OldSpeak

Am I a Liberal? Confessions of an Irenic Iconoclast

By Charles Strohmer
August 10, 2005

Three times that I know of last year I got caught in the crossfire of American’s culture war by people who must think they know me better than I know myself. Three people responded to pieces I’d written by labeling me a “liberal”—end of discussion. Like dragsters braking hard at the end of a quarter mile run, it shut down any further thinking on their part about what I had been arguing for or against. Their responses reminded me of the common Christian retort, “Well, the Lord told me.” If God told you, end of conversation.

Fortunately I’m not Jim Wallis, the Sojourner’s founder and president. Increasingly since Sojourner’s launched the “God is not a Republican or a Democrat” campaign last summer, which garnered more than 100,000 signatures from across the religious spectrum, being in the crossfire has become a way of life for Wallis. His new book, God’s Politics—a phenomenal best-seller that challenges both the left and the right, politically and religiously—is carrying him around the country on book signings “dis­guised,” he says, “as town meetings.” His itinerary also is filled, every week, with earnest discussions everywhere among disparate political and religious groups and think tanks, as well as one-on-one conversations with diverse political leaders sometimes at the highest levels, e.g., George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two, he told me recently during a phone conversation, being two of the latest. But, he quickly added, he catches flack from both sides of the political and theological divide. 

On a recent conservative Christian radio program out of Los Angeles, he was labeled as a leader of the religious left because he cares about poverty. “But poverty,” Wallis replied, “Is a biblical issue. It’s not a left issue. There are 3,000 verses in the Bible about poverty. The first words out of Jesus, after he came into Nazareth [from the wilderness] were that the Spirit had anointed him to bring good news to the poor.”

But it’s often much more heated, as occurred after a recent speech to a group of liberal Democratics. “I gave them a lot of Bible, Jesus, and faith, and a lot of them liked it,” Wallis told me. “They’re tired of this secular fundamentalism on the left. But then Kim Gandy, the leader of the National Organization of Women, stood up and just attacked me, saying: We don’t want any kind of religion to shape our politics. And then she said: Abortion is our issue; Jim Wallis will sell us out on this issue. He wants to put out a sign that says No Jews or Gays Need Apply, Just White Aryan Christian Men. I mean, I was there. I heard this.”

Wallis believes that her unfounded response was triggered by how receptive the crowd had been to a Christian message on poverty and the war. “That was threatening to her. But two weeks before I was at the Heritage Foundation, on the right, and [someone] there did the same thing. He distorted what I was saying and attacked me. He said: Jim just thinks that the only answer to poverty is more federal spending. But I’ve written whole chapters that say the opposite to that. Then he said: Jim and his liberal friends think that we deserved bin Laden. But in my book I’m very critical of the left for not being tough enough on terrorists like bin Laden.”

These are classic examples of the all too common way in which labels function as convenient ploys for intellectual mis-engagement or disengagement with important issues. They represent the widespread one-upmanship within Amer­ica that militates against the civil and wise discourse across religious and political lines that should be occurring in order to reach consensus on vital life issues.

For instance, “liberal” on the lips of some conservative Christians, if it is not labeling an enemy, has become a term of contempt. Is this grace-speech seasoned with salt? I have a hunch about how this mocking spirit got into Christian attitudes. First it worked its way into the broadcast studios within the vast and hugely popular network of politically conservative Talk Radio programs, which millions of conservative Christians listen to and absorb every day in America as if they were hearing Jesus himself speaking to them. Like fire, which never says “Enough!” now this mocking spirit is applying for  residency status in American Radioland’s emerging political left programs, which are being funded and aired to ensure equal time for its own constituency. There is nothing redemptive, however, about a spirit that evokes exclusivist attitudes fostering the kind of “othering” that divides our already divided nation. Christians, of every sort, need to ask: Is this an attitude consistent with the gospel?

Also, what is meant by “liberal”? My three responders did not say. Its use as an adjective before the word “theology,” however, is dissimilar to its appearance before “democracy.” That is, certain features (to be brief and general about it) surrounding the authority of Scripture and religious experience, the nature of revelation and miracles, and the purpose of the church are known as liberal theology to mark them off from how conservative theology handles those issues.

“Liberal democracy” is quite another thing. That tag line, it should immediately be noted, is not a reference to the “liberal” wing of the Democratic party. Rather, liberal democracy is what America is. Representative government, constitutional law and rights, the balance of powers, individual freedoms, strong political parties, a free press, a free market economy, private associations, churches not controlled by the state..., for Americans who can answer, “Of course! Of Course! We wouldn’t want to be without these!” then that is a rousing affirmation of liberal democracy.

America is not just a “democracy.” Democracies hold elections, but they may also ignore the constitutional limits on their power and deprive citizens of basic rights. Anyone wishing to understand the difference would be well-informed by reading Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, in which he notes that our “bundle of freedoms might be called ‘constitutional liberalism’.” So there seems to be a great deal, indeed, “liberal” that conservatives themselves would not only rue the loss of but also be willing to die for, and have died for on many battlefields. Further, where these are lacking, or not adhered to, democratic governments could produce theocracies, which is what some political scientists fear from radical Islam and even from the Christian reconstructionist, or dominionist, movement.

Here it is worth pausing to absorb the admonition of David Walsh, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. Commenting on just one characteristic of the liberal democratic tradition, “rights,” Walsh writes: “If we cannot explain to ourselves why a liberal order of rights is worth preserving, it will not be possible for us to persuade ourselves and our children to retain it much longer” (from his essay in Eerdman’s Public Morality, Civic Virtue and the Problem of Modern Liberalism).  

My gripe with the American political and religious scene and the media is that they are driven by left-right polemics, which today inflates the terms “liberal” and “conservative” far beyond their appreciative usages in the English language. They are now all-encompassing dismissal words, terms that now say it all, designations to justify deafness. No longer is it necessary to have give-and-take on issues. “He’s a conservative.” “She’s a liberal.” Read: I don’t need to have the slightest concern for what she says; I’ve got the corner on the truth. But doesn’t Someone else have that locked up?

As for my three responders, I assume that when they heard certain points being made in what I had written, they assumed “liberal,” which immediately red-flagged me in their minds: they decided that they knew where I was coming from, and so to reject it without further consideration. As a good friend and colleague told me, “We’­re seeing a return of the old shibboleth mentality. If you have good relations with ‘the wrong tribe­’, you will be cut down at the bridge.”

This attitude in America is going to cost us, big time—politically, religiously, socially, and internationally—if we don’t start wising up. Fortu­nately many have, and they are finding huge audi­ences equally disillusioned and hungry for difference. There’s Wallis’ considerable influence (one only need visit Jim’s up­dates on sojo.org to get a feel for the huge numbers of people saying “Amen” to his outside-the-boxes approach). Another fellow traveler is Bruce McLaren, a senior leader in the so-called emerging church movement, who has for years been stimulating Christians to think with an orthodoxy that can affirm points of view across a wide spectrum of religious and political thought. In this context, his recent book A Generous Orthodoxy has wide appeal. Further—it’s something you would expect from this “third way” movement—one doesn’t need to agree with everything these representatives say in order to be counted as a kindred soul. In fact, they wouldn’t want you to become a “Dittohead.”  

And, you know, significant others are taking notice, and some are admiring. I’ve heard Wallis on two of American’s top secular interview programs, NPR radio’s “Fresh Air” and PBS televisions’s “Charlie Rose,” and, as the programs progressed, both hosts seemed honestly interested in what Wallis was saying because it was not polemical, not the clichés of left or right, but an attempt to carve out a third way on important life issues. That, in my opinion, is what both hosts found intriguing, because it was articulated from an overt Christian point of view that could sensibly critique both sides where necessary. That was making sense to the hosts; and according to what Wallis knows from the vast amount of email he receives, it is making sense to many of the millions who listen to him on such shows.

Some are even applauding. Certainly New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks is. He has identified a number of key Chris­tians who are “trying to step out of the culture war so that they can accomplish more.” Brooks makes an interesting case in point if only because he is Jewish. Last year he chastised heavy­weight media giants (in that column Tim Russert of “Meet the Press”) as being a source for distorting American Evan­gelical Christianity. “There is a world of difference,” Brooks wrote, “between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them.... Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.... If evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose.” He then spent the rest of his November 30 column praising Stott and commending him as a “humble,” “self-critical,” and “embracing” Evan­gelical who ought to be a go-to person for the media and for politicians, especially Democrats, who really want to understand that faith, as opposed to, he concluded, a Jerry Falwell.

Brooks has done it again. In his May 26 column of this year, he argued that liberals and conservatives should join forces in fighting, for instance, a war on poverty instead of a culture war. Indeed, he already sees them working together. He cites Bono, “a serious if nonsectarian Christian,” who is “at the nexus of a vast alliance between socially conservative evangelicals and socially liberal N.G.O.’s.... I see [the evangelical community] in the midst of a transformation—branching out beyond traditional issues of abortion and gay marriages, and getting more involved in programs to help the needy. I see Rick Warren, who through his new Peace initiative is sending thousands of people to Rwanda and other African nations to fight poverty and disease. I see Chuck Colson deeply involved in Sudan.... Most of all, I see a new sort of evangelical leader emerging.”

He doesn’t say if he has in mind people like Wallis and McLaren, but I suspect he is savvy to them. It is leaders like these, he concludes, who will provide new ways and opportunities for “millions of evangelicals” who are “embarrassed by the people held up by the news media as their spokesmen.” But Brooks is not naive. He recognizes that serious differences over life issues are not going to go away. Nevertheless, “more liberals and evangelicals are realizing that you don’t have to convert people; sometimes you can just work with them. The world is suddenly crowd­ed with people like Rick Warren and Bono who are trying to step out of the logic of the culture war so that they can accomplish more in the poverty war.” Christians need to ask: isn’t this at least part of what the gospel of Jesus is all about?

I don’t know what fresh, fleshed-out gospel-shaped influences on many of our domestic ills and international relations would look like, but I’m trying to get there, and discovering on the path that it takes concerted experimentation and the resultant misunderstandings of a status quo so ideologically entrenched that it shuts down active listening with any that it perceives to be the “other.”

I do know that I’m being increasingly distressed because I can no longer buy into much of what political conservatism and liberalism have on offer. It’s not that both are in my mind complete write-offs; yet. The contributions each has made to historical America are many and varied, and who knows what their futures will hold out to us. It’s just that our changed, post-9/11 world presents us with landscapes of domestic and international sharp curves and turning points that I don’t see political conservatism or liberalism very able to negotiate, unless they themselves “get with it.”

If that puts these ideologies near their “sell by” date, then let today’s buyers beware. (Currently, this is the era of conservatism in America, and religious and political conservatives here can’t stop gloating over the supposed demise of liberalism in the country; and even liberals are now questioning if liberalism has any good ideas on offer any more. But pendulums swing. In the 1960s, liberalism had labeled conservatism as dead.) In an insightful book from 1982, scholar Walter Brueggemann seems to have been prescient of our day when he writes this about what he calls “the prophetic canon” of the Old Testament:

The prophets appear when the old consensus is at the brink of failure. They assert that the old structures of human reason and human management are obsolete because of the new things wrought by God.... [The prophets] did not accept the presumptive world of the dominant culture. They refused to have their knowledge or perception or imagination limited or controlled by such social constraints.... The imaginations of the prophets left them open to experiences, discernments, and disruptions that were denied in principle by convention.... [Their task is to] create a new arena for Israel’s imagination and derivatively for Israel’s political actions. They seek to form an alternative context for humanness by creating a different presumptive world which is bouyed by different promises, served by different resources, sobered by different threats, and which permits different decisions. That is the visible result of the liberated imagination which goes public in Israel.... It [therefore] becomes clear that the intent of the prophetic canon is essentially to disrupt the old consensus. The community had probed, shaped and stabilized the precarious disclosure from the tradition. Over a period of time even the radical revelation [at Sinai] of the tradition became fixed and settled and administered. It became stable enough that any adult knew the right answer to the question of a child. There is a quality of “you have heard it said of old.” The problem is that what was said of old had become settled formula to define and legitimate a closed, settled world. So the Torah, taken by itself, had its radicality domesticated. Therefore there was need for an explosive, disruptive, “But I say unto you” that both derived from and moved against the old tradition” (The Creative Word, his emphases).

I certainly recognize the importance, indeed the indispensability, of abstract ideas, if only because of my chosen profession. But more than that, working with them is a part of what it means to be human. I am, however, increasingly coming to believe that it is vital for Christians of all sorts today to have their political thinking organized not around an ideology but around Christ. It is easy to dismiss such a worldview shift by patting ourselves on the back and believing that we already are drawing from Christ for our political thinking, when in actual fact we may not be. But that discussion must wait for another time. Meanwhile, you won’t go wrong reading Alan Storkey’s wise and timely new book Jesus and Politics.

To achieve “prophetic” leadership in our day, it is going to take, I believe, among many other things, a willingness to be seen and heard as a voice crying in the modern wilderness; to be like Christ among curious crowds who responded, “What manner of teaching is this?” rather than to be numbered among the backslapping camaraderie of ologies and isms that are basking in the light of their own glory singing congratulatory hymns to themselves and turning aside from the voices who seek to offer individuals, society, and the world a future substantially better than the present.

First published in Openings (Jul-Sept, 2005, No. 21)

Charles Strohmer is the author of seven books, one co-authored, and writes for religious and secular publications. He is working on a book about U.S. international relations with the Muslim World.

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.