Moral Minority: Connecting Politics with Religion

In the first part of Moral Minority titled “An Emerging Evangelical Left,” David Swartz invites us to view the rise of the Evangelical Left through the lens of four individuals. They are John Alexander, the founder of The Other Side Magazine (originally named Freedom Now), Jim Wallis the founder of Sojourners magazine (originally named The Post American) and of the Sojourners, U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield, and Sharon Gallagher.

But his first chapter in this section covers Carl Henry and Neo-Evangelical Social Engagement. At first glance, this might seem jarring to many because Carl F. H. Henry is not a figure anyone would associate with the politics and activism of the Evangelical Left. As editor of Christianity Today (1958-1968), Henry was considered a part of mainstream evangelicalism against which the Evangelical Left would rail.

Carl Henry was also a founding board member of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which isn’t exactly a card carrying organization associated with the Left, evangelical or otherwise.

Swartz acknowledges that while Henry appreciated the “heightened social conscience” of the young evangelical leftists, he was “ambivalent” about their “angst, flamboyant rhetoric and specific policy prescriptions” (24). According to Swartz, Henry is still considered a key figure in the rise of the Evangelical Left because of his 88-page tract, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947). In that tract, Swartz reminds us, Henry “carved out space between the social gospelism of Protestant liberalism and the separatist, socially pessimistic tendencies of fundamentalism”.

In an attempt to draw a middle course for a “socially engaged faith between social gospel advocate Walter Rauschenbusch and fundamentalist Carl McIntyre,” Henry’s social vision “would confront important social issues such as racism, labor disputes and military aggression by communistic and totalitarian regimes, all the while retaining conservative theology and evangelical piety”.

But Henry’s call to social action lacked a defined program and with a few exceptions was “devoid of any coherent plan for what evangelical social engagement might look like.” Swartz approvingly quotes Lewis Smedes to the effect that this lack of specificity gave the impression that “evangelicals do not yet have a social ethic.” As a result, “it allowed a politically diverse spectrum of evangelicals to claim Uneasy Conscience as their inspiration.”

Henry’s conception of social engagement consisted largely of placing redeemed individuals in positions of social importance rather than specifying policy. Aiming to cultivate individuals, neo-evangelicals began to build a growing and substantial infrastructure.

“There was no one indirect line from the Bible to the ballot box,” declared Henry, and Swartz reminds us that “neo-Evangelical leaders only rarely mobilized on behalf of–or even endorsed–political candidates.” 

I’m inclined to think that Henry’s modest “social agenda,” has much to commend it. A frequent and fair criticism of the Christian right and the Moral Majority is that they too often threw Henry’s counsel of caution to the wind. However, as Swartz shows, the first evangelicals to draw an overly simplified line from the Bible to the ballot box were the key representatives of the Evangelical Left.

We’ll look more closely at them in the next post.