Do You Know This Man?
May 8th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Every pastor is sure he knows how to talk to this guy:
It’s easy. With Biff, here, you talk tractors, nail guns, and torque. You slip into saying “dese, dem, and dose.” You use football analogies. Better yet, you tell your own football stories, if you have them. You try to pull off the coach routine. You go easy on the Bible because he doesn’t care. You don’t try to teach him. You keep it real concrete, because Biff’s a hands-on guy, and if you try to talk theologically you’ll lose him.
I don’t think most pastors know this guy at all. I think most try to reach Biff with populist clichés only from laziness — or because they’re too intimidated to sit down and talk with him. I think that if pastors realized who Biff actually is, and if they began to connect with him, their churches would be revolutionized.
Here are a few things I’ve learned about him.
1. Biff’s a genius.
Forget about losing Biff with your sermon. He’s way ahead of you. That’s why he stops listening. I know a contractor who hardly says a word, and who looks like he wouldn’t try to follow a theological inference past the second “if.” But he has a deep, sharp intellect. He figured out how to install a Czechoslovakian engine in an airplane he built — without a manual. He reads the social patterns in a room faster than anyone else, and he can articulate what the patterns are. He has keen, biblically informed doctrinal priorities.
Pastors need to know that Biff has no trouble dealing with complexity. But he can tell when you’re using complexity to disguise ignorance. And he won’t sit for it.
2. Biff knows how to interact with all kinds of people.
Yeah, he looks narrow. But there’s a good chance that Biff went to college. In all probability he has lived in many different places, perhaps even worked internationally — and not just in the military. If Biff is over forty-five, you may find that he has some history with the counterculture in the sixties or seventies. In his business, he either learns how to deal with many different subcultures, or he fails.
I know a lumberman who lives to cut down trees. He just loves being alone in the woods with a saw and some timber. To look at him, you’d say he was the original good old boy. And if you only talked with him for five minutes, you wouldn’t learn anything to shake that impression. You’d never know he once worked in computers. Near San Francisco.
3. Biff learned early to conform.
There are guys who are no deeper than tractors, nail guns, and torque. But Biff is not one of them. In my experience, he got the message as a young kid that he wasn’t supposed to be a dreamer, that dreamers were worthless sissies. So he constructed a persona that enabled him to get along with the other guys. He talks about tractors, nail guns, and torque because that’s what they talk about. But the dreamer never completely died. In fact, the persistence of that dreamer, maybe in despair, is a key to his emotional life.
In the back corner of a closet, Biff may have a world-class collection of jazz LPs, which he will only show you if he thinks you’re safe. It will astound you what Biff reads, what he ponders, what he responds to. I’ve had guys that look exactly like Biff, lots and lots of them, become fans of my classical violin playing. That’s one way I accidentally got underneath Biff’s conformity.
Interesting things start to happen when Biff decides that God wants him to exercise his creativity.
4. Biff respects masculine analysis.
He likes his categories hard and neat. They can be complicated. They can be paradoxical. But they cannot be soft. Which is too bad for evangelical sentimentality, because Biff has no respect for Ned Flanders.
With all these points, I’m not saying Biff yearns to hear lectures on Schleiermacher, or that he secretly watches Masterpiece Theater, or even that he is fully conscious of himself. I’m just saying that he’s smarter than we think, broader, more open, more curious than we think. I’m saying that the potential in any church for significant interaction with other subcultures is far greater than most pastors imagine.
We can nurture that potential if we ditch our cramped view of people — perverted by demographics, marketing tactics, and Meiers-Briggs tests – and see them for who they really are.
Sondheim As a Preacher
May 1st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I’ve spent many hours this week in an orchestra pit rehearsing for Chico State’s production of A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim. Between keeping track of key changes, being anxious for the physical safety of our percussionist as scenery collapses above him, and enjoying the great voices of the cast, I have been evaluating Sondheim’s success as a preacher.
A preacher has to do more than convey information about “how one ought to live.” In my view, he has to show listeners how their lives are inextricably bound to God, and how that bond impacts their decisions. That mission calls him to engage listeners with drama, emotion, narrative, and especially characters. His preaching has to display individuals who struggle with God, both rightly and wrongly.
To fulfill this mission, the preacher has several tools: the Bible (source for the dramatic material), doctrine (derived from the Bible, and delivered as principles), life experience (his own, his listeners’), etc. In a sermon, he uses these tools to redirect the motivations of his audience Godward.
I’ve written about the inability of the evangelical populist to go deeper than sentimentality. So much of the spiritual deadness of evangelicalism, the dearth of transforming love, goes back to the shallow emotional range of its preachers. Most, it seems, can’t convey anything higher than healthful living habits.
Sondheim, though he presents what I find to be a spirituality of hopelessness, is skilled at preaching the worldly word. He has his source of dramatic material, a combination of what I’ll loosely call European tradition and American showmanship. His symbols, dramatic and musical, all derive from such sources, of which he has intuitive knowledge. Sondheim also shows keen insight into life experience. He flirts with audience expectations by using stock characters whom he later rounds out with humane understanding.
Which leaves doctrine.
There is a principle that animates the story of Night Music. The characters are all troubled, some driven to morose contemplation, others to flippancy, still others to cynicism. They struggle to find what a main character calls “a coherent existence,” and the field of their struggle is sex. Their escapades are often funny, usually humiliating, and occasionally moving. But each learns the doctrine by the end, learns it in his or her own way.
Night Music‘s doctrine? You recover a coherent existence when you find the object of your true desire. And to recognize that object, you must know yourself. The god this musical preaches so effectively is inside the human personality.
A few qualifications. Audiences don’t go to musicals for spiritual training. Tony awards like those lavished on this show are not given to productions that “make a point,” and this show is not “preachy” in that way. Sondheim’s goal was to give people something to enjoy, not to teach them. He may or may not believe the principle this story shows.
But Sondheim is a skillful preacher.
He shows how people’s lives are inextricably bound to the god of their desires, and how that bond impacts their decisions. His characters speak to people’s struggles.
My wayward imagination wonders how an evangelical, with his grab-bag of practical tips, would preach the Night Music doctrine. “Five Steps to Open Communication With Your Mistress.” “What Would Ibsen Do?” “Your Best Adultery Now!” If evangelicals preached sin the way they preach Christ, sin might go into as deep a decline as Christianity.
A preacher’s job is not to entertain, as Sondheim’s is. But evangelical preachers would teach and exhort with more potency if their Bible, their doctrine, and their life experience spoke to people’s struggles. The God of the Bible is not the God of easy answers. Jesus Christ struggles with us just as we struggle with him, if the Gospel of John is any guide. He is no stranger to relational agony. And he does not use gimmicks.
I notice that when I preach this God, using the Bible’s drama as powerfully and truthfully as I can, listeners take heart. They renew their struggles with greater insight, and they see God’s blessings. Their certitudes gained in struggle are earned, not purchased in bulk.
So I learn something about preaching from Sondheim. But I leave the orchestra pit relieved that the living God is larger than the gods of Broadway.
Integrity or Control? Choose.
April 24th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Lots of us have had to endure the control-freak pastor, the paranoid maniac who has to know WHO said his sermon went too long, and WHY that individual didn’t OBEY MATTHEW 18 and come to him directly, and WHO ELSE that individual contaminated with his SLANDER. HOW LARGE is the FACTION of CRITICAL SPIRITS this week?
And lots of us have had to endure the Meeting during which our motivations are impugned, our divisiveness is rebuked, and we are disinvited from leadership/attendance/Christianity.
So when I wrote last week that the first step away from populism is for evangelical leaders to rediscover the foundation of their authority, many readers probably said, “O callow youth, we think not. We’ve had enough of pastoral authority for one lifetime.”
Hang in there with me.
Authority, to my way of thinking, is not control over people. (The leader gives orders and uses levers of power to make sure he is obeyed.) Rather, authority is an indirect result — even a byproduct — of something no one ever sees: the workings of the leader’s own conscience.
My job as a pastor is not to compel others to do good, or even to entice them into doing good, but rather to subject my own will to the Bible’s commands. As others interact with me, they are confronted with spiritual choices in the natural course of relationship.
For instance, when I preach, the ultimate issue on my conscience is whether my words serve the text of the Bible — serve it both in expounding and in applying it to the people before me. If my conscience affirms that I enlightened my own ignorance, ducked no hard issue, and used excellent craft to teach a passage, then I have done my job as a pastor. The personal decisions people make come not so much from what I said, as from the time they spent interacting with my submission to scripture.
When I counsel, to take another example, I have to give biblical and Spirit-directed applications without shortcuts, gimmicks, or generalities. I also have to draw straight confession of sin out of people who would rather avoid it. Above all, I have to affirm what an individual has right, and withhold affirmation from what he has wrong. These are all issues on my own conscience, not anyone else’s, and the only way I can act rightly is by obeying biblical principles. The counselee’s decision to do good — which I cannot control — comes not so much from my direction, as from the time he spends interacting with my submission to scripture.
My conscience is the issue in every matter of daily life: prioritizing my weekly schedule, reacting to criticism, coaching others to resolve conflict, discipling my boys, loving my wife. My job as a pastor is to exhibit a submissive conscience. As people interact with me, they find themselves dealing with a way of life founded on different assumptions from theirs. The differences are what confront their souls with spiritual choices.
I am convinced that a leader earns a right to be heeded by orienting his or her conscience toward God’s word. If he or she is submissive to the Bible, he or she will acquire authority, and the authority will not be hierarchical, but relational.
I have found that when I try to use the levers of power to control people’s behavior, I splinter the integration of my conscience with the Bible. I have also found that the status-oriented fixations of populism involve leaders in catastrophic compromises of conscience, because populism boils down to what the Bible calls the fear of man.
I want to be able to say with Paul (2 Corinthians 1.12) that “our boast is this: the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you.”
To Revitalize Evangelical Culture
April 17th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
If populism has left evangelicals resentful and suspicious of “elites,” and complacent in a sentimentalized Christianity, how can evangelical leaders restore their movement’s cultural vitality?
Begin with a basic shift. Evangelical leaders need to rediscover the foundation of their authority.
I’ve noticed that a person with authority has a right to be heeded, to receive deference. For example, let’s say we have a bull session about how evangelism really ought to be done, and we each proclaim our opinions, together with all the reasons why we’re right. But when Billy Graham ambles over to the sofa and puts up his boots on the coffee table, we sincerely defer. We don’t repent of our opinions when he starts to talk. We don’t surrender unconditionally to whatever he says. But we do adjust our points of view to incorporate his.
I’m saying that a person with authority has a right to this deference. If someone in our bull session blows off Billy Graham, we disapprove because we feel that respect is something Graham is owed. The right to be heeded is powerful. If deference is not his right, then what he’s got isn’t authority.
I figure there are lots of possible foundations for authority. There’s authority founded on skill: Billy Graham has a right to our deference on matters of evangelism because he’s unusually competent. There’s also authority founded on charisma: Graham has a unique relational wisdom that has won over vast audiences for decades.
Some foundations for authority crumble, and cannot be rebuilt for an age. In the days when Graham first preached, he had authority simply because he was a pastor. Almost everybody deferred to a pastor for the sake of respectability. It didn’t matter whether the pastor’s congregation was fifty or five hundred: they adjusted their points of view to incorporate his. But this social authority deteriorated, and by the 1970s any pastor who depended on it was feeling vulnerable.
Other foundations for authority are perverse, like popularity. A celebrity will get deference for a while just because masses of people hang on his words. But adoring crowds can turn into mobs. Graham has had the authority of popularity, and has also felt the sting of disapprobation, as when he visited the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Since he did not build his ministry on his popularity, his stature eventually outgrew the setbacks.
Evangelical leaders, for the most part, have been running scared because of the loss of their social authority. They have watched American culture scoff at the stock character of the pastor, mocking his impotence in the face of cultural changes. And they have been retreating from any hint of that old authority in their leadership, trying instead to teach, evangelize, and organize on the basis of popularity or skill or charisma.
Populism, with its easy emotionalism, has become the most common way evangelical leaders gain a right to be heeded. They hoist an apparently strong banner that rallies the troops — and it works for a while. But this cynicism has nauseated so many believers that the search is on for community without authority — an egalitarian delusion now tempting emergents.
I believe evangelicalism will not regain vitality until its leaders rediscover their authority’s foundation. There has to be a reason for believers to listen to them, to defer to them. And subcultures outside of evangelicalism must see that reason, or they will not pay the gospel any heed.
In this connection, it’s worth noting that Billy Graham (no populist by my definition) had many kinds of authority, but only depended on one kind: the coherence of his character with the Bible. That is, the force of biblical authority exerted itself through Graham’s personal submission. More than anything else, this biblical integrity is what gained him the right to be heeded.
Next week, the technical specifications for gaining that authority.
How Populism Corrupts Evangelical Leaders
April 10th, 2008 § 4 Comments
This post may become a rant. We’ll just see.
A big part of my beef with populism is that it corrupts evangelical leaders, and I choose the verb corrupt for its precision. Populism rots a leader’s soul.
1. Populism substitutes the lowest common denominator for unity.
I’ve said that evangelical populists whip up people’s negative emotions, like resentment and suspicion, using carefully chosen enemies. The problems with “our society” are the fault of “the Hollywood elites” or some other class. I’ve also said that the populist can only evoke people’s positive emotions through sentimentality, using symbols that have nostalgic, tear-jerking potential.
This simplistic emotionalism enables large groups of people to feel united by cheering or booing. It’s easy to feel bonded while we cheer the armed forces or boo the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A leader just has to speak to his audience’s gut, and common cause has been achieved.
But evangelicals in America both need and desire a deep identification with Jesus Christ. They need the unity of the Holy Spirit, which is only attained through doctrinal purity and relational grace, through truth and love — the very highest things anyone can imagine. What sort of leadership tries to achieve any other kind of oneness?
2. Populism substitutes clichés for truth.
The much-touted evangelical passion for the Bible is now largely spent, not because average evangelicals don’t care what the Bible says but because their leaders won’t teach it to them. The vast majority of sermons preached in American churches quote biblical snatches, as if Scripture were a sacred Bartlett’s. Structurally, however, these quotations are not the focus of teaching, but are called upon to support the preacher’s points. They are little better than slogans.
This preaching strategy is unavoidable for a populist, who conceives of his audience as virtuously stupid. He can’t presume to teach The People, who already know everything they need through their vast common sense, and who are sick and tired of the university elites telling them what to think. The only thing he can do is remind them. After all, they don’t need to know the conjugation of Greek verbs, and their attention span is . . .
The average evangelical in America both needs and desires God’s word. In fourteen years of preaching, I have yet to encounter a single stupid person. I have heard a lot of stupid preachers, who use their audience’s education level as an excuse never to master the arts of communication. What sort of leadership ducks the responsibility to teach?
3. Populism substitutes manipulation for leadership.
Manipulation is control. Manipulation is arousing people’s emotions without paying deference to their intelligence. Manipulation is blame-shifting, making other classes responsible for cultural evils. Manipulation is flattering people’s self-regard. Manipulation is the attempt to modify people’s behavior without edifying their souls.
American evangelicals need spiritual leadership — and I am convinced that they’ll respond to the genuine article. What sort of leadership uses the tools of control?
The reason populism corrupts evangelical leaders is this: Populism is a lie. It tells The People that they are virtuous simply because they are The People. It tells them they are one when they are merely conformist. It tells them they have knowledge when they’ve only inherited a collection of Bible verses misapplied. And the worst populist lie of all is that The People are a herd instead of a body.
Can any leader believe such things without his soul rotting in cynicism?
Sentimentality And Emotional Death
April 3rd, 2008 § 4 Comments
Populism, the ethos among evangelicals, works most powerfully with negative emotions like resentment and suspicion. The populist appeal is for The People to rally because The Elites are out to get them. It’s an appeal to wounded pride.
But, to evoke positive emotions, populism leaves evangelicals with only one tool. Feelings such as gratitude, joy, and love aren’t compatible with wounded pride, but can only grow in the soil of humility. Which is why the populist tool for evoking positive emotions is sentimentality.
Novelist John Gardner defined sentimentality as “the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause.” Arousing sentiment is essential, he said of fiction. But when an emotion is “achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration” — sentimentality – it “rings false.” (The Art of Fiction, New York: Vintage Books, 1991, p 115.)
I’ll put the point bluntly. Evangelicals can’t seem to arouse good feelings among themselves without artistic cheating.
We have, for instance, this:
Your daughter has gone beddy-bye, and she’s snuggled head-to-head with Raggedy Ann. Hovering over her, almost patting her silken hair, is Jesus, looking like a kindly woodsman who happens to blow-dry his hair. And what is Jesus saying to your daughter? “I know the plans I have for you, etc., etc.”
You, the viewer, are Daddy or Mommy peeking in to check on your precious baby girl, only to realize that Jesus is already there.
This picture is all “message,” like any other piece of commercialized art. The emotion it seeks to arouse is good — relief and joy at God’s providential care for your children. But the picture does not provide “due cause” to achieve this emotion. It cheats. It goes for “Oh, how cute!” bypassing the more volatile “Oh, how defenseless!” Because the girl is safely upper-middle-class, nothing truly horrible hangs over her. And Jesus is reassuringly within the Anglo-Saxon gene pool.
There’s no desperation in that picture.
As opposed to this:
The Miraculous Draught of Fishesby Jacopo Bassano (1545) arouses many emotions, but they need sorting. (The National Gallery displays the work here.) One fisherman kneels in a posture that mixes helplessness, gratitude, and loyalty. Another, his features contorted in amazement, has just hopped onto Jesus’ boat. He has abandoned the three remaining fishermen, who have to struggle with the catch and their boat by themselves.
My feelings about Bassano’s Jesus are complicated. He does not appear to my eye first because his robe is a cool blue, and he is not at the center of the action. Even when I notice him, I don’t feel that he is open to me. His back is turned, and I only see his face in a severe profile. Emotionally, he is remote from the frenzy of activity among the fishermen, with his posture erect, his face serene, and his hand raised in blessing.
This painting doesn’t tell me what to feel. But it provokes many sentiments, and the more I reflect on them, the more force they have. I find myself responding to a King.
This is not a populist painting: Jesus is not “one of The People.” But he is in the ordinary. The painting’s complexities give it power.
The populist cannot trade in complexity. He controls his audience’s emotions with a false simplicity — us against them. He can arouse the uglier sentiments easily with slogans. But how can he arouse redeeming sentiments like gratitude when he has driven out the humility that gratitude requires?
It’s no wonder evangelical church life is so emotionally unsatisfying. With harangues against the godless, we sing our own virtues, and then with sentimentality we invite each other to rest in coffins of self-regard.
The Uses of Suspicion
March 27th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Populists are the virtuosi of ugly emotions. They always hit the right notes.
So, in examining the evangelical version of the populist aesthetic, I started with resentment, the pedal tone that rumbles underneath us-and-them rhetoric. Now we examine the populist use of a related chord, suspicion.
The formula is well-known: the elite few have not only amassed money and power for themselves (which we resent), they’re conspiring (we suspect) to use their unfair advantages to destroy our way of life.
Consider two quite different incidents of evangelical suspicion in response to films.
In 1989, evangelicals got wind of a Martin Scorsese film not yet finished, The Last Temptation of Christ. Lines from the screenplay and descriptions of scenes had leaked, and the way Christ was portrayed was shocking. So the grass-roots operations that had helped elect Ronald Reagan twice, and the elder George Bush once, swung into motion to protest the film.
The line I remember was, “Those people in Hollywood have gone too far this time!” The film confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Hollywood elites were out to discredit the faith. The massive protests marked a new phase of push-back in the culture wars. We were mad as heck, and we weren’t going to take it anymore.
But it was the evangelicals who went too far. Their protests ensured blanket free-media publicity for the film’s opening — and accomplished little else.
Moral: Negative emotions get the masses moving, but not always in the right direction. In the case of Last Temptation, using people’s suspicions to rally them for battle plugged the film, rather than sink it.
In 2004, Mel Gibson used evangelical church networks in an under-the-radar marketing campaign for his film, The Passion of the Christ. He gained the endorsements of prominent evangelical pastors, and held rough-cut screenings in large churches to invitation-only audiences. The campaign was a huge success.
I recall that the push to get on board with The Passion unleashed many evangelical sentiments. Some of the feelings were understandable — a sense that the film was a significant evangelistic opportunity, for instance. But others led to profound misjudgments. Just to take one example, there was a sense that this was “our film,” when it was really more from Roman Catholic traditions. Such distinctions seemed not to matter.
There was also a sense that Gibson had put himself at risk to produce “our film,” both in terms of his finances and his career. I remember people talking about what “Hollywood” could “do to Mel” because he had made this film. “So we’d better get out there and support him, make the film a success.” I heard this kind of thing from lay people as well as pastors. The Passion became a way “we” could hit back at “them.”
Evangelicals heavily invested their credibility in Gibson. They defended him, in particular, against charges that the film was anti-Semitic. So when Gibson made anti-Semitic remarks during his DUI arrest on July 28, 2006, there was nowhere for evangelicals to run. How were we going to defend “our guy?”
Moral: Suspicion drives groups to choose their friends based on their enemies. Gibson’s testimony of life-change sounded a lot better when he was overturning the chessboard in Hollywood than it did when he was railing against the Jews.
I’m not saying that Last Temptation was really a good film, while The Passion was really a bad one. I’m not saying that Scorsese was really sincere and well-motivated, while Gibson was really just a slick manipulator. I’ve never seen either film, nor have I looked into the hearts of the two men, who have both been held to account for their public words and deeds.
I am saying that evangelicals got very public black eyes in both cases because of their addiction to us-and-them populism. They picked both fights and friends on the basis of point-scoring opportunism.
I am also saying that evangelicals learned populism from politics, not from the Bible. The uses of suspicion for organizing the grass-roots, for fund-raising, and for Sunday morning fulminations, are many. If the goal is to keep people’s view of their own team inflated, then populism works.
But if the goal is to soften souls — which the Bible says our goal ought to be — then the uses of suspicion are few.
Evangelicals, Populism, and Resentment
March 20th, 2008 § 2 Comments
Evangelicals are hard to understand without reference to populism (as we’ve discussed here). So let’s delve into the populist aesthetic and see how it works. Consider the usefulness of ugly emotions.
The quintessential populist speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan in 1896, at the Democratic convention that nominated him for president. The issue that year was the gold standard, which Bryan opposed because he said a limited money supply harmed farmers and laborers. His speech bristles with at least two kinds of resentment.
On the surface, Bryan expresses resentment of wealth. He turns to the pro-gold delegates in the convention hall and says, “When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course.” Populism is often reduced to this formulation, that the rich are too rich. But Bryan is talking about something deeper.
He targets the issue of status, asserting a new definition of a “business man.” Notice the socially explosive contrasts:
The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain . . . .
That’s powerful stuff, not because it’s about money, but because it’s about status — the relative worth of rural and urban people. The paragraph expresses people’s resentment when their culture fades under the dominance of something alien. Here’s another explosive moment from Bryan’s speech:
You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
This rhetoric aims at the gut. It pits one way of life against another.
The populist aesthetic of resentment has not changed after 112 years of campaigning. Here is Governor Mike Huckabee, the evangelical former-candidate, in a speech at an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa before the caucuses last January:
If you go to caucus Thursday night and give me an opportunity to come out of here winning this caucus, I am going to tell you, it will stun the political chattering class — all those folks out there in the Wall Street to Washington axis of power who love to predict what you are going to do, who have it all figured out, because after all, money is what makes politics. It is all about the money.
It’s only “about the money” for Huckabee to the extent that money is a symbol of status. Notice his word choices, aimed at the guts of the Elks Lodge members. There is an “axis of power” — power over you – that runs from “Wall Street to Washington” — not the locations but the class markers. The rich people in the axis “love to predict what you are going to do.”
More from the same speech: “Well, I know I have been outspent in this state 20 to 1. I understand what that means. Just like some of you understand that your whole life you feel like you have been outspent 20 to 1 in about everything you have ever tried to do.” See the heads nod vigorously. “That’s right. Everything I have ever tried to do.”
On Super Tuesday, after winning several southern states, Huckabee linked his constituency’s anger at the party establishment to the obvious biblical images. As reported in the New York Times he said, “Tonight, we are making sure America understands that sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.” He took a specific shot at Mitt Romney: “And we’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.” Gold again.
On some other blog, they can argue about the economics of the middle class. I’m not saying that everything’s financially rosy in the average household.
I am saying that evangelicals now use a political rhetoric that flatters “true believers” and creates whole classes of enemies they can blame for their woes. Wall Street wants to buy the Iowa caucuses. Washington bureaucrats are conspiring to destroy the family. Hollywood elites are imposing their values on The People.
I have two questions:
1. Does populism leave the evangelical soul softer or harder?
2. Does an agnostic bond trader on Wall Street know that there’s a difference between crucifying Jesus on the cross of Calvary and crucifying farmers on a cross of gold? Will the farmers be able to help him distinguish the two?
By the way, in 1896 William McKinley won the presidency and Bryan lost.
Evangelicals and Populist Suicide
March 13th, 2008 § 12 Comments
Decades ago, evangelicals and their hard-bitten brethren, the fundamentalists, rode off the cultural cliff, and the flag that snapped in the wind all the way down bore the stripes of populism.
We’ve discussed here and here how believers are afraid of interacting with American culture. Fundamentalists shun the larger culture because they fear the contamination of worldliness. The position of evangelicals is softer. They adopt the forms of the consumer culture, using TV and pop idioms freely, but only in a parallel media universe that mimics the secular originals.
Believers have many historical models for participating in contemporary culture while living out pure doctrine, ethics, and spirituality — models like the Princeton theologians we sketched last week. But both evangelicals and fundamentalists have rejected these models. We no longer produce leaders with the cultural depth of a J. Gresham Machen. The exceptions, like Francis Schaeffer, are glaring.
I believe we have rejected our historical models because we now see them as elitist. To hold the attitudes that education and the life of the mind should be important values in the local church, that the arts should be a vibrant part of church life, or that genuine scholarship in the pulpit is the least a congregation should expect, is to incur many evangelicals’ wrath.
Regular people don’t see the point of such fancy talk. And if regular people don’t see the point, then there is no point. (I’m not slamming “regular people” here. I’m articulating what I think has become an ethos. I happen to think “regular people” will provide ways forward for evangelicalism.)
This expectation that spiritual leaders will set everything according to the standards of “regular people” is new, and distinctly American. It results from the evangelical embrace of populism.
I use the term populism in a specific sense. I refer to the political and cultural aesthetic that traces at least as far back as Andrew Jackson. This aesthetic transcends parties and factions, and has expressed itself across the ideological spectrum. It has these basic characteristics:
1. Populism is agrarian, southern, and western.
Jackson was from Tennessee, and was far removed from the aristocracy of Virginia and Massachusetts. He cast the aristocratic John Quincy Adams out of the presidency, and the shindig after Jackson’s first inauguration left the walls of the White House smeared with cheese. Other populist figures in American history have been William Jennings Bryan (born in Illinois, moved to Nebraska), and Huey Long (governor of, and later U.S. senator from, Louisiana.)
The fact that evangelicalism is strongest in rural, southern, and western regions is not coincidental. Evangelicals have deeply anti-urban attitudes.
2. Populism feeds on suspicion of corporate, academic, financial, and cultural “elites.”
Jackson was bent on destroying the Bank of the United States. Bryan made his career opposing the gold standard. Among this year’s presidential contenders, the most virulent populists were John Edwards, pitting the “two Americas” against each other, and Mike Huckabee, pitting evangelicals against Republican insiders. Populists hate power “in the hands of a few.”
Evangelical fear of “cultural elites” needs no elaboration. Used as a money-raising appeal, its effect is primal.
3. Populism is animated by resentment.
One of the things that makes populists so compelling is that they feel the resentments of a particular class personally. Jackson seemed to draw life from anger. Bryan identified closely with the plight of agrarian people in an increasingly industrial society. George Wallace was not compelling because he was a racist, as people outside the south imagine, but because his hostility to northern liberals was completely sincere. (Gay Talese is enlightening on this point about Wallace in his memoir, A Writer’s Life.)
I may be flirting with controversy here, but . . . evangelicals thrive on their own cultural resentments. The Hollywood elite. The scientific establishment. The Ivy League elites. Evangelicals both cherish and resent their status as outsiders.
4. Populism can evoke positive emotions only through sentimentality.
As rhetoricians, populists gain quick and questionable access to wells of loyalty through cheap symbolism. The flag. “And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” Jimmy Carter (not James E.) in his cardigan sweater, carrying his own luggage. Bill Clinton’s suddenly thickening accent.
Evangelical sentimentality is egregious. The juxtaposition of the stars and stripes with the cross. The happy-clappy music. The weepy testimonies. The southern pronunciation of CHEE-zus. Our dependence on these tricks is an embarrassment.
Line up Machen against these characteristics and he fails on every count. He was from the northeast. He was an Ivy League elite. The notes he hit in his rhetoric were not resentment and sentimentality. He made his case with scholarship, and based his appeals on principled reasoning.
This is probably why the Princeton leaders lost influence among fundamentalists, as the voices against modernism became less theologically informed and more populist. Like William Jennings Bryan, who turned the Scopes trial into a media frenzy and lost the cultural contest to Clarence Darrow — lost it big time.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll examine such issues as how the populist aesthetic works, how specific evangelical leaders like Mike Huckabee use it, what populism does to local churches, and why populism will always fail. I will not argue for a return to elitism. Still less will I argue that we need “another Machen,” or “another Princeton.”
But I will argue that evangelicals are deluded about the flag they carried off the cultural cliff. Their flag did not proclaim, “Jesus Saves!” Their flag said, “Small Towns Forever!”
