January 29, 2011
OF COURSE, WHEN WE ELECTED A LIBERAL CHRISTIAN...:
The religious crisis of American liberalism (Theo Hobson, 26 January 2011, Open Democracy)
Barack Obama’s vision of hope had religious echoes. He boldly presented himself as the heir of the civil-rights movement, which, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, was an expression of liberal Christianity as well as progressive politics. King himself was inspired by the “social gospel” movement that influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal.The American liberal-left in the 20th century had clear links to religion. This overlap goes back to the abolitionist movement: Frederick Douglass was a forerunner of King. Lincoln was more reticent on religion, but powerfully suggested that divine justice was the fuel of the democratic project.
Obama knowingly drew on this tradition, with his impassioned talk of hope. This went much further than the “hope” rhetoric of other politicians; it often referred to the biblical concept of faith - implicitly, of course. He repeatedly characterised his candidacy as “unlikely”, and “improbable”: as if his career was a reason-defying miracle, as if he were not a normal politician but the amazed witness to God’s action, like Abraham or Joseph. It is little exaggeration to say that this prophetic theme gave him the edge over Hillary Clinton, a more experienced politician with very similar policies, and won him the Democratic candidacy, and then the presidency.
He understood that that the liberal vision is most powerful when in touch with its religious roots. Democrats had been routinely wary of pressing these buttons, which can misfire in various ways. Indeed the strategy almost misfired for Obama, thanks to his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
What enabled him to play the “prophetic” card with such success was the racial element: he could offer himself as a sign of the overcoming of racial division, and therefore a living icon of the liberal Christian vision.
This prophetic rhetoric is admirably rooted in American history, and Obama was a master performer of it. So why did his support melt away?
The problem is that this prophetic tradition, for all its attractiveness, lacks clear roots in contemporary culture. For the cultural overlap of liberalism and religion has been weakening for decades. In a sense the appeal of prophetic hope-rhetoric is nostalgic: it reminds Americans of a previous era of idealism.
In this previous era there was a strong culture of liberal Christianity for politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson to draw on. The old “mainline” Protestant churches, full of respect for the liberal state, were still very strong. Liberal Protestantism was America’s semi-official creed. This allowed Wilson to rein in the free market, and Roosevelt to implement the New Deal. Accusations that such policies were socialist did not stick, for their architects were clearly pillars of the nation’s Protestant establishment (establishment, that is, in the unofficial sense).
Liberal Protestant intellectuals had great cultural respect, into the 1960s. Thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr made it seem obvious that America was simultaneously liberal and Christian. The civil-rights movement seemed a new chapter in this story of the expansion of the liberal Christian vision. It still seemed that America was held together by a mild form of “civil religion” (a phrase coined by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967). And this civil religion emphasised the common good, and a liberal form of faith.
But in fact things were changing. The culture wars were underway. The fundamentalist strain of American religion revived. And anti-liberalism became central to the Republican Party, first with Nixon’s demonising of liberal elitists, then with Reaganomics.
And, perhaps most importantly, the old liberal Protestant consensus was crumbling. From the mid-1960s, the mainline churches began losing members fast: some opted for Evangelicalism, but most drifted away from religion. The most vocal Christians were now those who looked on liberal reforms with suspicion. Moreover, progressive causes had a new “secular” aura, especially with the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Roe vs Wade case in 1973.
The old assumption, that America was simultaneously liberal and Christian, was in tatters.
...in George W. Bush, they hated him.
