'Third way' could provide political hope

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 22, 1995 by Arthur Jones, Dorothy Vidulich

WASHINGTON -- The religious right has hijacked the evangelical movement. The Christian Coalition is laying siege to the Republican Party. Political liberalism is in eclipse, and angry political conservatism is on the rise.

Further, both left and right are hidebound with their own versions of political correctness, contends evangelical author Tom Sine, in his book, Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America's Culture War (Eerdmans).

To Sine, the politically correct left includes the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, National Organization for Women and ACT-UP; the politically correct right includes the Christian Coalition, Operation Rescue, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council and the American Center for Law and Justice.

And that's not the worst of it, according to Sine, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and the University of Washington. The heated rhetoric of right and left sparks increasing violence, Sine states, pointing to the murder of abortion clinic workers by antiabortion extremists and churches desecrated by pro-gay demonstrators.

Sine wants to stop it. He's looking for a "third way." But not before painfully illustrating to Americans what's happening in their society:

* Mainline Protestants have often allowed the political left to define their agenda, as evangelical Christians have often allowed the political right to define theirs.

* The religious right has a virtual hammerlock on the popular Christian media. Its simple black-and-white view of the world plays on people's fears and promotes a narrow political ideology that holds that to be a born-again Christian one must be a conservative Republican.

* There is a marked intolerance on the right, plus a certain naivete regarding the role of the market to solve all ills and an uncritical acceptance of the consumer society.

* A strong conservative element within American Catholicism endorses the church's antiabortion and "pro-morality" positions but adamantly opposes some of its other political and economic agendas. "Such people as Richard Neuhaus, Pat Buchanan and William Bennett," writes Sine, 'are trying to establish a broader coalition with the Protestant right on the basis of shared civic rather than spiritual concerns."

Sine links the religious right's 'terrors and fears" to the prominence of end times" beliefs held by many Protestants. Sine writes, "Virtually all the leaders on the religious right are absolutely certain they know how the world is going to end. Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, Charles Stanley and Pat Robertson are all convinced that scripture plainly teaches that the human race is destined for a terrifying collectivist future."

Sine writes that Pat Robertson guaranteed that there would be a 1992 tribulation "sparked by a Russian invasion of Israel," preparing the way for the Antichrist.

The one-world takeover scenario becomes the religious right's "master grid for interpreting all contemporary political issues, often with dismaying and tragic results," Sine writes. "One of the most disturbing side effects of this kind of end-times hysteria is the apprehension it evokes over any form of international cooperation."

These apocalyptic presuppositions so affect the religious right's vision, continues Sine, that it is not able to understand genuine pluralistic democracy at work.

"Many sincere conservative Christians, steeped in popular end-times fables, genuinely believe that the world is getting worse and worse, and that nothing of any significance can be done to make it better.

"Facing the problem of poverty around the globe, for instance," Sine writes, "they are inclined to throw up their hands and quote, inappropriately, "The poor you will always have with you' (Mt 26:11)." But Jesus, he continues, was of course "not counseling callous fatalism concerning the poor. He was simply pointing out that the needs of the poor would outlast his brief time on earth."

The most visible part of the reborn conservative movement, Robertson's Christian Coalition, has benefited from Bill Clinton's election because Clinton unintentionally pushed "the religious right's hot buttons on such issues as abortion and gays in the military" and gave the movement "exactly what it needed: a new enemy."

There's nothing conciliatory about the religious right -- it finds enemies wherever it looks and, according to Sine, no one exploits that better than Pat Buchanan.

As if to bear out Sine, Buchanan's Sept. 9 Christian Coalition dinner speech had plenty of enemies. "We don't need some secular humanist in sandals and beads at the Department of Education telling us how to educate America's children," intoned Buchanan.

More, Buchanan said, "the people who write American history have got an agenda, to inculcate and indoctrinate America's children in their contempt for America's past. The children and grandchildren of this generation may look like you, but think like `them.' That's what it's all about."

When Buchanan mentioned Clinton's name, the audience booed. Sine has his own explanations for the right's reactions. During a Sept. 7 discussion, Sine said he doubted that most people on the progressive left had "any idea of the apprehensions, real and imagined, that stalk America's conservative Protestants, Like fundamentalists all over the world, many are terrified by the engulfing, unstoppable tidal waves of social change, modernity and secularization." In the recent Iowa straw poll, continued Sine, Buchanan "played to all the worst fears on the secular right -- the paramilitary and religious right -- who live in terror of that future."