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Nearly two months ago—on May 22, to be precise—the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., held a meeting on "Evangelicals and Political Engagement: Assessing the Past, Scouting the Future." The political scientist and master interpreter of survey data, John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, led off with a paper on "Evangelicals and Civic Engagement: A View from (near) the Top." That was followed by the main event, pitting columnist Cal Thomas against Focus on the Family's VP of Public Policy, Tom Minnery, authors of dueling books on the subject. (Thomas' coauthor was Ed Dobson, a refugee from the Land of Falwell who repents of his former ways). The debate sputtered, in part because "political involvement" was never clearly defined and thus real differences were never substantively and clearly articulated—Thomas' passion surfaced in recurring complaints that James Dobson has repeatedly refused to meet personally with him to air their differences, an issue that hardly seemed relevant to the question at hand—but the conversation caught fire around a slightly different but important subject: how a pastor, in his role as preacher and not considered as a private citizen, should or should not speak to political issues from the pulpit.

I have been thinking about that debate-that-wasn't off and on ever since, wondering what form a real debate on the subject might take. It's a puzzle because I have a hard time imagining how one would go about building a case that Christians should shun political involvement across the board. (I know that various Christians have held that view over the centuries in many different times and places. I guess I should have said, "building a persuasive case.")

That question came to mind most recently when I was rereading The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation, by John G. West, Jr. (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1996), a book I highly recommend. Particularly valuable is West's account of evangelical reformers in the early 19th century. He devotes one chapter to evangelical battles against Cherokee removal during the administration of Andrew Jackson—an episode in evangelical history unknown to me until I read West's book.

If you are a reader of Books & Culture, or simply a regular visitor to our website, you may have seen Kenneth Moore Startup's fine piece, "Red, White, and Gray," a review of two books on Jackson and Indian removal published in our July/August issue and now posted on the web. West's chapter concerns an aspect of this sorry tale not covered there.

In order to evict the Cherokees from the lands they had occupied before the first Europeans settled in the Georgia colony, Jackson had to brazenly disregard treaties that the United States had signed with the Cherokees, who had already been persuaded to sell a good deal of the land "granted" to them in those treaties but who didn't want to give up their ancestral lands altogether. Persuasion having failed, Jackson and many of his fellow Americans were ready to resort to force.

Looking back, insofar as we ever do look back at this event, we have the impression that it proceeded with very little opposition. But in fact, just as many Americans of that period were against slavery—which still reigned supreme in the South—so there were many who were deeply uneasy at the prospect of removal. (History is always messy, as Startup observes: West mentions in a note on the Cherokee Constitution that it explicitly denied rights to blacks and mulattoes; many Cherokees were slaveholders.)

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46