Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism

Abstract

In this remarkably rigorous, richly contextualized, and generally exhaustive exploration of the evangelical Left, David R. Swartz returns readers to a time when theologically conservative Protestantism was “politically up for grabs” (p. 2). More significantly, he joins Doug Rossinow, Kevin Mattson, Thomas Frank, Simon Hall, and others in documenting the enduring, sometimes-ironic impact of 1960s radicalism. Taken as a loosely organized, often contentious, and tenuously transnational whole, Swartz's evangelical Left aspired to be a “third way” to social change, transcending “categories of right and left by establishing micro-communities of authenticity, peace, and justice directed by Jesus” (p. 87). It defied the culture wars through its marriage of the secular New Left's communitarianism and liberationist politics and the Christian New Right's doctrinal and sexual traditionalism. Swartz first records how 1950s postfundamentalists sided with 1960s young evangelicals, including those in groups such as the Christian World Liberation Front and the Sojourners (begun by the former Students for a Democratic Society member [and now Barack Obama adviser] Jim Wallis). Together, postfundamentalists and young evangelicals challenged historically apolitical Protestant publics to find God in civil rights, antiwar, and antipoverty organizing. Aided by “ethnic evangelicals” such as the Peruvian evangelist Samuel Escobar and the Evangelicals for McGovern founder Ron Sider, and energized by the left-leaning, born-again politicians Mark Hatfield and Jimmy Carter, expectations for a globally persuasive progressive evangelicalism did not seem unfounded. However, the movement—if it could ever be called that—quickly suffered the same internal divisions that had plagued earlier student pressure groups. When the Democratic party embraced abortion rights and marriage equality, varieties of southern and sun-belt evangelicals co-opted countercultural political activism in the name of Jesus, Jeffersonian individualism, and the June Cleaver household. Wallis, Sider, and their followers were recast in supporting roles as critics of a conservative Christian America that, in ways, they had been advocating all along.