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As things stand, too many Christians speak only from scripts written in the sacralized imperial rhetoric. Thus, while President Bush's evangelical faith petrifies most liberals, his administration is more aptly characterized as evangelical-Straussian. Its foreign policies, as by now widely documented, are the progeny of an unnatural embrace between conservative evangelicals and devotees of the philosopher Leo Strauss, whose epigones now infest political science departments throughout the nation. And the Bush Administration's secrecy, duplicity, and indifference to empirical evidence derive heavily from that second faction, whose utterly utilitarian conception of religion—Athens for the elite, Jerusalem for the rabble—apparently does not concern or even interest evangelical leaders.
Seen in the light of this blandly imperious civil religion, the "Religious Right" looks different. It includes not only the likes of Jerry Falwell, cheering on soldiers encountering insurgents to "blow them all away in the name of the Lord," but also Michael Novak and his "theology of the corporation"—in which, for instance, Halliburton is "an analogue of the church" and akin to Isaiah's Suffering Servant—and all those who quote chapter and verse from the Gospel according to St. Reinhold as filtered through John Courtney Murray: prudence (i.e., what passes for reason in on Wall Street and in the Beltway); deference to "wise" and "responsible" authority (i.e., assent to every edict from the State and Defense Departments); and "realism" (i.e., whatever the bankers and generals think possible).1
Charles Marsh would recall that the civil rights movement owes little but grief to conservative evangelicals and Niebuhrian realists. Indeed, as Marsh demonstrates in The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today, St. Reinhold himself, polestar of gravitas in the liberal firmament, urged a suffocating "patience" on King and his movement, and was, thank God, rejected. Seldom has "realism" been so clearly exposed as the wisdom of the well-connected. Aiming squarely at the latest generation of pharisees, Marsh indicts their ministration to a twisted patriotism, "a cult of self-worship consecrated by court prophets robed in pinstriped suits."
Many Christians—and not only those, like me, who stand on the socialist Left—have watched with mounting distress as the gospel is identified with this star-spangled Sanhedrin, while theology is tailored to the booming markets in avarice, pride, and fear. Against this civil religion, and especially against its sectarian variant on the Religious Right, Marsh commends the scandal of a Gospel unshackled from service to the idols of money and empire—as Jim Wallis does too in God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.
Wallis, as many readers will know, is the editor of Sojourners, the flagship journal of evangelical lefties, and his book, as well as the considerable buzz it's generated, are exemplary artifacts of religious liberalism, the leftish and weaker variant of the civil religion. He's currently a minor celebrity, appearing on radio, television, and panels on religion and politics. His appeal owes a lot to the low-rent quality of his antagonists: it's hard not to look good when you're pitted against a boor like Falwell, or when your book gets trashed in the Nation by the ever more tiresome and obsolescent Katha Pollitt. For many frustrated by the meagerness of what currently passes for religion in public life, Wallis embodies a religious progressivism ignored by the media and the academy.
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