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Tomgram: Chernus and Hilfiker on the Other Christian Activists

History can be mind-boggling. Only by reading Andrew J. Bacevich's superb book, The New American Militarism (excerpted at Tomdispatch last year), would I ever have known that, into the Cold War era, Christian evangelicals still nurtured, as he puts it, a generations-old "robust anti-war tradition." Bacevich adds, "[T]hey had tended to take a rather dim view of soldiering, seeing the profanity, harsh conditions, loose women, and cheap whiskey associated with camp life in the Old Army as not especially conducive to Christian living. Nor had they sought to engage in collective political action or to attach themselves to a particular political party." All that changed decisively in the Vietnam years. But even today, while white evangelicals tend to be conservative, vote Republican, and be militarily (or is it imperially?) gung ho, there is nothing monolithic about them, politically-speaking.

Nor, of course, are all Christians evangelicals by any stretch of the imagination, or conservatives, for that matter -- though you might not know it, given the singular spotlight of media attention that, for obvious reasons, has been shone on Christian fundamentalist supporters of George Bush and the Republican Party. Christians who don't fall into that category -- who weren't say, beating the drums for war in Iraq or for Sam Alito to become a "unitary executive" of the Supreme Court -- must feel some frustration at often being, however implicitly, lumped into that category in what passes for our national discussion.

So I'm particularly happy that Ira Chernus, a Tomdispatch regular and historian of religions, who has often taught the history of Judaism and Christianity, but tells me he "specializes in studying how these religious traditions affect secular political issues in our country," spent a weekend among progressive Christian organizers and decided to write a report on the world he discovered (which you'll find below). Perhaps a tad inspired myself, I asked an old friend, David Hilfiker, a former poverty doctor whose books I've edited, to add his own thoughts to this Tomdispatch package on the view from the Christian left. Long involved in the nitty-gritty issues of urban poverty (and its alleviation), he also wrote for Tomdispatch from Iraq, which he visited with the Christian Peacemaker Teams both before and after the Bush invasion. I hope that these two pieces offer at least a peek into a world that really deserves far more space and attention. Tom


Praise the Lord and Pass the Petition
By Ira Chernus

If you are waiting for a religious left to emerge to offset the power of the religious right, it may already be in your own neighborhood at a local church or synagogue. I stumbled across a branch of the religious left quite by accident recently, in Texas of all places, though the folks I met would say I was guided to them by the Lord.

On a weekend in mid-February, nearly 200 Evangelical Lutherans from all over the country came to Fort Worth for the Congregation-Based Organizing Strategy Summit or CBOSS. They talked, planned, and prayed about community organizing. They shared stories about what they had already accomplished through faith and hard political work.

They had demanded action from public officials and corporate leaders in their communities, and they were proud of their victories. Among the local triumphs some of them claimed were: affordable housing for thousands of families; guaranteed access to health insurance for all children; treatment centers instead of prisons for criminals; a new community center where a meth house used to be; free day-care centers; water and sewer lines for 150,000 rural poor who had none before; laws requiring public contractors to pay a living wage; surveillance cameras in police cars -- to watch the police themselves.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 7:11 PM