The Emphatic Christian Center: Reforming American Political Practice

Christian Century, May 24, 2000 by Gary Dorrien

Emphatic Christian Center: Reforming American Political Practice. By Kyle A. Pasewark and Garrett E. Paul. Abingdon, 320 pp., $29.00.

THE MIDDLE GROUND, treasured as the key to every election, has dubious associations. Words such as opportunistic, lukewarm, compromising and vacuous cling to it. Populist political commentator Jim Hightower observes that the middle of the road is home to yellow stripes and dead armadillos. Revelation 3:15-26 observes more ominously, "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth."

Kyle A. Pasewark and Garrett E. Paul are middle-grounders who take such warnings to heart. Pasewark, a student at Yale Law School, has been a theology professor at several liberal arts colleges; Paul is a religion professor at Gustavus Adolphus College. Both are Lutheran moderates who call for a different kind of centrism from the hollow, spineless, opportunistic and, above all, vacuous middle ground that they perceive in contemporary American politics and religion. They are not the kind of centrists who won't defend their own side in an argument. Neither do they argue, in the mode of former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm or the late Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, for an energetic form of middle-ground accommodationism. Rather, they vigorously argue for a centered Christian ethic that asserts its own principles, claims its rightful place in the public square and affirms the attainment of power as a social good.

The Emphatic Christian Center began as a 1994 CHRISTIAN CENTURY article that bemoaned the polarization of American politics and religion, especially as evidenced by Newt Gingrich's then-ascendent "Contract with America." But shortly after that, extremism fell out of fashion. Americans quickly grew tired of the politics of polarization. This could have been a good thing, the authors observe, but polarization gave way to an exhaustion and apathy which set the stage for the re-election of President Clinton, the epitome of vacuous-center opportunism.

The authors take pains to establish that "emphatic Christian centrism" is something quite different. They reject the polarizing politics of the established left and right wings in politics and religion, but not in the name of triangulating accommodation. "A center that sees its task as nothing more than brokering compromise between political extremes is a vacuous center that, ironically, worsen the very polarization it hopes to ameliorate," they contend. "A true center, an emphatic center, is defined not by the compromises it makes, but the positions it takes; not by the principles it sacrifices in the interest of compromise, but by those that inform its very being." It is centered in defined Christian commitments, and it centers the politics of the entire left-to-right spectrum. The regnant center, vacuous to its core, enables the recurring cycle of polarization and exhaustion, but a strong and emphatic center could reinvigorate American politics and religion by "calling the political wings back to their truest insights."

Pasewark and Paul begin by reviewing the often-desultory "religion and politics" literature. They distinguish among inclusionists (who argue that religion has a rightful role to play in American public life) and universalist exclusionists (who want to exclude religion from public life because religion isn't universal) and particular exclusionists (who want to exclude religion from public life because it causes conflicts). James Madison, John Dewey and John Rawls make their usual appearances, in the company of numerous others. Pasewark and Paul keep their distance from various ostensible allies in the first group, thought I think they exaggerate their differences from Catholic neoconservative Richard John Neuhaus. The authors miss entirely Neuhaus's important insistence that religious groups must not advocate public-policy positions or seek electoral victories on the basis of reasons that they exclude from public debate.

Pasewark and Paul rightly criticize exclusionists for repeatedly treating religion as inherently irrational; they contend that, at its best, religion is comprehensive in its grasp and capable of self-criticism and self-transcendence. It is not enough for inclusionists to make a case that "religion" is needed in public life, they argue; what is needed is advocacy of the kind of religion that ought to be valued in public life. Pasewark and Paul correct some of Neuhaus's majoritarian-sounding statements, but fail to acknowledge that their basic contentions about comprehensive breadth and depth, capacity for self-transcendence and the value of normative religion are all Neuhaus themes. Their idea of good religion is very different from his on specific issues, but they share some key principles with him.

While eschewing the language of "third way" politics, the authors pursue the customary third-way tactic of identifying essential similarities between their conflicting antagonists. American Christianity persistently reduces Christianity to the service of a freedom-worshiping ideology, they argue. American conservatives sacrilize individualism and free-enterprise economics; American liberals sacrilize individualism and the rights of personal freedom in the sphere of morality and culture. Both groups reduce God to a single metaphor. "The right exuberantly refers to a stem and righteous Father who has showered America with blessings--especially liberty--but losing His patience with America for its sins and now on the verge of withdrawing His blessings; meanwhile, the left usually refers tentatively to a vague, amorphous Love which can set us free to be the people we were meant to be, and which ought somehow to inspire us to be more loving."