Social Justice Goes To Church by Jon Harris

Author:Jon Harris [Harris, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion and Politics
Publisher: Ambassador International
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

NORTHERN REVIVALISM IN THE 1970S

MAINSTREAM EVANGELICALS OFTEN PORTRAYED THEIR more progressive associates as “liberal” for harboring at best, a “left-of-center” position, or at worst, a “socio-economic philosophy approximat[ing] neo-Marxist economics.”1 Young evangelicals reinforced this narrative by publicly criticizing political conservatives. In 1976, Jim Wallis and Wes Granberg-Michaelson warned of plans to form an “alarming political initiative by the evangelical far right” which included Congressman John Conlan and Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. They were concerned that sincere Christians would naively involve themselves in “political purposes” for the furthering of an “idolatrous mingling of church and state.”2 Of course, this did not seem to be a problem when Senator Mark Hatfield and Jim Wallis partnered to further progressive political goals.

The evangelical left did not see themselves as guilty of their own criticisms since they believed their political agenda uniquely transcended earthly understandings and categories. Their brand of “biblical radicalism” rendered “old distinctions and disputes quite irrelevant,” including common terms like “liberal” and “conservative.”3 Ron Sider “linked social justice to commitment to the authority of Scripture,” not allegiance to a political party.4 In a 1974 article entitled “Biblical Politics,” Jim Wallis wrote that it was actually dangerous for Christians to “embrace a liberal political philosophy” because it could facilitate the “church becoming a power of the world” instead of the “kingdom of God.”5

Convincing mainstream evangelicals that political ideas associated with the revolutionary New Left were, in fact, biblical, was a difficult task. If what progressives believed about social justice were true, it would mean that the most respected evangelical preachers and evangelists in recent memory had collectively erred in their understanding of basic truths like sin and the gospel. Such an incredible insinuation demanded something more than the authoritative claims of a handful of young activists and scholars. If progressives could demonstrate their ideas were legitimized by heroes within the American evangelical tradition, their argument would be more palpable. To accomplish this, they pointed to the Northern revivalists of the nineteenth century.

Preceding the modernist controversy, which solidified fundamentalists against the “social gospel” of theologically compromised mainline denominations, there existed an evangelical tradition which shared similarities with the radicals of the 1970s. Before what historian Timothy Smith called “the Great Reversal,” in which theologically conservative Christians abandoned social action, mid-century preachers like “Edward Beecher, E. N. Kirk, Albert Barnes, George B. Cheever, [Charles] Finney and William Arthur” furrowed “the ground from which the social gospel sprang.”6 Timothy Smith’s 1957 book, Revivalism and Social Reform, along with David Moberg’s 1972 work The Great Reversal, “helped evangelicals rediscover . . . a dimension of ministry largely abandoned during evangelicalism’s fundamentalist phase.”7

The Great Reversal followed on the heals of a string of “critical analysis of evangelicalism itself, by evangelicals” in the late sixties.8 David Moberg, a sociologist from Marquette University and signer of the 1973 Chicago Declaration, argued for a reconciliation between “warring factions” who disagree “on the question of whether the gospel is personal or social.”9 Moberg believed the “revivalism of a century ago was clearly related to the fulfillment of Christian social responsibility.

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