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12. Sojourning
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CHAPTER 12 Sojourning So, we are on the outside. Pro-lifers don’t like us because we push them to embrace a consistent pro-life ethic. Our friends in the justice and peace movement don’t like us because we make them uncomfortable with our anti-abortion talk. The presidential campaign forces us to focus on this. We have no clear choice. Neither candidate is genuinely pro-life. Neither comes close. —Sojourners In 1983 conservative activists repeatedly disrupted a conference on peacemaking at Fuller Theological Seminary. During a workshop on Central America, one protester shouted his objection to evangelical accommodation with communist totalitarianism until he was ushered out of the room. Another protester berated the 1,700 delegates from a balcony during a plenary session. When the disturbance brought the proceedings to a halt, the audience sang the hymn “Amazing Grace” to drown him out. A display table manned by the Institute for Religion and Democracy urged delegates to sign a “research report” accusing Senator Mark Hatfield and Sojourners’ Jim Wallis of advocating Soviet-style communism. These scenes and what they represented—an increasingly vocal and activist right-wing coalition of Christians—appalled progressive evangelicals. Incensed by President Reagan’s right-wing extremism, lack of experience, “one-sentence remedies for complex problems,” and the evangelical role in his victory, the evangelical left battled the religious right. David Chilton’s Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (which attacked the 234 Chapter 12 economic positions of Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger) and Francis Schaeffer’s The Great Evangelical Disaster (which condemned Evangelicals for Social Action, Wheaton College, and the Evangelical Women’s Caucus for having succumbed to secular humanism) sparked an epistolary reaction from many of those it targeted. Even prominent evangelical moderates such as Billy Graham and representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals felt compelled to explain that they were “not part of the New Christian Right.” These fiery exchanges between evangelical right, center, and left indicated how profoundly contested the political soul of evangelicalism was. That the religious right felt threatened; that Sider and Wallis continued to gain a hearing in evangelical circles; that certain titans of evangelicalism such as Graham distanced themselves from the religious right— all point to a persistent evangelical left. Evangelicals for Social Action, the Association for Public Justice, Sojourners, and many other organizations in the 1980s continued to agitate on issues of nuclear defense, global interventionism , and domestic policy. These campaigns, however, ultimately failed to rival the reach and influence of the religious right. Efforts to resist Reagan’s interventions in Central America by cooperating with mainline Protestants and Catholics sparked questions about how evangelical the evangelical left really was. Continuing fragmentation wrought by identity politics also plagued the movement. Unable to build a substantial constituency, the evangelical left remained overshadowed by the Moral Majority, which became identified in the popular mind as “evangelical.” A final effort in the mid-1980s to build a “consistent pro-life” coalition failed to reconcile competing identities and shifting constituencies within an unforgiving electoral system that fit poorly with the movement’s concerns. The movement did not disappear, and it labored on under difficult conditions. But the evangelical left enjoyed less political impact than it wanted, and few noticed its work in the 1980s. It was clear that the movement, while clearly not stillborn in 1973, had nonetheless failed to thrive. I No issue more dramatically underscored the continuing diversity of evangelical politics in the 1980s than the debate over covert U.S. military action in Nicaragua. Reagan’s military actions in Central America, designed to roll [34.239.148.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:52 GMT) Sojourning 235 back communist gains, provoked kaleidoscopic reaction among evangelicals . While the religious right steadfastly supported American intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere, progressive evangelicals denounced the Reagan Doctrine. Robert Zwier, chair of the Northwest Iowa chapter of the Association for Public Justice, declared that the U.S. was trying to “throw its weight around the world like a bully.” Both sides sought to sway a large swath of evangelicals in the middle, most of whom remained uneasy about Reagan’s quick use of the military but hopeful that intervention could promote global justice and install democracy in Central America. Progressive evangelicals cast their rhetoric against American interventionism in terms that would appeal to mainstream evangelicals. Instead of raging against American imperialism as evangelical radicals like Jim Wallis did in the 1970s, the...