-by Virginia Stem Owens
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I Read It in the Wordless Book
By Betty Smartt Carter
Baker Book House
398pp.; $13.99, paper
I once heard a speaker at a seminary conference in Texas ask, “If we don’t tell the story of Southern Baptists, who will?” Despite the fact that he had quite a different story in mind than I did, the question has haunted me ever since. Churchgoing Protestants in general remain one of the most underrepresented segments of American society in our national fiction today. New York publishers, hungry for spirituality themes, nevertheless consider even fictional evangelicals toxic. And despite the boom in formula fiction produced for the Christian Booksellers market, few religious publishers are willing to take a chance on novels attempting to depict with any degree of realism what life as a Southern Baptist might look like.
Ever since the midnineteenth century, when Hawthorne pilloried his ancestors as exemplars of pietistic hypocrisy, few novelists have taken a serious look at the lives of devout dissenters in this country. Early in this century, Sinclair Lewis set the trend by satirizing the Protestant subculture with his straw preacher, Elmer Gantry, just as he exposed businessmen in Babbitt and doctors in Arrowsmith. But while business and medicine have both survived as acceptable subjects for novels, Protestant piety seems stuck in Lewis’s satiric mold. One can, of course, find realistic treatments of other religious traditions. Chaim Potok has given us a fascinating series of novels set within Orthodox Jewish communities in this country. And more recently Jon Hassler has explored the lives of Catholic priests serving all-too-realistic congregations in small Minnesota towns. But Protestants have been depicted either as bizarre backwoods loners, as in Flannery O’Connor’s self-proclaimed expressionism, or as John Updike’s lapsed suburbanites, who lack even the exoticism of Graham Greene’s whisky priest.
No one, it appears, wants to take on the formidable task of depicting a Protestant family whose weeks are measured by the schedule of church services, prayer meetings, and women’s circles–despite the fact that a hefty percentage of the population marks time precisely by that ecclesiastical clock. Thus Betty Smartt Carter and her publisher, Baker Book House, deserve credit for giving us a realistic portrayal of an insular ethnic Protestant community. I Read It in the Wordless Book, Carter’s first novel, reveals the heart and soul–as well as the underbelly–of Christianity American style.
Carter’s characters, rather than mortifying themselves with barbed-wire undershirts or operating in a perpetual alcoholic haze, are reasonably sane citizens whose sins nevertheless create significant conflict. They plot their life’s course on the grid of the Dutch Reformed tradition, not in the Holy Land of Michigan, but in the Shenandoah Valley, where the surrounding sea of Baptists makes them even more conscious of their special calling to theological and ethnic purity. If, as T. S. Eliot said, dogs are as much a part of British religion as bishops, then it is pastry and covenantal baptism that fill out the sacred equation in Dutch Falls, Virginia, where the bread of heaven is oliebolen and the fruit of the vine is never fermented. (A note to readers more familiar with drinking Dutch Calvinists than the dry variety: In the South, to judge from Carter’s report, they disapprove of “the three B’s”–beer, blasphemy, and bedroom scenes on TV.)
The Grietkirk family, a pillar of the “F.R.C. of V.,” boasts two sons, one a real estate lawyer and the other a missionary working in Southeast Asian refugee camps. Both sons are the pride and joy of their widowed mother, who herself took on the task of raising Carolyn, the missionary’s daughter, after his wife’s death. The fly in the family ointment is the brothers’ sister. Jo, a loose-living divorcée, left Dutch Falls years ago for the bright lights of New York, to the everlasting disappointment of their mother.
The story unfolds through the eyes of the 12-year-old Carolyn, and begins with her father’s return to Dutch Falls on Independence Day 1976, after an absence of seven years. This momentous event, however, is all but eclipsed by a newcomer to Dutch Falls, Ginger Jordan, the glamorous red-haired wife of a Pentecostal preacher. The Jordans, formerly actors in New York, are having a rough time fitting into the small Virginia town, and the strain is showing in their marriage. To relieve her boredom with the unlikely role of pastor’s wife, Ginger Jordan gets the lead in a summer stock musical in Richmond, enlisting Carolyn as her onsite babysitter.
As if these exotic outsiders weren’t enough for Dutch Falls to contend with, Carolyn’s father springs another alien on his family–his new Vietnamese wife, Phuong, who has learned her Christianity from charismatics in a Guam refugee camp. But Carolyn’s stepmother can’t hold a candle to the bewitching Ginger. Outrageously exploited by this new “best friend,” Carolyn spends the Bicentennial summer concocting a web of deception that allows her to fulfill the actress’s extravagant demands on her time. And only the alien stepmother, painfully ignored and isolated within this Christian family, sees the truth behind Carolyn’s lies.
This is great material–not just an updated version of Little House on the Prairie meant to instill generic homespun values. The conflicts spring from the “worldly” allure of the theater in tension with the snug familiarity of Dutch Falls, from ethnicity supplanting true religion, from adolescent angst driven by its twin engines of hormones and romanticism. These are people we care about, entangled in problems that matter to us. And Carolyn as a preteen Pilgrim making her way through this Slough of Dutch Despond engages not only our terror and pity, but from time to time our gleeful recognition of the ridiculous.
There is only one problem. This book needed an editor bad. Its 398 pages should have been shrunk to about half that length. Someone needed to take a wrench to the plot, tightening the scenes so they would not audibly clunk. The emotional threads should have been stretched tauter. But because the prose is allowed to amble along, diffusing its sweetness as it goes, the plot becomes implausible, and the characters dissipate their essence. Carolyn’s missionary father remains a remote and ineffectual figure who scarcely notices either his daughter or his new wife. Thus it is hard to credit him with the heroic acts breathlessly revealed–but not dramatized–in the concluding chapters. Carolyn’s grandmother, whose eye no speck of dust escapes, nevertheless overlooks the repeated deceptions by her ward. The two magnetic poles of the novel-the flamboyant Ginger and the emotionally abandoned Phuong–are only allowed to exert their moral force in the book’s final quarter. A good editor would have prompted Carter to whittle the unwieldy proportions of the novel into a more shapely, and thus more effective, form.
The book’s want of editing points to a growing problem in publishing today, one that has for some time plagued religious publishers and is now affecting so-called secular houses as well. In the case of the latter establishments, insufficient editing is usually a result of downsizing and the industry’s notoriously rapid turnover in staff. Thanks to corporate mergers, the days of Maxwell Perkins’s patient collaboration with an over-prolific Thomas Wolfe are gone. Badly edited–even poorly proofread–manuscripts emerge with embarrassing frequency from previously impeccable publishing houses.
Among religious publishers, however, the reasons are somewhat different. Having only recently ventured into the field of fiction, most of them are content to stick with formulaic stuff, but there are brave publishers with larger literary visions: they dream of producing novels that can hold the mirror up to life in order to reflect a reality that includes both sin and grace. Unfortunately, they have embarked upon this enterprise without first equipping themselves with skilled fiction editors. The engine that drives a narrative is quite different from the one that systematizes theology or that seeks to inspire devotion. Using even an expert nonfiction editor to work on a fiction manuscript is like sending a diesel mechanic to break a green horse.
Few manuscripts of any genre are printed in their pristine, untouched state–nor should they be. No religious publisher would dream of bringing out a new biblical commentary without having on their editorial staff a scholar proficient in textual criticism. If they want to see the complex and heretofore unrecorded stories of Southern Baptists–or Dutch Calvinists–included in our national fiction, they need to invest in the resources it takes to do the job right.
That said, the debut of a gifted young novelist is always an occasion to celebrate. Betty Smartt Carter is a writer to watch, with an important story to tell.
Virginia Stem Owens, director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College, is the author of many books, including most recently Generations (Lion; UK only).
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 15
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- More from-by Virginia Stem Owens
-by Michael Cromartie
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Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics
By Anonymous
Random House
366pp.; $24
Early in 1996, Random House published Primary Colors, a novel about the 1992 Democratic primaries, though featuring a fictionalized set of characters. The author was “Anonymous.” Readers loved it (the book soon moved to the top of the bestseller list); critics praised it to the skies. Michael Lewis, writing in the New York Times Book Review (Jan. 28, 1996), observed that
“Primary Colors” is an odd book. But maybe the oddest thing about it is how good it is. In spite of its sins it is far and away the best thing I have read about the 1992 campaign; it breaks all the rules and lives to tell about it. The author’s portrait of Mr. Clinton is astonishingly powerful. I doubt that anyone who reads the book will ever again think of the President in quite the same way. I’m not quite sure why this should be, except there is a wonderful honesty about it, a refusal to give in to the conventional interpretation of people and events that cripples so much that is written about politics.
Speculation about the author’s identity was intense. Among the many names proposed, one that surfaced repeatedly was Joe Klein, longtime columnist and senior editor at Newsweek magazine. Klein denied that he was Anonymous, and rumors continued to swirl until the Washington Post broke the story, offering compelling evidence that Klein was indeed the author of Primary Colors.
What followed was a firestorm of commentary, heavily critical of Klein (and of Newsweek editor Maynard Parker, for helping to preserve the secret). By lying about his authorship of the novel, it was said, Klein had damaged the credibility of journalists everywhere and further eroded public confidence in the media. Some critics found irony in the exposure of Klein’s deception. Was this the same Joe Klein who wrote a widely quoted piece about President Clinton’s character flaws (“The Politics of Promiscuity,” Newsweek, May 9, 1994)? Why, the man is himself a bare-faced liar!
Dissenters–including Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic, William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review, and Richard John Neuhaus in First Things–noted that Klein’s “deceit” followed inexorably from the choice to assume anonymity. Did he not have that right? Now you can decide.
In August, Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center met with Klein in New York and asked what he had learned from his roller-coaster ride as Anonymous.
What motivated you to write Primary Colors, and why was it a novel?
I don’t know what motivated me to write the book, and it was a novel because it was a novel. It was a fictional situation that came to my mind and just exploded out of me. I guess when I thought back on it, because it was such a shocking event–I mean the creative act of doing this–I realized that I’d been covering American politics for 25 years and that I hadn’t seen anything that quite captured the intensity, the craziness, the velocity, and the humor of it. The ’92 campaign was, I thought, some kind of watershed. There was a level of complexity to it that journalism couldn’t reach. I didn’t know whether fiction could either, and I certainly didn’t know if I could do it. But once I started doing it, the book just took off on its own. I found that I was learning a lot about myself and about people through these characters.
Some real, some imagined?
No, they’re all imagined. There are some who bear a closer resemblance to real people than others, but the first scene in the book is the only thing that ever actually happened in life. I went to an adult reading program in Harlem with Bill Clinton at one point. But in the scene, as it appears in the book, within a matter of pages Jack Stanton separates himself in my mind from Bill Clinton very clearly. Suddenly he starts talking about his Uncle Charlie, who may or may not have won the Congressional Medal of Honor; we never really find out for sure. Bill Clinton didn’t have an Uncle Charlie. Anonymous’s feelings about Jack Stanton are very different from my feelings about Bill Clinton, and Henry Burton’s feelings about Jack Stanton are different from mine and Anonymous’s.
So for those who sit around and speculate about who’s who and what’s what . . .
It’s a useless enterprise.
Because they’re a combination of all kinds of observations you’ve made in covering politics for a long time and on how certain people operate in the political world.
Right. People say, “What you did to so-and-so is unfair.” In my mind, so-and-so ain’t so-and-so.
Did the process of developing these fictional characters give you any better insight into the role character should play in politics?
Just that character is an incredibly complicated concept. This is something I’ve believed throughout my ten-year tenure as a political columnist, that we only define character negatively in journalism. There are positive and negative aspects to character. Many of the standards that we hold these people to are just incredibly unfair and incredibly stupid. As a journalist, I took the side of the quarry as opposed to the pack in every character issue battle we’ve had over the past ten years. I sided with John Tower, I sided with Barney Frank, I sided with Clarence Thomas, I sided with Bill Clinton on Gennifer Flowers, Whitewater, and a number of other things.
Because?
Because I believe that the phenomenon of the witch hunts is more important than any of the misdemeanors. A hundred years from now people are going to look back on this period the way we look on the Salem witch trials. And now having lived through a circumstance like this myself, I’m even more adamant about this. The one exception I ever made to that rule, you had a part in: the conference on Character and Political Leadership that you held at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which I took part in. It led me to the conclusion, which I still hold, that the lack of discipline in Bill Clinton’s private life had carried over to a lack of discipline in his public life.
Which led to your much discussed article on “The Politics of Promiscuity.”
Yes. Promiscuity in the dictionary definition is all about discipline. Sex comes way down in the definition–below appetite, by the way. In any case, character is a complicated thing. In many ways I think we should be looking for people who have done questionable things to be leading us.
In Primary Colors I quote Bill Bennett: “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” I think if you look back in religious history and in legend you find that the great leaders are the ones who have been through the tough times, have seen temptation, and have succumbed to temptation. They’re the ones you can trust.
After all the praise that Anonymous received for writing Primary Colors, were you surprised at the criticism you received when your identity was revealed? It got positive reviews all over the place before.
No, I was not surprised at the criticism that I received. I had a sense that the mob was after me. It stopped being a game for me when it really became a manhunt. It was a very complicated group of decisions that I had to make surrounding this.
Could you have envisioned, when you first decided to make the book anonymous, some of the conundrums it was going to put you in?
No, but some of the conundrums that people think are conundrums are not conundrums. I have absolutely no guilt, no question, no doubt at all in my mind that I had an absolute right to privacy in this case, and that it had nothing to do with my journalistic credibility or integrity. Not a thing–apples and freight trains.
The conundrums were almost entirely personal and they had to do with friends and the nature of friendship. I noticed this very early on. I won’t name this person, but one of my very, very closest friends, someone to whom I’ve told just about everything, called me just before the book appeared and said, “Have you read this book that everybody is saying you wrote?” I said, “You’ve read it?” And this person said, “Yes.” I said, “Tell me about it.” I managed to get through the entire conversation without ever doing a direct lie, at which point I called my agent and said, “I can’t bear this; I cannot handle this.” The reason I was able to get through that conversation so easily was that this person assumed that I would never ever not tell if I had done it. That quality of credence that I had built up among my friends over the years was sorely called into question by this deception. That was the toughest part about it.
But it was necessary. People who have reviewed the book have since said to me, “If I had known it was you, I never could have reviewed it that way.” I wanted the book to have a clean read, to be judged on its own merits without any baggage.
In all of the criticism you received about hiding your identity, were there any occasions where you felt something valid was said, where you said, “Ouch, that hurt”?
There were people who had criticisms where I said, “Ouch,” but I didn’t buy their criticisms. I respected them as people. There were friends who said, “You lied to me.” That hurt, and I’ve spent many hours talking it through with friends. But the kind of public criticism I got? The notion that journalism would be hurt by this is totally absurd. To my mind, and in keeping with what I was saying to you before about the phenomenon of the witch hunt, journalism is hurt far more by the spectacle of journalists making a big deal over this than it is by anything I’ve done.
Take someone I respect, Ken Auletta, who writes press criticism for the New Yorker. He called me a liar, said what I’d done was bad for journalism. So I called him up and said, “OK, let’s talk about it.” We did, and I described the following circumstance–something that had actually happened. Two days after the contract for the book was signed by my agent, a reporter from the New York Times called me up and said, “Hey, what about this novel everybody says you wrote?” I said “What novel?” A nondenial denial. Then she said, “Random House just signed a contract for this novel about the 1992 presidential campaign that was anonymously written, and people say it was either you or Michael Kelly or Sidney Blumenthal.” I said “Well, have you talked with them?” She said, “Yes, they both said no. What about you?” (By the way, at this point only four chapters were written.) I said, “I work five days a week for Newsweek. I work weekends for cbs. How could I have ever found the time to do this?” Another nondenial denial. She didn’t give up, though. She said, “Yes or no?” And I said, trembling, “No.”
How in the world would she know about the book two days after the contract was signed?
It’s just journalism–this is the world of publishing. It was hot. So for the next hour, Ken Auletta and I played psychodrama where I was the reporter and he was Joe. He said, “Well, you could have said something else.” I said, “Try it, try anything.” In every last instance the New York Times would have reported, “Michael Kelly said no, Sid Blumenthal said no, and Joe Klein said the lox at Zabar’s is wonderful.” It would have been some kind of evasion. There was finally no way to dodge the yes-or-no question.
How will this experience help you in the future in the way you cover politics?
Well, I think it’s going to intensify the way I’ve been feeling throughout, which is that we have to let these people be human beings. By the current standards, there is no way that Winston Churchill could become president of the United States. This is a man who the first thing he did every morning was pour himself a scotch. Franklin Roosevelt poured himself a pitcher of martinis every night, cheated at poker, and cheated on his wife. They were flawed men, but they were also great men, and their peccadilloes didn’t render them unfit for leadership.
At one point I went in to Andrew Hayward, who had just taken over as president of CBS, and offered him my resignation. We had a very pleasant conversation, and he asked me what I had learned over the past week, having been through a press conference and all the rest. I said, “You’re the first person my age to run one of these things, and you’ve got a big problem here because we–collectively we–are like a 14-year-old boy who has just discovered sex, and we want to do it as frequently and as indiscriminately as we want. It feels fabulous, it feels wonderful. And it’s entirely irresponsible. What your job should be–believe me, I’m in no position to give you advice about this right now–but I think that your job should be getting us past pubescence.”
That’s the way I feel about journalism today. We are entirely indiscriminate in our use of this magnificent piece of equipment that we have. The intensity of the spotlight is distorting, both on the upside and the downside.
I found myself in that press conference saying things that I truly didn’t believe, just out of defensiveness. When I’ve talked to other public figures about it, they say it happens to them a lot.
Why is it that so many politicians who run for the presidency talk about their own religious faith? Clinton quotes Scripture; Carter quoted Scripture; Reagan had a religiosity about his presidency; they all feel obligated occasionally to meet with Billy Graham. What does this say about our leaders or about our politics?
It’s not about our leaders. They do what they do because we demand it of them. We ask for the appearance of piety. The current trend is for people like Newt to go and build houses as part of the Habitat for Humanity program, or Clinton to rebuild a church. As transparent as that is, I think it’s a step in the right direction.
I like to see politicians show their piety through exertion, through sweat equity, through physical labor. And even if you think they’re phonies-there are going to be a lot of phonies building houses over the next decade, I predict–you’re still getting a church or a house out of it.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 16
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- More from-by Michael Cromartie
-by John L. Moore
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Special section: America, America
I sat in a California living room while a man from Idaho displayed his homemade driver’s license, quoting from the Constitution to explain why the government had no right to regulate his freedom of movement. Where is the Other America? In your neighbor’s head. America is a memory, the meaning of which is always being contested.
See, for example, a collection of essays entitled History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, edited by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 295 pp.; $30). You’ll recall the controversy that resulted when the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum set out to mount an exhibit featuring the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima) to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The editors comment: “The opening of a history front in the decade-old culture wars, even if only a new twist on an old act for Republicans and right-wingers, has been a genuinely shocking experience for historians committed to examining cherished national narratives.”
My heart goes out to the students of those genuinely shocked historians. Are their professors really so utterly clueless? The history wars are never-ending, and no wing, right or left, has a monopoly on outrage. In this special section, we visit a few contested sites of memory. American origins: individualistic or communitarian? Is the Constitution just whatever the judges say it is? Should we continue to read America’s intellectual history as written by the pragmatists and their heirs–Rorty, et al.–in which, as it happens, they are the bringers of enlightenment? Was there any justification for the internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? How does the history of religion in America look when women are added to the story? Join us, if you’re not too easily shocked.
-JW
American Militias: Rebellion, Racism, and Religion
By Richard Abanes
InterVarsity
296 pp.; $14.99, paper
Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat
By Morris Dees, with James Corcoran
HarperCollins
254 pp.; $24
Militia. What an ugly subject. You cannot say the word without seeing images of Oklahoma City and the torn bodies of men, women, and children.
Militia. A carelessly used word. In its primary meaning, it refers to citizens enrolled and trained for the internal defense of a state. That was meant to be the role of a state’s National Guard, but they are more supplements to the federal military now than guardians of individual entities. The National Guard was very active–with above average mortality–in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Militia. The popular definition? A private army of pot-bellied, middle-aged men acting out Rambo fantasies with ak-47s, fueled by insane conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks, and the New World Order. A term encompassing everything from law-abiding citizens who believe in self-defense and the right to bear arms to radical groups such as the Freemen, the Aryan Nations, even the Ku Klux Klan.
Militia. The last bastion of power for angry white guys.
I am an angry white male living in a state famous for angry white males, including the Freemen, the Militia of Montana (MOM), and–on the opposite end of the radical spectrum–Ted Kaczynski, the alleged Unabomber.
I am very unhappy with the government. I work myself to the bone, but taxes keep me broke and tired. I vote regularly but have lost faith in the ability of the political process to bring about meaningful change. The government interferes with almost everything I try to do. It is too big, too corrupt, too impersonal, and too unaccountable.
In some ways I am like many militia members. Perhaps you are, too.
“We must remember that most of those involved in the Patriot movement are good Americans,” writes Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. “They simply have gripes against the government. Most of us probably share a number of their views.”
Yapping dogs. So many yapping dogs we are tempted to turn over in our sleep, cover our heads with pillows. The warnings of a real watchdog could be drowned out by this cacophony of idiocy.
Richard Abanes, the author of American Militias: Rebellion, Racism, and Religion, is worried about this milieu. In their separate styles, both he and Dees are suggesting we leave a night-light on and sleep less soundly. Abanes even predicts a wave of homegrown terror between now and the year 2001, as if the approaching millennial date were a full moon driving the barking dogs crazy. “I expect growing violence and physical danger,” he has told me. “Just about everyone will be touched somehow by the terrorism. Besides that, there is the threat of psychological seduction. Some conservative Christians now embrace virtually anyone who shares contempt for the liberal establishment.”
The picture is further clouded by groups that selectively appropriate Christian teachings and symbols–groups such as Christian Identity, defined by Abanes as a “social, political, and spiritual movement composed of religiously inclined racists from the ranks of the neo-Nazi community, the KKK, and other white supremacist organizations,” with roots in British-Israelism.
Abanes and Dees single out Pat Robertson, Beverly LaHaye, and Pat Buchanan as national leaders whose predictions, beliefs, or campaigns have been influenced by people with connections to the extreme fringe on the right wing.
Right wing. I hate even using the term. Yes, I’m a conservative white male living in a rural state, but it gets even worse: I attend church regularly, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and own a number of rifles and handguns, including a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14. In the eyes of many, that would be more than enough to damn me as a right-wing zealot. If Newsweek could identify white supremacist Randy Weaver as a “Christian fundamentalist” (Weaver and his family were members of Christian Identity), as they did in an August 1995 piece, then the door can swing both ways. “Evangelical,” “fundamentalist,” or “charismatic” Christians are automatically dangerous right-wingers.
Are the yapping dogs fulfilling their own paranoid prophecies by bringing down persecution on any person or group identified as “conservative” and “Christian”? Abanes believes that potential exists, and his book, being Christian in perspective, takes a serious look at the religious roots and branches of this noxious shrub of paramilitarism. For example, he contends that Weaver’s favorite book is Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. This could prove upsetting to church librarians who have assumed that the camo-clad limit their reading to The Turner Diaries or the equally ficticious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Simplistic solutions for salving endtime fears are perennially popular among scapegoaters and the spiritually irresponsible.
Most of us in Montana, Christian and otherwise, shudder as our beautiful state is identified with patriot groups, militias, and white supremacists. While many of their neighbors sympathized with the Freemen’s frustrations with the government, hardly any supported their actions, and most considered them hypocrites or self-righteous nut cases. Like Kaczynski, most of Montana’s radicals are transplants attracted by the state’s isolation and its libertarian independence. Montanans have long had a philosophy that anyone can do anything he or she wants as long as they are not hurting others. Words and ideas don’t hurt. Say what you want. Think what you want. It’s a free country; just stay out of my pasture if I put up a No Trespassing sign.
It is time for Christians to tell the paramilitary conspiracy fanatics that our green pastures are off limits. Call it tough love. Call it the limits of grace. But an ignorant and agendized media are easily misled and will rush to believe goats proclaiming themselves to be sheep. If goats are thought of as sheep, all sheep will soon be considered goats. It is for the Christian–hence the value of Abanes’s book–to pursue discernment and draw the proverbial line in the sand.
While their individual soldiers are often well-intended–some militias perform valuable social and civil services–the private armies and patriot groups are neither good prophets nor reliable watchdogs. Their prophecies are often conceived in the echo chambers of the Internet, void of accountability and attribution. Their barks of warning are mostly static. No direction, no music, no poetry: just a blaring of base and baseless fears. While feigning secrecy and service, they thrive in the spotlight. Especially the leadership. Has Bo Gritz seen a microphone he didn’t love?
Last year at a gun show in Billings, I rushed past tables of survivalists’ trinkets and warfare manuals on my way to the men’s room. As I reached for the handle, the door suddenly swung open and out stepped John Trochmann, the balding, bearded, patriarchal leader of the Militia of Montana. His deep-set eyes sparkled, his silver beard glistened, and his chrome dome reflected the bathroom’s fluorescent lights. Trochmann pivoted gracefully and bowed–almost genuflecting–holding the door open as if beckoning me toward a sovereign’s throne.
Thanks, I thought to myself. But the gesture is ostentatious. You are merely pointing the way toward the toilet.
An All-White Heaven
>Many Christian patriots believe the end is near and view Washington politicians as evil conspirators laying the foundation for the soon-to-be revealed Antichrist, whose reign of terror will end only when Jesus Christ returns to earth in glory. Many white supremacists also feel the end is approaching. They, however, see the government as a Jewish pawn that must be destroyed in preparation for an Armageddon-like race war. In this last days scenario, whites emerge victorious from the battle to establish an Aryan republic in America.
A preoccupation with the end-times is shared by Christians and white supremacists because many white supremacists emerged from mainstream Christian denominations. Unfortunately, these non-Christian defectors from the faith have borrowed heavily from their Christian roots, picking those doctrines that are most appealing–especially beliefs associated with the end-times–and blending them with racial prejudice.
The reason many Christians are re-establishing links with non-Christian racists is twofold: (1) rhetoric denouncing the government has recently become widespread within the evangelical community; and (2) some Christian leaders are accepting without hesitation anyone who appears to be a like-minded government-basher. As a result, evangelicals–who profess a faith free of prejudice–are often endorsing and sharing public platforms with neo-Nazis, former Ku Klux Klan leaders and other racists.
-From American Militias
John Moore is a writer. His novel The Limits of Mercy, just published by Thomas Nelson, completes the trilogy begun with The Breaking of Ezra Riley and continued in Leaving the Land.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 18
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-by John c. Green
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Active Faith
By Ralph Reed
Free Press
311 pp.; $25
Second Coming: The New Christian Right in Virginia Politics
By Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox
John Hopkins University Press
285 pp.; $32.95
A Practical View of Christianity
By William Wilberforce
Edited by Kevin C. Belmonte
Hendrickson
288 pp.; $16.95
Who Speaks for God? The New Spiritual Politics Beyond the Religious Right
By Jim Wallis
Delacorte
220 pp.;$17.95
How Right Is the Right? A Balanced and Biblical Approach to Politics
By Randall L. Frame and Alan Tharpe
Zondervan
206 pp.; $10.99, paper
Why the Left Is Not Right: The Religious Left: Who They Are and What They Believe
By Ronald H. Nash
Zondervan
222 pp.; $10.99, paper
What you most fear tells a lot about you. Is it AIDS or Alzheimer’s? A mugging or an IRS audit? For many journalists, the answer would be, None of the above. What haunts them is the specter of Christians in politics: rank after rank of the born-again, marching in lockstep to the orders of Pat Robertson or some other theocratic poohbah.
Indeed, it is a terrifying thought. But as anyone who has served on a church committee can attest, there’s no need to worry. American evangelicals have a gift for disagreement. From theology to manners to culture, they have a long history of disputation among themselves, and this penchant for debate is especially evident when the subject is politics. Several recent books by evangelicals from across the ideological spectrum confirm that no consensus is in sight. For readers who want to reflect on Christian involvement in politics, there is no better place to start than these books before us.
Taken together, the books highlight three important topics crucial to understanding the proper role of Christianity in democracy: practice, priority, and position. Practice is the realm of personal conduct in the political process. Should Christians be held to a higher standard as they participate in the rough and tumble of politics? Priority denotes the political agenda: Are there topics to which Christians should give special attention? Finally, position refers to the substantive content of politics: Are there specifically Christian positions that believers should take on the issues of the day?
Ralph Reed’s new book, Active Faith, addresses political practice most directly–appropriately so, since Reed is the executive director of the Christian Coalition, the most successful political organization of evangelicals. As much as anyone, Reed is responsible for the clout of the Religious Right in national politics. His book combines political history–an insider’s account of the movement–with an attack on the “hollowness of liberalism.” Readers will learn a great deal about the origins and operations of the Christian Coalition, and they may well be surprised by the source of its influence: old-fashioned grassroots mobilization of voters.
Many readers will also be surprised to find that Reed traces the spark of the movement not to Roe v. Wade, but rather to President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to have the irs investigate private schools to see if they were set up to avoid integration. That was what galvanized conservative Christian political involvement.
The biggest surprise, however, is likely to be Reed himself, who defies the common stereotypes of the Religious Right. The press sometimes portrays these activists as ignorant, unsophisticated, unreasonable, intolerant, and uncivil. Reed is none of these things: his arguments are informed, sophisticated, and reasonable, and his approach to politics is civil and tolerant. Furthermore, Reed is acutely aware that these negative stereotypes arose in part from the movement itself. He can be a scalding critic of the intemperance of Christian conservatives, from the Moral Majority to Christian Reconstructionists. He notes, for instance, that the movement’s rhetoric about a “Christian nation” generated the impression that it had theocratic aims. He demands that his associates cease to refer to gays and lesbians as “perverts,” and that they desist from attacking President Clinton on religious grounds. He even admits to his own costly mistakes, such as his use of military metaphors in describing the coalition’s tactics.
Thus, while Reed is an outspoken advocate of traditional morality on hot-button issues such as abortion and gay rights, he insists on the importance of civility:
What does it mean to be a person of faith in the political arena? It is no different from being a Christian in any other vocation. . . . If he is the starting middle linebacker for a professional football team, he tries to stop the other team. Politics is a contact sport. . . . In that combat, I play hard and I try to win. But I never hit below the belt, I play according to the rules of fairness and courtesy, and after the game is over, I always help my opponent up off the turf. My faith is not a function of my politics.
Christians, like other folk, may have strikingly different political goals; a distinctive contribution of their faith, Reed suggests, should be to make the pursuit of these goals–the practice of politics–more civil and tolerant. This point underlies Reed’s brief stab at a “theology of Christian political involvement” near the end of the book, where he argues that Christians should (1) be skeptical of political power, (2) take the responsibilities and rights of citizenship seriously, and (3) practice “grace and humility in speech and deed.” The “active faith” Reed proposes is more an approach to political behavior than an agenda or a set of positions, although he clearly has a point of view on these things as well.
The ideal of a civil politics by religious people will seem old hat to many readers, of course, but it is still not widely accepted among the people Reed seeks to mobilize–or among the liberal media. He is speaking in large measure to political neophytes when he argues that one can be both a Christian and politically active. At the same time, he is reassuring outsiders that they have nothing to fear from the religious aspect of such politics.
Reed’s sweet reasonableness is winsome but not entirely persuasive. To begin with, friends and foes alike are bound to be disappointed by the lack of religious justification for either his priorities or his positions on the issues.
It is not clear, for instance, if the social-issues agenda of the Christian Coalition derives from moral imperatives or if it merely reflects the personal preferences of its members. Why are issues such as poverty and racial reconciliation given lower priority? Does God really have a position on abolishing the Department of Education or the capital gains tax? And when Reed claims that Christian conservatives are motivated by “compassion” and “justice,” what exactly does he mean by these terms?
Such questions direct us to the trenches of activism illumined in Second Coming: The New Christian Right in Virginia Politics, by political scientists Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. (The first coming? That was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which also originated in Virginia.) This book combines analytic social science with vivid case studies, adroitly mixing survey data with personal interviews. Focusing on the 1993 state-level and 1994 federal elections, with a particular emphasis on the senatorial campaign of Oliver North, Rozell and Wilcox cogently assess the strengths and weaknesses of the movement.
If Second Coming provides a contemporary context for Reed’s manifesto–how does “active faith” work in practice?–a recently reissued classic offers a valuable historical perspective. William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of Christianity, edited by theologian Kevin Belmonte and introduced by Charles Colson, was one of the earliest calls for evangelical involvement in public affairs, and its arguments have lost none of their power. Wilberforce is best known for his struggle to outlaw slavery in Great Britain–a campaign that he led for several decades from his seat in Parliament. In his time, as it is today, the notion of bringing religious values into politics was anathema to many people; but Wilberforce persisted, helping to inaugurate a period of sweeping social reforms.
For a vivid contrast to Reed’s politics, see Jim Wallis’s new book, Who Speaks for God? Where Reed emphasizes political practice, Wallis emphasizes priorities. A community activist and writer who helped found the Sojourners Community in 1971 and Sojourners magazine shortly thereafter, Wallis is one of a number of evangelical leaders who issued the “Cry for Renewal,” a statement calling for a new political vision beyond the standard ideological distinctions in American politics. That was followed by the founding of Call for Renewal, a network of local activists dedicated to implementing the vision articulated in the statement. (Documents relevant to both are included at the end of the book).
Who Speaks for God? thus develops further the line of thought that Wallis explored in his previous book, The Soul of Politics (New Press/Orbis, 1994), where he sought a “higher ground” neither Left nor Right, neither liberal nor conservative: a genuinely Christian political vision. Wallis succeeds only partially in realizing that ambitious goal. Although he criticizes religious liberals and secularists for rejecting a role for religion in politics (in Active Faith, Reed quotes with approval an earlier Wallis comment on this very point), Wallis’s fire is largely directed at religious conservatives, specifically Reed and other evangelicals in the Christian Coalition. Indeed, the rhetorical question in the title of the book is a rebuke directed at them for “claiming to speak for God.” Wallis answers his own question thus:
Is there a reliable guide to when we are hearing the voice of God, or just a self-interested or even quite ungodly voice in the language of heaven? I think there is. Who speaks for God? When the voice of God is invoked on behalf of those who have no voice, it is time to listen. But when the name of God is used to benefit the interests of those who are speaking, it is time to be very careful.
In Wallis’s view, Christian conservatives are committed to serving the interests of the rich and powerful to the detriment of the poor and powerless. He claims that another “voice” is needed to speak for evangelicals in politics to counter the Religious Right.
Self-consciously adopting a prophetic style, Wallis attemps to provide this voice. And like the sweeping judgments delivered by prophets of old, his arguments are at once exhilarating and irritating, one moment bringing tears to one’s eyes and the next filling one with outrage and anger. But at every turn, the reader is forced to ask: What does the Lord require in politics?
Wallis is aware that his probing questions will be controversial. His special concern for the poor and oppressed can only disturb the complacency of many deeply committed Christians who have given up struggling with these difficult issues. “We must neither simply destroy welfare” he argues, “nor keep defending the welfare state.” His challenge to the powers that be is equally trenchant: “The biblical tradition says that the poor should have as much clout as those with money and power.” In these ways, Wallis calls the Christian Coalition and other evangelicals to account for their politics.
The power of Wallis’s argument comes from its close identification with the biblical tradition, especially the Old Testament prophets Amos and Hosea and the teaching of Jesus regarding the poor. From these texts, he develops three principles of “spiritual politics” that can serve as tests for the priorities of Christians: compassion, community, and civility. Compassion is the best developed of these principles and underlies the remaining two. His definition is worth quoting: “The word compassion means literally ‘to suffer with.’. . . True compassion has less to do with sympathy than it does with empathy. . . . [C]ompassion means to recognize the kindred spirit we share together.” Community is the real-world expression of this empathetic connection, which eventually includes everybody: “The moral and political foundation for community is that, fundamentally, we need each other. ” Civility is putting community into action: ” ‘Civility’ is really about two things: the quality and integrity of our public discourse, and the level and depth of citizen participation in political process.”
So Wallis’s argument, in contrast to Reed’s, is fundamentally about the purposes of politics and less about its specific procedures or policies, although he has a point of view on these matters as well. Wallis and Reed both emphasize the importance of civility, but they are not really talking about the same thing.
In Wallis’s view, a Christian politics begins and ends with God’s demand for justice. This uncompromising insistence that Christians focus on “what really matters” is almost the opposite of Reed’s stress on Christian practices in politics.
There are, however, very real limitations to a prophetic style in politics. By its nature, rebuke is abrasive, and it is very difficult for prophets to be reconcilers. Wallis shows little compassion for his conservative opponents and is often uncivil toward them, undermining his stated goal of building a “moral center” from a “new dialogue embracing all sectors of the religious community.” Prophetic politics also falls short on practical details. Once one gets beyond the question of priorities, Wallis’s policy proposals tend to be rather modest. In fact, a list of these ideas reads remarkably like those suggested by Reed.
Similarly, prophetic politics can be ineffective. The topics Wallis cares so deeply about must ultimately be addressed by mainstream political institutions, the very “partisan politics” he decries at every turn. His discourse contributes very little to this difficult task. Finally, any set of priorities can be questioned: Wallis gives much less attention to issues such as abortion, which may have as much warrant for Christian concern as poverty.
Where should Christians stand on the issues of the day? Reed and Wallis clearly have policy preferences, but their views hardly exhaust the scope of debate over how Christian values should be applied to issues. Just in time for the political season, Zondervan has published two books that together provide a good outline for considering this topic.
The first of these, How Right Is the Right?, by journalist Randall Frame and Alan Tharpe, dean of Eastern College, surveys the issues from a moderate to left-of-center point of view. Frame and Tharpe begin with a broad look at the political situation of American evangelicals today, including a review of the Christian Coalition, the unique mission of Christian churches, and what they call the “pathology of ideology.” The second half of the book is a topical review of the key issues before the nation, ranging from welfare to abortion.
Frame and Tharpe fill in many of the arguments advanced by both Reed and Wallis. First, their “ten commandments for moderate political behavior” amount to a fuller exposition of Reed’s Christian practice, amended to include Wallis’s prophetic priorities. Second, in their concluding section, “a political agenda for evangelical moderates,” the authors give some substance to the new vision of the Call for Renewal, spiced with an emphasis on Christian involvement in mainstream politics.
The second of these books, Why the Left Is Not Right, by Ronald Nash, a theologian at the Reformed Theological Seminary, looks at many of the same issues from the right side of the political spectrum. This book has a very different structure, however, focusing on describing the Religious Left (where Nash locates Wallis and others associated with the Call for Renewal). Nash makes a number of solid criticisms of the issue-positions of these writers, particularly the influence of the secular Left on some of their thinking. Unfortunately, the book is seriously marred by mean-spirited attacks and allegations that are poorly substantiated and in some cases demonstrably untrue (such as the claim that Wallis was a strong supporter of the Soviet Union).
These lapses undermine an otherwise useful exposition of conservative views on the issues of the day. Even if one grants the prophetic priorities of Wallis, conservatives have a lot to offer in the search for solutions to poverty, racism, and crime. Conservatism need not be an inflexible apology for the powers of the Earth, and it can answer to biblical imperatives as well. The book ends with a plea for Christian practice, entitled “Love Your Enemies (Even If They Are Conservatives).” Given Nash’s strident tone, the attempt at irony backfires.
These books point to the value of vigorous political debate in Christian circles. Frame and Tharpe’s call for a careful weighing of argument and evidence in arriving at issue-positions is in many respects a model for disputation among Christians. If there is in fact a correct Christian point of view on a given issue, it can only be discovered by a balanced debate managed by fair-minded participants. Readers who find that prospect utopian must be reminded that God is not finished with us yet. In this sense, the penchant for disagreement among evangelicals is a gift to the nation.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 20
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-by Daniel Walker Howe
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The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Thought
-By Barry Shain
Princeton University Press
416 pp.; $39.50, hardcover, $17.95, paper
Natural Rights and the New Republicanism
-By Michael Zuckert
Princeton University Press
397 pp.; $39.50
The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism
-By J. David Greenstone
Princeton University Press
352 pp.; $45, hardcover, $13.95, paper
For a long time it seemed indisputable that America was a nation whose constitution and politics were based on the belief that government exists in order to protect the rights of individuals. In recent years, however, a number of historians have undertaken to challenge this conventional wisdom. They have argued that the founders of the American Republic were less interested in the rights of individuals than we had supposed and more concerned with the welfare of the community. Their conclusions, although varying, run something like this. Early Americans were by no means unanimously and simply dedicated to an individualistic philosophy of natural rights. Instead, they were in touch with a multiplicity of political ideas, including some that were strongly communitarian in nature.
As a result of these scholarly labors, we now realize that the set of political theories with which America began was diverse and complicated. Alongside the philosophy of natural rights for which John Locke and Thomas Jefferson are famous, historians of the new school have put a variety of other political philosophies, including the corporate ideal of balanced government inherited from the ancient world, medieval peasant or artisan notions of a “moral economy,” the communal ideals of Protestant sectarians, Renaissance humanist ideals of patriotic virtue, and the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. At the same time, however, other historians have been stoutly defending the primary importance of Lockean liberalism in defining the American political tradition.
But why should we care about these issues? Why have so many intelligent people researched them with such diligence, pondered them so deeply, and now argue about them with such vehemence? Actually, what is at stake here is no merely arcane or antiquarian matter, but the intellectual legitimacy of present-day American institutions and life. To become aware of history is to be made aware of alternatives to the present. To learn about other political philosophies is to realize that the one under which we live is not the only possible one.
This realization is all the more vivid if it can be shown that alternative philosophies are not alien, but were actually believed, followed, and implemented in America. Those who would like to see the existing American system of private property and individual rights replaced with a different system, something more redistributive, perhaps more socialistic, and more humane (in the eyes of its advocates), feel they have a stake in drawing attention to alternative value systems that once commanded significant support in this country. History can be used as a political weapon and a moral example.
Barry Shain, in his new book The Myth of American Individualism, makes no bones about his political purposes. He writes, he explains, to address contemporary needs, to identify a political philosophy both “democratic and communal,” one that “meets the needs of America’s more progressive citizens.”
Himself a political scientist, Shain undertakes to collect and summarize the work of a generation of historians of early America in such a form that their conclusions can be absorbed and used by his fellow students of American politics. Shain plays the role of an academic mediator, a Marco Polo who has visited another scholarly world and returns to tell what he has found and what it implies for his own world.
As a title, The Myth of American Individualism is not only deliberately provocative, it may be misleading. Shain does not claim that American individualism doesn’t really exist; indeed, he worries that there is too much individualism in America today. What he argues is that the individualism of present-day America is supported by the myth that no other political philosophy but that of individual natural rights has ever prevailed in America, and this myth he sets out to shatter.
American society was not originally individualistic, he argues, but only became so after the Revolution. And the shared value system that Shain claims antedated the natural-rights philosophy of Lockean liberalism in America is Protestant Christianity. The form of Christianity that most interests him is Reformed (that is, Calvinist) in theology and sectarian in organization; it was transplanted to the Atlantic coast of North America by various groups, most of them religious dissenters from European state churches. These included English Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and German pietists.
What concerns Shain about these people is not what they themselves valued most highly–their personal spiritual relationship with the risen Christ. What he likes is the fact that their way of life constituted a form of democratic communalism. They bore collective witness to their faith in defiance of temporal authorities and despite frequent hardship. They were people who restrained their emotional and hedonistic impulses–a trait that Shain also approves. They maintained “watch and ward” over each other to preserve their community discipline, guarding each other against the opportunity to sin, and rendering mutual aid and comfort.
Shain has rendered a valuable service in calling attention to the power of Protestant Christianity in early American political culture. In many ways his emphasis on the importance of the small community–the church and the town alike, although he doesn’t distinguish them–is well placed. To understand the power of these local communities and their ministerial spokesmen helps us understand many things: for example, how the American Revolution mobilized so much popular enthusiasm in New England, as well as why it commanded less widespread active support in parts of the country where local community ties were more attenuated. In a more general sense, Shain’s book also helps us appreciate the constructive role of self-discipline in early American personality development and social life.
For all its virtues, however, Shain’s work suffers from his polemical purpose, which narrows his vision. He writes about individualism and communitarianism as if they were mutually exclusive. Actually, he knows better: he points out that the early Americans he studies “did not demand that one discriminate in a zero-sum fashion between the true good of the individual and that of the public.” Yet, even if they did not treat individualism and communitarianism as alternatives, he conceives his thesis as if it were so. If Protestantism was important, he argues, individualism must not have been. Shain virtually equates Protestant Christianity with communalism, because that is the only aspect of it with which he concerns himself. What he recommends to us in the end is not Christianity itself, only its support for community values.
But Christianity, even within the Reformed tradition alone, is too broad a tradition to be restricted to the polemical purposes of Barry Shain. In reality, Reformed Christianity nurtured not only communalism but also individualism in early America.
Reformed Protestants rejected those aspects of the Catholic faith that had justified priestly prerogatives: the sacrament of penance and absolution; the authority of the pope and his cardinals; the right of the church to interpret and supplement Scripture. In getting rid of this overlay of clericalism, Protestantism empowered the common layperson to assume control over his or her destiny in the next world–and, by eventual implication, in this world as well. The name for this personal authority in Protestant theology was “the priesthood of all believers.” One of its important facets was the right of private judgment in the interpretation of Scripture. The radically democratic vision of Reformed Christianity embraced individualistic aspects as well as community responsibility.
Rather than seeing Protestant religion as a collectivist obstacle to American individualism, it would be more accurate to see Protestantism as helping pave the way for it. The principal philosophy of individualism in America has been Lockean liberalism, as Shain acknowledges; he prefers to speak of “individualism” rather than “liberalism” simply because the latter term has come to mean so many different things.
In fact, many colonial and revolutionary Americans had no difficulty at all being both good Protestants and Lockean liberals. Indeed, John Locke himself typified the relationship between the two: He was the son of an officer who served in the parliamentary army during the English Puritan revolution; he allied himself politically with the Protestant religious dissenters and was himself a member of the Low Church (i.e., Protestant) wing of the Church of England.
Michael Zuckert’s Natural Rights and the New Republicanism is an examination of the origins of the philosophy of liberalism, that is, individualism. Zuckert belongs to the group of scholars who feel that the search for collectivism in early American political thought has gone far enough, and now it is time to take another look at the liberalism of Locke. So Zuckert began his work, intending to write a book about the intellectual basis for the founding of the American republic. As he traced the origins of his topic, however, what he ended up writing was a book on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English intellectual history.
Zuckert analyzes the rationale for resistance to royal authority in early-modern England, because that was the tradition in which the American revolutionaries were trained. (One might add that so long as the Americans were engaged in dialogue with British adversaries, they had to employ language that the other side in the debate would understand and had to appeal to principles the other side might acknowledge.) Within the Anglo-American tradition of opposition to the divine right of kings, Zuckert identifies three components: Protestantism, Whiggery, and Lockean liberalism.
The political implications of Protestantism proved critically important in the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s. By subordinating the king’s will to God’s will as revealed in Scripture, Protestantism provided a lever for resisting royal authority. By contrast, Whig arguments were secular, drawn from legal principles embodied in English constitutionalism and the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius; they figured prominently in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Finally, Zuckert turns to his third version of opposition to royal prerogative–the third generation, so to speak–Lockean liberalism. Based on belief in natural rights, this was the principal rationale for the American Revolution in the 1770s.
For each of these philosophical positions, Zuckert provides a sophisticated and lucid analysis related to the context of the times. He even does the same for the defenders of the divine right of kings.
Zuckert calls the Lockean philosophy invoked by the Americans the “new” republicanism in order to distinguish it from earlier forms of “classical” republicanism endorsed by ancient, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century theorists. Like Shain, Zuckert believes that the role of classical republicanism in Anglo-American political thought has been much exaggerated by some recent historians.
One should recognize that Zuckert’s term “new” is relative, however; Locke’s ideas were already more than three-quarters of a century old by the time of the American Revolution. American scholars have a tendency to adopt Locke as one of their own and write about him as if he were an American who lived in the 1770s. Zuckert, to his credit, acknowledges that what was really new in the American Revolution was not the discovery of Locke’s principles of natural rights but the first attempt to implement them on a large scale.
After having carefully distinguished Locke’s philosophy from that of classical republicanism, Zuckert acknowledges that the two got mixed up again in the brilliant polemics of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose devastating critiques of corruption at court were published (with prudent anonymity) as Cato’s Letters in the 1720s. Within a structure of argument that was essentially Lockean, based on natural rights and government by consent, “Cato” also made use of certain favorite debating points of the classical republicans, such as the moral dangers of unrestrained avarice. Cato’s synthesis became the ideological and rhetorical basis for the American Revolution half a century later. In the end, the “new republicanism” of the Americans included both Lockean and classical elements, although the Lockean side was dominant.
As Cato’s synthesis suggests, Barry Shain’s concentration upon the polarities of individual and community creates a false sense of opposition. In the last analysis, what is crucial for maintaining civility in a free society is not the subordination of the individual to the community but that individuality should be expressed in a responsible and disciplined manner.
The old-fashioned distinction between liberty and license was not such a bad way of expressing this truth. Early Americans recognized this; they believed in liberalism but not in hedonism. When Thomas Jefferson declared that “the pursuit of happiness” was a natural right, he didn’t mean a life of self-indulgence but a life of self-fulfillment, through the education and profitable employment of one’s natural faculties.
Early Americans subscribed to a model of the human personality in which two faculties of the mind were acknowledged as rational: conscience (often called the “moral sense”) and prudence (self-interest). All acknowledged that in a properly balanced character, these would be the number one and number two motives, respectively; they would control the actions of the individual, and to them the various ‘passions’ (emotions and appetites) of human nature would be subordinated. Unfortunately, as people realized, the strength of the faculties of the will varied inversely with their rank in the sequence of rightful precedence. Although conscience was rightfully supreme, it was notoriously the weakest of motives; the unreliable passions were the strongest, with prudence somewhere in between. The task of law, aided by religion, custom, and public opinion, was to strengthen the conscience within each individual. The virtuous individual was one who, employing such helps as society provided, developed a balanced character, that is, one in which each faculty was properly developed in relation to the others and in which one’s talents were developed to the fullest. The virtuous person accordingly engaged in both self-discipline and self-improvement–or, as they might alternatively be termed, self-control and self-development. This ideal of character development, prevalent not only in early America but on both sides of the Atlantic, was readily harmonized with both Reformed Christianity and Lockean liberalism, as well as with classical republicanism. It was an admirable ideal that related the well-being of the individual to that of society.
Much of what Shain and Zuckert write about early American thought demonstrates the prevalence of this model of the human faculties and their proper development. “Americans believed that the passions of the self must be constrained within a social framework,” Shain rightly declares. But the constraints on passion that early Americans recognized were not only social but also personal. The supremacy of reason over passion was even more important than the supremacy of society over self. Zuckert points out that in the liberal philosophy of Locke and “Cato,” individuals are treated as “able to give shape and form to their lives, able to suspend their desires and act on reason.” The subordination of the bad self to the good self, of passion and impulse to reason and conscience, was a major theme of political, social, and literary discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was this intrapersonal subordination, not that of the individual to the community, that the writers most often praised and demanded.
This model of the individual faculties and their proper relationship to each other influenced the teachings of Anglo-American political philosophy. Cato’s Letters made the point as well as any number of Americans: “The world is governed by men, and men by their passions.” While the purpose of all government is to restrain the passions of the subjects, the purpose of constitutional government is to restrain the passions of the rulers as well. The greatest exposition of the philosophy of the American Constitution, The Federalist Papers of 1787, explains the functioning of the proposed institutions of government in terms of maintaining the supremacy of reason over passion, of wisdom and virtue over licentiousness.
The recognition of the role of government in relation to the faculties of the individual brings us to the last of the three books under review: David Greenstone’s The Lincoln Persuasion. The late David Greenstone was, at the time of his premature death, writing a major re-evaluation of the American political tradition. This book is the unfinished product that he left behind.
Defying the recent interest in non-Lockean philosophies, Greenstone chose to return to a study of Lockean liberalism as the principal fount of American political thinking and institutions. Zuckert’s book–along with others by such scholars as Thomas Pangle, Joyce Appleby, and J. R. Pole, who have also reaffirmed the enduring importance of Lockean liberal thought in America–may be taken as legitimating Greenstone’s decision. What Greenstone discovered, however, was that liberalism itself branched into two versions in America, which he called “humanist liberalism” and “reform liberalism.”
The two versions of liberal individualism derived from two different attitudes toward the process of self-discipline or self-development. Some American liberals have emphasized the right to self-development and have accordingly stressed the importance of eliminating external constraints that inhibit individuals from pursuing their own preferences. These Greenstone calls “humanist liberals.” Their goal he calls “negative liberty.” But other American liberals have emphasized the duty to self-development, and have accordingly stressed not simply the absence of constraints but the presence of positive help and incentives to individuals to develop their potential. These Greenstone calls “reform liberals,” and their goal he calls “positive liberty.” Among the “reform liberals” have been those who worked to redeem people who needed help in shaping their own characters, such as alcoholics, criminals, and the insane, though “reform liberalism” is also concerned to help perfectly normal people realize their potential.
Greenstone then offers a set of essays treating various American political leaders who personify and illustrate his argument. As humanist liberals he offers Thomas Jefferson, Stephan A. Douglas, and Martin Van Buren; as reform liberals he offers John Quincy Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Lydia Maria Child. (Unfortunately, not all of the illustrative essays actually got written before the author’s death.) The book takes its title from its climactic section, in which Greenstone shows how Abraham Lincoln remade American liberalism by synthesizing the two liberal ideals. As the emancipator of slaves, Lincoln removed the most oppressive of all constraints on individual self-realization, a “humanist liberal” goal. Yet he also went beyond such a merely negative interpretation of liberty; he believed that people had a duty to pursue self-improvement, and he supported such “reform liberal” causes as public education and temperance in the interest of providing positive help in this undertaking. Lincoln’s devotion to promoting American economic development (by transportation projects and a protective tariff) can be seen as his way of fostering a diversified society in which people would have wider scope for the development of their various talents than agriculture alone could offer. Even in its truncated form, Greenstone’s book constitutes a profound exploration of the meaning of the American political tradition and its relation to the formation of individual character.
Despite their differences, there is, perhaps, a message here for us in these three books. Such a lesson might run something like this: By comparison with the earlier America we have been reading about, American society today is dangerously hedonistic and preoccupied with a kind of irresponsible individualism. American society needs to find some way to reassert the moral values on which the country was founded, to proclaim and defend them in family, church, and school, so as to inscribe them in individual personalities. People need to undertake self-discipline, to accept responsibility not only for their actions but also for their character, and to undertake to reshape their character as necessary, subordinating “passion” (what we would call short-term emotional gratification) to conscience and rationality.
Whether we continue to subscribe to a national philosophy of individual natural rights, as Zuckert evidently believes we should, or trade it in for a new and undefined form of communitarianism, as Shain hopes we will do, seems a matter of less immediate urgency. (My own view would favor neither of the above, but that would be another story.) Whatever philosophy we embrace as a people should be one that makes adequate provision for the nurture and development of the moral self, for the full realization of the potential of each individual, as Greenstone reminds us that Abraham Lincoln taught.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, magazine
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 22
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-by Allen C. Guelzo
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Lincoln
By David Herbert Donald
599 pp.; $35
Voices of the Marketplace: American Thought and Culture, 1830-1860
By Anne C. Rose
187 pp.; $27.95, hardcover; $15.95, paper
One of the great difficulties in understanding the history of American ideas is that so few people believe there is any such history. In 1879, in the fourth volume of the fledgling British philosophical quarterly Mind, the premier American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, surveyed the nearly 300 Protestant or state-related colleges and universities in America and concluded that most of them were intellectually worthless. Even in state-chartered, nonsectarian colleges, the atmosphere was “pervaded with the spirit of some distinct religious party, yet strictly evangelical,” and the study of philosophy in particular was “determined by the convictions of constituencies and trustees, while professors are to a great extent without independence or initiative in matters of speculative thought.”
Hall’s swingeing indictment of American collegiate philosophy was promptly seconded in articles in the 1880s by William James and John Dewey, and from there canonized by American cultural historians from Merle Curti to Robert Wiebe as a sort of received wisdom. Pick them up at almost any page, and you will find that before 1879, and especially before the Civil War, the American mind was an unforested landscape, preoccupied with politics and business rather than ideas.
But Hall’s article distorted some fundamental aspects of “the American mind.” As Daniel Walker Howe and and the whole tribe of “republican theorists” from J. G. A. Pocock to James Kloppenberg have demonstrated, Americans before the Civil War were militantly attached, not just to politics, but to explicit brands of republican political ideology; and they already possessed a homegrown brand of American phenomenology in the extraordinary outgrowths of the New Divinity (the intellectual heirs of Jonathan Edwards) and transplants of formal theological confessionalism. The American intellectual landscape was in fact thick with trees, but they were of a nature that Hall (and with him the first generation of American pragmatists, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright) preferred not to recognize as trees. Pragmatism feared the social divisiveness of political ideology, and therefore wanted to believe that American political ideologies were simply not ideas at all, but only agendas; and they personally resented the intrusive dominance of Protestant denominations and Protestant theology over those 300-odd American colleges, and so chose to read the intellectual life of those institutions as no life at all.
In fact, James, Peirce, Wright, and Hall spent large portions of their careers attempting to leverage off its pedestal a particular form of American philosophy, a form concerned principally with questions of epistemology and how the mind knows things, and known generically as “Scottish” or “common sense” realism. Pragmatism was convinced that epistemology was a null set, and that what mattered was finding out the best ways for the mind, or the person, to act. This is a perfectly valid ground for criticizing epistemology-based concerns; but Hall was not interested even in conceding that there was something worthwhile to criticize. And this worked in the 1880s and thereafter, first, because Hall’s demotion of American intellectual life gelled neatly with a long pattern of self-indictment of American letters from Emerson to Mencken, and second, because Hall launched his strike at just the moment when American psychology was making its first effort to preempt philosophy as the authoritative interpreter of what a mind is.
The result has been that the conventional genealogy of American thought (if it extends further back than William James) usually begins with Benjamin Franklin, whose Autobiography is cheerfully read as a sort of proto-pragmatist manifesto, then continues through Emerson and Thoreau, stops off briefly with a few sociologists and conservationists, and finally arrives at James and Dewey. And even if the weight of modern scholarship on Jonathan Edwards forces some recognition of the great revivalist, it is usually only for his revivalism, or (more recently) as a prophet of Peirce’s semiotics.
Never mind that Franklin’s Autobiography is a highly unreliable text that wanders over such occultic ground as soul-transference; never mind that Emerson never wrote anything of a sustained philosophical nature longer than 37 pages; and never mind that “Scottish realists” like Francis Wayland at Brown University–or, for that matter, Francis Bowen at Harvard, or Mark Hopkins at Williams, or Charles Hodge at Princeton Seminary, or even Charles Finney at Oberlin–were deeply engaged in epistemological problems while Thoreau mucked gloomily around Walden Pond. Such a genealogy satisfies the predominant (and now renascent) spirit of pragmatism in modern American philosophy and rinses the development of American thought clean of any association with epistemology and its dangerous kin, theology. Even modern evangelical historians now rush to condemn their evangelical forebears’ preoccupation with “Scottish realism.” We have all joined the great pragmatic booboisie.
It would be hard to think of a more obvious American of the nineteenth century than Abraham Lincoln. People recognized this in his own day and have been recognizing it in a relentless hail of biography ever since. Not for a long time, however, has a Lincoln biography been so anxiously awaited as David Donald’s Lincoln. The octogenarian Donald was the protégé of another famous Lincoln biographer, James G. Randall (so much so that the young Donald became a sort of honorary member of the Randall family), and he has toiled most of his life in the Lincoln vineyard. His first book, Lincoln’s Herndon: A Biography (1948), revealed Donald’s vivid literary gifts as well as a perky inclination to look at the subject of Abraham Lincoln from peculiar and revealing angles. The book not only chose to go at Lincoln through his raspy law partner and biographer, William Henry Herndon, but even the title became a puckish historical inversion: Herndon’s sensational tell-all biography of Lincoln was billed on its title page as Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, and Donald had only to reverse the first two terms to get a head-turning title for his own book.
In a subsequent academic career that stretched from Columbia to Harvard, Donald collaborated in revising and updating Randall’s flagship textbook, The Civil War and Reconstruction, edited the diary of Civil War Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, produced a two-volume biography of Civil War senator Charles Sumner, and published a collection of Lincoln essays, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (2d ed., 1956), which are still some of the finest things written on Lincoln in this century.
Given the fact that Benjamin Thomas’s classic Abraham Lincoln is now almost a half-century old and far behind advances in Lincoln research, and recognizing that the reputation of Stephen Oates’s With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1977) has plummeted like a shot bird after charges of plagiarism were levied at it in 1991, there was every reason to expect that a Donald “Lincoln” would become the finest single-volume Lincoln biography of this century, too.
And it hasn’t. Despite the expectations, Donald’s 599-page Lincoln has a curiously bloodless, plodding quality to it. Although Donald had access to what Thomas did not (such as the authoritative nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler) and although he also had before him what Oates did not (Cullom Davis’s massive Lincoln Legal Papers project, still under way in Illinois), Donald’s Lincoln becomes a quagmire of facticity. He offers, at the very beginning, no explanation for why another Lincoln biography has now become necessary; neither is there any conclusion at the close to sum up the significance of Lincoln’s life. Donald’s Lincoln literally stops dead when Lincoln’s heart stops beating on April 15, 1865. Above all, he deliberately disengages Lincoln as much as possible from the onrushing narrative of American political events, a peculiar decision since Lincoln committed so much of his life to the combat of political affairs. Donald would like to explain this strategy by insisting that he does not want to write “a general history” of Lincoln’s times and wants to stick close to Lincoln himself. A fair enough request for a biography–except, that is, for a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Oddly enough, Donald avoids attaching his narrative of Lincoln’s life to Lincoln’s context, only to wind up attaching that narrative to nearly every modern context of Lincoln interpretation. Every turn in the book contains a nod toward some Lincoln interpretive constituency, and after a while, Donald becomes so careful in accommodating everyone else’s Lincoln that his own Lincoln ends up resembling an assembly of not-always harmonious interpretations. We get no sense of the Lincoln whose easily riled temper forced him into a lifelong school of the most rigid self-control, no sense of a marriage that nearly every close observer agreed was a “domestic hell,” and very nearly no hint at all of Lincoln’s secularized determination not only to do right, but to be seen and understood as doing right. We do not even get much of a glimpse of Lincoln’s physical appearance, despite the fact that his outsize height allowed him to dominate any room he entered, and the fact that his platform performances as a speaker were often mesmerizing.
If there is one theme that Donald does use in an attempt to give unity to his Lincoln, it is Lincoln’s fatalism (what Lincoln called in 1846 his “Doctrine of Necessity,” in which all events were ineluctably the effects of causes and in which there could be no free will). Donald believes that this was Lincoln’s core value, and that it explains Lincoln’s most fundamental personality trait–“passivity.” That the President who freed 4 million slaves and preserved the unity and liberty of the republic in the midst of the Civil War should be found passive is the one thing in this book most likely to surprise its readers.
But the curious thing is that Donald is not wrong: Lincoln grew up in a Hard-Shell Baptist family and never lost a sense of the most uncompromising version of divine predestination and human helplessness. The problem with this fascinating insight is that Donald has absolutely no idea what to do with it. And no wonder: Americans in the nineteenth century, as G. Stanley Hall would so elegantly put it, were not supposed to be much encumbered with “independence or initiative in matters of speculative thought.”
Those who knew Lincoln personally often remarked on Lincoln’s intellectual hobbies, especially philology (Lincoln once prepared a lecture for the entertainment circuit on the origin of language), while those who were his opponents, from Cartwright to Stephen A. Douglas, also knew–or learned the hard way–that Lincoln was a Whig-Republican ideologue of the most unrelenting stripe, who subjected all practical political considerations to a series of Whig-Republican litmus tests. But because so much of the history of American ideas has been written from the pragmatist presumption that American ideas before the 1870s were a quaint irrelevancy, and everything after the 1870s only a variation on pragmatic progressivism, it never seems to occur to Lincoln biographers–much less to David Donald–that Lincoln was anything other than a politically savvy Jacksonian who led his country to one triumphant compromise after another (as if the Thirteenth Amendment enshrines a compromise).
Despite a “defective” (his own word) education, Lincoln had an active and restless mind that caught the track of numerous ideas from the common currency of Springfield’s lyceums, libraries, and newspapers. There was, in fact, less cultural distance between Springfield and Boston in 1850 than there is now, and Donald misses completely the echoes in Lincoln’s “fatalism,” not only of Calvinist predestination, but also Enlightenment mechanism of the Tom Paine variety and the psychological motive-theory of Benthamite utilitarianism. Donald is hardly less blind to Lincoln as a political ideologist: Donald dismisses political Whiggism in two pages, declares the Whig ideology dead by 1848, and as a result has no explanation for why Lincoln’s administration accomplished the most far-reaching revolution in American domestic politics since Thomas Jefferson by enacting, piece by piece, the agenda of Henry Clay’s “American System.” Lincoln’s “fatalism,” as far as Donald seems able to present it, is just a mood; his politics are only people-management. Francis Wayland, whose Elements of Political Economy (1837) was Lincoln’s political Bible, gets mentioned exactly twice, in passing, in Donald’s Lincoln.
Lincoln was a politician, not a philosopher, so perhaps there is a measure of excuse in Donald’s case for neglecting so utterly the mind of Abraham Lincoln in the life of Abraham Lincoln. There is less excuse for such neglect in Anne C. Rose’s Voices of the Marketplace: American Thought and Culture, 1830-1860, where the main course is clearly “culture” rather than “thought.” Her previous book, Victorian America and the Civil War (1992), is a study of cultural transformation, with culture meaning the “prerational” sets of “rituals, customs, and crafted material objects” rather than “the deliberate creation of intellectuals,” and transformation meaning “the context of struggles over social power between competing interests such as classes, races, or sexes.” As such, her interpretation of Victorian religion was an essay on attitudes rather than ideas, and in this new volume, that basic contention does not change much.
For Rose, American culture in the three decades before the Civil War was composed of three fundamental paradigms–democracy, Christianity, and capitalism–all of which underwent transformations characterized by increasing professionalization, a greater homogeneity of national culture, and an increasingly vast range of choices. In the case of American Christianity, this translated into an abandonment of revivalism in favor of religious gradualism (as typified by Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture ), a vast outpouring of new and sometimes bizarre religious and reform movements, and even a peculiar confessional or high-church conservatism (in the form of John Williamson Nevin, Orestes Brownson, and George Templeton Strong).
This “transformation” does not, unfortunately, seem to have anything to do with what people thought about as Christians, and the general supposition of Rose’s approach is that no one in America thought, exactly, about anything. It is not, in fact, until Rose begins to discuss “the languages of capitalism” that formal structures of ideas–in the form of Protestant theology and the “Scottish realists”–finally make an explicit appearance, and then it is only to claim that American “realism” induced a preoccupation with practice rather than thought, which coincided happily with the market revolution. For Rose, it is a “real question . . . whether Americans had patience for religious speculation at all. The theological minimalism of the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century did not reverse this trend, and rational thinking became more closely identified with the solution of practical tasks.”
This nerveless blotting out of an entire intellectual generation has to be more than just a simple failure of historical imagination on Rose’s part, if only because it is immediately followed by an entire chapter on Emerson and Thoreau (and Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman and the “American Renaissance”). But then again, perhaps it helps to recall that Rose’s first book was an interpretation of Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 (1981); even Walden Pond becomes pragmatized. What Rose has done in Voices of the Marketplace is to recapitulate cheerfully all the conveniences of the secular genealogy on a smaller scale, right down to the implied suggestion in the title that the only voices in American thought before the Civil War were commodified ones. Perhaps the one single development in nineteenth-century American intellectual life Rose wholeheartedly seems to approve is the appointment as president of Harvard in 1869 of Charles William Eliot–who, of course, hired William James.
Several years after Hall’s 1879 Mind article, Josiah Royce wrote an article of his own on “The Thoughtful Public in America,” in which he insisted, contrary to Hall, that “When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists.” The real problem of Americans was their unaccountable willingness to follow the pied piper of any “seemingly new and large-minded doctrine,” and such a piper had only “to announce repeatedly to the public the high valuation that he sets upon his own ideas concerning noble topics in order to win a respectful hearing from any.” Americans were, in Royce’s estimate, a nation of idealist inebriates, suckled on creeds that induced them to think too much.
Significantly, Royce never published the article. It was the responsibility of pragmatism–and Royce considered himself a pragmatist–with the weight of Darwin on its brow, to sober Americans up and bring them to a genuine appreciation of evolutionary unhappiness. In so doing, however, it has been necessary to cheapen the vitality of the antebellum American intellectual tradition, and to cheapen antebellum American thinkers in the bargain. Whatever else one wishes to make of “Scottish realism,” it decisively linked American collegiate philosophy with a substantial international repudiation of the naked, mechanistic phenomenalism of Hume, d’Holbach, and La Mettrie, even while the most radical exponents of the Edwardsean New Divinity were attempting to domesticate and convert it. It is easy to miss, when concentrating too much on the personalities and institutions of American collegiate life before the Civil War, how much the “Scottish realist” reply to Hume was cut from the same philosophical cloth as Kant: it was awakened from the same Berkelean slumbers as Kant, and it placed its bets for certainty on the same fundamental appeal to intuitive perception as Kant. It did not have much sympathy for the looser forms of Kantianism mediated to American Romantics by James Marsh’s famous edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, or to the Hegelianism on offer from European transplants like Frederick Augustus Rauch and Phillip Schaff.
Far from American thought being as parochial as Hall wanted to paint it, it was the philosophical transplants, the Edwardseans, and the “common sense” realists who actually preserved American intellectual life from parochialism after the Revolution and the Jeffersonian repudiation of Europe. Unhappily, if there is any glimmering in Rose of such a connection, it is not very apparent. And rather than “common sense” realism functioning as the toady of evangelical obscurantism, “common sense” realism gave Protestant evangelicalism a platform from which to speak ethically to a bourgeois culture in danger of losing all hold on morality, rather than withdrawing, as the pietist Awakenings often did, into come-outerism.
Abraham Lincoln did not need to be an evangelical himself in order to participate in that consensus; that his biographers have failed to see that as his context, or see that he had an intellectual context at all, is an interesting measure of how much we have surrendered in understanding the American mind.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 25
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The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth
-By William R. Casto
University of South Carolina Press
267 pp.; $49.95
The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt
-By William E. Leuchtenberg
Oxford University Press
350 pp.; $30, hardcover; $15.95, paper
Benchmarks: Great Constitutional Controversies in the Supreme Court
-Edited by Terry Eastland
Eerdmans
181 pp.; $18
The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation
-By H. Jefferson Powell
Duke University Press
296 pp.; $39
We are under the Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” So spoke Charles Evans Hughes, then governor of New York and soon to be a U.S. Supreme Court justice himself, in a 1908 address. For most students of our Court and Constitution, Hughes’s pithy statement sums up the central problem of the Court’s role in American government. The foundational structures and principles set forth in the Constitution limit the government even as they empower it. But who is to decide whether a particular government action transgresses the Constitution’s limits?
Leaving that responsibility to the legislature or executive–the very agent, typically, whose action is in question–is like leaving the fox in charge of the chicken coop. For these and other reasons, the American political tradition from the outset has authorized the courts, especially the Supreme Court, to engage in “judicial review” of laws and invalidate those inconsistent with the Constitution.
The justices’ insulation, through life tenure, from direct political pressure offers the hope that they will enunciate true constitutional principles regardless of immediate popular reaction. (It was the Court, and not Southern legislatures or the U.S. Congress, that finally declared state-enforced segregation inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of equality.) But the same insulation also creates the risk that the justices will simply enact their own policy preferences, leaving the citizenry no easy means of correction. (Amending the Constitution is very difficult, and consider how opponents of abortion rights have failed to get them reversed even after several Court appointments by “pro-life” presidents.)
The risk of judicial subjectivity is increased because many key constitutional phrases (“due process of law,” “freedom of speech,” “cruel and unusual punishment”) are open-ended, unclear in their application to current problems. Is the Constitution then simply “what the judges say it is”?
These issues have become particularly pressing in American legal culture. But for Christians, there will always be another, more fundamental question: How should one think theologically about the role of the Court and respond theologically to its actions? A quartet of recent studies on the Court and the Constitution (historical, jurisprudential, and theological) offer an occasion to touch on these questions.
Judicial Review, Natural Law, And The Early Court
The institution of judicial review as a regular feature of government was an American innovation. In the eighteenth century, as now, the predominant practice of English government was one of legislative supremacy: the common law of contracts, property, and torts was overseen by judges, but when Parliament legislated, it did so for the most part, in Sir William Blackstone’s words, “absolutely and without controul.”
In contrast, the American revolutionaries, smarting under Parliament’s perceived excesses, appropriated a tradition of the English opposition that held that even legislative acts would be voided if contrary to natural law, or “common right and reason.” The Americans, however, took the distinctive step of translating such fundamental principles into a written constitution, which the people could approve in a specific act. Thus the primary justification offered for judicial review under the new federal Constitution was not natural law, but popular sovereignty. As Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers and John Marshall ruled in the landmark Marbury v. Madison (1803), judges could disregard a law enacted by the people’s representatives if, but only if, it conflicted with the people’s own higher declaration of law in the Constitution.
In fact, however, the relationships among judicial review, natural law, and common law were quite complex, as William Casto emphasizes in a fine account of the 1789-1801 Court, The Supreme Court in the Early Republic. Although this period is often overshadowed by the subsequent Marshall Court, Casto searches it carefully and finds themes crucial to understanding judicial review today.
A 1798 case, Calder v. Bull, kicked off judicial debate over the role of moral philosophy or natural law in constitutional interpretation. In an otherwise garden-variety opinion interpreting the express constitutional prohibition on “ex post facto” (or retroactive) laws, Justice Samuel Chase provoked dispute by claiming that even if a state’s “authority should not be expressly restrained by the constitution,” the state would still be forbidden to violate “general principles of law and reason”–for example, by passing “a law that takes property from A and gives it to B.” In rejoinder, Justice James Iredell denied that judges could invalidate a law “merely because it is, in their judgment, contrary to the principles of natural justice.” “The ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard,” Iredell said, while the very purpose of a written constitution was to put “marked and settled boundaries” on legislative power.
Iredell’s opinion was an ancestor of theories of constitutional interpretation that limit judges to considering the text and original meaning of a provision. Did Chase’s opinion, on the other hand, assert (as Iredell and later critics charged) that the justices are virtual Platonic guardians, free to ignore the text and history and invalidate legislation on the basis of morality and natural law? No, says Casto; relying on Chase’s own writings strongly affirming popular sovereignty, he argues that Chase meant only that “natural-law principles might be consulted in seeking the meaning of the Constitutions that the people had approved.”
Simply demanding a textual “peg” on which to hang natural-law reasoning, however, does not really reduce the risk of judicial subjectivity, since many constitutional phrases are so broad as to bear a variety of (conflicting) moral theories. (At various times in our history, for example, the “due process of law” clauses have been read to protect the rights to own slaves, to run a business free from regulation, and to have an abortion.) But as Casto points out, eighteenth-century judges internalized a further constraint on their decision-making: legal reasoning was bound up in the common-law tradition, which changed very slowly and was resistant to broad or explicit moral theories. As long as there was a coherent professional community of (mostly elite) lawyers, the judges in practice would be guided by its interpretive norms.
The first moral issue in America to rend that community (and the whole nation) was slavery. The Supreme Court’s disastrous pro-slavery decision in the Dred Scott case (1857)–which deprived millions of African Americans of full humanity, hastened the onset of the Civil War and destroyed the Court’s standing in the North for years–dramatizes the dangers of the justices venturing far into moral theory without either express textual support or a broad social consensus. The framers had deflected the problem of slavery by assuming the institution’s existence but refraining from explicitly giving it full or permanent protection. The Court thus turned to the open-ended concept of “due process,” holding that slaves were “property” that the government could not deprive a slaveholder of when he moved into a territory.
Liberty Of Contract: The Laissez-faire Court
The second time that the Court used the “due process” concept to enact a controversial moral theory likewise precipitated a crisis. As nineteenth-century industrialization prompted increased government regulation, the Court responded with a campaign to protect the laissez-faire economy on two constitutional fronts.
Federal laws regulating wages, hours, and working conditions fell because, the Court said, Congress’s power to regulate interstate “commerce” did not extend to regulating “manufacturing.” But the Court invalidated even state legislation, most notably a maximum-hours law for bakers in Lochner v. New York (1905), on the ground that both workers and employers had a fundamental “liberty to contract” with each other on whatever terms they pleased, and state interference with these bargains was a denial of “due process.”
Matters came to a head in 1936 in a constitutional showdown elegantly recounted by the distinguished New Deal historian William Leuchtenberg in The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. Several sweeping New Deal laws, enacted in response to the Great Depression, were killed off by the laissez-faire Court; an angry President Roosevelt proposed to “pack” the Court by appointing a new justice for each one over age 70; but before his plan came to a vote in Congress, two “swing” justices suddenly changed course and began upholding laws virtually identical to the ones they had voided just a year earlier (wags famously called it “the switch in time that saved nine”). After this 1937 “revolution,” the Court turned away from economic review and toward different constitutional values, such as racial equality and freedoms of speech and religion.
Leuchtenberg rightly treats the battles over federal and state regulation as part of one political war. But a closer legal analysis might have emphasized that the Court stood on more solid constitutional ground in limiting Congress than the states.
The decisions invalidating state laws elevated an extremely controversial theory of worker/employer bargaining equality–“indefensible” and a “fantasy,” the commentators called it–to the status of a “fundamental” premise under a provision (“due process of law”) that does not speak directly to economics, and possibly not to the substance of legislation at all. By contrast, as John Marshall had argued more than a century earlier, the text’s enumeration of congressional power over interstate commerce clearly “presupposes something not enumerated,” a realm of purely local matters.
Although the “purely local” realm was bound to shrink considerably as the economy developed and became more interconnected, the post-1937 Court, by refusing to place even the most lenient restrictions on federal economic regulation, probably shirked its duty to enforce the constitutional scheme. (The 1994 decision invalidating the federal prohibition on carrying guns in schools may signal that the current justices are interested in setting such limits once again.)
The foregoing analysis, of course, presupposes some standards for appropriate constitutional decision-making: a preference for relying on relatively explicit textual provisions (such as the interstate commerce clause) over the most open-ended, malleable ones (such as “due process”); a close look at the problems that prompted the enactment of a provision, to help understand its meaning; and an effort to read a particular provision in the light of the role it plays in the overall structure of the Constitution (for example, the scheme of enumerated powers as the means for empowering but also limiting the central government). If there is no professional consensus in favor of this (or some other) set of interpretive criteria, then constitutional law will fall into chaos; and that is what has happened.
The Modern Court Besieged
After the New Deal, a considerable consensus developed around the Court’s new role: protecting the rights of politically powerless minorities (racial, religious, and political) and leaving issues of economic regulation to the political process.
The Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren tested that consensus by aggressive decisions–on racial segregation, criminal procedure, school prayer, and other issues–that overturned long-standing practices. But what most fractured the constitutional culture was Roe v. Wade, which repeated Dred Scott’s mistake of finding a highly controversial moral theory–this time that of radical individual autonomy–in the “due process” provision, on a deeply divisive issue and with little effort to justify the decision by the traditional standards of constitutional reasoning.
Indeed, whatever professional consensus once existed on methods of constitutional interpretation has broken down. For example, each of the contributors to the provocative new collection of essays entitled Benchmarks: Great Constitutional Controversies in the Supreme Court dislikes some important part of the Court’s work; but they agree on little else. Walter Berns of the American Enterprise Institute excoriates all substantive readings of the due process clause–including both “liberty of contract” and “reproductive privacy”–as violations of the original intent and as simple impositions of the justices’ preferred moral theory. (Berns traces the problem back to 1798 and Justice Chase’s invocation of “general principles of law and reason.”) By contrast, political scientist Hadley Arkes and ACLU president Nadine Strossen both defend a realm of constitutional privacy–except that Arkes supports the laissez-faire “right to contract” and questions abortion rights, while Strossen urges just the opposite.
The point is not just that these commentators disagree on the results; it is that they lack even a common starting point for interpreting the Constitution. Berns begins with original intent, Arkes and Strossen with forms of moral philosophy but very different ones. They simply talk past one another.
The most optimistic contribution in Benchmarks comes from Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, who urges that judges and scholars rediscover the virtues of traditional legal craftsmanship in interpreting the Constitution: close attention to text, history, and the overall constitutional structure. Whether that tradition can be rejuvenated, however, is uncertain.
Theological Reflections On Judicial Review
How might a Christian think about and respond to the institution of judicial review in our system of government? Obviously, neither Scripture nor church tradition says anything directly about that question. But the rich resources of Christian social ethics can be brought to bear on the work of the Court; and a good example is Jefferson Powell’s fascinating book, The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism.
Powell, who teaches both law and divinity at Duke, rightly characterizes the key question: Do Christians have some theological reason to prefer decisions made by bodies directly accountable to the majority, such as legislatures, or decisions by more politically insulated judges? It is not customary for Christians to think about that question (unless they are lawyers, in which case they tend to think about it as lawyers rather than as believers). Too often, Christians react to court decisions based solely on the ultimate result: abortion rights bad, aid to religious schools good, and so forth.
Even if these particular reactions to results are correct, the ad hoc, result-oriented nature of the response is insufficient. As a theological matter, it fails to bring the sovereignty of God to bear on the process by which results are reached. And as a practical matter, it contributes to making the church appear as just another interest group with a very particular agenda.
One’s reflection on the role of the Court should be guided by one’s general approach to Christian social ethics. One obvious potential approach is the Christian natural-law tradition, which affirms that there is a significant category of moral truths that all human beings, including nonbelievers, can know by reason.
Perhaps the Court, insulated from political pressure, can serve as the deliberative body in our government that declares such principles. Natural law could be used more or less aggressively by courts. For example, natural-law arguments for the full humanity of the unborn have been employed not only to criticize Roe v. Wade for preventing states from criminalizing abortion, but also to argue further that states must protect the unborn: that is, that courts should strike down the liberalized abortion laws that exist in many states.
The use of natural law in judicial decisions has the advantage of recognizing the existence of objective moral truths “written on [all human] hearts” (Rom. 2:15). But there are also dangers, both theological and practical, with authorizing judges to seek and apply such principles in constitutional decisions.
As we have already seen, it is questionable whether the framers meant for judges to enforce moral principles beyond those reflected in the constitutional text. Moreover, as Justice Iredell warned long ago, “natural justice” has turned out to mean very different things to different judges: witness the long and tortured history of the use of “due process of law” to protect varying rights (slave ownership, economic freedom, abortion) that judges have viewed as “fundamental.” This history reflects the theological truth that sin interferes with the ability of humans–including judges–to perceive accurately the demands and domain of natural law.
Powell also questions a “natural law” approach for the Court, but for even broader reasons. He writes from an Anabaptist perspective on social ethics, which has been powerfully reformulated recently by thinkers such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. Like them, Powell emphasizes the importance of maintaining the uniqueness and integrity of the church’s witness, and the threats to that uniqueness and integrity that arise when Christians become involved in the world, especially in the coercion that characterizes all acts of government. Thus, he argues, reliance on the Court to articulate “Christian” principles is a form of the “Constantinian” error that has repeatedly infected the church.
From this stance, Powell attacks the secular myths by which we idolize the Constitution and the Court. The justices do not simply articulate timeless moral principles, he argues; they mostly assume the modern American ideology of individual autonomy. Judicial review does not protect freedom against government in the simple way we often say it does; judges are themselves government officials, and their decisions are coercive acts that prohibit some person or group (majority or minority) from taking some action. And while we might like to believe that judges are sympathetic to the weak and powerless persons who are the fundamental focus of biblical social concern, the judges’ membership in the privileged class ultimately limits such sympathies drastically.
Given these critiques of the Court’s pretensions, Powell rightly sees some virtues in majoritarian decision making. While the Court is a “centralizing and homogenizing agent . . . of social change,” allocating authority to other bodies, from Congress to local school boards, can “increase . . . the variety of decisionmakers available to hear and respond to deviant or weak voices.” Moreover, while the constitutional tradition by nature makes dangerous claims to finality and absolute value, “American electoral politics loudly proclaims its own corrigibility, its openness to revision by the citizens’ exercise of the vote.”
As Powell recognizes, however, judicial review has important advantages over majoritarian decision making as well. Judges’ sympathy for the weak may be limited, but it is often likely to exceed that of legislators, who are beholden both to majorities and to powerful economic interests. Powell thus ends up as more of a “Christian realist” than his Anabaptist rhetoric indicates: like Reinhold Niebuhr (whom he criticizes), he sees the need for the coercive power of the courts to fend off even worse coercion by majoritarian bodies.
All of which returns us to our first question: What sort of approach will enable the courts to check majoritarian power without abusing power themselves in the process? In this regard, remember the original argument of Hamilton and Marshall: courts should act when, but only when, they are enforcing a principle approved by the people who ratified the Constitution. That argument offers both a role for the Court and a constraint on its behavior.
Of course, enforcing the principle originally ratified is by no means a mechanical process. Judgment is required, for example, to determine how a principle applies to greatly changed conditions decades after its enactment. Given that irreducible element of judgment, the crucial qualifications for a Supreme Court justice are ones of attitude and temperament: an appreciation for both the importance of the Court’s role and the limits on judicial ability to remake society through constitutional law, plus an appreciation for the virtues of legal craftsmanship. And such a sense of both the possibilities and limits of judicial decision-making is deeply consonant with Christian assertions about the simultaneous promise and weakness of human nature.
Thomas C. Berg is associate professor of law, Cumberland Law School, Samfor University.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 27
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“For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942
By Brian Masaru Hayashi
Stanford University Press
217 pp.; $35
Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II
By Page Smith
Simon & Schuster
476 pp.; $27.50
Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona
By Richard Nishimoto
Edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
University of Arizona Press
262 pp.; $45, hardcover; $19.95, paper
Breaking the Silence: The Redress Movement in Seattle
By Yasuko I. Takezawa
Cornell University Press
248 pp.; $37.50, hardcover; $14.95, paper Whispered Silences
WHISPERED SILENCES
For another valuable perspective on the internment, see Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II, with text by Gary Y. Okihiro and photographs by Joan Myers (University of Washington Press, 249 pp.; $60, hardcover; $29.95, paper). Myers undertook a personal odyssey, visiting the desolate sites of all ten of the wra camps in which Japanese Americans were held during the war. Her haunting photos of the camps as they are today–and of objects left behind there–evoke the suffering of the internees with stark beauty. Okihiro (a leading scholar in the field of Asian American studies) contributes a superb essay that draws heavily on the memories of those who were in the camps while placing their experience in historical context.
On Sunday evening, December 7, 1941, the college group from Saint James Episcopal Church in Los Angeles (a Caucasian congregation) met as planned with the college group from Saint Mary’s Church (a Japanese congregation). Earlier that day, when news came of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, some members at Saint James wanted to cancel the meeting, but the majority thought otherwise, and the gathering took place: a Vespers service, dinner, and an address by the presiding bishop of the Los Angeles diocese. When the Japanese students from Saint Mary’s returned home, some of them learned that, while they were out, their fathers had been arrested by the FBI.
In the first five days after Pearl Harbor, 1,370 Japanese aliens on the West Coast were arrested, generally because they had ties with Japanese cultural and religious organizations. But they were only a few among the 16,000 suspected subversives who were arrested at the outset of the war, many of them Germans and Italians (and many subsequently released). Church leaders and government officials–including President Franklin Roosevelt–spoke of the need to respect the civil rights of all Americans, including those of Japanese ancestry, and for a short time that sentiment prevailed. By February of 1942, however, only two months after Pearl Harbor, plans were being laid for the removal and incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese from the West Coast, and on February 19, Roosevelt signed the executive order that set those plans in motion.
About the brute fact of these events–the bare outline of internment and, many years later, redress–there can be no disagreement; but everything else is up for grabs, subject to contesting interpretations, beginning at the basic level of terminology. Why did the internment take place? What was its impact on the Japanese American community? And if, in the internment and its aftermath, democracy was on trial, what was the verdict? From sharply different angles, four recently published books provide an opportunity to consider these questions.
Wrong country, wrong state, wrong time
In the 1990 Census, Japanese Americans, with a population of 847,562, ranked third among Asian/Pacific Islander groups in the United States. As the descendants of immigrants from Asia, they–along with other Asian Americans–challenge the notion that the American mosaic is derived exclusively from Europe and Africa. Japanese Americans are distinctive as the only Asian American group that is primarily American born. All the other major groups–Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Asians–are predominantly foreign born. While these other groups have experienced rapid growth through immigration as a result of the landmark Immigration Act of 1965, Japanese immigration has been at low levels. Thus Japanese Americans will soon be surpassed in numbers by groups that, in 1960–when the Japanese constituted by far the largest Asian American population–were tiny by comparison.
It requires a stretch of historical imagination to connect today’s Japanese American community–affluent and educated well above the national average–with the community cruelly displaced during World War II, and even more so with the first generation of Japanese immigrants, the “issei,” who began coming to the United States in the 1890s.
Harry Kitano, a scholar of the Japanese American experience, said of that first generation that they came to the wrong country and the wrong state at the wrong time. Overwhelmingly, the early Japanese immigrants came to California, with some moving north to Oregon and Washington. They came at a time when, after several decades of Chinese immigration, nativist passions were running high, and the negative stereotypes promoted by the anti-Chinese movement were easily transferred to the Japanese.
After a brief period of extensive immigration from Japan, Congress enacted a series of laws intended to curb further immigration, culminating in the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. At the same time, in California and elsewhere, farmers who felt threatened by competition from hard-working issei families, in concert with the ideologues of the anti-Japanese movement, won passage of alien land laws (intended to prevent aliens from owning the land they worked). Finally, in Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), a case that challenged the legality of denying Japanese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens, the Supreme Court closed the door on the issei, ruling that Asians were “non-whites” and, lacking the exception granted to people of African descent, were thus ineligible for naturalization.
Thus, unlike immigrants from Poland or Italy, Germany or Ireland, Norway or Mexico, the issei were excluded by law from full participation in American civic life. Their American-born children, the nisei, however, were U.S. citizens. This difference in status accentuated the cultural difference that always exists between immigrants and their American-born children. It also encouraged the issei to maintain close ties with their homeland.
Japanese Immigrant Nationalism
Brian Masaru Hayashi, in “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren,” explores the sensitive question of Japanese nationalism among Japanese Americans in the period before World War II. (The topic is sensitive because some commentators believe that to acknowledge any significant degree of pro-Japanese sentiment would be to concede that the internment was justified.) In a carefully documented study based on extensive research in Japanese-language sources, Hayashi looks at Japanese American Protestants in Los Angeles and finds that they exhibited nationalistic fervor and identified with Japan in the 1930s. Hayashi’s book thus challenges the received view, that Protestants constituted “the vanguard of cultural assimilation within the Japanese American community.”
Not the least of the virtues of Hayashi’s study is its pioneering look at the early Japanese American Christian community. In 1930 the Japanese population in the continental United States was 138,834, roughly 20,000 of whom were Protestants. Hayashi’s study focuses on three Los Angeles churches representative of that group: the Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Episcopal Church (now Centenary United Methodist Church), the Los Angeles Japanese Union Church (now the Union Church of Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Holiness Church. All three churches, despite differences in emphasis, were strongly evangelical:
The members and pastors of the three churches held complete confidence in the Bible, were preoccupied with the gospel message, and sought to persuade other Japanese Americans to adopt the faith and thereby gain virtue in this earthly life and eternal life in the hereafter. All three churches conducted weekly Bible studies, and all three labored to spread the message of the gospel to others, especially to their fellow Japanese.
Moreover, Hayashi observes, the churches “emphasized certain aspects of evangelical Christianity, of an American sort that had a close relationship with American cultural values in general.”
At first glance, then, Hayashi’s findings regarding Japanese nationalism are surprising, for one might well expect that membership in Christian churches should have hastened acculturation and assimilation into American life. And, indeed, into the 1920s, that appeared to be the direction for many Japanese American Christians. But the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Court’s ruling in the Ozawa case reversed this course. Rebuffed by these actions, many of the issei began to take greater interest and pride in their homeland. At the same time, Japanese officials, led by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, encouraged this development.
Matsuoka has not received the attention that he should from Asian American scholars. As one who had actually lived and studied (at the University of Oregon) in the United States in his youth, he did not look down upon Japanese Americans, as many of his peers did. Rather, he understood their experiences and struggles, and he cultivated closer ties and better relations with the issei and nisei generations of Japanese in America.
Furthermore, Hayashi points out that several aspects of Japanese Protestant Christianity facilitated political and cultural identification with Japan. First, the headquarters for the Methodist and Presbyterian denominations cut back on monetary support for the Japanese ethnic churches. As a result, Japanese Protestant churches found themselves more and more dependent upon the Japanese American community to sustain them financially. When they sought contributions, the churches also found it necessary to be linked with the concerns and sentiments of the immigrant community. And in the 1930s, this translated into pride and support for the military successes of Japan in China.
Second, the Japanese American version of evangelical Protestantism did not require believers to discard traditional Japanese values. The themes of mission, social work, and respect for government strengthened ties with the homeland. When disasters struck Japan, Japanese American Christians responded generously. They endorsed the slogan Doho no tame ni (“For the sake of our Japanese brethren”). Protestant evangelical morality and commitment also resonated well with seishin: the Japanese term comprising the values of such traits as loyalty, purity, filial piety, virtue, and honesty, in contrast to individualism, decadence, and materialism. Protestant beliefs and seishin fused together were compatible with allegiance to Japan. Thus Hayashi’s discovery of immigrant nationalism in the Japanese community complements other studies by Jerrold Takahashi, Yuji Ichioka, and John Stephan.
On reflection, this evidence of Japanese nationalism is not at all surprising. After all, other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, Armenians, Germans, Italians, Koreans, and Chinese, have shown strong identification with their ancestral homelands. Consistent with this theme, among the nisei there was a group known as the kibei, who were sent for a time by their parents to live and study in Japan. During the 1930s, Japanese Americans prepared and sent thousands of imonbukuro, or care packages, to Japanese soldiers fighting in Manchuria and later in China. They donated imonkin, or comfort money, for the families of Japanese soldiers who had been wounded or killed. Japanese vessels visiting ports such as Honolulu or Los Angeles were greeted warmly, and the fujinkai, or women’s associations, arranged hospitality programs for the Japanese naval personnel. Japanese American newspapers, like the Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi in Los Angeles, gave coverage that sided with Japan against China. In its annual poetry contest in 1938, the Rafu Shimpo even published senryu, or satirical poems, that were critical of the Chinese. In all this, the response of Japanese American Protestants might be likened to the fervent patriotism characteristic of American evangelicalism.1
The Decision For Internment
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the loyalty of the Japanese American community understandably became a crucial issue. In the upper echelons of the federal government, there now occurred a struggle between the officials of the War Department and the Justice Department. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his staff felt that circumstances merited the removal of the Japanese on the West Coast. It did not help that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had been harping on the theme that subversion in Hawaii had been responsible for the success of the Japanese military. As he explained, “I think the most effective fifth column of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception of Norway.”
Opposing this position was Francis Biddle, the attorney general of the United States. Biddle was concerned about infringing on the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans and did not feel any evacuation was necessary. Moreover, his associate, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the fbi, did not feel that there was any evidence of subversive activity by the Japanese. But there were others sharing the sentiments of Stimson and Knox who proved to be more influential. These included the West Coast Commander General John L. DeWitt, who was worried about the security of the Pacific Coast and wanted to separate out the disloyal Japanese. They also included Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion and his aide Karl R. Bendetsen of the Aliens Division, who doubted the loyalty of the Japanese.
Actually, a number of federal agencies had already investigated the allegiance of the Japanese. For example, Lt. Cdr. Kenneth D. Ringle of Naval Intelligence, who was fluent in Japanese, had been studying the Japanese American community. He was convinced in 1941 that most of the Japanese were loyal to the United States. Curtis B. Munson, who prepared a report for the White House in November 1941, had also been examining the Japanese community. He believed that, on the whole, the Japanese were not a threat. Hoover and the FBI had chased down rumors about Japanese subversion but could find no evidence to substantiate those claims. And Gen. Mark Clark and Adm. Harold Stark, in surveying the situation, believed that there was no need to impose special measures against the Japanese.
But Stimson was determined to pursue the issue with the President. And when Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with the matter, he decided to defer to the War Department. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which eventually opened the door for the Japanese American internment, saying only, “Be as reasonable as you can.”
In Democracy on Trial, the distinguished historian Page Smith (who died shortly after this book was published) suggests that the internment decision was one that nobody wanted to make. Somewhat by a process of trial and error, the United States fell into the situation of ordering the removal of the Japanese. Smith faults Biddle for being too rigid and doctrinaire in his support of civil rights for the Japanese. By refusing to allow mass searches of individual homes and neighborhoods, Biddle forced DeWitt to press for the more drastic measure of total removal to ensure security.
Smith takes this stance because he believes that military considerations dictated the need to evacuate the Japanese. He endorses the idea that, in wartime, “worst-case scenarios” must be taken into account: “It is certainly better policy to overestimate than to underestimate enemy capabilities,” he notes. “Pearl Harbor is a vivid reminder of the principle.”
Taking note of the expressions of nationalistic sentiment in the prewar Japanese community, Smith argues that the military had to be concerned about security for their army and navy installations. He declares that if no one could say that subversive activities would take place, “it was equally the case that no one could guarantee that they wouldn’t.” Smith tries to look at events in 1941 and 1942 “from the ground,” from the perspective of the actors at that time. He finds it difficult to quarrel with the logic of General DeWitt’s opinion that the Pacific Coast was the home to potential enemies.
Smith believes that DeWitt did not have the luxury to err regarding the security of California and the nation. The general’s decision was made according to military, not racial, considerations. He feels that public officials involved in the mass removal and incarceration made their decision after “wise and prudent” deliberations in a “responsible” and “reluctant” way. As Smith puts it, “the evacuation issue was a very small item in a global war that put the so-called free world at the risk of its life.” Smith thus accepts the argument that evacuation was based on military necessity–even if later events proved it was not necessary–and feels that the Japanese American internment was a small price to pay.
In holding to this interpretation, Smith goes against the flow of most who have written about the internment. Whereas most authors have found fault with DeWitt, Smith rehabilitates the general’s reputation. Yet, one wonders if Smith has not tried too hard to view events from the perspective of DeWitt and those who favored the internment. In so doing, he has deferred to history and legitimated what happened. One could argue that the internment was not really necessary. After all, Hawaii–the site of the Japanese attack and actually closer to the Pacific theater of war–did not witness the mass removal of its 160,000 Japanese residents. Moreover, Smith tends to see the Japanese Americans as tragic pawns. While he decries what happened to them, he nonetheless implies that the end justified the means. For Smith, history is filled with tragedy, and the fate of the Japanese Americans was another replaying of that theme. For Hayashi, however, the “mass internment was an injustice, however many Japanese Americans there were who sympathized with Japan.” Hayashi contrasts the treatment of Japanese Americans with that of German Americans and Italian Americans, who were not subjected to mass incarceration.
American Concentration Camps?
In the months following the signing of Executive Order 9066, the Japanese community from the West Coast, two-thirds of them American citizens, were removed from their homes to assembly centers, and then to ten war relocation centers situated in seven different states. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency, had the responsibility of administering the ten camps. The relocation centers were artificial communities hastily erected to house anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 internees. Barbed-wire fences and sentry towers were posted around the camps. Within these sites, the residents tried to eke out as normal a life as was possible under these circumstances. Children attended school, and adults were afforded opportunities for work. Inevitably, the artificial environment took its toll; in the midst of doubt and uncertainty, many inhabitants experienced stress, tension, and conflict.
How should one refer to the WRA camps? That may seem like a trivial question, the sort of thing academics squabble over amid general indifference. But the issue is important, for the argument over how to name the camps reflects a larger argument about the meaning of the internment in American history. One could, of course, adopt the government’s own terminology: “relocation centers” or “relocation camps.” Others, however, feel that these terms are euphemisms that hide the tragedy of what really happened. Men, women, and children, two-thirds of them American citizens, without charges placed against them, and without the right of a trial by jury, were indiscriminately placed into sites of mass incarceration. Their only deficiency was their identity as Japanese persons in America.
Roger Daniels, who has written widely on Japanese Americans, claims that these WRA camps were “concentration camps.” He recognizes that they were different in character from the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust, but he staunchly defends the use of the label. He reasons in the following manner: First, the historical records show that President Roosevelt and other officials made use of the term “concentration camps” in referring to the WRA sites. Second, most dictionaries define “concentration camps” as places where political prisoners, prisoners of war, and others are held captive. Third, the term itself has its origins well before World War II. It dates back to Spanish Gen. Valeriano Weyler’s reconcentration policy in Cuba before the Spanish-American War of 1898. It is also linked with the British term for camps established for civilian prisoners during the Boer War in South Africa from 1899-1902.
Nevertheless, some writers still shy away from using the term “concentration camps” and instead employ the term “internment camps.” Daniels, however, argues that this label should be reserved for the detention camps that were devised for aliens. There were Japanese alien internment camps at sites such as Crystal City, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, that were different in kind from the ten WRA camps. These alien internment camps were administered by the Justice Department rather than the WRA.
Page Smith also enters into this debate about appropriate terminology. He rejects the designation “concentration camps,” which summons up “the image of a fearsome Nazi-like death camp arrangement.” In Smith’s judgment, such associations are dramatically at odds with the actual experience of the Japanese American internees. The WRA camps, he argues, resembled communities such as villages, towns, or small cities. Indeed, he sees them as ” ‘forcing grounds’ of democratic principles,” where, for better or worse, the internees had “learned, willy-nilly, the tactics of democratic politics and in this sense none of them were as they had been before.”
In the scholarly community, the increasing trend is to use the term “concentration camps” for the WRA camps and the label “internment camps” for the alien detention sites. As an example, one could cite the volume Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (1993), edited by Brian Niiya for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. With the exception of Smith, all of the authors reviewed here–Hayashi, Lane Hirabayashi, and Yasuko Takezawa–accept these terminological distinctions. At the same time, the tendency is to accept usage of the phrase “the Japanese American internment” to describe the mass removal and incarceration of the Japanese Americans.
By using, again and again, the term “concentration camps” to refer to the WRA camps, scholars contend that they are getting at the truth behind America’s self-congratulatory national mythology. But it is fair to ask if this term really respects the specific nature of the Japanese American experience during World War II. Is the implicit analogy with Hitler’s death camps helpful, leading to a deeper understanding of the internment, or is it, in fact, misleading?
Popular Resistance In The Camps
Consider the title of the third book under review here: Inside an American Concentration Camp, a collection of several reports by Richard Nishimoto, compiled and edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. This provocative title was supplied by the editor, who has thus framed the pieces in a context not imagined by the author.2 Nishimoto (1904-56) was born in Japan and was a graduate of Stanford University. During the years from 1943 to 1948, he was employed as a researcher for the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Directed by Dorothy Swaine Thomas, JERS was an effort by the University of California to document the life of the Japanese Americans in the wra camps. One publication that resulted and that became a standard reference source was The Spoilage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement (1946) with Thomas and Nishimoto as coauthors.
As a resident of Poston–the largest of the ten WRA camps–who was fluent in Japanese, Nishimoto was seen as a valuable field researcher for JERS. He wrote numerous reports detailing the camp life that he observed and documented the many reactions of the Japanese who were confined in the desert near Parker, Arizona. It was a place so hot during the summers that residents only half-jokingly referred to it as “Poston, Toastin’, and Roastin’.” Staying with the other inhabitants, Nishimoto noted the difficulties of camp administrators in getting cooperation from camp residents in work activities such as firebreaking. He also discussed the refusal on the part of Japanese residents to leave WRA camps near the end of the war.
For Lane Hirabayashi, these reports are documented descriptions of popular resistance on the part of camp residents. Many accounts of the Japanese American internment depict the camp residents as the victims of a wartime decision. Once they were within these communities, they had little recourse but to bide their time. But Hirabayashi believes that the camp residents were more than passive victims. Indeed, he argues, they resisted in many ways. Through the frequent airing of complaints, noncompliance with camp directives, labor slowdowns, strikes, protests, and even occasional riots, the Japanese internees indicated that they were dissatisfied with the conditions in their camp and with their confinement generally.
This resistance even extended to a refusal on the part of many to leave the camps. By 1944, the tide of the war had clearly turned against Japan. The WRA took the position that all of the camps, except for Tule Lake, should be closed down in 1945. But there was popular resistance. Nishimoto noted that representatives from some of the camps opposed this idea at an All-Center Conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February of 1945. At this conference, camp representatives showed an unwillingness to leave unless certain demands were met. They wanted assistance, financial help, and various assurances. While this reluctance to leave might be viewed as bizarre and quixotic behavior, Hirabayashi says it is quite understandable. The internees’ refusal was really an attempt to take control of their lives. They wanted to indicate that they could not simply be dictated to by the WRA without any prior consultation.
Hirabayashi acknowledges that his interpretation of popular resistance is not necessarily a view that Nishimoto himself would have endorsed. Brian Hayashi would probably add that Hirabayashi does not give enough attention to Japanese nationalistic sentiment as a motive for this confrontational behavior. (For example, some residents saw themselves as subjects of Japan and refused to cooperate with camp authorities.) And Page Smith would argue that Hirabayashi has set up a false dichotomy, as if the internees were forced to choose between passive compliance and “popular resistance.” In fact, Smith would contend, the overwhelming majority of the internees chose neither of these alternatives. They were far from being passive, nor did they engage in resistance; rather, they got on with their lives: In time the centers became small cosmoses. They had all the agencies and instrumentalities, as we say, of any community. And some uniquely their own. They had religious services, social organizations, hospitals with doctors, nurses, operating rooms (the residents of one center, dissatisfied with their chief of medicine, petitioned the administration to have him fired), cooperative stores, small business ventures such as barber shops, tobacco stores, internal economies, and . . . largely unsuccessful attempts at modest war-related industries. They had schools, recreational facilities, social programs, transportation and communication systems, construction crews, paid workers, labor boards.
Nevertheless, Hirabayashi does present an interesting perspective. He has suggested a potentially useful method of looking at the camp experience from the level of residents rather than that of officials at the time.
Internment And Japanese American Identity
The imminent defeat of Japan had become obvious by early 1945, and there was no longer any need to maintain the camps. The WRA rejected the recommendations of the representatives made at the All-Center Conference. All ten of the WRA camps were closed by March of 1946. The internees were resettled in their former West Coast homes or in other communities. Although there was some hostility directed at Japanese Americans, its intensity and pervasiveness eventually diminished. Many issei never recovered from the ordeal of the internment and the often substantial material losses they had suffered–the human cost was incalculable–but others, especially among the nisei, were eventually able to join the ranks of the middle class and share in America’s postwar economic growth.
Over time, the consensus view of the Japanese American internment has altered radically. An event that was hardly even acknowledged in American history texts during the first postwar decades is now presented in books and films at many different levels, ranging from middle-school texts and stories for young readers to an enormous scholarly literature and a vast archive of primary sources. (“All in all,” Page Smith writes in a note on sources, “I think it safe to say that no event in history has been so thoroughly recorded.”) Many now see the mass removal and incarceration as a grave injustice to Japanese Americans. In this sense, they might well differ with Smith’s judgment that military necessity justified the evacuation.
With the Civil Rights Act of 1988, the U.S. government officially apologized for the internment of the Japanese and authorized payment of $20,000 to each survivor of the camps. Passed by a large margin in both houses of Congress and signed with great fanfare by President Ronald Reagan, the 1988 legislation provided dramatic evidence of the change in public sentiment.
How did this transformation come about? This is in part the subject of Yasuko I. Takezawa’s Breaking the Silence. In the immediate postwar years, Japanese Americans were preoccupied with rebuilding their lives. But by the early 1970s and 1980s, the community was embarked on a campaign for redress: to secure recognition from the U.S. government that the civil rights of citizens of Japanese ancestry had been violated during wartime. The redress campaign also served as an opportunity to educate the general public about the history and experience of Japanese Americans.
Takezawa, a Japanese scholar who has lived in the United States, locates the roots of the redress campaign in 1972, in Seattle. Conveniently, she was a graduate student at the University of Washington and was in an advantageous position to observe and to record some of the progress of this movement. From her perspective, the nisei were generally reluctant to discuss the internment episode. Perhaps it was the shame or the pain of the memory. In any event, in the years following the war, many nisei sought to blend in and to merge with the larger society. As a result, their children, the sansei, or third generation, seemed to be acculturating rapidly. They appeared to be indifferent to their cultural heritage and demonstrated no interest in the internment experience. Indeed, assimilation and a high rate of marriage outside their own ethnic group raised fears among Japanese Americans (comparable to those expressed by many American Jews) that the very survival of the Japanese American community might be in doubt.
But suddenly, in the 1970s, many sansei expressed a desire to learn more about the wartime internment. Why the abrupt change? Certainly the civil-rights movement and the increasing emphasis on ethnic identity helped to promote a heightened sense of ethnic and political consciousness among Asian Americans. In the quest to discover more about Japanese American identity and history, the sansei learned about the relocation experience of their parents and grandparents.
Japanese American activists in Seattle, many of them of the third generation, helped to mobilize support for redress. Many leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), such as Bill Hosokawa and Mike Masaoka, were initially reluctant to join the cause. They feared a backlash. Nevertheless, through the use of the media, videotapes, plays, and the reenactment of Day of Remembrance commemorations to focus attention on the internment, the Seattle activists were able to win a wider base of national support for redress.
A crucial stage was reached when the U.S. government agreed to establish a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1981. Holding hearings across the nation, the commission gathered testimony that led to a final report in 1983. The commission concluded that the Japanese American internment was due to “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” It recommended a formal government apology, the establishment of an educational fund, and individual payments of $20,000. From these findings, both houses of Congress sponsored bills that finally passed and became the Civil Rights Act of 1988.
In this campaign for redress, sansei played a major role. But just as important, they were given an opportunity to enter into a dialogue with their nisei parents. There was reconciliation and mutual discovery across the two generations. The result of this communication was to instill among the sansei a sense of pride in their ethnic heritage and to strengthen intergenerational ties. The redress movement also enhanced their sense of community and made them more aware of minority concerns and a broader Asian American identity.
In short, Takezawa finds that the wartime internment experience helped to reconstruct and define Japanese American identity. She is aware that ethnicity can be expressed differently over time, and that ethnic identity is constantly being constructed or reconstructed; others might say ethnicity is a cultural invention. A consciousness of history–in this case, the redress movement growing out of knowledge about the internment–is helping to shape and to nurture a sense of ethnic identity among the sansei. The sansei are experiencing both assimilation and an enhanced sense of ethnic awareness; the two developments are not incompatible. At the same time, Takezawa notices that the reinterpretation of the Japanese American internment has become tantamount to a legend. It is a legend of setbacks and success, injustice and vindication, suffering and triumph. It is a very American story.
Franklin Ng is professor of anthropology at California State University, Fresno. He is the editor of the six-volume Asian American Encyclopedia (Marshall Cavendish).
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 30
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“You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America
By Susan Hill Lindley
Westminster John Knox Press
599 pp.; $35
Susan Hill Lindley’s survey of American women and religion arrives on the scene at an auspicious moment, after two or three decades of vigorous scholarship in women’s history in general and in women’s religious history in particular. It reflects where scholars find themselves at this juncture–both in its strengths and its roads not yet taken.
The book is the most comprehensive attempt to date to synthesize the diverse literature of the recent decades, covering the various forms of Protestantism (mainline, evangelical, and African American), sectarian and utopian groups, Mormonism, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and even, in the final chapter, sections on women in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Goddess religions. Where religious traditions are unfamiliar to most readers (e.g., Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam), Lindley offers brief descriptions. She is also sensitive to variations according to region, acknowledging the ways in which women’s experience in the South or West differed from that in the Midwest or Northeast. Moreover, Lindley demonstrates an astonishing grasp of the literature and of the major historiographical controversies, both in women’s religious history and in American religious history more generally. For instance, she reminds us that, in the nineteenth century, women’s ambitions to preach were not precisely the same as their aspirations to ordination; women could preach without being ordained. Her footnotes are good guides for anyone wanting to explore a particular topic or issue further.
Most important of all, Lindley goes a long way toward organizing this vast body of heterogeneous material, tracing unifying themes such as that of “True Womanhood,” the nineteenth-century ideal that constructed women as primarily mothers and wives, more moral, private, virtuous, and spiritually minded than men, and confined mostly to home. This is a particularly valuable connective theme since almost all varieties of Christian groups–and some non-Christian as well–subscribed to that ideal in the nineteenth century. (In fact, not a few religious groups have continued to do so, to one degree or another, throughout the twentieth century.)
Inevitably “You Have Stept Out of Your Place” resorts to many of the conventional ways of ordering the material: by denominational or ethnic tradition (Roman Catholics, Native Americans, African Americans, for example), and in terms of losses and gains made by women in their movement toward lay leadership and clerical office in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. Within this scheme, Lindley links denominations in sensible ways, rather than tracing each singly (this could be extremely tedious where denominational histories resembled each other in regard to women). For instance, in the twentieth century she groups those denominations that have granted formal equality to women (most of mainline Protestantism and Judaism except for the Orthodox); those that started by giving women greater leadership scope and then partially retracted it (the conservative evangelical Protestant denominations); and those that have more or less stayed the course (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy). Where other themes have been developed in the recent literature–for instance, the great foreign missionary movement of the late nineteenth century; attempts to “masculinize” institutional religion; and women’s intimate involvement with social reform and benevolence–she has made fruitful use of them.
The volume might be faulted in certain respects, though probably the fault lies more with the state of the scholarship than with Lindley herself. First, her treatment of some groups is necessarily thin. Her sections on Native Americans reflect the youth of the field of Native American religion. And she must hurry over the complex stories of women in Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (though, again, the footnotes will come to the rescue of those who want to know more).
Second and more important, Lindley seems less comfortable with the twentieth century than with the nineteenth (one symptom of this is that eight or nine chapters deal almost entirely with the nineteenth century, two with the turn of the century, and only four or five devote themselves wholly to the twentieth century). Her account of the nineteenth century is thematically richer. This, I would argue, is no accident, for the interpretive lines are yet to be set for the twentieth century. For the time being, for the twentieth-century narrative Lindley must rely primarily on the standard story of the progress (or lack of progress, as the case may be) of women’s formal leadership in American religious institutions. There is no doubt that issues of ordination, the acquisition of lay rights, and access to theological education have been crucial parts of the twentieth-century story, but thus far other significant parts of the story have been eclipsed by the efforts to tell the “leadership” narrative.
How might Lindley’s volume best be used? It is more for dipping in and out of, I think, than for reading from cover to cover. There is simply too much to absorb. It would serve as a wonderful companion volume in a course on women and American religion, perhaps supplementing the documentary texts collected in Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller’s Women and Religion in America. (It would add some coherence to the stories those disparate documents tell.) Or it might help tie together a reading list featuring the books that are emerging as classics in the field, such as Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender and Evelyn Higginbotham’s work on National Baptist women. In comprehensiveness, Lindley’s survey surpasses the two volumes edited by Catherine Wessinger on women in mainline and “marginal” religious institutions, focusing as they do mainly on issues of leadership.
No doubt the next survey volume, maybe a decade down the line, will benefit from further interpretive work on the history of women and religion and therefore will cover ground somewhat different from Lindley’s. In particular, I hope it will reflect coming advances in our understanding of twentieth-century women’s religious history. (At the risk of sounding self-serving, let me mention the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project, funded by Pew and operating out of Andover Newton Theological School, which is intended to widen our grasp of this period.)
I trust a future survey will go beyond the question of women’s “leadership” to a richer consideration of what is now being referred to as “lived religion,” that is, to the varied forms of female devotion and piety. Women’s prayers, fiction, meditations, arts and crafts, autobiographies, and hymnody all need more attention than they have received thus far. So do a multitude of other topics that are thoroughly entangled with religion, such as women’s role as nurturer and educator in the family, and women’s physical existence–their sexuality, their experience of giving birth, and their health concerns.
Further, a future survey might tackle some still unanswered questions: Given the increasing options for women outside the home in the twentieth century, what is it that has impelled women to persist in working through religious institutions and/or through a religious understanding of what they are about? Indeed, what is it that lies at the core of women’s religious experience in the twentieth century? There is probably a variety of answers depending on which women we are looking at: Are liturgy and ritual central? Rules for living? A morality expressed particularly in a concern for social justice and equality of persons? More theology than we commonly recognize?
Finally, with any luck, a prospective survey would be in a better position to tackle the question of the relation between “secular” and “sacred” women’s history. For instance, the recent excellent scholarship on the female origins of the welfare state (e.g., Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare ) has pretty much omitted the religious dimension in favor of concentrating on women who embraced the discourse and outlook of the social sciences. I suspect there is a religious dimension to the story of the rise of the welfare state, but it has not yet been explored or articulated. To cite another example, feminism in most of the twentieth century has been assumed to be largely secular in its outlook, sometimes even anti-religious. Is it possible that by a closer examination of the styles and discourses of the women’s movement we might discover more of a religious legacy than hitherto suspected?
The scholars who explore these questions and, eventually, the historians who attempt the next surveys will surely build on Lindley’s work and pronounce themselves grateful that she has laid out so much material with such sophistication, care, and clarity.
Virginia Lieson Brereton is codirector of the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project at Andover Newton Theological School.
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 33
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Postethinic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
By David Hollinger
BasicBooks
210 pp.; $22
How, some half-dozen years after it burst on the scene, multiculturalism has clearly passed its zenith and begun its descent toward domesticated acceptance and stodgy curricular institutionalization. Naturally, any such statement must immediately be qualified, for, as John Higham pointed out when it was still on its ascending arc, multiculturalism is not only a “buzzword” and a “crusade,” but also “a gigantic mystification.” The first and third of those labels still apply, but the crusading aura has definitely faded.
Its buzzword quality helped to make it mystifying, for if multiculturalism was vague to start with, overuse made it hopelessly multivalent. There are, indeed, almost as many interpretations of multiculturalism as there are people who employ the term. The strongest versions, often heavily overlaid with some species of postmodernism, deny to the United States a collective national identity, claiming that “America” is nothing but the barren if not depraved political container within which the race–and gender–defined groups that are the authentic agents of culture have historically been oppressed. Weak multiculturalism, by contrast, is indistinguishable from the “tolerance for diversity” traditionally associated with cultural pluralism and the more relaxed versions of melting-pot assimilationism.
Strong multiculturalism, which is far too extreme to win general acceptance, broke through to general visibility with the controversy that greeted New York’s “Curriculum of Inclusion” in 1989. Its excesses prompted intense criticism from persons like Arthur Schlesinger and C. Vann Woodward, who could not credibly be dismissed as reactionaries. As a conspicuous element in “political correctness,” multiculturalism was thrown further on the defensive by the tidal wave of ridicule that rolled over p.c. in 1990-91. But the protean nature of the phenomenon helped it weather those storms, for virtually no one objects to the idea in its weaker tolerance-for-diversity forms, which, like the more robust versions, draw on antiracist and antisexist sentiments that are deeply rooted in the culture. Indeed, the determination of most critics to make clear that they are not against tolerance for diversity has no doubt reinforced acceptance of generic multiculturalism, which can always be given an acceptably benign interpretation.
David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism belongs to a second wave of commentary that began to appear in the midnineties. It reflects the determination just mentioned–to preempt charges of prejudice and cultural insensitivity–for one of Hollinger’s objections to multiculturalism is that it does not adequately comprehend the full richness of American diversity.
His book outlines a position intended to preserve the positive elements of multiculturalism while moving beyond its “increasingly apparent” limitations. This “postethnic perspective” is not put forward as “an all-purpose formula for solving policy problems,” but simply as “a distinctive frame within which issues in education and politics can be debated.” It constitutes, however, a searching critique of multiculturalism, which takes on special significance because of Hollinger’s sympathy for the goals of this “prodigious movement,” and because of his stature as one of the nation’s leading intellectual historians.
Hollinger strongly supports cultural diversity and therefore endorses multiculturalism to the extent that it genuinely enhances respect for, and nurturing of, that quality in American life. More particularly, he approves the way the movement has established the legitimacy of descent-based communities (i.e., racial and ethnic groups) as bearers of cultural diversity sufficiently important to be accorded recognition in public policy. The latter point is related to his belief that the displacement of “species” by “ethnos”–that is, melting-pot assimilationism by multiculturalist diversity–is to be understood within the context of a larger epistemological shift that he finds congenial. The larger shift involves a movement away from thinking in universalistic terms to a more lively awareness of historicity, the “recognition that many of the ideas and values once taken to be universal are specific to certain cultures.”
Hollinger’s principal reservations about multiculturalism have to do with what we can call its “essentializing” of race. He does not use that term, but it comes to mind in connection with his criticism of the five descent-based communities around which multiculturalism has structured itself: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Euro Americans.
Although he approves of affirmative action, the political policy that gave rise to this “ethno-racial pentagon,” Hollinger finds the pentagon itself increasingly unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. By making race the trump category and reducing ethnicity to comparative insignificance, it has fueled a pervasive racialization of thought and policy, the most deplorable distortion of which is the now almost conventional identification of race with culture. Insofar as multiculturalism encourages this tendency, it actually constricts real cultural diversity and threatens to become an avatar of old-fashioned biological racism, which–though discredited for more than half a century–is clearly the theoretical source of the assumptions associated with the ethno-racial pentagon.
Hollinger also lays considerable weight on the fact that the regnant schema cannot accommodate an increasing population of “mixed race” persons, who are unlikely to tolerate for long being classified by some variant of the odious “one-drop rule.” Finally, he is troubled by the unwillingness of many multiculturalists to credit the reality of American nationality and the importance of the social and political values built into it.
The author’s prescription for moving beyond multiculturalism is not set forth in programmatic fashion; rather, it is embedded in his broader analysis and critique. He is, however, quite insistent on the need to distinguish sharply between race and culture, and he cautions against increasingly generalized resort to racial terminology. In this connection, he urges calling the groups that make up the pentagon “ethno-racial blocs” (a cumbersome mouthful) rather than “races,” because the former expression implies a more “contingent and instrumental” way of classifying people, which is the direction antiracists should “want to be heading.”
Hollinger would like to see a greater emphasis on “cosmopolitanism,” by which he means a capacity to savor cultural diversity without undue attachment to any one of the elements comprising the diversity. Such an emphasis, he believes, would enlarge the range of cultural choice for individuals and thereby promote a “diversification of diversity.” Cosmopolitanism is, indeed, the key element in Hollinger’s postethnic vision, which, as he describes it, “prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as part of the normal life of a democractic society.”
Despite his commitment to historicist particularism, Hollinger rejects the view that human-rights talk is no longer tenable. (Even Richard Rorty, he notes, “has come around to insisting that full recognition of the historically particular character of our discourses should not be taken as a license for abandoning a traditional human rights commitment.”) Moreover, he affirms the existence of an American national community and espouses a “civic” nationalism based not on descent, but on a shared commitment to democratic ideals and practices. He is even brave enough to reply to multiculturalist parody of this kind of Americanism with a parody of his own that is daringly incorrect politically. And in a brief but arresting passage, he suggests that the tradition of church-state separation might be applicable to state action in respect to ethno-racial blocs:
In this . . . view, ethno-racial cultures ought to look after themselves much the way religious cultures have been expected to do. Both are sustained by voluntary affiliations. The products of both are to be welcomed as contributions to the richness of the nation’s cultural life and thus as part of the environment for its politics. But both partake more of the private than the public sphere, and neither is to be the beneficiary of outright public subsidies. In the meantime, programs for affirmative action can continue to occupy the political space that was theirs alone before culture began to take over the ethno-racial pentagon.
Also of special interest to readers of this journal is Hollinger’s citing of religion as a model for the relatively free entry and exit–individual affiliation and disaffiliation from the group–that postethnicity envisions across the board.
No summary could do justice to the subtlety of Hollinger’s formulations, but even these remarks may suggest the scope and boldness of his postethnic vision. His book is, to my mind, quite persuasive in its critique; and postethnicity is an appealing next step beyond multiculturalism. There are, however, three points I would like to see addressed if Hollinger decides to develop more systematically the position he has outlined for us here.
First, the role of women’s studies and gender theory in multiculturalism and the postethnic future needs fuller consideration. Second, it seems to me that Hollinger’s enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism has skewed his tracing of that concept’s historical interaction with cultural pluralism and assimilationism. Moreover, one may ask whether cosmopolitanism can fulfill Hollinger’s hopes for it as a key element in postethnicity, since it is doubtful that an outlook hitherto confined to a sophisticated few can serve as the basis for a large national society’s cultural policy.
Finally, there is the question of affirmative action. Hollinger endorses it as a way of overcoming “racism,” which he regards as real, although “race” is not. But that would seem to ground the policy in a paradox; and affirmative action is the root cause of the pervasive racialization of thought that Hollinger deplores, while attributing it to the ethno-racial pentagon, which is but an artifact of affirmative action.
Here, it might be said, Hollinger’s book is provocative by implication only. But that is not its overall character. This brief volume contains the most probing exploration of multiculturalism that has appeared to date, and it succeeds brilliantly in sketching new directions for the future.
Philip Gleason is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including most recently Contending with Moderity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press).
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 34
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- More from-by Philip Gleason