Evangelicals and the Social Crisis

The issue joined. I have chosen to speak about the present and the future of evangelical social concern. I do not find this an easy task. In the first place, what is an evangelical? I was tempted to define that word, but thought better of it.

Yet the question is a live one. I wrestled with it some years ago while watching two television programs. I had switched on the set, hoping to kill some time in a rather lonely setting in eastern Illinois. The TV, an ancient one, finally warmed to the occasion, and into view came a somewhat stiffly choreographed gaggle of young people singing the latest “with-it” religious tune. Then from the midst emerged a tall figure, handsomely dressed, who pointed his finger at me and announced, “Something good is going to happen to you!” His prophecy was fulfilled 30 seconds later when, on another channel, I viewed a remarkable CBS documentary on the amazing Brazilian archbishop, Dom Helder Camara.

Now both these men are called evangelicals, both represent discernible lifestyles consistent with their understanding of the gospel. Both accept Jesus Christ as the norm for discipleship. One reflects the affluence and influence of North American evangelism, the other the hard life of the peasantry and the oppressed.

I was fascinated, because I knew that here were two different perceptions of what it means to be evangelical. Here were almost certainly two different views of what salvation means to the marginal masses in our century. Here were two men who, in their struggle to follow Christ, personalize a central issue among believers in the world today: not so much the question of evangelical identity, but more crucially, the question of salvation in our times. What does salvation mean in the age of Big Brother? Or to put the same question another way, what is the gospel?’ How can it be perceived as good news by our fellow humans?

We raise this question here because we are concerned about the present and the future. Hence, we have chosen not to dwell on the past. This is unfortunate in a way, but it makes my task easier. I am not a historian. But I have asked other men who are about the history of evangelical social concern. They refer me to Timothy Smith, or to Alan Heimert or Perry Miller, perhaps Kenneth Scott Latourette. I’ve read Mr. Henry’s Uneasy Conscience and Mr. Wirt’s Social Conscience. I’ve attended what evangelical leaders call “historic” conferences where attempts were made to “speak to the issues.” I was in Berlin, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Dallas—I’m a professional conference-goer. I was also invited to share in the conference on salvation today, sponsored by the World Council of Churches in Bangkok.

Why all this research? Because I needed some evidence that this thing called Christianity as viewed by us evangelicals has made a difference in the lives of the oppressed of the world. Black students wanted that information—they have heard our spokespeople, visited our churches, interpreted our guilty silence in the face of monstrous social outrages, and have concluded that social concern and evangelicals were mutually incompatible. There is very little evidence over the past 100 years to disprove that conclusion.

Sadly, there is very little evidence currently to disprove it either. With one possible exception: Some years ago Harry Golden spoke of a phenomenon in the South that he claimed was unique in our country’s history ... the emergence of a different revolutionary, the black man. Golden identified two weapons used by black men to force communication and recognition. “One is the writ, the brief, the court argument … the law, the oldest complex in our Anglo-Saxon civilization. The second weapon is even more remarkable. It is Christianity, the oldest complex in our Western civilization” (Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 16).

This celebrated author, editor of the Carolina Israelite, also spoke about evangelicals. He said,

The evangelical plantation owner saw no relationship between religion and politics. He forgot that while Christianity is a group effort to realize the joys of an afterlife, that effort is realized only through an individual ethic here and now— little did the Southerner suspect that one day the descendants of slaves would wield Christianity as a finely tooled political weapon, asking jobs, school wages, and hospitals in its name.

He concluded, “If Christianity is saving the Negro, so is he saving Christianity.” Interesting insight. And yet evangelicals were conspicuous by their absence in that struggle precisely because they did not perceive it as being evangelical.

The inadequacy examined. Why? In the first place, we seem to have an inadequate theology of sin. We have dwelled so long on the gross sins of individuals that we have very little understanding of the corporate nature of sin. We can only speak meaningfully of evangelical social concern if we understand the relationship between individual sin and its corporate consequences. Rosemary Reuther is helpful when she writes in Liberation Theology, (p. 9):

Even in Saint Paul, the personal movement of conversion and reconciliation with God cannot be separated from his gathering into the community of reconciliation and promise, for these are two sides of one and the same thing. By the same token it is clear that, for Paul, the state of sin, alienation, and brokenness between man and God does not result simply in individual “bad acts” but stands within a corporate structure of alienation and oppression which has raised up a social and cosmic “anti-creation.” The individualistic concept of sin ignores this social-cosmic dimension of evil.

She continues:

A prophetic sense of sin might indeed acknowledge that sin begins in the personal (“cor curvum in se”) but its expression is corporate, social, and even cosmic. Sin builds up a corporate structure of alienation and oppression which man, individually, cannot overcome. This corporate structure of sin distorts the character of man in community and in creation so fundamentally that it can be visualized as a false world.

Now we evangelicals know this. We teach this in the schools we sponsor. The people who write our journals know this. But this reality is treated as an abstraction. Sin is real, but slums are not; we have not shown the ethical and moral connection between sin and slums. Greed is real, but excessive profiteering in the name of free enterprise is not; lust is real, but we prefer to inveigh against the swivel-hipped secretary who ambles seductively down the office aisle rather than the callous manipulation of the Justice Department to re-elect a president.

We fail to acknowledge that as members of the community of fallen humanity, we are responsible for the misery of others; we have not only practiced sin, but have also rejoiced with others who did likewise. The fruit of that corporate sin now provides the economic base for our evangelical institutions.

Secondly, we have preached, and preach, a privatistic application of the Cross, which is inadequate. The Cross, in the minds of most Christians, is either an historical artifact upon which Jesus died or else a bad case of lumbago. But in the experience of our Lord, it was “the judgment of this world” (John 12:31). We have called men to repent on issues that God is not the least bit concerned about. Rather, conversion requires a proclamation of the Cross that awakens the individual to his need for a radical change. The individual must be confronted by a demand that illumines not only his responsibility for his own sin but also his culpability for the creation and perpetuation of society’s corporate sins. Thus is created a new person, one who repents of his involvement in the world, his mental surrender to the group-think of Big Brother; a person who renounces his advantages in the present order to assume a place among the wretched of the earth.

Lesslie Newbigin, in Bible Society Record (Feb. 1961, p. 19), put it so well:

Our faith is that the Word of the Cross is in very truth the power of God unto salvation—not just the rescue of each one of us separately, but the healing, the making whole of the whole creation and the fulfilling of God’s whole will. Our faith is that the Cross is in truth the only event in human history which can properly be called the crisis of human history, and that the issue which is raised there for the entire human race is one beside which even the survival of human civilization on earth is a secondary matter.

Thirdly, we suffer from what Helmut Thielicke calls a “false conservatism”—an attitude that fails to perceive the political implications of the church’s prophetic and pastoral role in society. Says Thielicke (Political Ethics, p. 627, 628):

False conservatism expresses itself in the inclination to accept world conditions as they are. Under this pseudoconservative banner, a corrupt social order, which keeps part of humanity living at substandard economic levels while allowing another class to exploit and profiteer, is regarded as a matter of divine providence—or visitation—calling for simple acceptance and submission …. To refer the existing social and political situation directly to divine providence, and to ignore the secondary human causes—the guilt and error of individuals and of organized groups—is to create among Christians a condition which we might describe as political apathy. If everything that takes place is regarded as God’s doing, then it is obviously sanctioned by what is assumed to be the will of God. Logically, then, it can never be opposed. Even though child labor, malnutrition, and the oppression and humiliation of millions cry out to heaven, they must simply be accepted.

It is a terrible judgment on Christianity and on false theology that the decisive social movements of the last hundred years have not originated in any will on the part of the Church to play the good Samaritan. The Church has not taken the Lord’s command to “love thy neighbor” as a concrete commission to change a blatantly unjust social situation. No, the decisive impulses for change have come from within the ranks of the oppressed and humiliated themselves. There has thus been nourished a kind of revolutionary instinct, the terrible symptoms of which may now be seen throughout the world, in their extreme form in communism …. To be sure, Christians have helped the needy. Think of the Church’s many works of mercy and of the countless acts of private charity. But these were bound to be regarded as alms, and hence as humiliating to the recipients, a cover-up for the unjust situation, so long as the proletariat was given the impression that the Church actually tolerated the unjust situation as a whole—and did so in the name of that evil conservatism which even dared to claim sanction for itself in the will of God.

It seems obvious that the fault of much that parades as evangelical is far more American than Christian in its attitudes and stance toward the oppressed among us. We don’t particularly care for the poor in our own ranks, and technology and affluence have made it possible for us to avoid them. Technology has produced the freeways, and affluence (with the complicity of the Federal Housing Authority) has produced the suburbs.

But what about the future? The question is not whether the evangelical has a future. Given the self-perpetuating nature of institutions, it is probable that we shall see most of our organizations prosper “till Jesus comes.” Beyond that, the ball gets cloudy. The question is rather: Is there any future for evangelicals in social action?

There is, of course, without question now a mood among a new breed of evangelicals that can make significant breakthroughs. Some of this new leadership had its sensitivities honed to razor edge in the '60s as part of the student protest movements. What many older evangelicals do not admit is that much of the current aggravation about social concerns owes its life to these and other civil-rights movements. Now older, and recovering from the shock induced by the collapse of the New Left, many of these people are also discovering in the New Testament a more radical discipleship than their fathers knew. Some of these people have made their way into evangelical seminaries and will be exerting significant leadership in the near future.

But there is also a discernible pulse among older leaders. What I have called the “Mood of Minneapolis” is still haunting many of those gathered for that occasion. The response to the ministries of Tom Skinner, Keith Miller, Leighton Ford, and others advocating strong social commitments was heartening, and these delegates could provide the basis of new coalitions for social action as well as a means to bridge some serious gaps in communication between generations.

To compliment this evangelical mood is a profoundly significant change of attitude in America, particularly in intellectual circles. Robert Heilbroner (The New York Review, Oct. 15, 1972) puts it like this:

We are experiencing the onset of a new mood in the seventies. This new mood is conservative, although not in the usual sense in which the word is used in political debate. I would describe it as the rediscovery of a perspective on human events that highlights certain aspects of history, of “human nature,” if I may risk the term to which both the liberal mood of the fifties and the radical mood of the sixties paid insufficient attention, if in fact they paid it any attention at all ….

[This new mood] dwells on the persistence of human folly in the face of heroic efforts to enlighten it with reason; on the perversity and cruelty that provide an insistent basso ostinato to the melodies of progress; on the extraordinary ease with which human sacrifice can be marshaled for war and the tremendous difficulties of adducing it for the tasks of peace; on the susceptibility of men and women at all levels of society to the delusions of nationalism or organized religion and their virtual immunity from any sense of human “brotherhood” with men and women of another territory or faith.

Heilbroner calls this mood “radical conservatism” and cites as one of its key features its willingness to ask terrible questions “that go to the root of things.”

Why does mankind refuse to make the changes, often within easy grasp, that might rid it of the oppression which it has known from earliest times? Why do human beings display the laziness, the cowardice, the stupidity, inertia, or indifference that allows things to go on as they are?

These will be acknowledged by evangelicals as root questions, and if Heilbroner is correct, then it is possible to take advantage of this conservative frame of mind. The scriptures supply the answer to this moral and ethical dilemma of man. But the evangelical church will need to overcome serious deficiencies in order to seize the moment for God. While in the forefront in the proclamation of the scripture’s answer to man’s moral dilemma, the evangelical has been deficient in his understanding of the way in which man frames his current crises. The late Abraham Joshua Heschel (The Center Magazine, March/April 1973, p. 43) exhibits a profound insight at this point:

The most serious obstacle which modern men encounter in entering a discussion about the ideas of the Bible is the absence of the problem to which the Bible refers. This, indeed, is the status of the Bible in modern society: it is a sublime answer, but we no longer know the question to which it responds. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.

Another voice is that of Rollo May, famed psychotherapist. In a critique of a major premise of much of the literature promising a new age, Dr. May declares, “Far from Consciousness III being an answer, it would be no consciousness at all, for it lacks the dialectic movement between yes and no, good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort.” Commenting on Charles Reich’s contention that a new order will come because there are no enemies out there, May queries (in Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, p. 54),

Are there no enemies? Can we call to mind the Berrigan brothers and think that? Or the Soledad brothers? Or Angela Davis? Or the convicts at Attica, who after the slaughter were forced to run the gauntlet naked? Or Vietnam? Reich has no understanding of the creeping fascism already discernible in our country: the turning of youth against their fathers, the anti-intellectualism, the growth of violence coupled with the sense of powerlessness of the mass of people, the tendencies of bureaucracies to make decisions on the basis of what works mechanically with all human sense drowned in opportunism.

There are many other voices, and a cursory examination of bookstalls would reveal the intensity of concern. By and large, the evangelical church is not tuned to the sounds of the '70s, and this inadequacy must be corrected.

A further task for the evangelical church is to disengage herself from her captivity to cultural conservatism of the sort described by Thielicke. Only then can she speak to the moral issues that threaten the very survival of a free society; only then can she become a true servanthood in the world.

Reprinted by permission from “The Chicago Declaration,” Creation House.

William Pannell was teaching at Fuller Seminary and was a contributing editor of the Post American when this article appeared.