelical” label are good ones to ask today. And while I take those questions seriously, I am firmly committed to sticking with that label as a means of self-identification. . . . For me evangelical identity points to such things as a firm belief in the supreme authority of the Bible and the unique atoning work of Jesus Christ, as well as to the obligation to work actively in inviting people to enter into a personal relationship with the Savior. And furthermore, it means continuing to plead with others who own the label not to pile onto those important convictions a lot of additional baggage that does not do honor to a label that I continue to love.

Click here for more.

This guy reminds me of Senator Mark Hatfield, a progressive Republican in the vein of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, not Sarah Palin and Rick Perry. “My faith,” writes Frank Fredericks in the Huffington Post, “informs my worldview, and that includes a belief that everyone should have a fair chance at success, that we should build more bridges than bombs, and that no interest should be a special interest. . . . Theodore Roosevelt was the first presidential candidate to run on progressive platform, with the Square Deal including consumer protections, challenging corporate monopolies and creating environmental protections. It wasn’t just smaller government, but better government.” Sounds a lot like Hatfield, who feared the emergence of evangelical right-wingers like Palin and Perry–and Robertson and Falwell before them.

Here’s an excerpt from Moral Minority on Hatfield’s early politics:

As Hatfield’s meteoric rise in Oregon politics progressed, it became increasingly clear that he represented a progressive wing of the party of Lincoln. To be sure, he was still a Republican. In fact, Hatfield was an unambiguous social conservative on abortion before the party itself became more consistently pro-life. He was also an anti-New Deal fiscal conservative. But his populist call for “genuine political, economic, and ecological self-determination” meant reducing “excessive concentration of power” everywhere, not only in the executive branch of government and labor unions, but also in big corporations and the military. Hatfield’s emphasis on decentralization, voluntarism, compassionate globalism, political localism, and populist electoral measures such as the recall, initiative, and referendum in fact dovetailed nicely with Oregonian tradition. Hatfield often cited his state’s historic leadership in women’s suffrage, child-labor laws, worker benefits, and the progressive income tax. He opposed a state sales tax, arguing that it was a regressive tax that hit low-income earners disproportionately. He sought and received labor support, earning the endorsement of the Teamsters in his 1952 run for the governorship. Hatfield’s leadership of the Young Republicans in Oregon in 1949 resulted in a platform that included aid to the poor and elderly, taxes on the timber industry to fund environmental research, and an end to racial discrimination. Dismissing the racial overtones that plagued much of the growing conservative movement at mid-century, Hatfield joined the NAACP. In 1953 he successfully introduced a bill that prohibited discrimination in hotel accommodations well before national and most state initiatives. Most Oregon evangelicals supported these initiatives; after all, they came from a governor who regularly stopped his state vehicle to kneel on the roadside to pray.

There’s a new Christian television show–but it looks a lot different than the 700 Club. “Red Letter Christianity” features evangelical lefty notables Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne. It airs Mondays at 9:00 p.m., Tuesdays at 2:30 a.m., and Fridays at 12:30 p.m. on TBN. You can watch  previous episodes online here.

I wonder if this is the first-ever progressive evangelical television show. Can anyone think of another?

Readers of this blog–who are almost certainly scholarly nerds like me–will enjoy this rousing game of Internet research that’s sort of like Seven Degrees of Separation. In WikiWars players must race from a page on Wikipedia to another seemingly unrelated page on Wikipedia using only Wikipedia links. I love the play-by-play!