“I’ve Got a Stone in My Shoe” (Pat Robertson)
September 18, 2005
What to do with Pat Robertson, the allegedly unrepresentative Evangelical? Ex-evangelical Eastern Orthodox journalist, professor, and GetReligion blogger Terry Mattingly wants Robertson “excommunicated”. Following Joe Loconte, Mattingly wonders why “Evangelical leaders” haven’t acted. It seems no one has noted the obvious problem implicit in Mattingly’s necessarily figurative use of the word “excommunication.” How, as an “Evangelical leader,” do you “excommunicate” or even discipline someone who doesn’t belong to your particular sect, probably because his sect and your own exist due to theological differences that now or in the past were the basis for schisms and excommunications which probably followed numerous prior schisms and excommunications?
Perhaps the situation is simply this: anyone who can get a voice as an “Evangelical” can say a lot of stupid things with relative impunity because incoherence and confusion breeds more of the same. The chickens come home to roost, as they say, and they will roost as long as they can make a buck and hold an audience. But instead of seeing Pat Robertson (and much else) as a clear sign that a supposedly flourishing “Evangelicalism,” alongside the dwindling oldline and mainline Protestant churches, is just another aspect of the dissolution of a tradition of heresy and revolt, Evangelical talking heads want to think they are having a renaissance: “More numbers (attendance, members, giving), more votes, more public attention! We must be doing something right! Now we’re taken seriously! Now people know we aren’t a bunch of Elmer Gantries!” And then Pat Robertson makes the national news, ably deflating the Evangelical boosters. What to do?
Commenters to Mattingly’s discussion of this question in this post at GetReligion are getting mighty bold: what is needed is more denunciations! A piling-on of theologians! Someone floated an intriguing boycott idea–definitely a suitable back-room, passive-aggressive approach for Evangelicals who generally have a problem with being strategically not-nice, even when facing people (let alone a “Christian brother”) whom they take to be extremely not-nice.
I don’t recall this much fuss after Ted Haggard made racist and anti-catholic remarks about Latin Americans. Why is that? And what exactly is so bad about what Robertson said? Who wouldn’t agree that, given a choice between the two, assasination might be preferable to war? The main ruckus seems to be in reaction to the rather clutzy application of this idea to a political situation few Americans know or care about and the fact that it was done by someone who could be (and was) linked to “evangelicals” or “conservative protestants.” Should Evangelical pastors and public intellectuals never suggest the needfulness of violent and even technically illegal political acts? Or is it just a matter of application and decorum? Had Robertson said the same about Saddam Hussein, would it have been tolerable to Evangelicals?
In any event, I think it’s clear enough that Robertson is a boob who should be ignored for many reasons, not denounced. Denunciation just amplifies a fracas, although it offers opportunities for the self-aggrandizement of the denouncers who jump in. This is how blogs and Washington work, but to their credit Evangelical leaders may shy away from such pettiness.
Furthermore, denunciation of a Pat Robertson type is strategically unwise because it would probably generate more of the ridiculous posturing of the “evangelical elite” whose idea of redemptive purpose is to be broadly liked and respected, even by the most left-wing and anti-religious organs of opinion, either because they are liberals themselves or are mere cowards. (The latter often evolves into the former, especially in intensely liberal environments.)
Here are the people Mattingly and some of his readers have listed as ideal but overlooked Evangelical voices and kinder, gentler, smarter candidates for media constructions of “The Evangelical.” We have Lee Strobel, Tony Evans, Lauren Winner, John Mark Reynolds, Marshall Shelley, Barbara Nicolosi, Chris Seay, Roberto Rivera y Carlo, David Gushee, Charles Chaput, Nancy Pearcey, William Romanowski, Ken Myers, Albert Reyes, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas Oden, Luke Timothy Johnson, Al Mohler, Mark D. Roberts, John Piper, Mark Noll, John Stott, R. C. Sproul, Paul Zahl, Alister Begg, and John MacArthur.
Oddly this list includes non-Protestants, people who do and do not think “Fundamentalist” is a very bad word, mainliners, and reformed persons. Some of these are people who do not really regard themselves as evangelicals or who would not be recognized by an evangelical as an evangelical. Few, if any, of them can plausibly claim to represent even sizeable minorities of the many different people who identify themselves as “evangelicals.”
So who are the really representative Evangelicals? Ted Haggard, Rick Warren, and other major megachurch leaders who are not cited in the preceding Evangelical A-List. This is undoubtedly because they are too unintellectual, too corporate and commercialistic, and thus do not represent a real advance from the gauche Robertson who positively beats some of these men when it comes to appearance and speaking talent. “Why not D. James Kennedy,” asks Pantagruelist Dan Knauss? Kennedy is smart, can speak well, has a big following–but he’s allegedly a Dominionist, which is rumored to mean a kind of Evangelical or conservative Protestant who might think it’s legitimate to take over the government–and other bad things. Kennedy thus constitutes the same kind of thread to the moderate mere Christians as Robertson. Too militant! Too liable to fan fears of theocrats!
If the truth will be told, approximations of the Mattingly/GetReligion A-List and its admirers emanate from a minority of disaffected ex-evangelicals, neo-evangelicals, post-evangelicals and other indelibly marked evangelical souls obsessed with disregarding the reality of Evangelicalism while contriving ideal fantasy versions of it from the dimninished, dissolute standpoint I described at the outset of this post. Why should anyone think they know what they are doing?
Imagine a gathering of the A-List aces. Sit them down together and they will all smile and pretend to be “Evangelicals,” meaning “smart and affable ‘mere christians.’” If the agenda is to get the rank and file, or at least the media, to accept these people as model evangelicals and leaders, it’s a long shot. They don’t agree on what or where they are as Evangelicals–or where they are going, or where they ought to go. My abiding sense is that what unites them is the dim sense that “Evangelicals” are America’s last best hope for some kind of theologically and politically middling position between Elmer Gantry and John Shelby Spong. But try to define that position and you get the cipher that is Evangelicalism: an ongoing identity crisis that continually updates the question and never settles it. All concerned parties would do well to consider Philip Jenkins’ recent rhetorical question in The Wall Street Journal: “Which is the greater error, the worse misunderstanding of a religion–to believe that it teaches radical separation from a failed world or that it calls for immersion in that world and a thorough acceptance of its ways.”
This is “I’ve Got a Stone in My Shoe” (Pat Robertson) in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Among the Detritus of the Storm: Calvinism, Intelligent Design, and the End of Friendship | Next: Traditional, Faithful, Mainstream, Representative, Typical? | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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» Traditional, Faithful, Mainstream, Representative, Typical? from The Japery
Terry Mattingly has clarified his meaning and terms somewhat regarding the Poynter and GetReligion posts I mentioned here earlier today. He writes that he never mentioned “traditional Evangelicals,” which I think he intends as a reference to my remark … [Read More]
Tracked on September 19, 2005 08:06 PM