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In"The Revolution Begins in the Pew: ‘Trotsky and St. Benedict'," for Books and Culture, my friend, Eugene McCarraher at Villanova, reviews God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis and The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today by my friend, Charles Marsh, at the University of Virginia. Eugene's essay is deeply thoughtful and provocative. I'm not sure I agree with his criticism of Jim Wallis. It may be that, as an articulate spokesman for the Catholic Left, McCarraher has some broader issues with the Evangelical Left, for which Wallis is a prominent spokesman. Generally, I share McCarraher's enthusiasm for Charles Marsh's work, but our colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, would be quicker than I am to endorse Charles' approach to doing history."Responding to historical accounts that depict the civil rights movement as a secular phenomenon in religious guise," says McCarraher,
Marsh contends that it was rooted fundamentally in Christian faith; that King and other activists understood their cause as an episode in our journey to the Kingdom; and that the loss of this faith occasioned the corruption, decline, and fragmentation of the movement's moral energy. But Marsh also challenges the very protocols of historical writing itself by"interpreting the civil rights movement as theological drama." Asserting boldly (in a volume published—what portent is here?—by Basic Books) that history really is the medium of revelation, Marsh concludes that we must narrate the movement's story, not strictly in the useful but limited parlance of secular professionalism, but more directly in the language of theology. So there is more than literary flourish when Marsh writes that"God set a dramatic stage in Montgomery," or when he muses that the chaos precipitated by the freedom struggle bore"evidence of God's presence and promise," or when he affirms King's unembarrassed declaration that"God is working in history to bring about this new age."
This"new age" whose advent King proclaimed appeared in several"experiments in truth," as one activist called them, avant-gardes of the eschaton whose communities of love offered foretastes of the abundant banquet of the Kingdom.
It is all well and good to recognize that the movement was, at bottom, a religious phenomenon, but serious history hesitates to identify God's action in history and serious theology knows both the hiddenness and the activity of God in human events.
But do read McCarraher's essay. It's a brilliant piece of work.
"[W]e don't really have a good, easily recognized political equivalent of a term like fundamentalism, that could be used to characterize an ideological and political absolutism which insists upon the actualization of an 'other worldly' politics. Eschatological would probably have been a more precise metaphor than apocalyptic for McCarraher's politics [if metaphors can be precise], as apocalyptic has some connotations which one could argue are not that good a fit for McCarraher's politics."
I think, actually, that if one looks at some of the debates which have developed in Christian circles dealing with political theology that such terms can be found. Basically, what you have is a traditional understanding of political theology, as exemplified by Troeltsch and Niebuhr (and, arguably, Jim Wallis), which posits the Christian revelation as an event which does not so much gather the faithful as provide a civilization ethic, one which operates in the background to correct, suggest, and guide our (secular) political work. Then you have what might be called "theological politics," in which the gathering mandated and/or presupposed by the Christian revelation (depending on how you look at it) is itself take to constitute an alternative polis that we should be looking at creating in the midst of modernity. Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, John Howard Yoder, and others would fit in this category.
McCarraher's politics aren't "eschatological" or "apocolyptic," because they aren't, like fundamentalist perspectives, aimed at fulfilling the conditions for some final, new, or end-time revelatory polity. On the contrary, the assumption is that the Christian tradition itself already has shown us how to realize the "beloved community"; all King and other civil rights leaders were doing, according to this interpretation, was taking action so as to make that already-present community visible and more widely livable (by, for instance, making the state own up to Christian obligations in regards to the treatment of African-Americans, and later moving towards a similar insistence upon social and economic opportunities being made more widely available, thus enabling the poor so often excluded from the community to be a part of it).
It's interesting tracing out the links between this kind of theological politics and the Old (and New) Left; socialist thought in the West is almost always rooted in some sort of moral or religious enterprise (even Marx's via Hegel, though he would have strenuously denied it). One of the primary calls of the New Left was for more politics, more participation, and social (and hence moral) reform was understood to be a necessary part of that. I don't think we should be quick to assume that just because King's politics, or McCarraher's, are only at most partly liberal, that means they're doing something other than politics. "Illiberal" or "witnessing" politics admittedly doesn't translate very well into a positive program for action--you need voting and interest groups to do that--but the latter are far from sufficient on their own.
Sorry for going on so long about this; it's just that it relates pretty closely to a long debate I've been having over Milbank and political theology with some co-bloggers. (Indeed, this post fits in well enough with our topic, at least as I see it, that it warrants a link.
Leo Edward Casey -
6/17/2005
My background is that of a working class Irish Catholic kid from Brooklyn whose initial, formative experience, and introduction into, politics was through the Catholic Left at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement. I spent a great of my high school years working in the NYC Catholic Worker house of hospitality in the Bowery, walking UFW picket lines outside of supermarkets, and attending courses and conferences at Emmaus House in East Harlem. When I went to a college with a full-time work-study program, my first six month job was with the Harrisburg 8 Defense Committee [for Phillip Berrigan and 7 others accused of conspiracy] amd my second six month job was working with the UFW in California. I know firsthand the theology and the politics here.
I do not question that it is possible to have "in, but not of, the world" politics based on perfectable acceptable Christian [and Catholic] theology. I once believed in exactly that combination. And I am not objecting to the theology, although I do not hold to it today. I am objecting to McCarraher's politics qua politics -- having a theological or moral undergirding for a politics does not exempt that politics from specifically political criticism. Specifically, a politics that has at its core a project of political and social transformation can be criticized on the grounds of its capacity [or lack thereof] to bring about that transformation, and on the grounds of its capacity to keep the transformation process connected to its motivating values. Theology/morality and politics are linked, but not reducible to each other: one could have a sound theology or moral philosophy, and a poorly thought out and constructed politics; conversely, one could have a poorly thought out and constructed theology, and a sound politics.
Perhaps I contributed to the confusion by using theological terms to describe McCarraher's politics, but frankly, we don't really have a good, easily recognized political equivalent of a term like fundamentalism, that could be used to characterize an ideological and political absolutism which insists upon the actualization of an 'other worldly' politics. Eschatological would probably have been a more precise metaphor than apocalyptic for McCarraher's politics [if metaphors can be precise], as apocalyptic has some connotations which one could argue are not that good a fit for McCarraher's politics. Still, given all of that, I would still contend that the logical and ideological structures of fundamentalist and eschataological thinking determine McCarraher's politics, separate and apart from this theology. [I am not so theologically illiterate as to not recognize the ways in which Catholic theology is clearly not fundamentalist, starting with the method of interpretation of scriptures, which I saw as the implication of Ralph's initial comments.]
One anecdote has stuck in my mind for nearly forty years, which tells a lot about the problems here. About a year or a year and a half after the Harrisburg 8 trial ended with 'not guilty' verdicts, we had a reunion of some of the defendants and many of the Defense Committee organizers. Discussion that weekend was consumed with a proposed 'fast until death,' that one of the defendants and several of the Defense Committee had proposed to undertake. Virtually everyone else saw it as politically counter-productive, drawing energy from actions which might actually have some impact on ending the war, and a combination of self-indulgent and self-destructive. Fasting is certainly an action with deep roots in the traditions of non-violence, but when it has been meaningful and constructive, it is linked to the larger community of support in some constructive way, as a call for self-reflection, a mode of mobilization or a means to draw attention to the cause -- in this case, it was none of these. At one point, someone said, "You folks are just non-violent Weathermen," and I thought, he is exactly right. Of course, one would never think of pacifists, on the one hand, and those who glorified violence, on the other hand, as being similar, but once one abstracted away from that particular question, and looked at the underlying politics, there was a remarkable symmetry.
What was crucial about the American New Left [a category which includes the civil rights movement as well as the anti-war movement], in contrast to the American Old Left, was that it saw the need for undergirding politics with a morality. By contrast, the Marxism of the Old Left was spoken in a language of historical developments and economic laws, a langauge of amoral determination. But by and large, the New Left succumbed to the opposite error of the Old Left, by reducing politics to prophetic 'moral witness,' and in so doing, lost touch with the essential democratic quality of being grounded to, in dialogue with and ultimately accountable to the demos, the people. When a politics of 'moral witness' alone proved ineffective as a means of political and social change, the New Left turned on the demos unprepared to accept its prophetic calling, and came to understand the American people as the enemy. It was a very short distant from such a conclusion to the politics of the Weathermen. And so what had started out as a politics end up as a politics of moral nihilism.
I qualified this main narrative of the New Left with the terms 'by and large,' because there were clearly moments in that history, perhaps best represented by the civil rights movement and King in the early 1960s, where a working balance of morality and political engagement in this world were established. This unraveling of that balance was a complex interaction of the pressure of developments and the inadequacy of the conception.
I make this point at this length because I believe that McCarraher's politics, as expressed in this essay, are a form of the New Left politics of 'moral witness,' in its most problematic form.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/17/2005
You address "fundamentalist" but not "apocalyptic" in your response. I take it that you cede the latter point to me.
I agree with you that there is an "in, but not of, the world" tone to McCarraher's piece. For good or ill, that's a perfectly acceptable construction of the role of a Christian in public affairs. As I said elsewhere, I disagree with him about voting -- I think that he should have held his nose and voted -- but his choice is not inconsistent with what he understands the responsibility of a Christian to be.
Leo Edward Casey -
6/17/2005
Pretending that apocalyptic and fundamentalist can only be understood in the literal sense of each term, as theological positions, and that they can not be applied metaphorically, to a viewpoint which applies the same sort of logic to politics and uses the same method in politics, is to evade the question I posed. McCarrahar is not a religious fundamentalist; he is a political fundamentalist, with his disavowal of the corruption of all but the pure, 'not of this world' politics. In his classic study of American Marxism, Daniel Bell applied religious language and synbolism to great effect, noting that American Marxism of the sort that McCarrahar advocated in this essay, with its contempt for 'compromised' liberals and social democrats, was 'in the world," but not 'of the world.'
Ralph E. Luker -
6/17/2005
You are exactly on target, I think, Caleb. And, yes, King was more of a Niebuhrian than McCarraher seems willing to acknowledge. It is, however, a much contested issue in current civil rights scholarship. I've told Eugene that I still think that he should have held his nose and voted, but what's so great about his article is that it gets us to chewing on these issues. There's a sense in which we need to have been willing to die for voting rights (as some people were and did), while still knowing that voting per se is not likely to achieve the Kingdom of God.
Caleb McDaniel -
6/17/2005
Thanks for the link, Ralph!
It's interesting that McCarraher begins by disavowing voting, dismissing both parties as essentially the same, because his treatment (of Marsh's treatment) of King virtually ignores that a major part of the movement he led was to secure voting rights. He urges us to recover King's later critiques of imperialism and materialism, which I am all for, but where's the voting? Clearly King's political theology left room for the vote, and I have a suspicion it's because King admired parts of Niebuhr (correct me if I'm wrong, Ralph) and would not have been so quick to dismiss theological "realism."
This is a rambling comment; there's lots to chew on here.
Hugo Schwyzer -
6/17/2005
Oh my hat, I will have to weigh in on this. It's a very fine article. Ralph, thanks for the tip. And yes, apocalyptic and fundamentalist need to be returned to their right usage, particularly in an article about religion and politics.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/16/2005
Mr. Casey, You have, I'm afraid, misused both "apocalyptic" and "fundamentalist" in this description of McCarraher's "politics." I don't see how he can correctly be accused of either.
Leo Edward Casey -
6/16/2005
I am not so impressed by McCarraher. It is important, I would agree, that a political stance in the world be undergirded by a moral philosophy, and not simply an expressional of Machiavellian real politik. And one's religious creed can perform that function as well as any other well-considered moral philosophy. But religious or moral inspiration for a politics does not exempt it from criticism on political and pragmatic grounds, and the sort of apocalyptic and fundamentalist politics [not religion, but politics] McCarraher espouses, with the equation of Democrats and Republicans as the two parties of business [Mammon], is a self-indulgent and self-righteous politics, where one dispenses with hard work of 'making the world better' if not 'right,' in the name of moral purity. His problem with Wallis is not Wallis' religious evangelism, but the fact that Wallis recognizes the moral imperative of engaging the actual political world as it is, in order to 'make the world better.'
