The negative image of Evangelicals and, even more, Fundamentalists, is rooted in the media driven wake of the famed Scopes "monkey trial" of the 1920s. The facile pen of H.L. Mencken and his legion of emulators spread a highly influential and not justified portrayal of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist opponents of the Darwin-Wallace evolutionary hypothesis as a slavering mob of pointy-headed cretins who lacked the cranial capacity to understand science but possessed an emotional attachment to the Bible as the inerrant word of Truth which surpassed rational analysis.
The urban sophisticates of the hoi oligoi had a good laugh at the expense of these Christians, which lasted from that time down to the present. The laughter has been as inapposite as the original Mencken caricature.
From the Thirties on to the Sixties, opinion surveys, social observations, and political actions alike showed clearly that the majority of Americans were Christian. The Christianity was broad but not particularly deep. During the years when the slogan, "The family that prays together, stays together," was heard often and loud, most American commitment to religion was more of a civic nature than a matter of deep and abiding faith. The belief in and invocation of God were considered such key definers of "the American way," that the words, "Under God" were inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance to provide a bright, shining line separating us from them--the Soviet and other Communists.
At the time when President Eisenhower famously declared that the American experiment made no sense unless it was rooted in a deep belief in God regardless of whatever particular belief or god might be involved, the word "Communist" was almost invariably preceded by the word, "godless." God was the great dividing line between the US, the American people, the values, and aspirations which bolstered both on the one hand and the globe girdling "commies" on the other.
The general view was simply that no true, real American would lack a belief in God, preferably but not necessarily one of a Protestant Christian hue. In a show of inclusiveness, the term "Judeo-Christian" was introduced. While any number of hatchets were employed to split the theological hairs contained in this circumlocution, most Americans simply nodded in agreement. Consensus existed: Real Americans believed in God, subscribed to Judeo-Christian values, and acted accordingly. Since no "commie" could do either and be true to their secular faith it followed that no real American could be a "commie." "Commies" were, by definition, heaved out of the All-American club.
"Judeo-Christian" values, or, at least the various confessions which clustered under that flag, were seen as the custodians of American moral values. These, as pronounced from pulpits beyond counting focused primarily upon two areas. One was loyalty to the nation, the state, and the government. The other was (drum roll, please) sex.
Unlike the much maligned Puritans who, believing as they did in the inherently "fallen" nature of humankind, understood that pre-marital sex was to be expected, the Americans of the mid-century years exhibited a preoccupation with sexual morals which bordered on the obsessive. The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists were in no way outstanding in their positions or preachings on sexual matters in American life.
The sexual focus of the time, the fifteen years separating the end of WW II and the coming of Camelot, was on pre-marital conduct with a penumbra of concerns involving the portrayal of sex in film and on TV, teenage dating, inter-faith dating, public displays of affection, and, perish the thought, divorce. A married couple in a (gasp!) double bed, teenagers holding hands, the changing styles of dancing, and the emergence of rock and roll as the music of youthful choice or the presence of a (shock!) divorcee in polite society could raise many a ministerial brow, cause more than a few denunciations from pulpit and pundit alike.
Conspicuous by absence were abortion (illegal,) birth-control (hidden or non-existent until the advent of the "Pill" in the opening days of the Sixties) evolution (absent in most high school and many college textbooks) as well as identifiable Evangelicals or Fundamentalists other than the redoubtably acceptable figure of Billy Graham. Present however in public views of religion, Christianity specifically, were the heroic figures of martyrs to the faith in Communist countries. The figure of the imprisoned Christian suffering for the faith in the dungeons of the Soviet Union, the satellites of Eastern Europe, were stock characters in the us-versus-them morality play which was a constant sub-text of the Cold War.
So pervasive and potent was the image of the suffering Christian that it was employed with great success by one Tom Dooley, MD who served as a medical officer in the Navy and was present during the evacuation of people fleeing the Communist government of the Viet Minh in North Vietnam following the French defeat there. Dr Dooley later admitted that the horrifying picture of tortured Catholics bleeding from their many stigmata was pure fiction, but that admission came years later, well after the picture had served well in ginning up support within the US for the notion of siding with Saigon against Hanoi regardless of either American national interest or the realities of Vietnamese politics and society.
The image of Christians willing to suffer the most horrific of deprivations and torments in order to keep their faith proved to be both widespread and long lasting in effect. It became a very central (and unacknowledged) portion of the new culture of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity which would emerge in ever greater power and definition in the Sixties and beyond.
The sense of being victims for faith at the hands of the "secularists" started in the early Sixties. In part, as previously mentioned, the sense of embattlement came as a consequence of Warren court decisions on the question of prayer in the public schools. In part, it was rooted in the changes in sexual behavior which were lumped together under the term, "the sexual revolution." And, in part, a part which is as important as it is unreferenced, the sense of being shoved to the back of the values bus emerged with revisions in public school curricula following the Soviet success with Sputnik.
American education was rapidly tried and convicted as having failed to produce people as competent in science and technology as the system in the Soviet Union. Within the mass of changes demanded or recommended in the post-Sputnik period of tooth-gnashing, hair-pulling, and chest-beating, there was one proposed by a collection of anthropologists and educators called Man: A Course of Study (MACOS.)
MACOS was an effort in both multi-culturalism and cultural relativism intended for use in both primary and secondary schools with the intent of showing American kids what constituted a "culture" as well as the general meaning of the term. The goal was to inspire a sense of just how all humans were bound together by the requirements for group and individual survival. One of its main points, perhaps the main one, was simply that no society, no culture was inherently either superior or inferior to any other.
The Law of Unintended Consequences came into immediate application. More than the creeping re-emergence of the Darwinian New Synthesis now ably reinforced by the discovery and description of the mechanism of heredity, DNA, it was MACOS which roused both the interest and ire of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist community. Taken to its logical (and probably intended) conclusion, MACOS denied any pride of place to Christianity or societies which found all or most of their roots in the Christian heritage.
Coupled with the nationalism which typified Americans (as it does most folk, most places, most of the time), the Christian Evangelical critique of MACOS caught hold on schoolboards throughout the country with the result that few systems had the political will to institute the program in any significant way. It is important that the inchoate campaign against MACOS waged from more than a few pulpits became the basis for the later programs of opposition to the teaching of the New Synthesis.
The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who opposed MACOS and celebrated each victory against it overlooked that the major reason for the multi-cultural, cultural relativist program resided not in its denial of a privileged position for Christianity or the Judeo-Christian tradition per se, but rather in its implicit assault upon nationalism. The affinity of Americans for the American nation as the being the best was the major reason for the repeated rejection of MACOS.
This is evident in the relative failure of later Evangelical and Fundamentalist efforts to kill off the New Synthesis for once and all. While most Americans reject the notion that humans emerged from earlier forms of life (surveys show we are exceeded only by the Turks for wholesale rejection of a purely biological explanation for the emergence of humankind), the Darwinian knife does not cut so painfully close to the nationalist bone as did MACOS.
The Supreme Court came to the rescue of the Evangelical/Fundamentalist community, which would have been condemned to return to the political shadows and perhaps even lose their new found identification as victims--martyrs for the faith--at the hands of the secularists. The rescue was the decision in Roe v Wade thirty-seven years ago.
The matter of abortion had been edging out of the dark alley throughout the Sixties. In a number of messy, incomplete, and confusing legal decisions as well as political actions at the state level, abortion had been increasingly legitimized almost without anyone beyond the immediate battlelines noticing. All that changed with Roe v Wade.
The issue of abortion was propelled instantly into the forefront of public consciousness. It was an issue perfect for those Americans, primarily Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Roman Catholics who had become evermore perturbed by the changes in sexual behavior and gender roles which exploded during that great decade of tumult, the Sixties. The legalization by a few men on the Supreme Court of "the murder of the unborn" was the perfect dividing line between the (secularist or semi-apostate Christians) "victimizers" and the upholders-onto-death of Christian morality, the witnesses and potential martyrs to the demands of faith.
Enter the Christian "Right."
No comments:
Post a Comment