I first read Jacques Ellul’s False Presence of the Kingdom and Hope in Time of Abandonment (both published by Seabury Press) while riding a Greyhound from Boston to Atlanta in the late spring of 1973. Although Ellul is not what one would call a great prose stylist, I plowed through the two volumes as if they were racy novels, letting the tiny reading lamp above the seat burn late into the night until my eyelids drooped in rhythm with the motion of the bus. By the time we reached the Georgia line, I had finished both.
What kept me glued to the pages was the fact that in these books Ellul presented a critique of religiously based political activism which articulated, made sense of, and expanded the feelings and thoughts I had dwelt upon for some time. This critique, if I can attempt to sum up its major points in a few phrases, argued that most such activism ended in faithless conformity to the world, a conformity which robbed the gospel of its identity and power.
Most such efforts, moreover, were characterized by an embarrassing combination of incompetence and irresponsibility on the part of Christian participants. At their worst, these activist efforts became the tools of demonic forces and movements; even at their best, they were specimens of what Ellul called “conformity to tomorrow.”
His description of this conformity bears quoting here in full:
It consists in a moderate opposition to the existing political power, together with the espousal of the ideas and doctrines of the most sensitive, the most visionary, the most appealing trend in society. This is a trend which, from the sociological point of view, is already dominant, and is the one which should normally be expected to win out (like the trend of the philosophes in the eighteenth century socialist trend today). In this way, the political stand has the appearance of being independent, whereas in reality it is the expression of an avant-garde conformism.
The specific criticisms set forth in False Presence were based on his analysis of trends in the French Reformed Church during the early sixties, as France was emerging from the agony of the Algerian War. Not knowing anything about the scene in France, I couldn’t evaluate these comments in their original setting. But as Ellul pointed out in the preface to the English edition, the parallels to America’s situation toward the end of the Vietnam War are numerous and striking. Hence the implications of what he calls the “sociological examination of conscience” of church-based activism struck home again and again.
The agreement of this argument with many of my own reflections did not, however, leave me feeling pleased or self-righteous because, as Ellul himself repeated several times in the text, “I suffer from each one of these lapses and I accuse myself first of all.” The Christian political activist he was writing about in False Presence could have been me; it was me. I could see that most of my radical political notions in the sixties had been conditioned above all by my background and sociological milieu. If any proof were needed, in 1973, having turned thirty, gotten a job, and acquired two children, my views were changing all too predictably as my situation changed. The fact that all around me I could see similar developments among most other activists of my generation was additional confirmation.
The important thing about this realization, however, was not the simple exposure of the relativity of my politics and the politics of my peers. Ellul could have gone from that exposure to preach withdrawal from politics, or to predict confidently our ultimate arrival in the bosom of the Establishment, or even the Right. But he did neither.
Instead, he used the evidence of the relative, conditioned, and conformed character of this activism as the basis for a description of what he thought were the elements of an authentically faithful presence in the political arena. It is, he asserted, “a question of seeking another way, another connection, another political significance. But that search can only be undertaken after we have recognized the original fixing of our choices and ideas by our environment and life situation, after we have given up covering our purely political and sociological positions with a Christian cloak and accepted all the consequences that entails.”
One of the first of these consequences is the chastened recognition that “Christians adopt all the possible political positions, and we have no right to suspect their good faith, nor their Christian faith, nor their ability to live that faith.” In the final chapter of False Presence, Ellul adds several other criteria for discerning and developing an authentic presence: it should be unique in character, biblically-based, trenchantly realistic, focused on basic (rather than trendy) issues, carefully and competently prepared, and carried out in a manner which exhibits and manifests Christian reconciliation, especially among Christians belonging to different and even opposing political groups.
Ellul lays particular stress on the latter condition. Moreover, this cross-party reconciliation should manifest itself in steady efforts to demystify and defuse explosive issues, to carry on dialogue with the opposition, even to represent opponents in dialogues within one’s own group, and to be discreet about the means used to express and defend our positions.
The style of this presence is described toward the end of Hope In Time of Abandonment. It is what Ellul calls “the incognito.” This is a concept of considerable subtlety, and again the book in which it is set forth deserves to be read as a whole if it is to be understood fully. Yet to hint at the meaning of the term, we can look to Ellul’s major example, the people of Israel. “Since being broken as a nation,” he writes, “[Israel] has buried itself in the incognito. Outwardly accepting the manners and customs of the peoples in whose midst it is settled, it is nevertheless always different, displaced, unlike, incapable of the sociological or spiritual communion forever set before it.” This incognito style by no means indicates a dilution of the faith to make it acceptable to a profane society, but rather “it is a refusal to speak to those who turn a deaf ear, who do not want to hear, who turn away thinking to have arrived at a judgment of something they know nothing about.”
But does this style presage a retreat of Christians from involvement in history? “Do we have to ask ourselves,” Ellul retorts, “whether Israel has been absent from history? Is it not, rather, Israel which has made far more history in the end than anyone else? . . . If history is looked at closely, and without the usual Christian prejudice, it turns out to have been forged at least as much by the Jewish incognito as by Christian activism.” The meaning of this incognito is that it enables the church to maintain the one resource which is uniquely its own, and which Ellul believes the world needs above all today: hope.
As I said at the beginning, I was dazzled on first reading with the discernment evident in these two books, and challenged by the models they offered. But brilliant as they were, the suggestions were not concrete. How would a presence to politics that was faithful in essence and adequately protected in the armor of the incognito be developed among American church activists? Or more pertinently, how did these ideas apply to my own life?
As it happened, providentially I suppose, an example was not long in coming. I was on the bus headed south to do research for my book Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South. Selma had been the high-water mark of pre-Vietnam church activism in the sixties. I had been in Selma and listened with other activists to endless sermons in the church where we met on how the unpaved Alabama streets outside were in truth the location of the church and God--how it was necessary to put one’s body on the line, to stand and be counted, to take risks for freedom, and so forth. I believed them as did the rest.
But Selma had been the end of the line for that same movement, an upsurge which, gathered on the white steps of the statehouse in Montgomery, looked and felt absolutely unstoppable. Yet in scarcely more than a year this grand coalition had been scattered like a bunch of tenpins by the double blows of Vietnam and Black Power. Even in Selma itself, local blacks quickly forgot the solidarity of their campaign and fell to squabbling ingloriously among them selves, virtually neutralizing their newly-won political power for several more years.
As I sorted through the material on this situation in order to tell the story of the campaign, I came across the name of a minister of the Church of the Brethren named Ralph Smeltzer. [ Editors note: Ralph Smeltzer later served as director of the Church of the Brethren’s Washington office, concerned with various issues of peace and justice, until his death last year.] He had been in Selma a few times before the campaign, and I decided to look him up in Washington, where he was his church’s representative. Smeltzer turned out to have worked extensively in Selma and agreed to let me look at his records of this work. These records were two large boxes full of notebook paper covered with his careful handwriting, spanning a period of nearly two years before, during, and after the voting rights campaign.
Smeltzer provided me a stunning example of the style--and the potential impact--of a Christian presence in the world, in the incognito. He worked in almost complete anonymity as a communicator-reconciler in Selma. His contacts and efforts probed to the very center of the situation in the city, on both the white and black sides of the community. His influence shaped the situation subtly yet profoundly, perhaps even decisively. He operated in a thoroughly professional fashion, analyzing the community, developing his contacts with great skill, exercising enormous discretion, showing respect for everyone he dealt with. He always identified himself as a Christian minister, yet he resolutely declined to interrupt his work to try to make converts. And when his work was finished, he moved on as quietly as he had come.
Working with his records reshaped my whole understanding of the situation. His accuracy was amazing, considering the conditions under which he had to work. Amazing too was his physical courage--to move about as an outsider in a community as full of hate, racism and violence as Selma was when he first arrived, alone and unheralded. In a situation which had previously been defined for me almost exclusively through the mass media, to come upon a piece of work so different in kind and yet so obviously important was to find one of the most phenomenal performances in a situation that produced many startling phenomena.
The impact of this work did not stop in Selma. Combined with the catalytic readings from Ellul, it affected my whole approach to writing the history of the campaign. It made me much more conscious of the relativity of what had originally looked like a starkly black and White situation; it increased my respect for several of the white figures in the city; and it made me determined to do as much justice to their experience and outlook as I possibly could.
The impact of Jacques Ellul’s writing has affected my whole approach to my vocation as a journalist and writer. The primary consequence has been to detach me very firmly from the style that is called “advocacy journalism,” a style I formerly relied on. But it has not edged me back into the old mold of “objectivity.” I didn’t believe in that concept in the sixties and I don’t believe in it now. Instead, I have attempted to practice what might be described as “reconciling journalism.” The questions posed by Ellul about the point of view, handling and quality of work in the world inform and challenge my writing constantly.
As my own thinking and political notions continue to evolve, the frame work set out in Hope in Time of Abandonment and False Presence of the Kingdom has become more, not less pertinent to both, as well as to the faith that underlies and lives in tension with them. I find more and more sense in quotations like the following, from the last chapter of Hope in Time of Abandonment:
If Christians take seriously the evolution of this society, they have to understand that it is not by commitment to action that they can make any important changes in it, but by the insertion of a completely new and unexpected dimension, the incognito. It is that which is presence to the world, through the shock of refusal, through the gap left vacant, through the resulting chasm, through the unlooked-for break in the conversation. it is the manner of the presence to the modern world which has changed for me, and not its importance or its necessity.
When this article appeared, Chuck Fager was an author, freelance writer, and Sojourners correspondent living in San Francisco. He is the author of Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South. His article “The abortion impasse: a way out” appeared in the December 1976 issue of Sojourners.
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