Just a quick thought I wanted to throw out tonight. 

One often hears from the liberal Hollywood crowd that we should try to understand why the terrorists and their cultures hold us in such contempt.  We ought to examine our consciences, our actions, our histories in order to see the ways in which we have developed and perpetuated their subjugation, ways in which globalism has robbed their resources, ways in which our presence in Muslim lands is seen as offensive, etc.  Then, presumably, we'll engage in an act of national repentance and learn to be more tolerant and understanding, and everything will be just swell. 

Of course, by emphasizing our lack of tolerance and sensitivity for other cultures, they make it appear as though it is the conservatives, the traditionalists, the unwashed uncultured masses who are to blame for our low standing in the hearts and minds of some nations around the world.

Now I don't mean to deny that the history of our policies in the Middle East leaves much to be desired.  And in our efforts to contain communism we were forced to make some hard choices between containing the spread of a catastrophic ideology and propping up tyrannical regimes that were willing to help us.  All of these things, and more things beside, have contributed to our perception overseas. 

But you know what?  A child growing up in Saudi Arabia knows very little about what the old-fashioned midwesterner or Bible-belter is like.  But he knows a LOT about what folks in Hollywood are like.  A child growing up in Riyadh may not even know much about our dealings with the Shah of Iran, but he knows a LOT about American television and movies. 

I really wonder about the sincerity of this professed concern for international opinion, for one simple reason.  If these Hollywood liberals took the time to read the ravings of Osama bin Laden and his deputies, they would find a lot more said about the materialism and rampant promiscuity of the United States, about the sheer immoral decadence of the United States--and can anyone deny that these are precisely the things for which Hollywood is known worldwide?  

What, after all, is the great purveyor of American culture to the world?  Movies!  And what do Muslims around the world see when they watch American movies and television shows?  They see all the things that the Muslim faith has taught them to abhor: rampant sexual recklessness, selfishness and self-indulgence, godlessness and greed.  

So I have a message for Hollywood: If you're concerned about why they hate us, then start making movies that represent the true ideals of America, movies and television that show people with moral fiber who are striving to live ethical and godly lives--and then try behaving yourselves in a way that shows some common moral decency.  Then I'll believe that you care. 

Because if all I knew about America was what I saw in movies and television, well, to be honest, I wouldn't have much respect for it, either.

As you might've heard, Time magazine has launched a discussion in print and the blogosphere regarding whether the Bush administration has abandoned its "Cowboy Diplomacy." 

You can find the Time story here, Fred Kaplan in Slate disagrees that there has been any substantial change in the actions of the administration here, while you can find one celebration of Cowboy Diplomacy here. 

Kaplan claims that rumors of the death of Cowboy diplomacy have been greatly exaggerated.  I want to claim that rumors of the birth of Cowboy diplomacy were exaggerated from the start. 

I've done a fair amount of research on this tonight, and I'll assemble the evidence tomorrow and offer it in a lengthy post.  For now I want to ask a series of questions:

Was there ever such a thing as Cowboy diplomacy in the first place?  Or was the foreign policy of the Bush administration rather less "Cowboy" than the media and liberal intelligentsia made it out to be? 

Perhaps there is something Cowboy-ish about a President who is willing to provide leadership and take initiative.  But it seems to me that Bush's foreign policy was never so arrogant and unilateral as the liberal media portrayed it. 

So we may have circumstances similar to the ones I described in the entry on Harvey Cox.  The media invented a certain reality which it invoked and reiterated over and over again, until it became established in their minds.  When they see evidence to the contrary later, they begin to wonder whether there was a change--rather, of course, than wondering whether they misunderstood the phenomenon from the beginning. 

In other words, what they perceive as a change, is really the development of a more nuanced and more correct view of the matter.  It is not the policy that has changed, but merely their perception.  Or more charitably we might say that further evidence has come to light, in Bush's dealings with Iran and North Korea, that Bush always really meant those things he said about using diplomatic pressures first--things they assumed he said but didn't really mean. 

I've spent several hours tonight reviewing Bush speeches, and I'm going to show tomorrow, in some detail, that Bush's foreign policy was never quite so stridently cowboy-ish as it was portrayed to be.  Bush always had a more subtle, balanced, multi-pronged and diplomatic approach than he was given credit for. 

If you're coming over from RCP and looking for the post on contemporary evangelicalism, look to the "featured post" list on the right. 

I'm still learning my way around the townhall blog system, and still finding some glitches.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but click on the article title to the right and it should take you there.  Thanks for coming!  My goal is to provide at least one post per day analyzing the arguments for a key political issue. 

UPDATE: As if to prove the points I make in "Harvey Cox Swings and Misses," a piece by Barack Obama appears in today's USA Today.  Read it here. 

Obama's claim that when religious people engage politically they must articulate and defend their views in language and forms of reasoning that are shared and publicly-available--while attractive and in line with the "public theology" movement among the religious left--is ultimately not persuasive.  If a person wishes to engage in political discourse, and simply explain that he or she is motivated by his own internal religious convictions, then that is a perfectly legitimate course of action.  There is no responsibility for all people to translate their beliefs into public forms before they can act in the political sphere. 

In terms of the claims I made in my piece, here is the key paragraph from Obama's article.  Note how he reduces conservative evangelicalism to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, exaggerates their claims, and then suggests that they are only concerned with "issues of abortion and gay marriage."  This is the same pap that's passed around where I live and work, in the circles of liberal academia, and it's so obviously wrong that it reaches, I believe, the level of outright dishonesty:

"This gap [between those who attend church regularly and vote Republican, and those who do not and vote Democrat] has long been exploited by conservative leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who tell evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting that religious Americans care only about issues such as abortion and gay marriage."

In today's Sunday edition of the Boston Globe, the esteemed Harvard historian of American religion, Harvey Cox, submits an article that describes and (I think it's fair to say) enthusiastically welcomes a movement within American evangelicalism away from the 'religious right'.  Now, Cox certainly possesses a formidable scholarly reputation, and has dedicated most of his career to understanding twentieth-century American religious history.  But this piece is probably not worth reading, except as a disproof of the oft-heard claim that liberals are the guardians of nuance, because it is fundamentally flawed by three undefended (and in my view false) assumptions. 

The title is "Old Time Religion," and the subtitle tells us "a new generation of evangelicals are discovering their progressive roots."  So we know from the beginning that Cox intends to show (A) that contemporary evangelicals are moving leftward on the political spectrum, and (B) that this does not constitute a rejection of their heritage, but a return to a previous, even illustrious (and more authentic?) tradition of American evangelicalism. 

Regarding (A), for instance, he writes that:

"Evangelical Protestants are becoming increasingly concerned about a wide range of issues...which put them at odds with much of the Bush agenda...It is simply no longer accurate to identify 'evangelical' with 'religious right.'"

There are two assumptions in these statements that, once challenged, undermine Cox's argument.  They are:

     1.  There once was a time when it was accurate to identify 'evangelical' with 'religious right.' 

     2.  There once was a time when "Evangelical Protestants" were less "concerned about a wide range of issues." 

In other words, for Cox to say this equation is "no longer" accurate, it must have been accurate at some time.  For him to say that evangelicals are "becoming increasingly" concerned with a variety of issues, it must be the case that they were recently less concerned.  As we'll see, many of the problems with Cox's argument come from a caricatured understanding of evangelicalism from the 1970s to the 1990s.   

In his second claim (B), Cox says that this newly-emerged evangelical progressivism marks a return to the tradition of earlier Christian 'progressives' who fought for the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.  The hidden assumption here is:   

     3.  That there is continuity (in some meaningful and significant sense) between the evangelical progressives of today and the Christians who fought against the oppression of blacks and women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   

Now it may not be entirely fair to call these assumptions, because Cox does advance something like an argument for (1) and (2), with his (necessarily) brief overview of twentieth-century American religion.  But the arguments are so thin and perfunctory, and so fail to face the important questions, that he clearly does not feel the need to demonstrate their truth.  I'll show this below. 

So what is Cox's argument?

The opening story Cox tells about Bush's reception at Calvin College (a 'conservative' evangelical setting) is merely anecdotal, and has rhetorical but no argumentative value.  Even as an anecdote it's surprisingly weak.  Let's move on to the heart of the argument.

History shows us, according to Cox, that "Christians who are theologically conservative have not always been politically right wing."  Fair enough, with one proviso: these categories of 'conservative' and 'right wing' are still vague and undefined.  To give an example: By and large, theological conservatism does lead to 'political conservatism' on social-moral questions, but the application of conservative theological principles to international affairs, say, is a much more contentious matter even within American evangelicalism.  Cox runs into the same problem when he writes that "African-American churches...have always been theologically conservative and politically progressive."  Yes, they've been progressive when it comes to questions of social justice and racial equality, but more conservative on moral matters.  Besides, what it meant to be progressive at the start of the twentieth century may have little to do with what liberals mean by progressive today.   

Cox begins his history by noting that theologically conservative Protestants at the start of the twentieth century were more concerned with "religious, not political" matters, but nonetheless they "were often left-leaning populists and progressives in the political arena."  Then he provides a sketched history (I don't mean this as a criticism; of course it's sketched, it's a newspaper article) of evangelicalism in the twentieth century.  The history he provides, if not nuanced, at least points to the presence of competing strands of political thought within the larger stream of American evangelicalism. 

All nuance disappears, however, when it comes to the period of the emergence of the religious right.  As opposed to the "broad social outlook" of earlier leaders, what emerged now was "a narrow and contentious new kind of evangelicalism."  This is when Cox's argument falls fatally off-track.  In a move that I have seen countless times in academia in general and especially among liberal Christians, Cox equates the evangelicalism of the 70s to 90s with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  Thus, in this view, 'evangelicalism' in this period can be equated with the 'religious right,' because they have defined it as such.

The problem is that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were never representative of the breadth of American evangelicalism.  Cox imagines that what was earlier a complicated, multifaceted community and movement suddenly transmogrified into a narrow monolithic entity.  

Cox faults the Moral Majority, for instance, for turning away from the "religious" or "theological" concerns of earlier generations, in favor of moral and "explicitly political" concerns.  The Moral Majority, however, was never intended to address all of the concerns of the evangelical community, and was content to leave theological inquiries to the churches and the seminaries; it was quite explicit that it's emphasis was solely on social-moral issues, and thus it made common cause with those outside the walls of evangelicalism, i.e., with those who shared the same fundamental moral convictions. 

The Moral Majority, in Cox's view, accomplished an alliance between evangelicalism and political conservatism that benefited both parties.  Of course this is presented in pernicious terms, as though an organization that rallies people to vote for candidates who share their values, or political office-holders granting input and seeking counsel from those they represent, are somehow devious things.  When the Moral Majority faded away, Cox says, it was replaced by other organizations such as the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. 

My intention is not necessarily to defend these organizations, but to make two points, contradicting the assumptions (1) and (2) I listed above.  First, it was always wrong to identify evangelicalism with the 'religious right,' especially if by religious right you mean Jerry Falwell.  The focus upon Falwell has always been a canard, has always owed more to the convenience of Falwell for the rhetorical purposes of the liberal media and less to do with Falwell actually representing all evangelicals. 

To use a personal illustration, I've spent all of my life in evangelical circles, and even in evangelical circles that are politically conservative I have never read, seen, or listened to anything from Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.  There are many varieties of American evangelicalism, and many varieties of evangelical conservatism, and reducing them to straw-men in this way is simply dishonest. 

Putting Falwell forward to represent American evangelicalism is like putting Lyndon LaRouche forward to represent liberalism.  I don't deny that Falwell has influence over some followers, but that influence has been vastly exaggerated, partly because his often-extreme viewpoints can be used to discredit evangelicals generally.  So it may be convenient for opponents who wish to caricature and denigrate evangelicals, but it is unfair and inaccurate, and not helpful for honest argumentation. 

Cox, then, operates with a caricatured image of the 'religious right', and a caricatured image of late-twentieth-century evangelicalism that allows him to identify it with the religious right.  The 'religious right' he describes only existed in the minds of media and academia liberals.

The second mistake follows from the first.  Because Cox reduces the evangelicalism of the late twentieth century to Falwell and Robertson, and to their organizations that were formed to advance very specific social-moral purposes, he concludes that evangelicals had forgotten about questions of social and international justice (and thus the present concern with these questions constitutes something new).  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Precisely because these organizations did not represent the breadth of evangelicalism, there were other organs within the evangelical world (they're called churches) that concerned themselves with social justice and care of the poor, and with international affairs and war.  The attention of media and academia liberals focused on militias and abortion-clinic bombings because it suited their agenda and prejudices.  But the truth is that evangelicals have always devoted enormous resources in money and man-hours to the poor and needy.  Cox can claim that the emerging generation of (more liberal) evangelicals "are concerned about a much wider range of issues" only because he has constructed a falsely narrow image of the earlier generations. 

I have said that 'evangelicalism' always has been a broader category than the 'religious right,' and that 'evangelicals' have always had a broader set of concerns than Cox supposes.  But even the claim that the 'religious right' only cared about abortion and homosexuality is manifestly false.  Even Falwell and Robertson, whom Cox takes to be representative of the narrowness of evangelical vision during this period, were constantly gathering and sending goods to victims of famine and disaster.  Cox's claim is similar to one that is often made by Jim Wallis (whom Cox mentions in the article), that conservative evangelicals have reduced "values" to abortion and homosexuality.  This is such an absurd claim that it's difficult to take seriously.  I pointed this out to Wallis once, that evangelicals debate and take action on a far broader variety of concerns...he agreed...and then he went right on making the same claim as before.  It's not about honest representation, unfortunately; it's about finding the rhetorical means to advance a particular agenda, whether or not that rhetoric stretches the truth.

Also, simply because political conservatives have advocated solutions to social ills that are different from those of liberals does not mean that they don't take those ills seriously.  I think we should admit that political conservatives and liberals can care equally for the common good, but can advocate different solutions in good faith.  Cox appears to take for granted that because the religious right did not advocate welfare-state responses to poverty and dovish foreign policies, they cared nothing for the good of the needy and the oppressed here and abroad.    

We reach Cox's third assumption, that today's political progressives are aligned with the progressives who fought for abolition and women's suffrage.  There may be an argument to be made for this position, but Cox never provides one, and never even confronts the need for one.  He simply assumes that when someone drifts into the 'progressive' sphere, one stands in the same sphere once occupied by the abolitionists.  Would he agree, I wonder, that when one becomes a Republican, one stands in the tradition of Lincoln?  At what point do the historical connections become so attenuated that they lose their validity and meaning?

There is no clear and direct line from the abolition of slavery to contemporary liberal positions on abortion and the Iraq war.  Would the abolitionists themselves have supported contemporary 'progressive' policies?  It's not clear that they would.  Moreover, does one ever reach a point where enough 'progress' has been made, and thus the wiser thing would be to 'conserve'?  Do you ever reach a point where further movement in the same direction would no longer be 'progress' but 'regress'?  Aligning every issue on the progressive-conservative arrow makes little sense, especially over the course of long stretches of history.  Claiming that abortions-rights activists stand in the line of the abolitionists...well, at the very least it requires a rigorous defense, and Cox supplies none, and seems unaware of the need.

In summary, then, (1) evangelicals always were concerned about a broad set of issues, and always have been a more subtle and complicated set of viewpoints and constituencies than liberals have liked to think--most theologically-conservative evangelicals that I know have a smattering of politically 'liberal' and 'conservative' stances on many issues.  (2) The perception of a "new" movement in the direction of a broader set of concerns is only possible on the basis of a simplistic and factually false reduction of earlier evangelicalism to the caricatured narrowness of a Jerry Falwell--this "new movement" is not so much the creation of something new as the discovery of something that was there all along.  (3) It is not clear (it is, at the least, quite debatable) that the 'progressives' of today stand in significant continuity with the progressives who fought for an end to slavery.

Finally, Cox includes a number of throwaway-sentences that lead one to doubt his good-faith in argumentation.  A few examples: "Jesus himself had little to say about family values," and "he often criticized the 'traditional values' of his own time."  Jesus "had nothing to say about gays and a strong military," and he "died by torture." 

If I were not trying to read charitably, I would have to say that these are the sorts of sayings one would expect to find on bumper stickers, not coming from the pen of a renowned Harvard professor.  They do not exhibit the values of academia, values of charity and balance, fairness and self-criticism.  First of all, Jesus very much did have things to say about family values, if you include love, honesty, forgiveness, humility, mercy, faithfulness, and etc., among them.  Why Cox should have failed to do so is beyond me, unless, again, he's construing conservative evangelical views in an exceedingly narrow way, a far narrower way than any actual conservative evangelical would.  Second, many of the teachings of Jesus arguably establish principles which apply even to issues he did not address directly (the Constitution says nothing about gay marriage, right, and yet liberals certainly wish to argue that its fundamental principles have consequences for the debate?).  Third, in addition to the sayings of Jesus there are other parts of the Christian scriptures that address questions of sexuality and justice between nations, more and less directly.  Fourth, the fact that Jesus criticized values that were traditional in his time (and even that claim needs refinement) does not mean that he would criticize all values that have attained the status of tradition.  Presumably he did not oppose then-traditional values only because they were traditional, and would not advocate the opposition of tradition at all times, whatever the tradition may be. 

The "torture" point should be dealt with another time.  Cox intends this to tie in with his later account of how evangelical Protestants joined with those of other religious traditions to say that torture should be rejected.  This should hardly be surprising, and it was not, as Cox makes it out to be, a clear rebuttal of the Bush administration.  The question is not so much whether torture is wrong; most of us can agree that it is.  The question is rather what constitutes torture and whether the US military has ever advocated torture as a matter of policy.  The reason "no names were named" is because it's not clear that US has been guilty of torture as a matter of policy.  In any case, another topic for another time.   
 
The last and possibly most egregious claim is that these new, more moderate evangelicals "are more 'religious'" than the older generation of evangelicals.  The presumptuousness and--again--the sloppy imprecision of this claim is really rather startling.  "One could argue," he says, "that they are more concerned about actually following Jesus."  Well, one could argue many things, most of which are wrong.  In Cox's simplistic view the earlier generation of evangelicals had no concerns beyond the explicitly political, no activities beyond opposing abortion and homosexuality, had no concern for the poor and oppressed, and so on.  A generation like this would probably be less religious than the new generation that Cox describes.  But Cox has given us no strong reason to believe that such a previous generation ever really existed.  The evangelicals of that generation, whom I have known, have generally shown an authentic and often quite radical concern to live their lives in the imitation of Christ in the best way they know how. 

Taking political disagreement and saying this makes the opponent less religious--I thought that was something the 'religious right' was supposed to do?
 

Welcome to anyone who browses through!  After years sitting on the sidelines, spending altogether too much time reading blogs and opinion columns, I've decided to suit up and enter the fray myself.  

What could compel a man to do something so monstrously unintelligent?  Why would anyone willfully determine to sacrifice untold hours of time and untold amounts of frustration to producing a blog that will have no discernible difference whatsoever on the trajectory of political events and the world of political discourse? 

Frustration.   Persistent, overpowering frustration.  Frustration with the state of political discourse.  Frustration that screeds and slogans, bumper-sticker clichés and a general morass of confusion and ignorance should masquerade as intelligent political argument.  

The purpose of this blog is to assess and produce arguments.  For the sake of my own professional survival I intend to keep my identity concealed insofar as possible, but suffice it to say that my own professional training is in the arts of argumentation.  I do not intend to overload these 'pages' with jargon, but I do intend to bring some level of conceptual rigor to ongoing arguments in the social and political spheres.  

Let me make a few points clear:

1.  I strive to examine each issue on the weight of its own merits.  Historically this has led me to 'conservative' positions, and I see no reason to expect that this will change.  Intellectual integrity, however, requires that I remain open to wherever the arguments and evidence lead me.  And there are places where I believe conservative orthodoxy must be challenged, and places where I believe it has led in the wrong direction.  That's fine, of course.  A lively dialogue is the heart of a healthy movement. 

2.  My hope is that this will prove collaborative, which is why I've chosen to allow comments.  I don't pretend to be the sharpest and most informed person on every issue, or even any particular one.  So let me know where I'm wrong and I'll admit it.  The atmosphere here will be investigative, enquiring.  It will be no place for ad hominem attacks, for rhetorical excess, and so on.  I reserve the right to delete comments liberally.

3.  Since the purpose is neither to rally the troops for activism nor to sway a particular issue, but rather to deal with arguments themselves, it will deal with the arguments we find in a great variety of places, from international affairs and the war on terrorism, to domestic policy and immigration, to ethical and cultural issues.  Also, as academia and religion are my special spheres, I will comment on them more thoroughly than others. 

4.  Finally, the larger purpose here is to elevate and refine the discourse.  I try to hold myself to the standards that academia (my professional sphere) once advocated but now (at least in certain circles) seems to have abandoned: understanding opposing viewpoints before critiquing them, representing those viewpoints charitably and honestly, and dealing with opposing arguments in their strongest formulations.  I take these things seriously.  Ultimately they lead to more refined and more persuasive arguments.  

All right, I'll leave it there for now.  For the coming days I would expect the blog to be largely 'under construction.'  But drop by again if this sounds like the sort of dialogue that would interest you.  

Drop by again, that is, if you feel the same frustration.  Drop by if you're looking for a new form of discourse, for new ways of thinking, new ways through the dense thicket of conceptual confusion that is contemporary politics.