The New Left and Evangelical Radicalism
2009; Michigan State University; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jsr.0.0029
ISSN1930-1197
Autores Tópico(s)Communism, Protests, Social Movements
ResumoThe New Left and Evangelical Radicalism David R. Swartz In 1968 Bill Milliken, a religious youth worker in the gang-infested Lower East Side of New York City, met a fiery proponent of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Santos condemned Christianity for failing to address social problems. A particularly pointed conversation, in which Santos told Milliken that his “sweet, smiling Jesus” was trying to make “house niggers out of us,” prompted the young evangelical to pace a Manhattan bridge in the middle of the night and ponder a technocratic, “death-producing” America: The silhouettes of gray buildings lost their beauty. Outwardly, the buildings had an aura of beauty—majestic, a picture of strength. . . But their beauty was only steel-and-concrete deep. Inside those buildings, a death-producing machine had been created. A machine that was run on the gears of a value system that put progress before people. Power-hungry, dog-eat-dog executives reaped the real harvest. The middle masses who worked for the kings had been shaped into robots, pushing their assigned buttons so that the monarchs could grab the kingdom and the power and the glory. Despite these misgivings and the social convulsions that exposed the failure of American politics—grating poverty, race riots, the violent Democratic convention in Chicago, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin [End Page 51] Luther King Jr.—Milliken remained a mainstream evangelical by day. He remained sympathetic to Billy Graham, an emblem of modern conservative evangelicalism. He volunteered in the public school system and tried to repair frayed racial tensions between rival gangs. But at night he increasingly drifted to SDS meetings in the East Village where he “rapped” with Santos and other leftists who spoke of “the beast that must be slain.” Milliken began to agree that “the power structure with all of its technocracy and weaponry has too tight a grip on the people’s lives.” He lamented, “The cancer seemed to have spread everywhere.” The failing state ill-served by the ineffective ministrations of liberal politics could be cured only by “major surgery.” He wondered whether “the only way to deal with this kind of violence is with the violence of the whip. If Jesus were here today, I wondered, how would he deal with the money-changers of our time? With a whip? Maybe. Or a machine gun?”1 That theologically conservative evangelicals might in fact harbor leftist sympathies was incomprehensible to most movement leftists, whose roots in political liberalism took a very different trajectory than Milliken’s journey out of a tradition that was equal parts apolitical and politically conservative.2 Christianity Today, a magazine representing a party-line strain of evangelicalism that seemed to dominate in the 1960s, had editorially endorsed Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, condemned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as a disrupter of societal order, and consistently supported the Vietnam War. Even countercultural evangelical “Jesus Freaks,” lacking a hard rightist edge, failed to offer aid to the left, instead flaunting an apolitical impulse. Berkeley’s Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF), a lapsed rightist Campus Crusade chapter with close ties to the Jesus People movement, seemed to epitomize the hostility of evangelicalism toward the New Left. From 1969 to 1971, CWLF engaged in pitched battle with SDS. CWLF took over several SDS meetings and competed with SDS for rally sites on the Cal-Berkeley campus. A July 1971 article in Ramparts, the brash muckraking monthly from San Francisco, in turn portrayed the faith of the CWLF as only for “the fearful, the guilt-ridden and the childish, for those unprepared to dive, to make their faith leap into a political reality or mystical depth.” Calling articles in CWLF’s tabloid Right On “nothing but half-baked and awkward attempts at political relevancy,” Ramparts argued that they were instead a front for the right, that “a takeover by right-wing sugar-daddies” was impending.3 [End Page 52] Notwithstanding the mutual hostility between Right On and Ramparts, their shared space, level of interaction, and common political critique serve to destabilize several historiographies. A secularist perspective, as Douglas Rossinow has shown, did not uniformly characterize movement radicals.4 Nor did...
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