Having had the weekend to further reflect on the Evangelical Manifesto, I am happy (and relieved) to report that I still concur with my initial assessment. After a few more perusals, however, three new observations come to mind.
To begin with the document might have been more aptly entitled “The Evangelical Intellectuals’ Manifesto.” It’s a thoughtful and challenging piece, full of self-criticism and open-ended questions. In this respect it brings to the fore a side of this culture which most non-Evangelicals never knew existed.
Televangelists, Megachurches, Jesus Campers, scandal-plagued pastors, and bestselling authors peddling low-wattage Christological pulp—those are things that most non-Evangelicals knew existed.
But beneath that all (or above that all) can be discerned a not inconsiderable network of serious Evangelical theologians, institutions of higher education, discussion groups, artists, cultivated laypersons, and so forth.
I encounter many of the types of people who composed the Manifesto at scholarly conferences and assorted college campuses. What are they like? Generally, quite a lot of fun. Many come from thoroughly respectable drinking cultures and welcome into alcoholic fellowship believers and non-believers alike.
In private conversation, they tend to be fiercely critical of the demagogues whose simplifications they view as an embarrassment to, and degradation of, their theological tradition. Far less doctrinaire than prevailing Blue-State stereotypes may suggest, they tend to be very open to discussing alternative viewpoints.
In any case, what I think we are seeing in the Manifesto is a coming-out party of sorts. A more professorial and thoughtful strain of Evangelicalism is finding its public voice (Please note that “professorial” and “thoughtful” are not necessarily synonyms for “liberal”).
And if history is any guide, it is a voice that many will try to ruthlessly suppress. The intellectuals will be accused of “going soft,” “sleeping with the enemy,” “Uncle Tomism” and, most seriously, "heresy." Such are, and always have been, the wages of religious intellectualism.
The authors of the Manifesto clearly want to re-think and re-shape contemporary Evangelical culture and politics as represented by the Religious Right. As if any further sign was needed of restlessness in Evangelical America this marks the third such challenge in nearly as many months.
The first was issued at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. The second, and most successful, has been the work of the group Faith in Public Life that sponsored the Compassion Forum.
Finally, while I have been generally approving of the Manifesto let me call attention to a shortcoming: it advances a shallow reading of secularism. True, the text affirms the right of secularists to participate in the “civil public square” (p. 17).
Elsewhere though, it takes a page from the Mitt Romney playbook: “As this global public square emerges, we see two equal and opposite errors to avoid: coercive secularism on one side, once typified by communism and now by the softer but strict French-style secularism; and religious extremism on the other side, typified by Islamist violence.”
Not all secularism is coercive of course and the setting of laïcité in parallel with jihadism is preposterous. The French have their flaws. Their tendency to relentlessly impose a Gallic monoculture on the multicultures of their citizenry is one of them. But they do not count among their vices the savagery, disdain for human rights, and infatuation with slaughter that prevails among the extremists.
The authors of the Manifesto note that civil discourse entails an openness to self-correction. Should they survive the forthcoming onslaught from their co-religionists (and I hope they do) they will need to think more seriously about the positive political and cultural contributions of secularism.
(For more information about religion and the candidates check out Faith 2008 by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.)
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