Saving the Protestant Ethic by Andrew Lynn;

Author:Andrew Lynn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Channeling Evangelicals Away from Progressive Activism

The second tactic employed is perhaps the least conventional of the three. Culture-producing organizations involved in the faith and work organization see their promotion of meaningful work as part of a proxy war against a handful of left-leaning religious figures. Faith and work leaders position faith and work theology as vehicle to shore up greater loyalties to the economic system at large. Success in cultivating these loyalties, according to the logic at work here, then builds resistance to the beckoning call of the “evangelical left” and their anti-capitalist sentiments.

Some context is important here. For several decades, journalists and other observers of American evangelicalism have popularized notions of a certain fragility to the conservative voting patterns of a younger generation of evangelicals. Political analyses since at least 2004 have generated headlines like “Emphasis Shifts for a New Breed of Evangelicals,” “Why Young Evangelicals Are Leaving the Church,” “Millennials: Why the Young Religious Right Is Leaning Left.”25 Though political scientists and pollsters report this voting bloc actually shows no indication of fragility, there remains among older conservative leaders a haunting sense that the “youth” of the subculture are on the verge of deserting the traditional conservativism of their parents. A revolving list of hot political issues are typically portrayed as the instigators of unraveling the coalition, whether poverty, human trafficking, racial reconciliation, global aid, or climate change. Typically, these accounts include references to a handful of religious left leaders always threatening to poach conservative youth: Ron Sider, Tony Campelo, Jim Wallis, and Shane Claiborne.

Leaders of the organizations discussed above all perceived themselves engaged in a struggle against these left-leaning leaders. Strangely, I never witnessed any of the actual ideas of these left-leaning leaders ever directly engaged: this struggle takes the form of shadowboxing an opponent lurking just out of view. I likely would not have known these figures bore any relevance to the movement had I not asked all the movement leaders I interviewed whom they saw themselves working against. The Acton Institute leaders, in response to this question, named Wallis’s Sojourners group, Sider’s Evangelicals for Social Action, and the left-oriented Center for Public Justice. Likewise, the director of Kern’s Faith, Work, and Economics efforts identified the rise of “social justice mentality” among some Christian colleges inciting the concern that drove Kern’s involvement: “So if you looked at the popularity of Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, or Shane Claiborne, in some ways there’s a different argument being made in the case of free enterprise and the moral case for work, rather than saying, effectively, some form of redistribution is the best way to help the poor.” Similarly, Kern’s director of faith and work programming pointed to an American Enterprise Institute video as reflecting the preferred response to social issues that could avoid the “social justice mentality.”26 This partnership was spelled out more directly in a 2011 Philanthropy Today article that recounts Kern’s partnership with the American Enterprise Institute as motivated by worries that younger evangelicals “no longer see the connections between following God and serving others in a free marketplace.

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