412 - Recruiting the Radical Middle

Recruiting the Radical Middle
By S. Mark Heim

AMHERST COLLEGE once employed a professor whose charge it was to refute the doctrines of evolution for the edification and protection of the school's undergraduates. His position was discontinued, however, as his lectures tended to make Darwinists of his hearers. I am perhaps not alone in having a similar reaction to the stream of postal propaganda that crosses my desk these days.

No group or cause seems less appealing than the one whose appeal I have just read. My qualified support for certain legal abortions is no sooner confirmed by a hysterical right-to-life mailing than the callous hype of the National Abortion Rights Action League casts me right back into doubt. No sooner have I put down an ACLU tract, distressed by the broad terms in which it condemns religious expression in our public life, than I pick up the ludicrously prejudicial questions of a Moral Majority opinion sampler. ("Should school systems that receive federal funds be forced to hire known practicing and soliciting homosexual teachers?")

I

My reaction is easy to explain. None of these parties or their missives gives an inch. I presume that it has been field-tested and verified that no one will give to a campaign to preserve some legal abortions as a painful and regrettable necessity, just as no one will give to a campaign to increase the burdens on many of the poorest and most vulnerable among us in support of the necessary principle of the sanctity of life.

As a person who cannot be absolved of the guilt involved in either stance, I find nothing so infuriates me as the blithe dismissal of complexity. The fact that I am dealing with rhetoric and not argument does not relieve my frustration.

My operative definition of a moderate is one who cannot help seeing and partially identifying with the other side of every question. This is a capacity much honored and commended in the breach. While highly regarded as an intellectual virtue, this cast of mind seems not to be conducive to dramatic action or clear identity. Indeed, it may well be viewed as a liability if one is seeking tenure, media attention, or direct mail contributions.

It is notoriously difficult to make a successful rhetorical case for a mediating position. Extremes have much more figurative appeal. Those

S. Mark Heim is Assistant Professor of Theology, Andover Newton Theological School. He is a graduate of Amherst College, Andover Newton, and Boston College. An American Baptist, he has served churches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

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on the right and the left are equally familiar with the tendency to be "outbid" by those willing to go one or several steps more toward the logical extreme. The opposing party then seizes upon the most radical example as a club, with which less extreme adversaries can be threatened into conversion, silence, or identification with the extreme.

Supporters of legal abortion point to attacks on contraception and to the "regulated bedroom," while anti- abortionists point to celebrations of abortion as a means of birth control or as an index of "liberation." It is a hard time for those who believe in a mean, or for those who would combine the extremes of different parties.

II

One of the striking elements on the theological and religious scene is the present movement of those "in the middle" to form their own parties. It would be too simplistic to characterize these parties as the embodiment of my own "a-plague-on-both-your-houses" response to my fourth class mail. Yet they certainly are motivated by a conviction that the "party" structure of current controversy is begging central questions.

In most mainline denominations, there are now various types of "renewal groups." Evangelical in their outlook, the members differ markedly from evangelicals in many conservative denominations. The renewal groups are largely just that: they identify with their denomination. They celebrate their belonging and indeed they celebrate many of the "liberal" values and accomplishments of their mainline churches. But they seek to renew faithfulness to biblical Christianity, as opposed to what they see as the exaltation of secular norms in the church. By and large, they are not triumphalist. A spokesperson for the renewal group in the United Church of Christ said recently, "There is no renewal apart from the renewing of the agents of renewal. We must address the idols in our own camp and seek to accept the good things in the opposition camp."

If one were to point to events symbolic of this development, one could choose the "Chicago Declaration" of 1973 in which a group of evangelicals confessed their failure to live up to the social imperatives of the Gospel and the statement adopted by the National Council of Churches governing board in 1976 which confessed a failure to maintain the personal evangelistic imperative of the Gospel. But recent instances abound.

The Center for Christian Studies at Notre Dame has just launched a new journal, appropriately named the Center Journal. Its editor says, "We intend to situate ourselves centrally, avoiding political and theological extremes. It is our judgment that a centrist position, located in the mainstream of Christian tradition, is precisely the place where Christian thinkers need to gather in order to discover ways of successfully relating Christian faith to contemporary culture, to the modern mind, to the concerns of the age."

A member of the Editorial Board says the journal aims "to recapture

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from secularist domination the world of culture which, for long centuries in the Christian past, was part and parcel of the activities of Christians." Another member calls for renewed spiritual discipline on the part of believers, advocating not a theocracy but "the production of an environment so spiritually and intellectually attractive that it will overcome the appeal of rival ideologies, pessimism, the adverse pull of the modern world, and the unnatural obsession with remaining 'unattached.' "

Explicit in the agenda of this group is the necessity for Christian thought to become at least in part a frank adversary of "modernity." Implicit is the belief that all the row about secular humanism, however confused, has significant basis in fact. One of the articles in the first issue warns readers not to be frightened off this turf by the spectre of Jerry Falwell. The writer recommends the creation of another Christian lobby, parallel to the Moral Majority, which while not sharing the same political orientation will articulate the rights of religious values to be heard in the public realm.

We must reject the idea that values which may be for some people intrinsically rooted in religious conviction-as Roman Catholic opposition to abortion-are for that reason not eligible for enactment as public policy. And this principle must be articulated in such a manner that it cannot be discredited or ignored by an ad hominem attack on fundamentalism.

Donald Bloesch, another member of the Editorial Board, writes that "there are many conflicting ideologies today, some on the left and some on the right, but they generally reflect the ethos of the technological society." He implies that productivity, efficiency, and utility are the same norms applied at either end of the theological spectrum, whether it be church growth or social revolution.

Those who are launching the Center Journal are convinced that the middle may be a prophetic position, a position from which both ends of the current theological spectrum may be judged insufficiently radical. Jim Wallis has written, in his Agenda for Biblical People, that the most important distinctions in theology are no longer high church-low church, evangelical-liberal, Protestant-Catholic. "What matters most today is whether one is a supporter of establishment Christianity or a practitioner of biblical faith."

Sojourners magazine offered an illustration of what it can mean to be "in the middle" when it published its issue on abortion. After some struggle, the community and the editorial staff came to the conclusion that a laissez-faire attitude toward abortion did not square with their commitment to peace and non-violence. Wallis wrote: "For some conservative Christians, abortion has become a 'threshold issue' opening the door to wider concerns. For some radical Christians, abortion is emerging as a 'consistency issue' which reveals basic differences with the cultural and sexual values of the Left. There is the real possibility of some highly creative and unexpected new alignments." The new center may not be an average: it may be the place where mere "extremes" become truly radical.

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III

Another periodical is braving the postal rates and current economic situation and is called This World. Its goals are to "discuss in contemporary terms the moral values that undergird our society; to demonstrate their relevance to the political, economic, and cultural issues of our time; and by the force of superior logic, to uphold them against self-serving and uninformed assaults." The aims are audacious, the tone pugnacious. Here too a sophisticated trumpet is being sounded to summon us to battle secularism, which is here viewed as ignorance or rejection of the fact that our society is undergirded by values that are ultimately religious.

The sponsors of This World have no doubt that to exclude religion and religious values from public debate is to make that debate ultimately futile. Political, economic, and cultural issues are grounded in religion and moral values. To think about them in any other context would be academically sterile and politically dangerous.

Though prepared to be searchingly critical of the traditions and institutions of the West, this new journal is committed to "upholding" the moral and religious values which undergird American society. The editorial board, including Peter Berger, Max L. Stackhouse, Michael Novak, Paul Ramsey, and Carl F. H. Henry, is hardly made up of partisans of the Moral Majority. But it is certainly not composed of leftists either. The first issue carries an analysis of the economic thought of the World Council of Churches which is illustrative of the journal's stance. The Council's initiatives and aims are sympathetically considered. Its performance and theory are found wanting. There is no phobia about "Marxists marching under the banner of Christ." But there is sharp questioning as to whether democratic values can legitimately be subordinated to economic aims as the World Council's pronouncements seem to imply.

Some liberals are returning to the idea that there is a Christian substratum to the values and institutions of Western democracy, and that not only the substratum but the values and institutions may be worthy of support. Some evangelicals, in the midst of their resurgence, are learning to be leery of the religious exaltation of nation and party. Concerned evangelicals have worried aloud about whether evangelicalism is part of a true spiritual renewal or is being used for a political backlash. These complementary second thoughts might find a congenial meeting place in This World.

Some of those associated with This World were also involved in the founding last spring of the Institute for Religion and Democracy. The institute is an organization concerned with the extension of democracy and democratic values, and also concerned with the support given by some church groups to movements and forces it considers undemocratic. Some mainline churches apparently are nervous that the thrust of the Institute's work will be directed against appropriations from these churches for political or social groups in the third world. This led the

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United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church to commission an investigation into the Institute and its founders.

Last year, the Institute illustrated its position by holding a luncheon in Washington to honor the recipient of its first "Freedom and Democracy" award, Obando y Bravo, Archbishop of Managua. The Catholic primate of Nicaragua was chosen because he has upheld democratic ideals against both the right and the left. A supporter of the revolution to oust Somoza and a critic of the social inequities of Nicaraguan society, the archbishop has also been critical of measures curbing free speech and expression which have been adopted by the Sandinista government.

The Institute has produced booklets on the church in El Salvador and Nicaragua and has published a statement on "Christianity and Democracy" drafted by Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus. Its members include Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Barely a year old, it has already had an impact, especially on those denominations which suspect that their funding patterns are being examined for an anti-democratic "tilt."

IV

Neuhaus, a member of the executive committee of the Institute, has added his voice to those critical of "establishment Christianity" left or right. In his 1981 John Courtney Murray lecture, Neuhaus characterized our society not as post-Christian, but as post-secular. The fundamental reality, he argues, is not the rise of the religious right, but the collapse of "the 200-year hegemony of the secular Enlightenment in Western culture." Establishment Protestantism, represented by the mainline denominations, succeeded in shaping the political agenda of America's "Great Society." But in doing so, establishment Protestantism assimilated its own perspective to that of the culture and its secular elite. The triumphs of this "marriage" of mainline denominations to the society are real, most notably in the advances in civil rights. But the very success of the marriage has left mainline groups with little leverage or determination to confront the establishment of which they are an integral part. Neuhaus counts the mainline out as a major participant in redefining the American experience for the near future.

The religious right has played an important role in exposing the situation. Crude though its tactics may be, Neuhaus says there is no denying it has ruthlessly revealed the manner in which mainline groups neglected the "vital middle," and allowed all its positive symbols and images which were not nailed down to slide to the right: family, patriotism, moral discipline, democratic values. And even the rabid attack on secular humanism has awakened an awareness, at least in those like Neuhaus, that "the great threat to our common life comes not from aggressive religion, but from ideologies that deny the transcendent and thereby invoke the totalitarian impulse of the modern state, whether that totalitarianism be of the left or of the right."

But the religious right itself is, in this view, "conceptually destitute,

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ethically undisciplined, and addicted to divisiveness." It has laid open the wound, but it cannot help or heal. There is in Neuhaus' analysis a religious vacuum at the top in America, where a new religious elite, neither mainline or new right, must shape a new public consensus. He considers Catholics, Lutherans, and "new" evangelicals as possible candidates for this role.

But perhaps rather than any one of these groups a new theological middle is forming to contend for this place, a middle characterized not so much by compromise and calculation as by eclectic radicalism. I take it to be a good sign when more and more people become hard to classify: ". . . I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it" (Rev. 2:17). Those whom the Spirit wishes to make free, must first be un-named.