A few years ago, we needed to select a book to give to a small circle of Books & Culture supporters as a thank–you. I wanted a book that combined first–rate scholarship with deep Christian conviction. The book I settled on was God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, by Charles Marsh.
Marsh, professor of religion and director of the Project in Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, is a public theologian, meaning that he brings theological learning and reflection to bear on large matters of our common life. He’s written for B&C, and he’s become a friend over the years. His new book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity, is a perhaps belated addition to the already teetering stack of books published in the last year or so on evangelicals and politics in the Bush era. It includes sentences such as this one: “The partisan captivity of the gospel in the United States is the gravest theological crisis of the Christian faith in our time.”
I knew I was going to struggle with Marsh’s book when I saw the title of its introductory chapter, “On Being a Christian After Bush.” (What immediately came to mind was a counter–chapter, “On Being a Christian After Fillmore.”) But I read it through, first when the galleys came and again when the finished volume arrived in the mail from Oxford University Press. As a Books & Culture–ish type, you should read it too, to test your own sense of our present moment against that of a thoughtful fellow Christian. Your reaction may be quite different from mine.
For myself, only very intermittently does the world Marsh describes correspond to the world I know. Neither at the church where Wendy and I worship—Faith Evangelical Covenant in Wheaton, where partisan politics is strictly off limits—nor in the evangelical circles I’m familiar with across the country do I see anything resembling the pervasive “political captivity” of the gospel that Marsh indicts. I do see evidence of the distortions he identifies in the pronouncements of some prominent evangelical figures, but—in my experience—the influence of such attitudes is far less dramatic than he suggests.
The cover of the November/December 2004 issue of Books & Culture featured the slogan “Bono for President” along with a photo of the rock–star activist superimposed on an American flag. Inside that issue was a page labeled “Alt–America,” imagining an alternative administration in which Ry Cooder was our ambassador to Cuba, Warren Sapp was Secretary of Defense, Mary Ann Glendon was Attorney General, Cal DeWitt was Secretary of the Interior, and Jason Bourne was ready for Special Projects. No one in CTI’s administration complained about that cover—on the contrary.
Bono wasn’t on the ballot, and given a choice between George W. Bush and John Kerry I voted for Bush without any agonizing. Politics is all about making less than optimum choices—choices that should be made with an acknowledgment of fallibility, a strong appreciation for the law of unintended consequences, and a sense of irony informed by history. My wife and some of my friends did agonize before reluctantly voting for Bush or not voting for president at all. Other friends voted for Kerry as I had voted for Bush—based on their sense of the best choice in the messy world we inhabit as Christian citizens, not on any subordination of the gospel to partisan imperatives.
What to do when there’s such a massive gap in perception between friends and fellow believers—in this case, between the way Charles Marsh sees reality and the way I see it? First I remind myself that others I respect—my friend David Dark; Mark Gornik, director of City Seminary in New York; and so on—are pretty close to Charles in their sense of the current moment. A second impulse is to look for some area where our perceptions are largely in agreement, to see if I can build outward from that point. I found that more difficult than I expected in this case, not because of what might be called “political” issues but because of questions of tone and disposition.
Marsh’s book warns against the “messianic” inclinations of evangelicals, but it has been a long time since I read a book so devoid of humor, of irony, of the ingredients that work against messianic delusions. From his setting—a tenured position at a great university in the cosmopolitan (and quite beautiful) city of Charlottesville—he invokes Pascal against evangelicals, who (Marsh claims) have forgotten to maintain “a certain suspicion of the world” and have fallen willy–nilly into its snares:
To be sure, it may embarrass us to read Pascal’s fussy remarks on theater and popular entertainment, especially those of us in evangelical circles who have worked so hard to gain respectability from our cultured friends and associates, who have come to assume that the delights of the world can be easily enough baptized. But we might learn from our current political idolatries that it is time to hold up our amusements and judgments to the light of pure goodness.
Well, certainly, there is always a danger of going astray, but—at a time when a B&C piece by Alan Jacobs on the Harry Potter series prompts a reader to mournful indignation (we’re having truck with witchcraft, you see), and when narrow legalism is by no means moribund—we need to have some clarity from Marsh, who has already stacked the deck with an imputation of bad faith. Alas, one waits in vain for him to flesh out his jeremiad with any specificity. What does he have in mind? Reading the poetry of Paul Celan? Listening to the Decemberists? Watching Spiderman 3? The Sopranos? And what a nice touch to describe the Jansenist Pascal as “fussy”!
Worse, though, is Marsh’s call for a “season of silence.” It takes a certain obliviousness to write a BOOK calling other evangelicals to be quiet “in a noisy nation.” But to call as one’s chief witness Thomas Merton raises that lack of self–awareness to the level of inadvertent high comedy. For books by Merton, who has been dead for almost forty years, continue to pour from the presses even now—a new one came just last week. Marsh asks, “How can we regain faith’s authenticity?” Well, some of us don’t think that it has been lost, except as it has been lost and found and lost and found again ever since Pentecost. But here is Marsh’s answer to his own question: “I propose that we join the keepers of the mystery in a season of silence and together pray for deliverance and renewal.” And my question is, Why didn’t you start that season of silence before you got to page 154? Why didn’t you start it instead of writing this book?
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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