A New Day Dawning?

Attempting to evade her white owner’s sexual advances, Harriet Jacobs, author of the earliest extant female slave narrative, climbed into an airless, mice-infested, nine-feet long, seven-feet wide, and three-feet high attic-like garret under the roof of her grandmother’s house in 1830s North Carolina. Hidden there, the prostrate Jacobs reflected on Jesus’ suffering during Holy Week. His crucifixion on Friday culminated in the God-forsakenness of Saturday’s entombment in the grave, she noted, not unlike the claustrophobic space she presently occupied. If Jacobs, who eventually escaped across the Mason-Dixon Line with the help of abolitionists, could identify with the suffering Christ of Friday and the abandoned Christ of Saturday, the dominant white men negotiating her future emphasized Sunday’s “triumphal Lord of the Resurrection.”

Peter Heltzel, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and assistant professor of theology at New York Theological Seminary, seeks to integrate these two profound theological insights. Too often, he asserts, white evangelicalism’s emphasis on Sunday’s victory over death obscures black evangelicalism’s emphasis on Friday, the day when Jesus was lynched. Heltzel demands that “the white architects of a Euro-American modernity be interrogated concerning the problem of race.” In Jesus and Justice he does precisely that, circling back to Friday’s injustices, only to return again to Sunday in declaring his confidence in a resurrection of authentic social justice. Switching metaphors, Heltzel concludes that American evangelicalism has matured into a prophetic movement “in a shade of blue-green—blue representing the tragedy of black suffering and green symbolizing the hope of a new social engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment.”

Following a lengthy and learned discussion on the ambivalent evangelical heritage of antebellum slavery and antislavery activism, Heltzel fast-forwards to two prominent 20th-century “evangelical” theologians who fashioned the new shade of blue-green. If each had his limits—Martin Luther King, Jr., unable to restrain the civil rights movement from devolving into identity politics; Carl F. H. Henry, “ensnared in the logic of the ‘half-Gospel'” and never fully able “to integrate ministries of social justice”—taken together they prefigured a beloved community that could transcend black and white.

Henry, whose fingerprints marked evangelical institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today magazine, and World Vision, burst onto the scene in the late 1940s with The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, a seminal tract that repudiated the “evaporation of fundamentalist humanitarianism.” Heltzel ably charts the theological origins of Henry’s social awareness. A Reformed foundation supporting a “radical Baptist vision of social engagement” allowed Henry to move toward broader social reform of racism and a critique of the harsher elements of capitalism. If Henry’s programs of education, evangelism, and cultural literacy ultimately were unable to transcend the assumptions of 20th-century evangelical whiteness, they nonetheless reoriented fundamentalist otherworldliness toward a more public faith.

To Henry’s greening of public engagement, King added the blues. Heltzel contends that King developed a sophisticated theology of suffering, rooted not only in lynching and economic servitude but also in evangelical theology. In an argument derivative of David Chappell’s A Stone of Hope (2004), which found the deepest secret of the civil rights movement in black Christian faith, Heltzel explains that King’s realism about human nature, grounded in black revivalism and a biblical theology of love that stressed love of enemy, forced the white liberal establishment to end Jim Crow. King taught modern evangelicalism that “a cross-centered Christian life will mean suffering, persecution, and even martyrdom.”

In four case studies, Heltzel seeks to show that the prophetic black tradition of King and the socially engaged tradition of Henry are merging in 21st-century evangelicalism. The cases of Sojourners and the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), both harbingers of a new “politics of intercultural community” that push “beyond the black-white binary,” are the most compelling. Sojourners, initially an intentional community in interracial neighborhoods in Chicago and Washington, D.C., has for the past forty years urged attentiveness to the structural elements of racism in its provocative magazine. King and Henry’s theologies intersect more explicitly in CCDA’s founder John Perkins, born amidst profound racial and economic oppression in rural Mendenhall, Mississippi. After white segregationists killed his brother in the late 1940s, Perkins fled the Jim Crow South for more hospitable climes in Southern California, where he first encountered Henry-style evangelicalism. Compelled to evangelize his own people, he returned ten years later, initially hostile, like many white evangelicals, toward the civil rights movement. But, shocked by deteriorating racial conditions, Perkins joined the protest movement, hosting Freedom Summer activists in his home and spearheading a boycott of white businesses in his hometown.

The other two cases—Focus on the Family and the National Association of Evangelicals—are intriguing but ultimately less convincing. Heltzel sees James Dobson’s Focus on the Family as beginning to transcend institutionalized whiteness. Bishop Harry Jackson, a black evangelical from Washington, D.C., and regular radio show guest whom Dobson met while stumping for a marriage amendment, has challenged Focus to address other social issues such as racism, poverty, and the environment. Heltzel tracks a similar trajectory in the NAE, whose leaders in the postwar years understood racism as nothing more than personal prejudice. Since the late 1990s, however, long-time vice-president for government affairs Richard Cizik and a string of presidents—among them a deposed Ted Haggard—have added impressive numbers of minorities to the NAE’s leadership and have taken on environmental protection as a key initiative.

Heltzel is certainly on target in declaring that “something new is moving within evangelicalism.” A recent Calvin College survey shows that from 2005 to 2007, the number of young evangelicals identifying as Republicans dropped from 55 to 40 percent, and anecdotal evidence points to some potentially remarkable trends in evangelical politics. But for every instance of the blueing and greening of evangelicalism, there are jarring counterexamples—some emerging while the book was in press and some, to Heltzel’s credit, acknowledged in the text. He cites Mike Huckabee as an example of populist passion for racial, economic, and environmental justice, but fails to account for his sharp tack to the right during the 2008 presidential primaries. He cites possible shifts within Focus on the Family, but not Dobson’s more recent hostility toward Barack Obama’s politics. He cites CCDA as a model of structural sensitivity, but not Chris Rice’s unsettling description in Grace Matters of the intransigent cultural clashes and elusiveness of beloved community within an intentional community of which Rice and Perkins’ son Spencer were members. And political changes might not be as pronounced as the sharp decline in Republican identification indicates. Only one-third of former Republicans now call themselves Democrats; the rest are independents, suggesting that the shift Heltzel identifies might be a temporary blip due more to disillusionment with the George W. Bush era than with conservative politics as a whole. Heltzel’s verdict, despite signs of change, might be premature. Evangelicals’ continuing preoccupation with capitalist individualism—so ably charted by Christian Smith and Michael Emerson in their study of racial divisions within evangelicalism, Divided by Faith (2001)—very likely still holds.

Quibbles over current events aside, the more profound question raised by Heltzel has to do with the very definition of evangelicalism: Can King and Henry really be classified together? Heltzel answers affirmatively, citing King’s evangelical-like conversion story, stress on the Cross, appeals to biblical authority, and consultations with Billy Graham on organizing methods. Heltzel’s analysis of King’s spirituality offers important insights to civil rights historiography unacknowledged by scholars who variously depict King as a liberal Protestant optimist, a Niebuhrian realist, or a personalist. While King was never simply or only an evangelical, he did draw from evangelical resources to fuel his racial activism. Heltzel—in masterful discussions on the egalitarian elements of 19th-century revivalism, Baptist notions of separation of church and state, Anabaptist sensibilities of marginalization, and Wesleyan empathies toward the marginalized—offers a striking rebuke to those scholars who see faith as epiphenomenal of “real” forces, as a mask for social and economic concerns. Those, for example, tempted to see Dobson and other culture warriors on the right as theocrats should be heartened by Heltzel’s discussion of Nazarene theology and social healing.

Heltzel’s theological approach necessarily deemphasizes the social sources of divisions between King and Henry. Sociologists—who classify black denominations as “black Protestant,” not evangelical—will cringe at his apparent dismissal of the stark contrast between the cultures, politics, and religious practices of black evangelicalism and Henry’s new evangelicalism. Historians—whose sophisticated classification schemes that triangulate theological, cultural, and ecclesiastical networks make it difficult to genealogically link black and white evangelicals—will cringe at Heltzel’s alignment of the disembodied theologies of King and Henry. This book’s ambition—to integrate white and black traditions—is promising, but it fails to work as well as Charles Irons’ recent work on actual ecclesiastical relationships between black and white parishioners in his book The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008).

Lacking evidence of organic connections between King and Henry, Heltzel can enlist only their theologies, not their social and religious networks, to support his thesis about an emerging evangelicalism that encompasses both traditional belief and progressive politics. This makes for a superb theological meditation but a less-than-convincing statement regarding politics on the ground. In this regard, Heltzel falters like Amy Sullivan, Jim Wallis, David Kuo, and other advocates of a progressive evangelicalism, who, emboldened by the failure of the Bush Administration and the Religious fluency of Barack Obama, have issued a raft of premature declarations about the demise of the Religious Right. If, in the end, Heltzel succeeds in demonstrating that conservative theology does not inevitably lead to conservative politics, he relies more on wishful thinking and theological possibility than on historical or sociological evidence for his belief that such a coherent progressive movement is underway. Sunday’s coming, but it’s still only Friday—maybe Saturday.

David Swartz is a postdoctroral fellow at the University of Notre Dame and is working on a book, under contract with the University of Pennsylvana Press, about the evangelical Left.