Of Men and Metanarratives (Part 2)/ Peter Eavis
Come up with an alternative.
That sums up many of the responses to my Tuesday column. In it, I argued that Michele Bachmann winning the GOP nomination could prompt the media to highlight the toxicity some of us see working within hard-edged evangelicalism. Revealing this unpleasant stuff in a high profile political race could even speed up a possible societal shift away from a style of faith some of us see as sectarian, belligerent and judgmental, I claimed.
In the comments section, Caleb asked an excellent question:
“Should Bachmann-style US Christianity be exposed and destroyed, do we yet have the gears, resources, and integrity to replace it? What is our "theological metanarrative"? Can it sustain a critique of the downsides of secular culture in the same way that it can critique, say "Stage 2" Bachmannism?”
And Caleb helpfully provided a definition of “theological metanarrative.”’ It is a worldview that claims to be “in sync with the big story about the reality of God in the world.” Caleb says conservative evangelicals at least have that. Not having some sort of narrative, Caleb posits, could reduce politics and economics to a “crass pragmatic market calculus” that aims only for size and strength.
My first pushback: I am not sure conservative evangelicals’ set of beliefs amounts to a meta-narrative. They certainly have an agenda, and one they are keen to push. But its often narrow nature seems to prevent it from being “meta.” Here’s an example. Caleb recommended Michael Lindsay’s Faith in the Halls of Power. I downloaded the book and read about something truly striking that occurred at the very outset of the conservative evangelical push into power. In 1980, President Carter, himself a devout evangelical, held a White House conference on the family. He refused to exclude homosexuals, enraging many of the other evangelicals, who went on to become powerful in Washington. My point here is not whether Carter was right or wrong. Instead, what’s telling is that from the very start one group of evangelicals “won” the political battle – and then succeeded in telling everyone that their style of faith was authentic. I was left asking: Whatever happened to the Carter-style evangelicals? How did this strain get left out of the power equation so early, and then have very little sway in the proceeding 20 years? Were there just so few of them? Or did politics seem the wrong way to go to them, and so they decided instead to go and do great stuff in their churches? Or were they actively kept out of politics, because the conservative ones simply had more power and fight? In other words, was the right-wing meta-narrative actually a mask for a plain old power grab?
(March 26, 1977 gathering of gay and lesbian community leaders at Carter White House)
How do we have enough room in our metanarrative? Can we make it more center-set than bounded-set? Well, I think we all agree that God is involved in human history. While we probably should feel queasy about appropriating God for particular policies, we have to admit that He also works within our conscience to bring more of His love into the world, and that can sometimes mean taking highly defined political stances. Those stances may even lead to strife and policies that directly hurt others’ interests. The good done by the abolitionists and the civil-rights movement took place amid violence, for instance.
The question I am left asking is: Can we discern which struggles we go to the barricades for, the ones we might even attach God’s name to, and which should we be more laid back about? Give me the weekend and I’ll have a stab at answering that. Because somewhere in that I think we might find the beginnings of a more acceptable metanarrative for faith and politics.
Want to give me some help? If so, use the comments section. Thanks!
