David French recently wrote
a refreshingly candid piece explaining his journey to being an unapologetic
Christian culture warrior. It is a thoughtful first person narrative and
together with a recent set of reflections by his fellow Patheos blogger,
Timothy Dalrymple, is representative of the kind of discourse left-leaning
Christians like myself need to consider and engage with. French’s argument in
his “Open Letter to Young, ‘Post-Partisan’ Evangelicals” is not addressed to me—I
am neither young, easily defined as Evangelical (although I consider myself
evangelical) or post-partisan in the sense French seems to have in mind--but I
am actively engaged in the debates French writes about and I am a more than
casual participant in the cultural moment that French unfortunately insists on
viewing as a culture war. In this work I have the occasion to read French and
other self-described Christian conservatives and I think I could perhaps offer
him a richer explanation, based on a different example of French’s own work, for why many young
evangelicals, and many other folk of different ages and beliefs, are tempted to
describe themselves as post-partisan.
When I am tempted to use the
term post-partisan, and often when I encounter people using the term, it is in reference to a frustration with a style
of partisan argument that so completely distorts its opposition’s views and so
cartoonishly portrays the moral and political choices people must make that I
want to wad up the paper or punch the computer screen. The frustration turns to
spiritual sadness when these types of partisan arguments are made by people of
Christian faith who are therefore bearing witness to a watching world. Partisans
of both the left and the right are capable of these distortions, as my open letter to Jim Wallis demonstrates. It is at moments like that when I am tempted
to throw up my hands, yield the debate to the warriors and attempt to fashion
myself a neutral, “Jesus only” observer and commenter. French is correct that such
a stance is not wise or even really possible, but he is sadly the source of
such frustration in ways that I hope he will consider and rethink. Allow me to
explain.
In a June 13 column for
Lifenews French unwittingly displays precisely the kind of Christian
partisanship that leads people to wonder if the culture warrior mentality
is beneficial to the Church’s
witness to the public truth of the gospel. In his article “Why do ‘Social Justice’ Christians Ignore Pro-Life Issues?” French engages in three culture
warrior practices that give partisanship a bad name:
Culture Warrior Practice #1: Fail to engage real people and their real arguments
and instead rely on your own worst-case descriptions to describe the entirety of
the perspective you want to defeat.
Here is the clearest example of this in French’s article:
Again and again I see young
social justice-focused evangelicals abandoning any effective voice for the
unborn for the sake of an ephemeral, culturally-fashionable concept that as a
practical matter means little more than advocating a utopian ideal through a
grab-bag of banal, functionally socialist policies. Moreover, the embrace of
social justice often drives them functionally into the arms of a political
party and political movements that are dedicated to protecting and even
subsidizing the “right” to kill children on a vast, industrial scale.
If he sees examples of this
way of thinking among young evangelicals “again and again” then it should have
been easy to link to even one example of these views.
Culture Warrior Practice #2: Present current debates in a way that is beneficial to “your side” but
distorted to such a degree as to raise questions about your commitment to
truthful discourse. As even casual observers know, the issue of the
environment is one that drives many Christians, particularly young
evangelicals, away from conservative political values. It makes sense, then,
that French would address the issue. But look at how he does it:
Let’s take the environment.
Social justice Christians just adore the environment. (Don’t we all?) They want
us to be good stewards of creation (who can disagree with that?) and as a
result decry dependence on fossil fuels and tend to embrace the full agenda of
the environmentalist Left — carbon taxes, cap and trade, emissions caps, etc.
etc. etc… in exchange for adopting fashionable leftist policies that at worst
actually harm the people they’re trying to help and at best represent
debatably-effective solutions to complex and intractable problems, the social
justice Christian Left has thrown under the bus the most vulnerable citizens of
this (or any) culture — unborn children.
What is interesting about
this is that the leading evangelical environmental group espousing the kinds of
policies French finds wanting—the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN)—consistently uses pro-life arguments to buttress their policy descriptions. Far from “throwing
under the bus” unborn children (what a terrible image to place on another’s perspective),
the EEN has made a point of marshalling its energies around environmental
issues that damage the unborn. This is not a convenient fact for French, but
it is a major one and it has been the subject of intense debate within the evangelical
community (Christianity Today even devoted a special feature to the EEN’s actions so it is not an obscure debate). Perhaps
French is completely unaware of this debate, but I find that hard to believe.
It seems more likely that instead of addressing the pro-life merits of the EEN
and their explicit claim to being completely pro-life, he has chosen to distort
evangelical environmentalists as those who silence the pro-life cause. This
fits neatly with his vision of himself as a culture warrior for the unborn, but
at the cost of any recognition of the complex context of the debate between
leading evangelical environmentalists and the broader pro-life community
Culture Warrior Practice #3: Finish your article by reducing your opponents to a
label they reject and then claim to have discerned the true intentions and
motivations of anyone who fits your simplistic description. Here
is French’s concluding paragraph:
So, please, let’s drop the false
moral pretense of “social justice.” You’re not fooling anyone. You’re a leftist
seeking leftist solutions to known cultural problems, and in so doing you’ve
elected to side with those who seek the legal right to intentionally kill
children. Oh, you may claim to be pro life even as you work diligently to
maintain and increase the power of those individuals and institutions that
advance and protect our abortion regime, but you’ve made your choice in the
real world.
That probably speaks for
itself, but I would be remiss if I did not point out that the greatest voice
for the unborn in French’s and my generation, John Paul II of blessed memory, regularly and
consistently gave voice to the specific policy prescriptions on the environment
and the war in Iraq that French equates with the social justice/leftist
position. Did John Paul, of all people, really “maintain and increase the power of
those individuals and institutions that advance and protect our abortion regime”?
Is it any wonder that young evangelicals wonder about the merits of Christian
partisanship when they see it practiced in a way that reduces moral and
spiritual giants like John Paul II to the moral equivalent of abortion
apologists?
No comments:
Post a Comment