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>> 135 7 Purpose Driven Politics The Saddleback Civil Forum and the New Civility of Evangelism Given that the previous generation of American megachurch leaders included some famously political firebrands like Jerry Falwell and John Hagee, it is curious that Warren’s cohort is largely apolitical. The names Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels, and Andy Stanley have no resonance in American politics, yet are household names in American evangelicalism. How is it that, despite the nearly unbreakable bond between American political conservatism and American evangelicalism, PDE churches are so relatively unpoliticized? The answer can be found by looking into recent forays into American politics by Warren and Saddleback Church. What we find is not the older religious politics of the Religious Right, but a new more flexible appropriation of politics for religious, and more precisely, evangelical, ends. The goal of the PDE church is not societal change, but societal relevance. On August 16, 2008, Rick Warren convened the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” where presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain appeared together for the first time in the 2008 campaign. Observers in the United States and around the world questioned the motives of Warren 136 > 137 understood by Warren and Saddleback pastors—and across mainstream American evangelicalism—as a distinctly local, contextual undertaking. The rhetoric and action of Rick Warren, the discourse among Saddleback congregants, and the institutional actions of Saddleback suggest that the Civil Forum was a local, place-based strategy for evangelism, not for a Falwellian union of conservative Christianity and American government. From its inception through to its current incarnation, the forum has been crafted and used as a local evangelical tool by which “the church” can regain respectability and normalcy in the eyes of “the community.”5 Such respectability and normalcy, rather than bases for a “micropolitics” that might later authorize theocratic desecularization, are instead continually used as instrumentally necessary conditions for a locally emplaced evangelism.6 What this means is that public religious action does not always mobilize individuals to political action or even political dispositions; sometimes it is the reverse: political action can mobilize individuals to religious action. It is possible, in other words, that culture can have its own ends. By looking back at the first Civil Forum, held four months prior to the Obama-McCain forum, I show how these events were originally conceived and thereby how they have changed. I then inspect the implicit claim in the title of these events: that they are sites of participation in civil society. After asking what the Civil Forum’s claim on the spheres of state politics and civil society might be, I explain that the act of civility and the attempted construction of a civil-societal place at the campus of Saddleback Church has little to do with political deliberation and political judgment—the sine qua non of democratic state politics and civil society—but is rather just another performative recasting of Saddleback and evangelicalism as an integrated part of the local, postsuburban environment. In other words, politics is the means, but a local, apolitical, and intimate evangelicalism is the end. . . . On the Way to the Forum The Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency was not the first program of this kind the church held. It is not always acknowledged in the news accounts and blog discussions of the event that it was part of a series of “civil” fora that Warren and other senior pastors had started planning less than a year prior. In April 2008, Warren quietly launched this series with the goal of “reaching out to the local community.”7 The first event would bring several Holocaust survivors to Saddleback to “share their life-changing stories,” with the goal of getting “the community to come together on issues that we all care about.” The official name of the first event was the “Saddleback Civil 138 > 139 a matter just for the Saddleback Valley community in south Orange County. Not only is the Holocaust obviously of supralocal concern, the Holocaust survivors that were invited to share their stories were not all from southern Orange County but were contacted through the national Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California. Therefore, it was not clear that the gathering that night on April 18 was indeed a community gathering . The Holocaust survivor panel was made up of nonpracticing and liberal Jews,8 while the audience appeared to consist overwhelmingly of Saddleback Church members, that is, conservative evangelicals. Despite the stated goals of...

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