Raised Evangelical: Bob’s Story - VI

We continue with our responses to the "Raised Evangelical" series on the atheist blog "Love, Joy, Feminism."

 

Section 6: Politics

 

Question 1: In his book Broken Words, Jonathan Dudley argues that a fourfold opposition to abortion, homosexuality, evolution and environmentalism constitute the markers of evangelical tribal identity. What role did opposition to these four issues [play] in your fundamental or evangelical upbringing, and would you agree with Dudley?

    Frankly most of these weren't issues when I was growing up. Abortion was illegal and homosexuality was never discussed in public. Evolution, of course, was discussed and debated. Environmentalism was not an issue for Christians at that time.

    Part of the problem with Dudley's thesis is that he is defining Evangelicalism in sociological terms: Evangelicalism has a "tribal identity" marked by opposition to certain political issues. But Evangelicalism should mainly center on the experience of salvation (justification by faith, the new birth, and a relationship with God). The church is supposed to be the mystical body of Christ and the communion of the saints, persons who are tied together by the shared experience, not a voting block in the American electorate tied to a secular political party.

    Abortion and homosexuality are, of course, serious moral issues that deserve the attention of the church, and evolution raises questions about the underlying worldview. Opposition to environmentalism, however, does not logically follow from the other three. If nature was created by design, then we should respect the design in nature just as we do in marriage. We are no more justified in raping the environment than we are in raping a woman on the street. Both acts violate God's purposes in creation and bring about serious consequences. Francis Schaeffer, in fact, wrote a very interesting book on the subject in 1970 – Pollution and the Death of Man.

 

Question 2: What role did you, your family, or your church community believe Christians should play in politics? What did your family or church hold was the end goal of Christians' involvement in politics? What were your family and church community's beliefs about the end times, and how (if any) did these beliefs affect their view of Christian's role in politics?

Question 3: Were you, your family, or your church community involved in politics? What did all their involvement include? Did your pastor ever preach a political view from the pulpit? Did you ever picket an abortion clinic, attend a "defense of marriage" rally, or participate in any related activities? Describe your experiences.

    The short answer to the first question is "none whatsoever." We were Baptists, and one of the "Baptist distinctives" is separation of church and state. Moreover, to answer the question about the end times, our church was very strongly Dispensationalist, and believed that we were living in the last time. The last great apostasy was underway, and the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Israel from the north! (Yes, that's what prophecy teachers were actually saying back then. How a supernatural figure like the Anti-Christ could be a dialectical materialist and a dogmatic atheist was never clearly explained.) Thus things were not expected to get any better. The church saw its role as snatching a few last sinners from the world before the end finally came (within the next few years).

    Moreover, most Christians at that time didn't have an especially favorable view of politicians. They were cigar-smoking, whiskey-swigging crooks who cut deals in back rooms. They were the dissolute looking bunch of characters you saw hanging out in the bar in a downtown hotel. Most Christians wouldn't care to admit that they knew any of these rogues and scoundrels personally.

    Beneath the surface, however, there was a gravitational pull toward right-wing politics. Although the pastor was careful not to discuss it from the pulpit, I think that Barry Goldwater got a lot of support from the members of the congregation when he ran for president in 1964. The fervently anti-Communist John Birch Society attracted support from evangelical Christians, and I can remember reading None Dare Call It Treason, by John Stormer, which laid out an elaborate conspiracy theory.

 

Question 4: What political issues did you, your parents, and / or your church community see as most important in deciding who to vote for and why?

    People's perceptions back then were colored by the Cold War, and the threat of a possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. And since the Soviet Union had tried to combine (illogically) a socialistic economic system with and atheist / materialist worldview, many conservative Americans did the exact opposite: they tried to combine (illogically) Christianity with laissez-faire capitalism.
What seemed to make it plausible at the time was the fact that some large companies back then practiced a kind of "welfare capitalism" that included generous benefits packages. And so American conservatives threw their support behind the free-market economic system and a strong national defense.

    There was also an ethnic dimension to all of this. Most "WASPS" (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the north were aligned with the Republican Party, while Catholics and Jews were mainly identified with the Democrats. So many Protestants, evangelical and liberal alike, thought that they were protecting the traditional American way of life by voting Republican.

    My father, and I think my grandfather before him, were strongly pro-business and ant-union, and pro-military. My father was known to have voted for Democrats only twice – once by mistake (he accidently pulled the wrong lever in the voting booth), and once because he thought that not even a Democrat could be as bad as Nelson Rockefellar, who was the Governor of New York State at the time. Shortly afterwards the Conservative Party of NY was founded, and my father became an enthusiastic supporter.