Liberals love the Accommodators, especially Jim Wallis. Mind you, I don't mean that they have agape love for them. It's more akin to the affection that a starter on the football team has for the cheerleader who is currently making the rounds. And the cheerleader, delighted to be invited to the parties, mistakes opportunism for respect and fails to see that she's never going to get a marriage proposal out of these relationships.
Because libs love the Accommodators, one frequently sees fawning enconia to Accommodators in that great communications bureau of the liberal movement, the mainstream media. All the tributes follow the same pattern. This piece, though not in a traditional MSM source, is illustrative. The author, Melinda Henneberger, discovers an ostensibly new tension in the evangelical movement, brought about by younger, better-educated evangelicals who have rejected the dogmas of their parents, come to their senses, and embraced Christ's true message of collectivism, statism, and redistribution of wealth. Unfortunately for Accommodators, this praise is not borne out of respect. In fact, with praise like this, one could kill a movement.
To see why liberal praise of Accommodators carries the seeds of the Accomodators' destruction, it is important to see why Accommodators are as popular as they are. Their influence (currently at its apogee) derives not from any insight, proposal, or virtue of theirs. No, the Accommodators fascinate the libs because they play against type. Here are evangelicals who are educated, aren't hung up about sex, and don't assume that humans are better than other species. Why can't you conservative evangelicals be more like them?
Henneberger's Accommodators, Aaron and Ginny Routhe, have moved beyond obsolete evangelical dogmas. They are no longer constrained by a belief that humans are uniquely created in the image of God. Ginny: "But pro-life for us is more holistic, more all of life and all of the environment-endangered species, and not just the human species."
They are no longer inhibited by defense of something so trivial as the intrinsic values of human life and conjugal marriage. Peter Ilyan, a "Christian environmental evangelist": "So now when James Dobson says it's only gay marriage and abortion we should care about? One of our jokes is that gay married couples have the fewest abortions of anybody."
Convenient that the quip is at James Dobson's expense, no?
Notwithstanding the current popularity of the Accommodators, the Accommodator anti-type is doomed for two reasons. First, the type itself is grossly caricatured. Accommodators have borrowed their stereotype of conservative evangelicals -- uneducated, prudish, joyless, peculiar, scheming -- from secular liberals, many of whom have never met a conservative evangelical, and all of whom avoid conservatives like the plague, whenever possible. But anyone who actually comes to know a conservative evangelical quickly discerns that the type is terribly unfair. Certainly there exist some joyless, prudish evangelicals. However, they are not anything like a majority.
So, Accommodators do not play well against type. "Give 'Em Hell" Zell Miller played well against type because the type -- the Democrat who cares more about defeating Bush than winning the War in Iraq -- is accurate. Similarly, Alan Keyes plays successfully against type because not very many black men in America are conservative.
By contrast, Accommodators have chosen to combat a type that doesn't fit their opponents very well. So their self-congratulatory calls for a "more well-rounded" and "more holistic" view of political issues rings hollow. When an Accommodator quoted in Henneberg's article asserts that "evangelicals en masse are beginning to realize that the Good News encompasses both" "fundamentalism [and] the Social Gospel," bewilderment sets in. Evangelicals are only now embracing the Social Gospel? Really? So the Salvation Army, Samaritan's Purse, hundreds of other charitable organizations, and millions of the most generous people on Earth were only pretending to be evangelicals?
Second, the more frequently Accommodators are held up as the anti-type the more rapidly they become a type of their own. Once it becomes conventional wisdom that savvy evangelicals vote for Democrats, the Accommodators will have served their purpose and will no longer be of any use or interest to orthodox libs. Like the cheerleader who has finished making the rounds, the Accommodator will find himself used, abused, and no longer invited to the party. Libs don't buy this stuff about the Gospel. They think it's trite, amusing... and convenient.
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2 comments:
I spent some time this weekend with a sizable group of evangelicals in their early 20's. The group had been assembled under the broad goal of changing culture. When the talk turned to politics I was surprised with many of the positions in the group. One student was ready to cast the entire military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan aside as immoral because of the actions of a small few in Abu Ghraib.
Another wanted to change the focus of the discussion to "social justice" though he could not adequately describe what he meant by the term.
All of the people in attendance were fresh out of college and some were in masters programs.
I came away with the impression that the Christian scene on campuses these days is decidedly more liberal in political terms than it was only 10 years ago. The Accomadoters have indeed made inroads.
To be sure, part of the reason for this is a desire to be seen as "cool" or "reasonable" by the culture at large. The desire to not be seen as a "know-nothing" has pushed weak minds into the conveniently cool Accomodator camp.
But I also have to believe that conservative failure in Washington, combined with uninspired evangelical leadership nationally, is the primary culprit.
If you are a young politically engaged evangelical, why would you want to be associated with George Bush and Pat Robertson when you could sit with the cool kids at lunch?
That's a great point. I think you are right that much of the impetus for this movement is an overreaction to the excesses of the Know Nothings and failed Repub leadership.
All the more reason to refuse to allow either the Know Nothings or the Accommodators appear to speak for evangelicals.
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