Breaking the bonds

Has any American History high school course ever managed to get close to the present day? Most run out of time somewhere around the Depression, if they get that far. (Maybe they ought to start at the present and work backwards…?) We didn’t even get to WWII in my own high school history class (I grew up in North Carolina, so we spent a lot of time on the Civil War and its aftermath) and there’s been another generation of history tacked on since then.

My daughter’s class is no exception: they’re just now making the turn from the 19th century to the 20th, talking about the “robber barons,” the “Second Industrial Revolution” and social reformers such as John Dewey and Jane Addams. So as I was helping her review her notes the other day, my eye was caught by a reference to the “Social Gospel” movement.

I was raised Catholic, but had little exposure to church history in parochial school. I didn’t hear about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement till college, and I know even less about American Protestant church history. So I was surprised to find that the notion that the Christian Gospel has implications for economics and public policy has actually been around for quite some time. (See pbs.org/now/society/socialgospel.html for a good summary. Wikipedia is also useful.)

You can understand my surprise, I hope. Most of the issues currently associated with religious faith in American public discourse, such as abortion and gay marriage, are personal and sexual in nature. Some evangelicals and fundamentalists have strongly resisted any attempts to broaden this focus to address issues of social injustice and ecological stewardship. Rev. Richard Cizik, VP for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, for example, has received enormous amounts of flak for supporting attempts to combat global climate change. Cizik and Harvard biologist Dr. Erik Chivian founded the “Scientists and Evangelical Initiative” ( chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/unite/index.html ) to promote ecological awareness within the evangelical community. Time Magazine recently named them two of the “100 most influential people” worldwide.

Keeping evangelicals focused on sexual “family issues” has been just fine with Republican strategists, who have been able to rely on evangelicals’ zeal, organizational strength and visceral reactions to these issues, and have manipulated them successfully for a generation at least. As a result, the financial/business interests within the GOP (what I like to call the “Mammonist” wing) have been able to win support for fiscal policies from people who by and large do not benefit, and are in fact frequently harmed by them.

But this unnatural alliance is breaking down. Recent stories have pointed out strong support for Sen. Barack Obama’s Presidential bid among young evangelicals. The social gospel is enjoying a resurgence, most visibly in the work of Jim Wallis and Sojourners Magazine (see www.sojo.net ).

Look for evangelical leaders, beholden to the Mammonists, to try to rein in this tendency. Following the recent gay marriage decision in California, there will be an upsurge in panicked appeals to “save marriage” by voting Republican. And as a recent story in Church Executive magazine ( churchexecutive.com/news.asp?N_ID=1278 ) indicated, there will also be stronger attempts to dissuade evangelicals from environmental awareness and activism.

But the bond has been broken, and people of faith are declaring their independence from the GOP—to the ultimate benefit, I believe, of both church and state.