8. Evangelical and Catholic Cooperation in the Public Arena
As the size and power of America’s central government have continued to expand and as the weapons of that government have been turned against religious people, it is understandable that conservative Catholics and evangelicals have come to recognize the importance of greater cooperation. Several facets of this newly evolving evangelical-Catholic partnership have great significance.
What were some of the forces that helped bring about this growing cooperation? Who are some of the key players? Why do some evangelicals oppose it? What are some of the arguments in favor of increased partnership?
ESSAY 8
EVANGELICAL AND CATHOLIC COOPERATION IN THE PUBLIC ARENA
Ronald Nash
Cooperation between evangelicals and Roman Catholics in America’s public arena continues to expand in spite of the numerous theological differences between the two groups. That warrants a look at some of the forces that helped to bring it about, at some of the people who have become players in this growing cooperation, at some of the reasons offered by evangelical critics who oppose it, and at some of the arguments that support the partnership. One of the things I fmd most fascinating in all this is the contrast between where America stood religiously, politically, and culturally in 1960, when Americans elected their first Roman Catholic president, and in 1993, when two vety liberal Southern Baptists ascended to the American presidency and vice presidency.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, many American evangelicals and fundamentalists were gravely concerned about how John F. Kennedy’s Roman Catholic beliefs might affect the way he would govern America. Now those fears appear a bit ludicrous in light of what is now known about Kennedy’s indifference to both his religious and marital vows. One reason Kennedy won the 1960 election was-his success in deflecting concerns about his Catholicism. His most important feat in this matter was convincing many conservative Protestants that he really did believe in an “absolute” separation of church and state. But, as evangelical author Os Guinness has noted, Kennedy’s commitment to the separation of church and state was absolute for reasons that were poorly understood in 1960. Kennedy “was largely uninterested in religion. With little personal faith to relate to public life, his sense of conflict [between church and state] was minimal.”1 Repeating a joke of sorts heard from many Catholics, Guinness explains that the lesson many Catholics learned from Kennedy’s presidency “was that you don’t have to be Catholic to be president.”2
Thirty-two years later, a member of a Southern Baptist church occupies the White House, and large numbers of evangelicals and Roman Catholics are appalled by what they see as his contribution to the continuing decline of morality in America. Continuing questions and alleged revelations about his
character and the support that his administration has lent to various left-wing causes—including the advancement of the homosexual, pro-abortion, radical feminist, and politically correct agendas, along with the assaults his supporters have made against traditional religious and family values—makes it safe to predict that if Clinton seeks reelection in 1996, millions of the same Protestants who voted against Kennedy will welcome the opportunity to vote for a conservative Roman Catholic such as William Bennett.3 In my judgment, this type of shift in the political thinking of America’s conservative Protestants is striking, at least to anyone old enough to remember the election of 1960.
So we have two presidents who, while ostensibly representing two religious constituencies that clashed in 1960, are nonetheless similar in many ways, including some that are not discussed publicly in polite company. They stand as bookends on either side of a period in which gigantic changes have occurred.
CHANGES WITHIN THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH BETWEEN 1960 AND 1993
Many believe that the single most important factor behind the dramatic changes within American Catholicism since 1960 was the Vatican II church council that took place between October 1962 and December 1965. Though some portrayed the council as an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to face up to the problems of modernity, theologically liberal and politically radical Catholics interpreted the results of the council in ways that created enormous confusion within Catholic circles and helped encourage movement toward more liberal political and theological beliefs and practices.
Roman Catholic author Kevin Perrotta is understandably reluctant to place too much blame for his churcII’s recent problems upon a Catholic church council. Nonetheless, he admits that Roman Catholicism has been much more open to change since 1965, including changes that have hardly been praiseworthy for Christendom. In Perrotta’s mind, the growing elasticity of Catholic belief and practice after Vatican II must also be traced to significant changes in American culture:
Catholics let down their guard just at the moment when family life was losing its honored place in American culture, the sexual revolution was entering a more radical phase, selfism was being proclaimed more blatantly, the secular feminist movement was being launched, and the tone of public life was becoming more hostile than ever before to Christian values. Entering the mainstream, many Catholics were carried along by these powerful anti-Christian currents.4
During the sixties, Perrotta reports, Catholic attendance at Sunday services dropped from 75 percent of total members to 50 percent. Between 1966 and 1978, some ten thousand priests resigned horn the priesthood. The number of religious sisters declined between 1965 and 1985 by some seventy thousand, effecting a major crisis in Roman Catholic school systems. Enrollment in Catholic schools declined by more than a third between 1965 and 1983.5 By the middle of the eighties,
The percentage of Catholics attending church had stabilized at a level much lower than before [Vatican II]. The exodus of priests and sisters had slowed, but the number of applicants remained below replacement level of those retiring. Some religious congregations of these groups seemed bound for extinction. Thus, while the number of Americans who identify themselves as Catholics was larger than ever, their degree of commitment, as evidenced in faithfulness to corporate worship and willingness to leave all to serve the Kingdom of God, was much less than it was before the council.6
Among Roman Catholics, the rate of both divorce and sexual activity outside marriage jumped dramatically. Equally disturbing for Perrotta, “A national organization of Catholics promoting abortion appeared, as did two national organizations of Catholic homosexuals which did not regard the Christian prohibition of homosexual practice as an absolute.”7 Large numbers of American Catholics now reject the moral and social teaching of their church.8 Many Catholics simply ignore what their church teaches about birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and sexual chastity outside of marriage.
During the three decades under review, Roman Catholicism has also changed theologically. Conservative Protestants and Catholics used to share a common worldview that saw the world as the creation of an Almighty God who has the power and the will to act supernaturally within His creation. Roman Catholics and evangelicals used to share a common commitment to many essential Christian beliefs, including the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ, and the final judgment that would separate humans into saved and lost. But this too has changed. In the last few decades, large numbers of Catholic professors, priests, and sisters have adopted ideas from various forms of Protestant liberalism. This has led many Catholic diinkers to adopt a hostile biblical criticism that has compromised the inspiration and authority of Scripture along with an antisupernaturalism that rejects the essential miracles of the Christian faith. As Perrotta explains, “Ideological trends in theology—feminism, the friending of Christianity with either Marxism or classical liberalism, secular trends in Scripture study, remissive trends in moral teaching—all represent serious and historically novel departures from Christian orthodoxy. ”9
This loss of faith is now apparent on the campuses of most of the best-known Catholic universities.
Recent Catholic theologians who have questioned the teaching authority of the pope and traditional Catholic formulations of Christian faith have generally advocated reinterpretations of Christianity which are essentially similar to those of secularizing Protestant theologians. Thus many Catholic and Protestant theologians find the supernatural aspects of Christian teaching implausible for modern men and women, are uncomfortable with the exclusive claims of historic Christianity,10 see the Scriptures as basically human and culture-bound religious documents, downplay the effects of the fall of man and the need for personal faith in Christ, and recast the Christian message in terms of feminism or leftist revolution."
Consequently, “Many Catholic institutions of higher learning do not accept any responsibility for offering Catholic teaching in their doctrinal and moral courses.”12 Such Catholic schools, Perrotta warns, have become de facto secularized schools.
It is the battle over this kind of unbelief that is the real issue in the dispute between radical and liberal Catholics and the pope. Richard John Neuhaus was correct when he pointed out that John Paul II “is exercised not about dissent but about apostasy.'"3 “It conveys a feeling of relief,” Neuhaus continues,
that at last somebody, John Paul, is calling the [Catholic] church to order, is seizing a few unruly adolescents by the scruffs of their necks and knocking some sense into their heads. In short, there is a sense of being fed up, of having had enough, of refusing to take it anymore. No doubt many Catholics, along with church authorities, feel they have been subjected to extreme provocations. When, for example, at the end of the 1970s the Vatican finally withdrew from the European theologian Hans Kung the license to represent himself as a Roman Catholic theologian, the response of many Roman Catholics was to wonder why it took so long.14
Though this chapter does not have these kinds of religious developments as its major focus, the theological tensions within Catholicism have helped to create a climate in which Catholic and Protestant conservatives have become more aware of the important common ground they share. Although evangelicals and traditional Roman Catholics are far apart on many doctrinal issues, as several chapters in the present volume attempt to show, their common commitment to tenets of the historic Christian creeds means they are much closer to each other on those matters than they are either to Protestant or Catholic liberals. That fact is not without relevance in the growing evan-gelical-Catholic partnership on political and social issues.
American Catholicism has also changed politically during the last three decades. Evangelicals who were concerned about John F. Kennedy’s liberalism greatly underestimated the conservatism of America’s Catholics. During the fifties and sixties, one writer reports, conservative Catholics “wore their religious identity as a badge of honor. ”15 What the author means is that many Americans thirty years ago were social conservatives precisely because they were Catholic. One way to get a sense of this is to go back and study old issues of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, National Review. Conservative Catholics ranked among this country’s strongest opponents of Communism. They were thoughtful enemies of secularism, humanism, and the liberal welfare state.16 When pollsters began to test public opinion on the abortion issue in the early sixties, Roman Catholic opposition was far greater than that found among Protestants.17
But during the last three decades, large cracks have appeared within the political and social thinking of educated Catholics as various ideologies such as neo-Marxism, the New Left, and democratic socialism began to have a greater impact in Catholic circles.18 The 1985 Pastoral Letter on the American economy published by the Catholic bishops of America was one indication of how things were going within the hierarchy of the American church. The letter was essentially a neo-Marxist critique of capitalism coupled with a plea for an expansion of the liberal welfare state and continued redistribution of wealth.
After interviewing a number of the bishops who supported the letter, Catholic writer Dinesh D’Souza published an article revealing that the typical bishop whose authority was being used to support highly questionable economic policies knew less about economics than a college freshman in the third week of a basic economics course. The title of D’Souza’s article, “The Bishop of Pawns,” was his way of suggesting that the real force behind the drafts of the pastoral letter were a few radical churchmen and intellectuals who had used the bishops’ goodwill and general economic illiteracy to score a public relations victory for their left-wing agenda. Whereas many Catholic laypeople may have thought the pastoral letter reflected the bishops’ detailed grasp of the issues, it turned out—D’Souza discovered—that the bishops themselves had no idea what they were talking about.19
Growing Catholic support for more hard-core Marxist views has been apparent in the unexpectedly rapid spread of liberation theology within important segments of Catholic (and Protestant) thinking. Put in the simplest possible terms, liberation theology is a movement that downplays the historic, doctrinal side of Christianity and emphasizes instead the importance of Christian action on behalf of poor and oppressed people. Liberation theology can appear attractive to dedicated Christians who find it easy to identify with the underdogs of the world. And what group of underdogs deserves compassion and help more than the poor and oppressed?
One thing that liberationists have tried to cover over is that their position has brought many of them to the brink of theological heresy. Many Catholic liberationists have been condemned by the Vatican for denying the Christian churcII’s historic understanding of such essential beliefs as the Atonement and Resurrection. Many Protestant liberationists are heretical in similar ways.
Supporters of liberation theology want people to overlook the heavy Marxist presence in their system. They want people to think that liberation theology is simply a product of conscientious and compassionate Christians demonstrating their love and concern for the poor and oppressed. In truth, however, liberationists appear to care only about the poor and oppressed people who interest them; they never had anything to say about poor and oppressed people in Marxist countries. Liberationist efforts to address the issue of poverty have always done so from an unabashed and unrepentant Marxist perspective. What finally produced the collapse of liberation thought outside the U.S. and Astern Europe was the set of incredible events that some now call “the revolutions of 1989.” The sudden sweeping changes that affected Eastern Europe and that now have stabbed deeply into the heart of the former Soviet Union have unveiled once and for all what many economists and social theorists have argued for years: the bankruptcy of socialism. It helped neither the reputation nor the morale of the advocates of liberation theology that the revolutions of 1989 and the new Russian revolution of 1991 repudiated the very ideas they held dear.
Many better-known Latin American liberationists are now distancing themselves from their former beliefs and embracing, however tentatively, an idea once deemed unthinkable: that capitalism just might have something to offer the world’s poor after all.
North American liberationists, however, are more intractable in their fanatical attachment to socialism. Those who dominate the mainline Protestant denominations and their left-wing allies within Roman Catholicism are not especially happy these days. They and their institutions may well be the last vestiges of the now discredited version of liberation theology. Their type of liberation theology supported means that were counterproductive because they impeded genuine and lasting progress toward the desired goal of genuine liberation. Liberationists understood little of how the poor may be delivered from economic oppression, opting only for repeatedly smaller pieces of an economic pie that, they insisted, could never grow larger. They were disturbingly complacent about democracy and noticeably lax about how the Christian faith deals with the most important kind of liberation— liberation from sin.20
Interestingly, the first shots in the Catholic battle over liberation theology were fired by John Paul II in his address to the General Conference of Latin American Bishops at Puebla, Mexico, in early 1979. The pope criticized efforts to politicize the gospel. He warned about people who depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle. This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive from Nazareth, does not tally with the church’s catechesis. . . . [Jesus] unequivocally rejects recourse to violence. He opens his message to conversion to all. . . . His mission ... has to do with complete and integral salvation through a love that brings transformation, peace, pardon, and reconciliation.21
Throughout the 1980s, Catholic supporters of liberation theology did everything they could to counter obvious Vatican opposition to their movement. The details of this debate are presented in my book, Beyond Liberation Theology, with coauthor Humberto Belli, a Nicaraguan Roman Catholic who is now minister of education in the Latin American nation that saw the Marxist Sandinistas use liberation theology as a tool in the perpetuation of their power.22 But any doubts about where the pope stood on these matters was removed completely in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus23 and the 1992 “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” As Robert Sirico, a Paulist priest and president of the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, observes, the new Catechism instructs Catholics that “they must take account of their pastors’ belief that economic systems ordered around the idea of individual liberty and limited government also tend to promote the kind of moral virtues and social relationships that the church is interested in advancing.”24 As Sirico explains, “The Catechism makes clear that there will be no turning back from the developments of church social teaching made by Centesimus Annus, the 1991 encyclical that excited controversy by its explicit rejection of a third way between capitalism and socialism.”25 To summarize this section, the influx of theological liberalism into the Catholic church has helped American Catholics realize the important common theological ground they have with biblically minded evangelicals. The growing support of many priests, bishops, and professors for lefr-wing political theories has helped to produce a similar appreciation of Catholic conservatives for their cultural soul mates within evangelicalism. In this second case, however, something new has been added. Because evangelical social thought has tended to lag far behind the social and cultural writings of conservative Catholics, a number of conservative Catholic writers have occasionally functioned as mentors to a growing number of conservative evangelical social activists. A short list of such Catholic thinkers would have to include Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel.26
CHANGES WITHIN AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM BETWEEN 1960 AND 1993
The changes in Roman Catholicism just noted are matched by equally dramatic alterations within conservative Protestantism. Some of these changes are more relevant to a different kind of writing and must therefore be passed over quickly. In 1960, evangelicals and fundamentalists were still carrying on a civil war of sorts. Evangelical thinkers like Carl Henry, editor of Christianity Today, were pressing a scholarly assault against liberalism and neoorthodoxy. Some fundamentalist leaders acted as though every evangelical was a closet-liberal of some type. Some evangelicals responded as though the fundamentalist leaders were undereducated bigots with chips on their shoulders. It was not a happy time for conservative Protestantism in America.27
Thirty years later there really are some people around who insist on calling themselves evangelicals when their view of Scripture or some important Christian doctrines fall short of the evangelical test. Disciples of the “fighting fundamentalists” of three or four decades ago have not changed; they have simply shifted their hostility toward dissenting fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, whom some describe as “the most dangerous man in America.”28 The evangelicals and fundamentalists who are in the middle of these two extremes continue to move closer together, both theologically and politically. The mention of Jerry Falwell serves as a reminder that in 1960, almost no cme outside of Lynchburg had ever heard of the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church. The same was true of Pat Robertson, Francis Schaeffer, and a host of other evangelical pacesetters of today. The first notice a young lawyer named Charles Colson would receive occurred when people began to think of him as Richard Nixon’s White House hatchet man. Still another indication of how far we’ve come in thirty years is that back in 1960 the explosive influence of the charismatic movement still lay in the future.
Although it is important to remember such things, these particular points of information are not especially relevant to the concerns of this chapter. One difference between sixties-style evangelicalism and our situation in 1993 is the contemporary abandonment of the political and cultural apathy of earlier evangelicals.
Within the lifetime of many readers of this book, evangelicals and fundamentalists regarded many of America’s social problems as unworthy of their attention. This widespread disinterest in culture, society, and politics could be traced to a variety of causes. For some, it was a function of eschatological beliefs that taught that Christ’s return for the church at the Rapture could occur at any moment, an event that would plunge the remaining world into the horrors of the tribulation period.29 Since the best of human culture could come to naught in the next seven years, why waste one’s time trying to improve it or save it? But a more significant reason for evangelical apathy in such matters seems to have been the lack of any widespread grounding of such Christians in the kind of worldview thinking encouraged so successfully in the ministry of Francis Schaeffer.30
Of course, evangelical social apathy thirty years ago existed in a world that was much different from today. Christian parents were concerned about a sexual and moral permissiveness that seems tame compared to today’s moral climate. Three decades ago, schools did what they were supposed to do—namely, teach the content of essential subjects. Any teacher found distributing condoms or describing homosexual acts as a valid alternative to heterosexual marriage would have been fired on the spot.
Once Christians recognized their obligation to become social and political activists, something surprising began to happen: some evangelicals began to align themselves with the very liberal forces in America responsible for the disintegration of American society. The disintegration of the African-American family in America and the massive deterioration of the quality of life of America’s poor is a direct, even if unintended, consequence of the misguided “compassion” of America’s social liberals.31
Many socially active Christians lack a solid understanding of the social, political, philosophical, and economic issues that underlie effective public policy. It is one thing to care about the poor and to desire to help them in meaningful ways. But if we misunderstand the foundational issues, we risk supporting policies that will result in more harm being dome to the poor.
It is bad enough that evangelicalism has been polarized by the continuing leftward drift of people who describe themselves as descendants of the Old Testament prophets. But unlike the biblical prophets of old, these evangelical leftists have aligned themselves with the very liberal statist establishment that is helping to destroy America economically and culturally. I will have more to say about this point shortly. For now, I must be content simply to note the parallels between the leftward movement of evangelicals and proponents of identical views within the Roman Catholic church. Even those who might dispute my analysis must concur that both evangelicalism and Catholicism today are in the midst of serious conflicts over important economic, political, and social issues.32
Unfortunately, the misadventures of contemporary Roman Catholic theology have their parallel within evangelicalism. Evangelicalism must now do battle with liberalizing tendencies within the broader evangelical movement. This can be seen in a diluted view of Scriptural authority as evangelical professors experiment with positions that deny or compromise biblical inerrancy and indulge a fascination with a neoliberal view of divine, special revelation that denies God any ability to communicate true propositions to human beings.33 Occasionally, one encounters evangelical professors who promote variants of the finite god of process theology34 or the Marxist god of liberation theology35 or the pantheistic “god” of feminist theology.36 Outside of evangelical education institutions, evangelical relief and development organizations often do a fine job of providing material assistance to needy people around the world but regrettably fail to accompany this material help with the gospel.37 It seems clear that evangelicalism has acquired some theological baggage that few of us anticipated back in 1960.
But evangelicalism also surprised everyone, including its enemies, by returning to the focus of national attention. As Kenneth Wald explains,
Of all the shifts and surprises in contemporary political life, perhaps none was so wholly unexpected as the political resurgence of evangelical Protestantism in the 1970s. Modernization theory had led many observers to treat traditional religion as a spent force in the United States and to discount its influence in the real world of national politics. Like other predictions associated with modernization theory, this assessment was rudely challenged by evidence that evangelical Christianity had achieved new strength and was ready to assert that power in political activity. The nomination of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the rise to national notice of organizations such as “Moral Majority,” the restoration of spirited public debate about certain “moral” issues—all these signs of evangelical political awakening marked the return to national prominence of a force that knowledgeable observers had long ago written off.38
Dean Curry, a professor of government at Messiah College, expresses his own astonishment over this phenomenon:
One of the most significant religious and sociological phenomena of the past twenty-five years is the emergence of theologically conservative Christianity as a cultural force in America. For over half a century, theologically conservative Christians—fundamentalists and evangelicals—lived in self-imposed exile on the periphery of public life. During this time, these conservative Christians wandered in a wilderness of cultural irrelevance, believing that this was the price to be paid for protecting the fundamentals of the faith against the onslaught of theological as well as secular modernism.39
Equally surprising to many is the extent to which Roman Catholics and other nonevangelicals have risen to the defense of evangelical activity in the public arena. Not surprisingly, it is conservative evangelicals who have been attacked for their political activity. Because evangelical and Catholic political liberals act in such harmony with their allies in the dominant liberal media and the major power structure in the Democratically controlled Congress and White House and the predominantly left-wing faculty on college campuses, they do not worry about such attacks.
Of special note is the openly displayed anger, fear, hatred, and bigotry exhibited toward evangelical conservatism from the far-left hierarchies of America’s so-called mainline Protestant denominations. Not too long ago, these religious liberals were busy trying to get the federal government’s help for causes and programs they supported. Reveling in their easy access to the citadels of power, these mainline liberals enjoyed chiding conservative Protestants for their supposed indifference to social issues—for ignoring what is called the social dimension of the gospel, which is simply a more polite label for the old social gospel. “All those guys ever do,” the liberals pouted,
“is preach what they call the gospel; they ignore everything else.” Suddenly the shoe is on the other foot. Religious conservatives have discovered the social dimension of the gospel, something that for them is quite different from the old social gospel. Now the liberals wish that conservatives would go back to their churches and forget the political arena. Now the liberals tell us that evangelical political activity poses a threat to “civil liberties, to a healthy diversity of opinion, and to the hope that we can conduct public affairs free of the divisiveness of religious factionalism.”40
Catholic defenders of evangelical conservatives dismiss such claims as rubbish. Religious conservatives, they counter, are doing essentially the same sorts of things that scores of other good American organizations have been doing for decades.41 Evangelicalism’s supporters in the Roman Catholic Church maintain that evangelicals have as much right to attempt to influence public society as other organizations. After all, that is precisely what theologically and politically liberal Christians have been doing for decades.
Many people think evangelicals have been getting unfair treatment from the media, the entertainment industry, and the academic world. As Richard John Neuhaus points out, “The pattern in the media and elsewhere is to use the term ‘Fundamentalist’ in a careless way that refers to anything we deem religiously bizarre or fanatical. . . . This pattern reflects intellectual laziness mixed with an unseemly measure of bigotry.”42
According to Nathan Glazer, recent evangelical activity in the public arena should be understood as defensive, not offensive. This activity does not represent a sudden assault on a passive and tolerant society. Rather, it is a reaction to what religious conservatives see as an attack upon them and their values: “It is the great successes of secular and liberal forces principally operating through the specific agency of the courts, that have in large measure created the issues on which the Fundamentalists [and evangelicals] have managed to achieve what influence they have.”43 Glazer provides several examples to back up his claim:
Abortion did not become an issue because Fundamentalists [and evangelicals] wanted to strengthen prohibitions against abortion, but because liberals wanted to abolish them. . . . Pornography in the 1980s did not become an issue because Fundamentalists [and evangelicals] wanted to ban D. H. Lawrence, Janies Joyce, or even Henry Miller, but because in the 1960s and 1970s, under-the-table pornography moved to the top of the newsstands. Prayer in the schools did not become an issue because Fundamentalists [and evangelicals] wanted to introduce new prayers or sectarian prayers, but because the Supreme Court ruled against all prayers. Freedom for religious schools became an issue not because of any legal effort to expand their scope, but because the Internal Revenue Service and various state authorities tried to impose restrictions on them that private schools had not faced before.44
Perhaps the issue of who started these fights is now irrelevant. But it is helpful to remember that
dominant power—measured by money, access to the major media, influence, the opinion of our educated, moneyed and powerful elites—still rests with the secular and liberal forces that created, through court action, the changes that have aroused Fundamentalists [and evangelicals]. What we are seeing is a defensive reaction of the conservative heartland, rather than an offensive that intends to or is capable of really upsetting the balance, or of driving the United States back to the nineteenth century or early twentieth century.45
Liberals have been so successful in getting their agenda adopted that it is easy for them to forget that “America is a many-cultured society, and that religion is an important component of many U.S. subcultures as well as of the larger culture.”46 Evangelicals are simply fighting back in an attempt to restore some balance and to regain some lost respect for beliefs and values that are important to them and have played an important role in the history of our nation.
To summarize this section, evangelicalism has undergone changes that mirror the growing split between political and theological liberals and conservatives in the Roman Catholic Church. But educated Catholic conservatives had never retreated into a religious ghetto, had never isolated themselves from America’s public arena the way evangelicals did. Convincing people to leave a ghetto has often been difficult. After many fitful starts, the evangelical genie is out of the bottle and has no intention of turning back. Roman Catholic support for this new evangelical social activism has been an important factor in the growing maturity of evangelical social action.
As Richard John Neuhaus explains, “The public resurgence of [evangelical] Christianity is good both for Christianity and for America, because it returns to the national discourse a huge bloc of citizens previously estranged from . . . ‘the public square.’”47 Surely, Neuhaus continues, it is incumbent on nonevangelicals, “especially those who claim to understand our society, to do more in response to this ascendence of [evangelicalism] . . . than to sound an increasingly hysterical and increasingly hollow alarm.”48 It would be nice to think that some day perhaps America’s militant secularists and religious liberals will take heed to Neuhaus’s words.
It is important to observe that the size and power of the central government has continued to expand and as the weapons of that government have increasingly been turned against religious people, it is understandable that conservative Catholics and evangelicals have come to recognize the importance of greater cooperation. The time has come to examine a few arguments for and against this cooperation.
THE DEBATE OVER EVANGELICAL-CATHOLIC COOPERATION
A few days ago, I opened a large envelope in my mail and found a sample copy of a new, privately published newsletter. The headline for that montII’s issue grabbed my attention: “Christianity [meaning evangelicalism] and Catholicism—An Unholy Alliance.”49
The article began by attacking evangelicals such as Charles Colson, Randall Terry, James Kennedy, and Pat Robertson for their efforts to promote an alliance between evangelicals and Roman Catholics in America’s cultural and political arena. All but a few sentences in the very long piece focused on the theological differences between evangelicals and Catholics, coupled with the insinuation that any cooperative effort would involve evangelicals in a serious compromise of their religious beliefs. I mention this publication to illustrate the strong feelings one can still encounter in some pockets of fundamentalism.
A year or so ago, a friend who was pastoring a church in the Northeast told me how his efforts to get his fundamentalist church involved in righting abortion met with powerful resistance from a faction that argued that standing in a long line of people to show support for the pro-life position might result in some folks in the church standing next to and even holding hands with a Catholic. The leadership in my friend’s church found that an unthinkable act. The pastor decided that what was truly unthinkable in his situation was continuing to minister to folks like that; he resigned and moved to a different church.
About the same time the aforementioned newsletter reached my mail box, I chanced upon a 1989 article in the Catholic monthly Crisis, written by the distinguished constitutional attorney William Bentley Ball. (Ball incidentally has often come to the legal aid of Protestant institutions threatened by people interested in using the power of the state to curtail the legitimate rights of Christian schools and churches.) In his article “We’d Better Hang Together,” Ball argues that conservative Protestants and Catholics had better begin to recognize the importance of working together. As his subtitle indicated, “It’s Time for a New Alliance Between Catholics and Evangelicals.”
Ball began his article by paying tribute to evangelicals, describing them as “the most dynamic force in American Protestantism today.”50 Evangelicals, Ball went on to say, “are building schools throughout the land, amassing in their churches converts from other faiths, playing a highly visible role in the pro-life movement, and preaching what they hold to be Biblical principles for a moral public order.”51 These born-again Christians, he continued, stress “the need for separation, in family and social life, from a ‘pagan’ culture, take in their stride accusations that they are fanatical, self-righteous, negative, and censorious. In spite of persistent battering by the national media, they are growing in number and strength.”52
Ball notes the occasional, often sporadic cooperation between evangelicals and Catholics in the past, usually occurring during presidential elections or more typically in pro-life causes. When the Moral Majority was still active, he reminds us, one-third of Jerry Falwell’s organization was Roman Catholic.
Naturally, Ball is aware of the serious disagreements between Catholics and evangelicals. But, he argues, “While the orthodox Catholic and the traditional Protestant [evangelical] differ on historic issues such as the papacy, tradition, and the sacraments, these issues do not have direct consequence in terms of public issues in the United States today. Too often forgotten by both evangelicals and Catholics are areas of doctrine which both share.” Because of our common commitment to a shared orthodoxy expressed in the historic creeds of the church, he continues, Catholics and evangelicals insist “upon certain moral principles which are at once vital to the public order and gravely threatened, [and] it is important for the common good that Catholics and evangelicals join minds and hands for the promoting of these principles. ”33
Imagine that we are walking along one of Florida’s seaside beaches when we hear a man screaming that his younger daughter is caught in a riptide and is being dragged into deeper water. “Please help my daughter,” he shouts. “I cannot swim, and she’s going to drown!”
Rushing to the man’s side, a lifeguard asks for the direction of his daughter. Suppose the father then pauses, looks at the lifeguard, and says, “Before you save my daughter’s life, I am compelled to ask you one question. What church do you attend?”
I can only assume that the author of the newsletter I mentioned would applaud the father’s action. I can only assume that he would object if his house caught fire and he discovered a Roman Catholic and evangelical working together to save his family. How, I am compelled to ask, can there be any religious scandal or offense in such cooperation? After all, as Ball points out, “Not a syllable of doctrine or conviction is put cm the negotiating table when fully cooperative action takes place between conservative evangelicals and Catholics on issues on which they not only doctrinally agree but on which they are morally bound to act.”54
Attorney Ball wins this debate hands down. It is time for fundamentalists to recognize that if we do not hang together we most surely will hang separately. The time for evangelical-Catholic cooperation within the public arena has come.
Notes
1. Os Guinness, The American Hour (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 170.
2. Ibid., 171.
3. Bennett’s name appears here only as an example of the kind of potential Catholic candidate with whom evangelicals and fundamentalists would be comfortable.
4. Kevin Perrotta, “The U.S. Catholic Church,” in Evangelical Renewal in the Mainline Churches, ed. Ronald Nash (Westchester, 111.: Crossway, 1987), 143-44.
5. See ibid., 144.
6. Ibid., 144-45.
7. Ibid., 145.
8. Ibid., 146.
9. Ibid., 155.
10. See Ronald Nash, Is Jesus the Only Savior? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994).
11. Perrotta, “The U.S. Catholic Church,” 147-48.
12. Ibid., 155.
13. Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 99.
14. Ibid., 99.
15. Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Twanye, 1993), 34.
16. See ibid., 36.
17. See ibid., 35.
18. For discussions of these ideologies, see Ronald Nash, Poverty and Wealth (Dallas: Probe, 1992) and Social Justice and the Christian Church (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992). Perhaps the best-known purveyor of neo-Marxism was the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
19. See Dinesh D’Souza, “The Bishops as Pawns,” Policy Review, no. 34 (Fall 1985): 50-56.
20. For more on liberation theology, including a detailed account of its historical development among both Catholic and Protestant ideologues, see Humberto Belli and Ronald Nash, Beyond Liberation Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).
21. John Paul II, “Opening Address at Puebla,” in The Pope and Revolution: John Paul II Confronts Liberation Theology, ed. Quentin L. Quade (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1982), 53-54.
22. See Humberto Belli, Breaking Faith (Westchester, HI.: Crossway, 1985).
23. See Belli and Nash, Beyond Liberation Theology, 53-54, 190-94.
24. See Robert Sirico, “Embracing the Market Economy, In Good Faith,” Wallstreet Journal, 23 December 1992. Sirico’s article does a good job of summarizing important economic and political emphases in the Catechism.
25. Ibid.
26. Two of Russell Kirk’s books that illustrate what one can learn from him are The Conservative Mind, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1986), and The Root of American Order (Washington D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991). Buckley’s many books include Up From Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Madison, 1985). Frank Meyer’s most important book was In Defense of Freedom (South Bend, Ind.: Regnery/Gateway, 1962). For an extended analysis of Meyer’s contributions, see Ronald Nash, Freedom, Justice and the State (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980), chaps. 1 and 4. Novak’s books include the following: The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1986), and The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1993). Two examples of Richard John Neuhaus’s writings are The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) and Doing Well and Doing Good (New York: Doubleday, 1992). George Nigel’s important books are Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford Univ., 1987) and Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1989).
27. For one account of those days, see Ronald Nash, The New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1963).
28. For a discussion of the old and new branches of fundamentalism, see Ronald Nash, Evangelicals in America (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), chap. 8. For discussions of Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, see chap. 7 of the same book.
29. For a critical analysis of this position, see Ronald Nash, Great Divides (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993), chap. 10.
30. For an account of worldview thinking that extends Schaeffer’s approach to new limits, see Ronald Nash, Worldviews in Conflict (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).
31. For a defense of this claim, see Nash, Poverty and Wealth, chap. 16. See also Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
32. See Nash, Great Divides, chaps. 1, 3 and 7.
33. See Ronald Nash, The Word of God and the Mind of Man (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presb. & Ref., 1992) and also chap. 11 of Ronald Nash, The Closing of the American Heart: What's Really Wrong with America's Schools (Dallas: Probe, 1990).
34. See Ronald Nash, The Concept of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983) and Is Jesus the Only Savior, chaps. 8 and 10.
35. See my books Beyond Liberation Theology, already cited, or Liberation Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987).
36. See my book, Great Divides, chap. 3.
37. See the following: Amy Sherman, “Where You Lead I Will Follow,” First Things (February 1993), 5-6; Thomas Guterbock, “What Do Christians Expect from Christian Relief and Development,” Stewardship Journal 2 (Summer/Fall 1992), 23ff.; and Nash, Is Jesus the Only Savior? chap. 12.
38. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 182-83.
39. Dean C. Curry, “Biblical Politics and Foreign Policy,” in Evangelicals and Foreign Policy, ed. Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989), 43.
40. Nathan Glazer, “Fundamentalism: A Defensive Offensive,” in Piety and Politics, ed. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Center, 1987), 247.
41. See Clifford G. Kossel, “The Moral Majority and Christian Politics,” Communio (1982), 340.
42. Richard John Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” in Piety and Politics, 12. Even though Neuhaus’s move from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism occurred after he wrote these words, there has been no shift in his position.
43. Glazer, “Fundamentalism: A Defensive Offensive,” 250.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 251.
46. Ibid., 245.
47. Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” 3.
48. Ibid., 18.
49. The name of the publication is A Layman’s Perspective. The issue in question had no date but was simply labeled No. 4.
50. William Bentley Ball, “We’d Better Hang Together,” Crisis (October 1989): 17. The article appears on pp. 17-21.
51. Ibid., 17.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 20.
54. Ibid.