Conservatives Without Conscience

Who are these people? In 2004 the Pew Trust sponsored a two-day seminar for leading journalists, calling the gathering “Toward an Understanding of Religion and American Public Life.” Religion historian Mark Noll, an evangelical who has authored several books on the subject, led a discussion about contemporary evangelicals. He explained their core religious beliefs, and noted that these religious commitments by themselves have not resulted in a cohesive, institutionally compact, or clearly demarcated group of Christians. There is, in reality, a large network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, and personal connections, as well as varying levels of belief and practice that fall under the evangelical label.[53] Noll pointed out that although certain Supreme Court rulings had caused evangelicals to become increasingly politically active, Roe v. Wade had been the tipping point. Before Roe, evangelicals were no more political than Billy Graham, thus either apolitical or unobtrusively political, and not active in politics. After Roe, self-appointed leaders within the evangelical movement became militant activists. “Baptists [ministers] Jerry Falwell and Timothy LaHaye, and the lay psychologist James Dobson, entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and 1980s,” said Noll. They “created the new religious right and have made conservative evangelical support so important for the Republican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.” Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, albeit unsuccessful in even coming close to getting the Republican nomination, further politicized a large segment of the evangelical community, Noll added.

Noll candidly acknowledged the authoritarian nature of evangelicals. Speaking as an evangelical and a historian of evangelicalism, he noted its incompatibly with the give-and-take of politics because of the rigidity of its beliefs. Noll said he wants evangelicals to learn “new ways of being present in the public space without believing that [they] have to dominate the public space” (emphasis in original transcript). Evangelical Christianity, he explained, is an intolerant religion, unable to say “your religion is fine with you; my religion is fine with me.” Rather “evangelical religion is offensive. It claims forthrightly that there is one, and only one, way to God,” and that is their way. The world has evolved, and Noll realized that evangelicals, so far, have not.[54]

Several attendees at the Pew conference referred to the work of a University of North Carolina sociologist, Christian Smith, who has studied how rank-and-file evangelicals think. One conferee said of Smith’s work that it showed that the rank-and-file is “a lot nicer than their leaders!”[55] Smith’s work supports the notion that the religious right’s political thinking and behavior may be less than uniform, and that the leaders of the Christian right do not necessarily speak for evangelicals as a whole.[56] While this may be true of the segment of the population investigated by Smith and his collaborators, their sample appears unrepresentative.[57] In the end, I found that the observations of Mark Noll—who deals with a wide array of evangelical brothers and sisters, day in and day out—as well as those of politically attuned observers such as Cal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator, and former president Jimmy Carter seemed more insightful and revelatory. All of these individuals have been critical of Christians in politics while remaining true to their faiths.[*]

Cal Thomas, a conservative Christian who once served as vice president of communications for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, has joined journalist and evangelical minister Ed Dobson in making “a strong case for the church to lay down its impotent weapons of political activism.”[58] Based on his experience at the heart of Christian right politics, Thomas said he believes that all the evangelical energy now devoted to politics could be better directed toward living and sharing the gospel. He has concluded that neither “our individual or collective cultural problems can be altered exclusively, or even mainly, through the political process.” Thomas found that “the marriage of religion and politics almost always compromises the gospel,” for “[p]olitics is all about compromise.” The conflation of church and state has resulted in the church’s getting “its theological pocket picked.” “Whenever the church cozies up to political power,” he continued, “it loses sight of its all-important mission to change the world from the inside-out.”[59]