Sweet Reason and Holy Outrage

President Lyndon Johnson’s language was often sprinkled with phrases other than biblical ones, but one of his favorite expressions did come from the prophet Isaiah. “Come, let us reason together,” Johnson would intone, and friend and foe alike soon learned to check their wallets. It meant he was about to work them over with his legendary political charms.

But it is hard to imagine a more appropriate phrase for today. Evangelicals need to look across the no-man’s land of today’s culture war and issue a call to our adversaries: “Come, let us reason together.”

I’m not advocating surrender or a sellout to Satan, as one Christian radio host put it when she heard me express these views. I am suggesting that we must engage in sane, civil discourse before it’s too late. For in the wake of the murder of Pensacola abortionist Davis Gunn, the culture war may not be mere metaphor much longer.

For decades, the two armies in this culture war have coexisted, more or less peacefully. On one side are those who believe in absolute truth; on the other, those who believe tolerance, not truth, is society’s ultimate virtue. It has been a societal Cold War, the two sides parrying, engaging in occasional name-calling, but never unleashing their arsenals at one another.

But now the big guns are booming.

Since Pensacola, the media have lumped together mainstream evangelical Christians with the Muslim fanatics who bombed the World Trade Center, insane cultists in Waco, and even Serbian butchers. They are all “religious fundamentalists,” the most reviled term in the modern vocabulary.

Under this assault, understandable frustration mounts on the Religious Right. But it is a dangerously short step from frustration to fanaticism.

Some believers talk as though our liberal adversaries are hatching plots in the basement of the American Civil Liberties Union to grind our altars into dust. Shaking with holy outrage, we drive ourselves further toward the margins of society, losing the vast middle. People camped there have consequently leaned against us: even those who like our character abhor our caricature. No one wants to side with hatemongers and bigots.

As in the Civil War of the 1860s, what is at stake is not just which side prevails, but whether the Union can be preserved. This escalating conflict can undermine the very democratic foundations that support us as a nation.

Cooling the incendiary rhetoric

Free democratic societies depend on the preservation of moral consensus: widely held agreements and beliefs that define appropriate communal behavior. From this consensus, society creates social boundaries to restrain our baser instincts and creates incentives to encourage virtue.

But consensus cannot be legislated or dictated. It is achieved as a result of free, open, and civil debate—the exchange of differing views in a pluralistic environment. Consensus demands an open public square, where even those who vehemently disagree can do so without violence.

It is this ability to engage in civil discourse, the lifeblood of a free society, that is in grave jeopardy today.

So what do we do?

First, Christians need to cool the incendiary rhetoric.

Everywhere I go, I hear generals in the Christian army directing furious battle plans to assault the other side. Some sound desperate, which is understandable. After all, the primary means of influence in American culture—politics, academia, the arts and communications media—are in the hands of those who oppose us.

But we will never win the culture war by waving placards in their faces or whacking them with our Bibles. That only confirms their stereotypes of us. We need instead to take to heart the apostle’s words in a previous time of persecution: “Never pay back evil for evil; overcome evil with good.” “Violence unreturned is a spent force,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew Nazi violence firsthand.

This does not mean we diminish our political efforts. We must continue to press for righteous policies on abortion, homosexuality, welfare reform, education, and so on. But we must do so the way Scripture teaches, with “gentleness and reverence” and a “spirit of power, love and a sound mind.”

Second, we need to live as a holy community embodying the love of Christ, demonstrating Christianity’s benefits to culture at large. Those hostile to religious influence have forgotten that Christian faith was the main force in many social reforms our culture looks back to with pride, such as abolition, the civil-rights movement, and the building of schools and hospitals. And today, even the most ardent secularist has trouble labeling as a bigot a Prison Fellowship volunteer who embraces an inmate dying of AIDS.

By our conduct, we must remind our secular neighbors that Christianity brings something vital to our culture, something easier to revile than to replace. Though today’s cultural elites would not admit it, there is something more dangerous than the entanglement of church and state: the complete segregation of religion from public life.

The time has come for evangelicals to reassess the battlefield situation, to reach out and “reason together,” to strive for the civil discourse so essential to our nation’s liberties. It’s not a new strategy, of course, but rather an ancient one—one that Christians have followed in biblical fidelity from the very beginnings of the church.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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