When I visited her university as a high school senior, my sister eschewed collegiate bacchanals and took me to an event that left an indelible impression. We went to a dark auditorium in which a pro-life organization showed films featuring graphic images of aborted fetuses. Among his many insights in The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, Jon Shields observes that many activists “became involved in the pro-life movement” after having “viewed a graphic depiction of aborted human life.” I returned home from my sister’s campus with horribly vivid memories of those pictures, though I did not become a pro-life activist and certainly misunderstood the nature of a typical college weekend.
It is always refreshing to encounter contrarian viewpoints, especially about topics that rarely receive more than superficial treatment in the media or academe. As Shields observes, for several decades scholars and journalists have accused conservative Christian activists of threatening American democracy by violating the boundary between church and state and using “moral” issues to distract voters from pressing economic matters which themselves have a moral dimension. Shields, by contrast, both praises the Christian Right for furthering the goal of “participatory democracy” articulated by the 1960s New Left and questions the vitriolic response of American liberalism to this development.
Shields approaches his subject from several angles, examining literature from a variety of Christian Right organizations (from the Christian Coalition to Stand to Reason), observing and interviewing pro-life activists, and analyzing data on political participation between 1972 and 2004. The latter is the least controversial section of the book. “However one assesses the Right’s fidelity to deliberative ideals,” Shields insists, “there is no gainsaying its influence on participation.” In 1972, the “turnout gap between white non-evangelicals and conservative evangelicals” reached 19 percent, with only 59 percent of the latter casting ballots in that year’s presidential landslide. Conservative evangelicals also were less politically active than African Americans. Three decades later, they were more likely to vote than African Americans and nearly as likely as non-evangelicals. Examining a host of other indicators, Shields finds that a group previously alienated from politics now practices engaged citizenship. Although the Reagan Revolution and Moral Majority “had almost no effect on evangelical turnout,” the persistent efforts of the more sophisticated Christian Coalition in the 1990s and the insistence of many movement leaders that Christians have a divine obligation to become politically active encouraged this participatory revival.
The general contours of conservative Christian politi- cization are well known, and some of Shields’ data tables will overwhelm those without statistical training. No matter. The book’s middle chapters, on the relationship between the Christian Right and “deliberative democracy,” are well worth the volume’s cost. Much of Shields’ analysis rests on a perceived tension between partisan mobilization and public deliberation. Incendiary rhetoric and dogmatic certitude motivate activists to join Christian Right organizations, but such rhetoric and certitude preclude the deliberative ideals of civility, dialogue, and careful, secular moral reasoning. Or do they?
Shields has no trouble identifying hateful rhetoric— such as terming supporters of abortion rights “babykillers”—when he examines the direct mail efforts of pro-life organizations. Such transgressions of “deliberative norms,” he concedes, are necessary to raise money and recruit activists. Once they have recruited activists and volunteers, however, most Christian Right organizations work hard to teach their supporters to engage their opponents respectfully and avoid appeals to theology or Scripture. The end result does not measure up to the radical skepticism and openness to alternative viewpoints prescribed by some secular liberals but nevertheless improves the overall quality of civic discourse in the United States. Shields suggests that “a degree of closeminded certainty is the price of a more participatory democracy.” Indeed, if “deliberative democrats want a more participatory democracy,” he concludes, “then they should be tolerant of the moral passions that are so important to mobilization efforts.” In other words, those who support democratic participation need to tolerate a certain amount of intolerance.
Shields concentrated his fieldwork on pro-life organizations, a reasonable focus given the centrality of anti-abortion efforts to conservative Christian activism in recent decades. (One wonders if the growing significance of political activism around gay marriage and related issues will alter the nature of Christian Right organizations.) Here Shields makes a distinction between “deliberative” and “radical” activists (with a “disjointed” group falling in the middle of the spectrum). Radical pro-life activists harass abortion providers and sometimes spew religious venom at women and medical staff entering abortion clinics. Deliberative activists, by contrast, are determined to counter negative stereotypes of the Christian Right in the media, on campus, and among pro-choice Americans more broadly. For example, pro-life students set up campus exhibits (often featuring images of aborted fetuses) and then courageously but respectfully endure hateful epithets from pro-choice counter-protesters, all the while seeking to initiate conversations about abortion that avoid theology. As Shields allows, pro-lifers choose their strategies pragmatically, but he identifies more than pragmatism at work, suggesting that conservative Christian activists have developed a genuine commitment to participatory and deliberative democracy. Moreover, they have furthered the insistence of that founding document of the New Left, the Port Huron Statement, that political activism should make “values explicit” and that universities should cultivate “moral enlightenment.”
Why, then, does the media portray the Christian Right as a threat to American democracy when pro-life activists behave civilly, promote dialogue and debate on meaningful issues, and boost democratic participation? If anything, according to Shields, it is pro-choice activists who disproportionately act boorishly and refuse to participate in meaningful dialogue on the issue—though he acknowledges that, since pro-choice organizations seek to maintain the status quo, they have much less to gain from debating the issues. Why does the media still write about Operation Rescue-type organizations even though pregnancy counseling centers have vastly more support among pro-life activists? Shields does not directly explain this alleged media bias. One presumes that negative media portrayals of the Christian Right exist for a variety of reasons, including the partisanship of journalists and the media’s preference for confirming preexisting storylines.
The Christian Right, at least in its recent mainstream incarnations like the Christian Coalition, has never been the American Taliban that liberals have inveighed against. Despite the presence of a few theocratic Reconstructionists, most evangelicals—as Christian Smith has demonstrated— are far too tolerant of other religions and hesitant about political activism to embrace such an agenda. [1] Moreover, the Christian Right has never achieved anything approaching monolithic organization or unity of purpose. It seems incredible that many journalists took seriously such nonsense as Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy (though to his credit Phillips presciently pointed to dangerously rising levels of national indebtedness). Most of the activists who appear in Shields’ book are anything but incipient theocrats. They are good citizens by any objective measure.
Despite its recent (and not unprecedented) obituaries, the Christian Right will probably remain a significant part of the American political landscape for the foreseeable future. It will therefore also remain an albatross for American evangelicalism. The Christian Right may possess underreported democratic virtues, but it has been a public relations disaster, especially because of the need for incendiary rhetoric to raise money and mobilize volunteers. The Barna Group reported in 2007 that only three percent of young non-evangelicals possess a favorable view of evangelicals. Moreover, this problem extends beyond evangelicalism. Only a small minority of young non-Christians have a “good impression” of Christianity. Massive majorities of young non-Christians, at the same time, criticize Christianity as “anti-homosexual.” [2] These negative views exist despite strenuous efforts on the part of many evangelicals to combat poverty, environmental degradation, and homophobia. Even if the Christian Right has furthered participatory democracy and inculcated certain civic virtues in its activists, it may be hampering the non-political, spiritual goals of its adherents and those of other Christians as well, creating new barriers to both evangelism and social partnership.
One might blame the media for this reality, but politically conservative Christian leaders—with their judgmentalism, vitriol, and hypocrisy—have provided plenty of fat targets for the punditocracy. Christian claims of media bias and victimization convince very few outsiders, and despite his game attempt to salvage the civic reputation of the Christian Right, Shields’ analysis will lamentably reach and convince few skeptics.
Nevertheless, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right contains a potential antidote to increasingly negative stereotypes of Christianity. Irrespective of political persuasion or activity, all Christians could learn lessons from Shields’ deliberative Christian activists. Rather than just complaining about or stoically enduring misrepresentations of their faith, they seek opportunities to patiently and respectfully change their antagonists’ minds. Their formula often fails. Still, because of their dogged persistence they cause some of their opponents to reassess their views of abortion and of Christianity itself. In both the public sphere and in private interactions, we could do much worse than to mimic their combination of civility and boldness.
John G. Turner is assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Univ. of North Carolina Press).
1. Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Univ. of California Press, 2000).
2. “A New Generation Expresses Its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity,” barna.org/barna-update/article/16-teensnext-gen/94-a-newgeneration-expresses-its-skepticism-and-frustration-with-christianity. Accessed March 23, 2009.
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