The Responsibility of the Christian Left

By Neil Elliott

On my office wall, nestled between contemporary icons by Robert Lenz of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Jesuit martyrs of the Central American University, hangs an image of Noam Chomsky. It's a framed poster I had prepared years ago when, as a faculty member in theology at a Roman Catholic women's college, I invited Professor Chomsky to speak on the topic “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in a Democratic Society.”

Facing an audience of Midwestern Catholic women, Chomsky stuck to his assigned theme by addressing the legacy of Archbishop Romero and the Salvadoran martyrs. The very brains of the Jesuit academics, he reminded us, were the “weapons” of liberation theology that Ronald Reagan's advisers had declared the greatest threat to U.S. interests in Latin America. The so-called “Santa Fe document” had specified the vital role the church was to play in the “new world order”: protecting the sanctity of “private property and productive capitalism,” and presenting no challenge to the empire's theological axiom that “war, not peace, is the norm of international affairs.” Needless to say, Chomsky saw our responsibilities differently.

Ideological Warfare

Looking back over a quarter century helps us understand our present situation – and our responsibility – as Christians living in the United States. In the 1980s, Central American theologians urgently described the “religious and theological war” being waged by a global empire eager to dress its war against the poor in the array of imperial theology ( Kairos Central America , 1988). That war was not just ideological, of course: the U.S. Army School of the Americas had trained, armed, and given at least tacit encouragement to the assassins of Romero, the Jesuits, and thousands of other, less renowned victims (though the facts were strongly denied by President George H. W. Bush and his Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney).

While more liberal Christian denominations prepared cautious studies on biblical interpretation and fretted over procedures for maintaining “the bonds of love” within their churches, the well-funded Institute for Religion and Democracy mounted aggressive campaigns to pressure moderate and liberal theologians out of their jobs in churches and seminaries, and to smear the World Council of Churches as a front for global Communism.

But the war was ideological. While more liberal Christian denominations prepared cautious studies on biblical interpretation and fretted over procedures for maintaining “the bonds of love” within their churches, the well-funded Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) mounted aggressive campaigns to pressure moderate and liberal theologians out of their jobs in churches and seminaries, and to smear the World Council of Churches as a front for global Communism. Oliver North gathered an enthusiastic network of right-wing evangelists to promote White House policy and provide "aid and comfort" – including gunrunning – to the terrorist contra army in Honduras. The Justice Department moved swiftly to prosecute U.S. Christians who dared to offer sanctuary to refugees fleeing the wars in Central America, or to protest the School of the Americas.

This is not distant history. Last February, the onetime architects of Reagan's contra armies assembled a similar army of death squad veterans to stage a military coup in Haiti . They removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest and liberation theologian from the presidency to which he'd been elected by an electoral margin of which George W. Bush can only dream. Another liberation priest, Gérard Jean-Juste, a renowned worldwide as a champion of nonviolence, was jailed for weeks without charges in the notorious Fort Dimanche. In a nostalgic gesture, the newly installed Prime Minister, Gérard LaTortue, actually hailed the convicted murderers ruling the streets as “freedom fighters.” The mainstream media acquiesced.

Two month ago, Ralph Reed, founder in the 1980s of the “Christian Coalition,” boasted of his success, as regional organizer for the 2004 Bush campaign, in turning out millions of right-wing “born-again Christians” to reelect the president. Another scourge of the Reagan decade, Jerry Falwell, is forming a successor organization to the “Moral Majority” to apply far-right pressure in Bush's Washington. And only weeks ago, the IRD got more media attention with its charge that the Episcopal Church was “anti-Semitic” than the church's actual policy recommendations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever achieve.

Though we may find the metaphor distasteful, some on the Religious Right frankly call this ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of American Christians a war.

A Propaganda Model

To paraphrase the letter to the Ephesians, we are not contending against the flesh and blood of “red-state” evangelicals. Trying either to ridicule or to outdo their earnestness on “moral values” misses the point. The “rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness” reign today by means of a massive propaganda system, as Chomsky and Edward S. Herman ably described “the political economy of the mass media” years ago ( Manufacturing Consent , 1987; new ed. 2002). Though the Institute for Religion and Democracy is a preeminent weapon of mass disinformation, this propaganda system is much more extensive. It includes the Clear Channel network that now exercises a virtual monopoly on religious radio and television programming throughout large parts of the U.S. (think Red America). As the Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) website observed in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act,

For all the complaints about “liberal bias” distorting their views, religious conservatives communicate directly to millions of Americans every day through media they own and control – including more than 1300 Christian broadcast stations (nearly 10% of all TV and radio stations), radio networks such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family and various cable TV platforms. Left-of-center movements – feminist, labor, environmental, etc. – have nothing close to this media power.

A friend and American Baptist colleague put it this way last week: “Some working people in my church listen to right-wing ‘Christian radio' sixty, maybe eighty hours a week. I've got just one hour on Sunday morning to try to present another perspective.”

A friend and American Baptist colleague put it this way last week: “Some working people in my church listen to right-wing ‘Christian radio' sixty, maybe eighty hours a week. I've got just one hour on Sunday morning to try to present another perspective.”

Does it really make a difference?

We confront a propaganda system that has convinced 46% of U.S. voters that there really, really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, evidence be damned. This system focuses unrelenting attention on the brutal crimes of Saddam Hussein, but consistently fails to mention that many of those crimes – most infamously, the massacre at Halabja – were committed beneath the smiling gaze of George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This system keeps meticulous watch on the body count of U.S. Marines, yet scrupulously avoids difficult questions about dead Iraqi civilians (perhaps 100,000, according to the premiere British medical journal The Lancet ). This system pays pundits to solemnly scratch their chins over the President's puzzler, "why do they hate us?" without mentioning a long history of brutal dictatorships, military coups, and armies of fundamentalist mujahedin  that British and American imperial policies have orchestrated throughout the oil-rich middle east (and central Asia, and Africa). And why not? As the pundits dutifully remind us, it's not about the oil.

Now we're told that Bush won a “mandate” on “moral values” – although exit polls actually show that a larger proportion of U.S. voters opposed the president's specific policies on abortion and same-sex civil unions than voted for him altogether.

The reigning propaganda system defines for all of us what “religion” is. The hard-right spin of “Christian news” programs, the soothing, insipid grins of electronic pastors, the parade of fabulously successful celebrities and millionaires whose cheery faith carried them through “the hard times” – these are standard fare. But one searches long and hard in the mainstream press to find out what a united front of American churches had to say about George W. Bush's prospective war in Iraq ( they were against it ). The newsweeklies examined the proportion of “God-talk” in each presidential candidate's stump speeches but failed to compare either candidate to his own church's policy positions on global debt, labor rights, or the environment.

It's time we reclaimed our identity, and owned up to our responsibilities, as the Christian Left. That phrase evokes a proud legacy that we betray when we take cover behind the cautious rhetoric of political neutrality. . . We must stop contenting ourselves with being the church of the “middle way,” of compromise, tolerance, and liturgical decorum.

Taking the Fight to the Right

It's time we reclaimed our identity, and owned up to our responsibilities, as the Christian Left. That phrase evokes a proud legacy that we betray when we take cover behind the cautious rhetoric of political neutrality. If we fail to distinguish ourselves, firmly, consistently, and often, from the principles of the so-called Christian Right, then all our talk about “love” and “peace” will sound to our fellow citizens like so much ineffectual wishful thinking. We must own – and if necessary, relearn – our church's teachings about the dangers of capitalism, the priority of human labor over profit, the preferential option for the poor, and the incompatibility of warfare with the teaching of Jesus Christ. We must stop contenting ourselves with being the church of the “middle way,” of compromise, tolerance, and liturgical decorum.

The problem isn't that the Left has failed to “get religion,” it's that too many of our churches have stood by silently as neoconservatives ravaged the social and civil infrastructure built to protect the vulnerable. Indeed, we've been tempted to collude in the privatization of the common good. As Barbara Ehrenreich recently observed in The Nation ,

Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services – but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.

Let's start naming those facts – and I mean, naming them in church . Let's stop letting the Religious Right dictate the terms of debate. Let's insist – from the pulpit, in letters to the editor, in coffee hour conversation, in meetings with legislators – that no one gets to use the language of a “war on terror” until they are ready to oppose the brutal coup d'état in Haiti, the murderous legacy of the School of the Americas, and Secretary Rumsfeld's quiet initiative to revive “national security strategy” in South America and (now) Africa . No one gets to speak of a “war on terror” in Iraq until they are ready to “do body counts” of dead Iraqis, for otherwise, as Jonathan Schell observes ( The Nation, Dec. 6), “winning the minds” of Iraqis through displays of overwhelming force becomes the very terrorism our military profess to be fighting.

Let's insist: No one gets to use the language of “family values” until they have stretched every nerve to support all families with livable wages, affordable housing and childcare, universal health care, and fully funded public schools. No one gets to praise the virtues of a “free market” until they are willing to oppose the artificial safeguards that guarantee obscene profit margins for Big Pharmaceuticals and Big Oil, while straitjacketing foreign communities through NAFTA and GATT.

Let us tell our churches we will not pray for “our troops” unless we also pray for our enemies, and for all who are killed, maimed, orphaned, left homeless, tortured, held as captives, or forced to spend another night in fear, listening to grenades and small arms fire and the screams of children.

Let us agree we will not get more political – but God help us, we will not be any less political – than Jesus was. Let us resolve to practice the ideological warfare that that advocate of “Christian realism,” Reinhold Niebuhr, described in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944): “The primary requirement of justice” in modern capitalist society “is that the dominant dogma be discredited.”

This will be scary. Telling the political truth about our faith, from our pulpits and in our small-group bible studies, will be controversial. We can expect to be told we're being divisive; that “we'll lose people,” and most seriously, that we'll cost our churches pledge units. We may even be warned, none too subtly, that the next round of budget cuts may have to include deep cuts to personnel. We stand to lose a great deal.

But what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose one's soul?

The Rev. Neil Elliott is chaplain at the University Episcopal Center in Minneapolis, Minn. He may be reached by email at chaplain@uec-mn.org .