THE RADICAL CENTER
…So It’s Time to Rid Ourselves of Extremists!
The Rise or Fall of American Empire
Chapter XIV
By
Doug Krieger
Part 2
THE “EVANGELICAL MANIFESTO” – POLITICS AS USUAL?
Could
it be that the “Church Militant” has had it with the vicissitudes of the body
politic? Could it be that so-called moderate evangelicals are about to
distance themselves from these “bought and sold” politicians and reaffirm the
“essence” of the Church’s mission to evangelize and transform society through
prophetic witness and testimony and deeds wrought by the Spirit of Christ, not
by the fickle nature of “who’s in power?”
So, let us attempt to disengage – let us resign from the political abuse heaped upon us by both major political parties. Haven’t we had enough of this already? Oh, don’t be so quick to assume that cleverly designed proponents of NEUTRALITY do not have their own aspirations at political influence upon this tar baby of religio-politico power—everything is not what it appears to be; to wit, Fuller Seminary’s latest attempt to neutralize the Religious Right by inserting the more appealing causes and impressions of evangelical social activism—activism which derives its post-millenarian essence from the noble pursuits to abolish slavery (Amen!) and a plethora of social ills from child labor to women’s rights.
Rather than read the platitudes of the “Evangelical Manifesto” and its suspect call for reforms in its entirety – allow me to present a most interesting initial analysis:
Eighty evangelical leaders are signing an “Evangelical Manifesto” that rebukes both liberal and conservative evangelicals for diminishing the Gospel to fight the culture wars, becoming “‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another.” It encourages political engagement (my emphasis) but it says evangelicals have sometimes spoken “truth without love” and it calls on evangelicals to “reform our own behavior.”
The document is embargoed until Wednesday, so most of the discussion centers on who is involved in writing and signing the manifesto.
Warner Todd Huston calls the manifesto “another attempt by the political left to undermine the devotion of Christians to the political right,” and asks why the project “studiously excluded so many prominent conservative Christians.”
Warren
Cole Smith says the document has both virtues and flaws, but he also
questions the list of people who either haven’t signed or say they weren’t
included in the process: Gary Bauer, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins,
Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard
Land, Michael Farris, and Concerned Women for America’s Wendy Wright. (Evangelical
Manifesto, calls for
reform, Alisa Harris, World on the Web, May 5, 2008)
Given the fact that the globe-trotting, Council on Foreign Relations member, AIDS-fighting, prophecy-deprecating Rick Warren (Warren Smith’s going to get some real “guilt by association flack” for this little investigative journalism) is riding high at the helm of this grandiose endeavor – I abide depressingly skeptical. Taking up another political slant by religionists is no better than the “Generals of the Religious Right” who are conspicuously absent from the list of 80 proponents desiring “reform” (aside from apparently Kay Arthur, Jack Hayford, along with Pastor Erwin Lutzer of Moody Memorial and Max Lucado). Warren is simply more politically determined to wrest the “social justice agenda” from main-line and nigh defunct Protestant denominations and their National Council of Churches allies among the prickly Orthodox.
Smith blew the whistle – so says Janice Shaw Crouse . . .
“This
week, a select group of men (if there are any women involved, none have been
identified) will issue a document they are calling ‘An Evangelical Manifesto:
The Washington Declaration of Identity and Public Commitment.’ We know just a
bit about this embargoed document’s existence, not its content, because Warren
Cole Smith, publisher of the Evangelical Press News Service, has written about
the plan and process of producing the declaration that purports to represent
American evangelical beliefs and values. Smith’s point in writing about the
manifesto is that the timing of the release makes it a political document, and
the closed group of people working on the content apparently excludes
traditional conservative and pro-family evangelical voices.
“However, no amount of pious-sounding rhetoric about our common American values will obscure the policy litmus tests on the great moral issues of the day upon which our humanity hangs; nor should it. As Christ warned the Disciples, standing for truth is not the route to public acclaim. The term ‘evangelical’ means a Biblical worldview and this dictates a philosophical/theological perspective on the timeless moral issues of Scripture. Those positions ought to be clear and unequivocal, rather than muddied by sophisticated rhetoric and clever obfuscation. The subtle danger is, as the old axiom states: ‘Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.’” (Muddying the Evangelical Waters, Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, Townhall.com, May 6, 2008)
But it “sounds” so
righteous to affirm the following and to “broaden our base” . . .
“We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life. Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman, we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness, by promoting reconciliation, encouraging ethical servant leadership, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, and educating the next generation. We believe it is our calling to be good stewards of all God has entrusted to our care so that it may be passed on to generations yet to be born.” (Evangelical Manifesto, pp. 13-14)
And, God forbid, that the internet would inflame the passions of Islamic radicalism . . .
On the other hand, we are also troubled by the fact that the advance of globalization and the emergence of a global public square finds no matching vision of how we are to live freely, justly, and peacefully with our deepest differences on the global stage. As the recent Muslim protests and riots over perceived insults to their faith demonstrate, the Internet era has created a world in which everyone can listen to what we say even when we are not intentionally speaking to everyone. The challenges of living with our deepest differences are intensified in the age of global technologies such as the World Wide Web. (Ibid.)
So – it’s really tough living with our “differences” – after all, we don’t want to get anyone upset – therefore, the major stress of the document demands CIVIL DISCOURSE to replace the strident rhetoric of the EXTREME LEFT and RIGHT in the American Public Square. The time for moderation is at hand – let the civility begin!
We utterly deplore the dangerous alliance between church and state, and the oppression that was its dark fruit. We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. While some of us are pacifists and others are advocates of just war, we all believe that Jesus’ Good News of justice for the whole world was promoted, not by a conqueror’s power and sword, but by a suffering servant emptied of power and ready to die for the ends he came to achieve. (Ibid.)
HOT TUB SPIRITUALITY – DON’T LET THE LEFT FOOL YOU
To reinforce this origination of evangelical bliss – and it must have been utter bliss that originated this . . . we must come to terms with the EXTREMES now so manifest amongst us evangelicals (giving the politicos McCain and Obama the wherewithal to distance themselves from the likes of Hagee and Wright):
“First, we Evangelicals repudiate two equal and opposite errors into which many Christians have fallen recently. One error has been to privatize faith, interpreting and applying it to the personal and spiritual realm only. Such dualism falsely divorces the spiritual from the secular, and causes faith to lose its integrity and become ‘privately engaging and publicly irrelevant,’ and another form of ‘hot tub spirituality.’ (a.k.a. Old fashion Fundamentalism so hated by Harold Ockenga)
“The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests.” (Evangelical Manifesto, calls for reform, Alisa Harris, World on the Web, May 5, 2008)
Admittedly, these “guys” are getting super sophisticated in their attempts to wrest the leadership of the “Church Militant” from its current leadership . . .
“The
left has made a concerted campaign to take over Christianity and use it for
the purposes of the Democrat Party and the cultural left in America today.
People like Dr. Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis have been known to work closely
with the Democrat Party. The failed presidential bid by John Edwards also made
attempts to work with the Christian left.
Various organizations
have sprung up since the late 1990s to further the leftist agenda in
politics.
(‘Conservative’ Christian’s ‘Manifesto’ Has Few Conservatives Involved,
Warner Todd Houston, May 3, 2008)
Odd, as I scanned the most recent additions to the signatories of this ever-growing, easily accessible document but had a difficult time of it finding the names below; although, it’s hard to find some of the originators of the Evangelical Manifesto manifested . . . even so, it MAY be that their absented names only confirm the Emergent Church suspicion as the originators of the document (therefore, the conspiratorial need to obfuscate the more “Emergent-type authors”).
“Dallas Willard, Tony Jones, Rick Warren and Brian McLaren are VERY INVOLVED, —- ALL part of the ‘Emerging Church’ - The Emerging Church movement has been working a long time to change the entire church, so now they have an “Evangelical Manifesto” - Most strong Believers will not go along with it.” (Evangelical Manifesto, calls for reform, Alisa Harris, World on the Web, May 5, 2008)
Fuller just doesn’t get it – or maybe they do – fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, as Dubya says, “shame, shame.” If you can believe these brethren really want a “civil discourse” in order to manipulate the political system to their advantage, where we march into the public square with “moderate frenzy” (a sort of oxymoronic notion, no doubt), then they’ve got another thing coming, given the religious stranglehold that the Religious Right has on the system. “Living with our deepest differences” – especially among these gentlemen – has or will become a cleverly devised exercise in power politics where style, over substance, shall, under the watchful eye of this new Evangelical Vatican, determine how the Woman mounts the Beast! But “mount the Beast” she must – for the public square is not “naked” (i.e., given over to the exclusive purview of the secular); nor is the public square sacred – it’s a blend of both, hardly CIVIL as desired by the Uber-Evangelicals.
UBER-EVANGELICALS vs. SUB-CHRISTIANS
Defining
our faith by the good news of faith in Jesus is one thing – but how that faith
is manifested in the so-called public square is another; especially, when it
comes to confronting our “differences.” The rejection, by these radical
centrists, of an exclusively “sacred public square” – as well as the “naked
public square” (all matters of faith are verboten – keep the public square
purely secular – absolute separation of Church and State) seems a bit
disingenuous. Who is to determine the civility of the dispute? Who will
balance the mixture of Church and State when it becomes confrontational? Who
will spare us from “liberal revisionism” and “conservative fundamentalism?”
Well, of course, the evangelical centrists:
“In contrast to these extremes, our commitment is to a civil public square — a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too. Thus every right we assert for ourselves is at once a right we defend for others. A right for a Christian is a right for a Jew, and a right for a secularist, and a right for a Mormon, and right for a Muslim, and a right for a Scientologist, and right for all the believers in all the faiths across this wide land.” (Evangelical Manifesto – PDF) (Editor’s Note: Why witches and warlocks got left out of this civil discourse is a gross oversight on the part of these concerned Evangelicals.)
The liberal who allegedly “accommodates the world” through compromise – especially compromised on the major tenets of the faith or “those more conservative” who tend to “defy the world that they resist it in ways that also become unfaithful to Christ” are summarily rejected by the Evangelical Manifesto . . . both deny the true Christ and are in counter distinction to the faithful witness of the Church.
Ah, but especially these “sub-Christian” fundamentalists, who are more closely aligned with enlightened evangelicalism as embodied within the confines of the Evangelical Manifesto – yes, these are well-deserving of our contempt:
The fundamentalist tendency is more recent, and even closer to Evangelicalism, so much so that in the eyes of many, the two overlap. We celebrate those in the past for their worthy desire to be true to the fundamentals of faith, but Fundamentalism has become an overlay on the Christian faith and developed into an essentially modern reaction to the modern world. As a reaction to the modern world, it tends to romanticize the past, some now-lost moment in time, and to radicalize the present, with styles of reaction that are personally and publicly militant to the point where they are sub-Christian.
A poor choice of words to describe Dobson, Robertson, Land and the lot of the Religious Right – Hagee, Parsley et al. Then again, once welcomed into the public square by these socially active Evangelicals, their erstwhile brethren, along with their country-bumpkin mannerisms, have become such an embarrassment to the refinement of the Emergent Church that they should be termed out; identified for what they really are: SUB-CHRISTIAN!
Fuller
will find that one hard to live down—it sort of has a look-down-your-nose ring
to it. Naturally, the opposite of “sub-Christian” is “Uber-Christian”
– is that what “they are?” Well, just some of them whom we here at Fuller so
designate – once they’ve crossed the reactionary bridge of public militancy,
they inherit our worst defamation:
SUB-CHRISTIAN! For some reason that
doesn’t sound very nice – almost derisive to the extreme; then again, we
wouldn’t want to sound extreme, would we?
After all, the politicization of faith is the monstrous no-no acclaimed by the Evangelical Manifestoites. In their denial of extremities to their public square, they either purposefully or inadvertently seize the square themselves – seeing themselves as somehow “holier than thou” and view their behavior as normative, superior and fair juxtaposed to the rigidity, defiance and even superficiality of their religious counterparts on the right and left.
“Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith; and it would be no improvement to respond to a weakening of the religious right with a rejuvenation of the religious left. Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church – and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons.
“Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power, what is right outweighs what is popular, just as principle outweighs party, truth matters more than team-playing, and conscience more than power and survival. The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness.” (Evangelical Manifesto)
I see little, if any, difference among or between those redefining the radical center versus the immediate politicization of the religious Right and Left in this nation. I am sure this contrast is exposed in a multitude of nations throughout the earth as well. It would be quite another matter if this engagement in politics were as ascendant as these Manifestoites claim it is; however, given the propensity of man to gravitate to the vagaries of politics as usual (notwithstanding the interior commitment to Jesus first and foremost) this printed dynamic devolves into an exercise in marginalizing one’s religious opponents to the aggrandizement of the greater virtue desiring to capture the religio-politico center stage – pushing one horseman aside does not make for a better rider to enter the arena. They’re all familiar with riding horses – just who can ride them the best is at issue. May I derisively announce: May the best horseman win!
CONCLUSION
What
is clear in this “Evangelical” posturing and signatory barrage is the plain
reality that evangelical political engagement has never been more volatile.
The “power struggle” within evangelicalism has commenced in earnest. As we
view the disassociation of McCain/Obama from the Religious Right and the
Religious Left (at least the Black Liberation theology of the Religious Left
and de facto, most of the Black Church) we may be witnessing the
growing strength of the Emergent Church in their final effort to defang these
extremities, and to usurp the religio-politico agenda. I find it at its best,
disconcerting, and at its worst, the final appearance of the Woman who mounts
the Beast.
There’s nothing more insistent than righteous indignation which demands absolute fidelity in all things civil – a sort of tyranny of civility – a new “Age of Reason” – where, “Can’t we all just get along” rules the day – thereby, accomplishing and talking through the vast social and environmental problems which face the nation and the world? Of course, this euphoric, altruistic plain ascends above the unreasonable and the acrid rhetoric so common amongst the “Religious Extremities” – Religious Extremities which will NOT role over and allow the New Emergent Church to wrest control of the socio-political agenda and thereby affirm that the intelligent and affirmatively successful elements of the Emerging Church should be at the apex of societal advancement and political stability.
What’s needed today, in order for the successful implementation of the New World Order – this Brave New World of religious tolerance and “civil renaissance” in the public square, is the avoidance of all such acute belief systems. Once the reasonableness of this concept is embraced by the “new center” – it will become the religious-political vortex of the nation. A new form of UNIVERSALISM has risen from the dead – and what a convergence is this! Here, Dubya articulates this mandatory relativism of religious tolerance and the Emergent Church commences their long march toward America’s ultimate destiny with the Beast—all in the name of civility wherein a “kinder and gentler” nation, led by its religious, progressive elements amongst the New Left and New Right (a.k.a. the Dynamic Center) emerges as the most impressive rider of the Beast System!
This chapter could just as well have found its way into our series, The False Prophet. All those “Christian Radicals” must be, once and for all, banished from the public square unless they accede to the would-be Emergent Church leadership—a leadership which has no intention of giving up their righteous struggle. Articulating the “new dynamic” has reached a vital level of expression heretofore elusive to progressives. But it’s this “reasonable appearance” which shall, in the immediate run, carry the day, isolate the extremities, and cause the Testimony of Jesus to be all the more obvious. And, how is that? Because it shall become increasingly obvious that radical Christianity and the uncompromised presentation of Jesus Christ as Redeemer and Lord – Who demands REPENTANCE FROM SIN for salvation – will NOT find in the Emergent Church a place for such doctrine and practice; instead, style shall transcend the true preaching of the Lordship of Christ and the preaching of the gospel of the Grace of God.
Furthermore, and absent from the action corollaries of the “Fuller Fullness” are all things prophetically objective – replaced by a bland “prophetic social witness” as the Church’s new but old mantra. Most certainly, Israel – that racist pariah who occupies the agenda of the Religious Right and the animosity of the Extreme Left for her complicity with that same Religious Right and the Industrial-Military Complex who supports her – though currently not found in the Evangelical Manifesto, will discover its obvious and soon-to-be growing consternation by these same Emergent Church leaders and their allies.
Many of the same proponents of the Evangelical Manifesto find their signatures among the 80+ who announced their support in the New York Times of President Bush’s two-state solution. Once again, I’m charged with a vast “moderate conspiracy” afoot amongst us all. May I leave you with these biblically restrictive but hopeful thoughts:
Then the LORD saw it, and it displeased Him
That there was no justice.
He saw that there was no man,
And wondered that there was no intercessor;
Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him;
And His own righteousness, it sustained Him.
For He put on righteousness as a breastplate,
And a helmet of salvation on His head;
He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing,
And was clad with zeal as a cloak.
According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay,
Fury to His adversaries,
Recompense to His enemies;
The coastlands He will fully repay.
So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west,
And His glory from the rising of the sun;
When the enemy comes in like a flood,
The Spirit of the LORD will lift up a standard against him.
The Redeemer will come to Zion,
And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,
Says the LORD. (Isaiah 59:15-20)