Brantley Gasaway’s new book on progressive evangelicalism opens with a striking story. In 1985 evangelical activists marched through the streets of Washington, D.C. As the demonstration began, a spokesperson declared, “We’re showing that we are willing to pay the price, to sacrifice, to go to jail, if necessary to draw attention to all the assaults on human life that are now so abundant.” By the end of the protest, in fact, police had arrested nearly 250 marchers for civil disobedience.
To those who assumed that the reference to human life derived from a singular animus against abortion, the march’s route seemed bizarre. Activists stopped first at the White House to pray for “an end to the arms race and for the poor, its primary victims.” Outside the Soviet embassy, they prayed for the people of Afghanistan, “whose country has been brutally invaded by another arrogant superpower.” At the Supreme Court they protested the “barbaric practice” of the death penalty. Not until their final stop at the Department of Health and Human Services did marchers intercede for unborn children.
These positions seemed—and still seem—idiosyncratic. But Gasaway contends that Peace Pentecost offered a coherent social agenda. Grounded in a “public theology of community,” it stood in stark contrast to the pervasive individualism of midcentury evangelicalism. The prophetic Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the pastoral Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action contended that sin expressed itself in more complex ways than person-to-person racism, violence against a fetus, and pornography. injustice often takes social shape. Racism, which Sojourners called “America’s original sin,” could be seen in systems such as apartheid and housing policies. Sexism was perpetuated through cultural language and male privilege. None of these structuralcritiques demanded a progressive theology. Instead, Wallis and Sider pled that a conservative hermeneutic of Scripture demanded social justice.