Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism

3. Jim Wallis and Vietnam

CHAPTER 3 Jim Wallis and Vietnam America was wrong—wrong in the ghettos and in the jungles of Southeast Asia. —Jim Wallis Like the rest of the nation, evangelical opposition to the Vietnam conflict developed unevenly. John Alexander and his father Fred, who agreed on civil rights, spent hours arguing over Vietnam in the late 1960s, agreeing only that “factual issues in Viet Nam are very complex, and we do not feel that Christians are in any special position to decide what the facts are.” When The Other Side finally did come out firmly against the war in the early 1970s, the magazine received “a lot of negative reaction from people who had been supporting us on other issues.” Protestants in general were reluctant to join antiwar activism. Many mainline leaders, stridently anticommunist during the Cold War, supported intervention in Vietnam as a means of halting Russian and Chinese advances . Dissent grew only after a group of prominent mainline spokesmen— among them Yale’s William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown, Union’s Reinhold Niebuhr, Hartford’s Peter Berger, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—spoke out against the war around the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Fundamentalists mostly fulminated against the emerging mainline dissent. Convinced that the United States was a bulwark against communism, John R. Rice, a prominent Baptist pastor and editor of The Sword of the Lord, declared that American troops “would be carrying out the command of God.” Most prominent neo-evangelicals, similarly unimpressed with emerging mainline critiques of American foreign policy 48 Chapter 3 in the late 1960s, maintained a moderate pro-war stance, even after the Tet Offensive and troop escalations. “What special wisdom do clergymen have on the military and international intricacies of the United States government ’s involvement in Viet Nam?” asked Carl Henry. “None” was his answer. Mainliners might “speak piously about our difficulties in Viet Nam, but a vocal and uninformed piety is worse than silence.” Though misgivings grew in the early 1970s, the most prominent neo-evangelicals followed Henry’s lead. Billy Graham, Christianity Today, and the National Association of Evangelicals, three exemplars of neo-evangelicalism that were convinced by long-held theories of dominos and containment, conceded that intervention was justified and worthy of support. Despite charting a middle course between criticism of the war and fundamentalist jingoism, evangelical heavyweights such as Henry soon faced dissent from within. As early as 1966, contributors to the Grand Rapidsbased Reformed Journal questioned whether Vietnam satisfied the criteria of a just war. In 1968 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship offered a Mennonite pacifist dozens of pages in its magazine to question the morality of Christian involvement in the military generally and in Vietnam specifically. An InterVarsity student at Portland State College, worried about the souls of Vietnamese innocents, wondered, “How can one witness with a bullet and a bomb?” Members of the Post-American intentional community in Chicago explained that opposition to Vietnam was their defining issue, one that engaged them on “a basic, deep, personal emotional level.” Its members anguishedoverthehelicoptergunshipsthatspreadmachinegunfire ,explosives, and napalm in the Vietnamese countryside, defoliating forests and jungles and rice paddies. Most antiwar evangelicals, even scholars who debated just war theory, responded primarily out of visceral revulsion over the images of spilled blood that splashed across their 13-inch television sets. Unmoved by the Cold War insistence on resisting communist advances in faraway places, growing numbers of evangelicals mobilized politically after watching friends return from Vietnam in body bags. Dissenting evangelicals also added a deeper grievance. By the end of the 1960s, antipathy toward the Vietnam War—initially grounded in the instinctive sense that dropping napalm onto civilian villages was evil—had matured into a critique of American society, civil religion, and evangelicalism itself. “Finally,” wrote Post-American leader Jim Wallis, who would become one of the most important faces of the evangelical left over the next decades, “the alienation from the church that my confrontation with racism Jim Wallis and Vietnam 49 had begun was completed by Vietnam.” Judging that “America was wrong— wrong in the ghettos and in the jungles of Southeast Asia,” Wallis saw civil rights and antiwar protest as God’s instruments of justice. The most strident antiwar evangelicals not only picketed ROTC activities and joined national Moratorium Day protests, but also proffered New Left critiques of the American economic and political systems. Indeed, for angst-ridden students such as...