Steven P. Miller's Blog

This last sermon was actually the first one that I had given in a LONG time (like, since high school, at the tail end of my mid-teens run as a Pious Youth). It is a product of having worked through (or begun to work through) a few things. It is also, in part, an effort to avoid the romance of despair simply by acknowledging the allure of despair. All this explains the sermon’s confessional and therapeutic aspects, offering hope as the complement to history. This may also explain its long-windedness.

You can find the text at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KVfA....

This sermon was prepared with the Fourth of July in mind. Eventually, it plays on The Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s (in)famous “God Damn America” sermon, while at some level offering an alternative to (NOT a refutation of) Wright’s approach, one that accounts for the ways in which “people hear many different things when other people talk about God and country.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, if you’ve read the previous two sermons, the text returns to the theme of history and its humbling (yet oddly comforting) relationship to faith.

Here’s the text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16q-s...

This here sermon was an attempt to strike a hopeful—read, faithful—tone in the context of a difficult and, admittedly, very annoying recent encounter with fundamentalism, the type of fundamentalism that is particularly obsessed with what one “really” believes. The text ranges from John Updike to the Spanish Inquisition and the Apostle Paul, with a sprinkling of Carol Howard Merritt and Pope Francis—a bit random (“eclectic” is the nicer word), but nevertheless fulfilling to put together.

Here is the slightly corrected text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZRlz...

So, I've been preaching a few sermons at St. Louis Mennonite Fellowship and thought I'd get them in somewhat post-worthy form. First up is the most recent (and shortest!) sermon, “‘More Than a Slave.’” It's a gloss on Paul’s Letter to Philemon in light of 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. Shout-out here to the New York Times’s amazing series on 1619; check it out if you haven’t already. Shout-out, as well, to my high school Latin teacher, Magister Richard Popeck, for having shown us a clip from Quo Vadis back in the day.

You can read the corrected sermon text here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/168Ez...

What do Donald Trump and the late Billy Graham have in common? Well, I published something about them this year. Trump, I wrote in a review of John Fea's BELIEVE ME, "is the Christian right reductio ad absurdum." And, to think, folks were once amazed that so many evangelicals saw the religiously lackadaisical Reagan as their political savior! Of Graham, I averred, "There is a reason why historians struggle to decide whether Graham was a forerunner of the Christian Right or what the Christian Right was implicitly rebuking. He was a bit of both." This, I still believe. Still, it’s worth noting that the line from Billy to Donald runs through Franklin. So, the two have that in common, as well. – Steven P. Miller

Here’s the Fea review: https://www.christiancentury.org/revi...

And the Graham reflection: https://religionandpolitics.org/2018/...

NOTE: Here is something that I originally drafted in June 2014 for an author’s column in the Wall Street Journal. For some reason, it fell through (I probably should have used an agent for the second book). Anyway, the idea was to offer takes on some notable reads relevant to recent American evangelicalism. It is dedicated to Orli, who was about four months old back then, and to Clarissa, who let me disappear to the library for a few hours to whip it up. (This version has been lightly edited for minor typos.)

1. Jimmy Carter: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) (Playboy, 2012, Kindle Edition)
The modern era of evangelical politics began not with Hugh Hefner but, of course, with Jimmy Carter—the other “J. C.” In 1976, Carter’s Christian politics of personality drove what pollster George Gallup Jr. called the “Year of the Evangelical.” In this legendary interview with journalist Robert Scheer, now available for download via Kindle, the born-again Democratic nominee struck his core notes of competence and integrity. We see Carter’s intelligence and honesty, but also his prickliness. We also see how he teetered near the trap door of 1970s sexual politics. In an awkward attempt to counter the assumption that a good Southern Baptist was surely also a prude, Carter confessed that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and thus had “committed adultery in my heart many times.” The Playboy interview nearly derailed Carter’s path to the White House. That he survived the flap was due in no small part to the fact that cable news did not yet exist. “In his heart, he knows your wife,” critics joked, alluding to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign motto. Indeed, the joke was on Carter in the end. The evangelical politics that he pioneered ultimately benefitted the Republican right.

2. Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (Vintage, 1995).
Popular evangelicalism has never lacked for a quality of spectacle, a fact that was especially evident in the late Eighties. The televangelism scandals of 1987, also known as “Gospelgate,” deflated Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s television and resort empire even as they inflated Nightline’s ratings. The darker side of spectacle was the “satanic panic,” which peaked during the Halloween season of 1988 with the television broadcast of a Geraldo Rivera special titled “Devil Worship: Exploring Satan’s Underground.” At the center of the satanism scare were allegations of ritual abuse, often based on recovered memories. Wright’s book chronicles what occurred soon after members of the Ingram family tuned in to Geraldo’s documentary. Paul Ingram, a charismatic Christian and police officer from Washington state, confessed to sexually abusing his daughters. He was responding to his children’s recovered memories, which confirmed fears of a vast satanic cult. Despite the increasingly preposterous nature of those memories and a failed hunt for satanic burial grounds, Ingram pleaded guilty to third-degree rape. Wright’s masterful exercise in narrative journalism provides a disturbing snapshot from the long history of American paranoia.

3. Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2010)
The past decade has seen a wealth of books linking evangelicalism to broad trends in recent American history, most notably the coalescence of a viable conservative movement. Dochuk’s history of migrants from the American South to the “Southland” of Orange County is one of the landmark contributions. Dochuk traces the powerful connections between Jeffersonian individualism, new money, and evangelical revivalism. This is the Southern California that elected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan before it turned to Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman. Here, the crabgrass frontier met the silent majority by way of the bible college. In Amy Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple of the 1920s and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church of the present, the American Dream and born-again redemption have melded into one. Dochuk admires the entrepreneurial verve of his subjects even as he reserves judgment on the long-term political changes that they drove. Rarely has evangelical history been written on such an epic scale.

4. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009)
“What’s the matter with Kansas?” author Thomas Frank famously asked of his home state (echoing another Kansas progressive, William Allen White). In a century’s time, the state has gone from socialist heartland to Sam Brownback’s playland. Moreton refashions this familiar left-wing lament, putting evangelical Christianity at the center of her conclusions. She focuses on the area that many of Dochuk’s subjects left behind: “Wal-Mart Country,” the Ozarks region where Sam Walton first found a market. In this innovative study of early Wal-Mart, Moreton’s “Wal-Mart moms” are the women stocking the shelves, not the ones hunting for everyday low prices. These workers, whom Moreton clearly admires, put the service in service sector. While Moreton is no fan of Wal-Mart’s union-averse ways, she empathetically demonstrates how the rise of the Wal-Mart economy and evangelical-style “family values” could complement, rather than contradict, each other. Bentonville headquarters aside, Wal-Mart has since moved beyond its small-town origins. Still, Moreton’s findings apply to enterprises like Chick Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, not to mention Duck Dynasty, where a born-again strand of the Protestant ethic endures.

5. John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (John Knox Press, 2011)
Fea’s title captures a question underlying the culture wars that raged in the aftermath of the “Year of the Evangelical.” So many ongoing debates about religion in public life go back to understandings, or misunderstandings, of the nation’s founding. The rise of the Christian Right was in part an effort to restore the status of Christian public life in the aftermath of liberal onslaughts (never mind that many progenitors of modern liberalism themselves embraced a variation on the Christian nation theme). Yet the history writing that has buttressed this effort often smacks of the very revisionism that its authors decry, turning the spiritually aloof George Washington into a good evangelical. Many progressives and civil libertarians, on the other hand, read modern secularism back into a founding period when Christian moral influence was generally assumed, if not always named. In this careful yet engaging book, Fea does what historians are trained to do. He puts both primary sources and the subsequent interpretations of those sources in context. This approach rarely serves a contemporary cause well. Yet the historian’s distinction between contextualization and relativism can serve the public good, in this case by depoliticizing the Christian nation question. The best popular historical writing has a way of answering “yet but no,” “no but yes,” and still leaving readers satisfied.

I recently read The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, which (I think) is the closest thing to a grand history of post-New Deal liberalism to appear in recent years. Authored by journalist Eric Alterman, with an assist from historian Kevin Mattson, it is rich, if also poorly edited. There are nice portraits of Betty Friedan and Jesse Jackson and a valuable shout-out to the largely forgotten historical significance of Moveon.org, although all of the above coexists with clunky clauses, unflagged transitions, and uneven anecdotes. With its wealth of characters and case studies, The Cause is an enjoyable read for those who already know a fair amount about the subject. Missing, however, is a real narrative that demonstrates something other than relative decline vis-à-vis an evolving standard.

Can’t liberalism ever win? Apparently, it can only fall short as the next challenge presents itself. The book’s approach is largely additive; civil rights appears on the liberal agenda, then so do feminism and environmentalism. Following a brief nod to the New Deal glory days, the story follows a conservative arc, to the point where the boatloads of liberal victories in the 1960s are described in terms of their limits, as if many of them have not endured for half a century. What is the most important thing to know about Medicaid? That it was born of compromise? Or that a majority in Congress supported the idea of health care for the very poor?

The book is a declensionist tale, although again the standard for judgment shifts by time period. The ironic thing—or maybe the defining thing—is that liberalism after the New Deal has almost always existed in a mode of trepidation, despite liberals’ purported belief in progress. When one comes across a reference to Reagan’s ability to employee the liberal optimism of yore, one could easily be forgiven for forgetting that such optimism ever existed, so permanently imperiled is the book’s version of liberalism. Alterman, whose book first appeared before the 2012 election, seems skeptical that Obama has created an enduring liberal coalition. Fair enough. But to leave open the question of whether Obama is a liberal in the FDR tradition (the inference that I drew from the book) is rather curious. So is the glib assertion in an earlier chapter that Michael Dukakis was not really a liberal. Liberalism’s weakness on class issues is very real, and obviously Obama has not squared that circle. Still, the tension between class and pluralism was present from the start of FDR’s political coalition. In other words, it is intrinsic to modern American liberalism.

Overall, this book confirms my sense that the left-leaning perspective of most historians is particularly evident in their interpretations of liberalism, which are often exercises in self-criticism. (Not that there’s anything wrong with liberal self-criticism. I engage in liberal self-criticism all the time. I just try not to do so when I am writing history, because usually it leads to ahistorical judgments.)

So, how would I do things differently? Here are two themes I would stress, besides the aforementioned motif of ironic pessimism: 1) liberalism’s ability, in very successful fashion, to assimilate radical ideas, starting with Marxism and extending through civil rights and feminism (This is The Nation side of the story: The cooption of radicalism might have diluted the left, but it also has kept American democracy both vibrant and stable.); and 2) liberalism’s attempts, in more halting fashion, to respond to conservative criticisms (This is The New Republic end of the story, although it is pretty clear that that publication did immense damage to liberal causes in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the areas of foreign policy and health care. Here, I am on the same page as Alterman. The late Michael Kelly, one of the nastiest, least fair columnists I have ever read, provides a reminder of the embarrassingly small-minded nature of political writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is someone who somehow called himself a liberal but who thought Al Gore was a threat to the Republic.). Combined, the above themes represent the recurring dialectic over Obama’s two terms, a blend of transgender rights and sequestration, health care expansion and resistance to raising taxes on the middle class.*

Liberalism is flexible, and liberals are capable of learning lessons. Michael Kelly aside, they are often their own best critics. Just how seriously one takes this dynamic might explain one’s current view of, say, Lawrence Summers—or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. Critics see flexibility as insincerity and lessons learned as rudderlessness. A more generous interpretation is that American liberals tends to be interested in what works, both as policy and as politics. That liberalism is forever falling short is hardly the whole story, and frequently not even the most important one.
- Steven P. Miller

* What the dialectic does not explain are the drone attacks and the hedging on Syria. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, I think this is because there really is no coherent liberal or conservative approach to foreign policy (just inconsistently heeded tendencies). The foreign policy arena is usually more partisan than ideological, although I recognize that both were at work in Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
(Edited and amended slightly on 6/14/16)

I just sent off a review of Joseph S. Moore’s intriguing new book, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (Oxford, 2016). It is a fascinating history of the Covenanters, a group of “fringe Presbyterians” (Moore’s words) who, in their American manifestation, railed against the Constitution as an un-Christian document that left out Jesus and left in slavery. If they are remembered for anything today, it is for their promotion of the so-called Christian Amendment in the latter half of the 1800s. The amendment would have declared outright that the Constitution established a Christian government. In contrast to their would-be heirs on the Christian Right, the Covenanters never had imagined that there was a Christian America to recover. A truly Christian nation required a clear covenant with God. That’s why the amendment was needed. The difference between Francis Schaeffer (perhaps the most influential popularizer of Covenanter-style political theology) and the Covenanters of the antebellum era is a great example how a radical in one century can be a reactionary in the next.

There is a lot more to this short but impactful book. Overall, it is a great example of how small case studies can shed light on big themes—in this case, the limits of an explicitly Christian politics and the bad history that is often required to embrace it. The Christian Amendment never made it out of committee. Even to get that far, however, Covenanters who promoted the amendment had to lighten up on the Founders, whom they had long attacked as impious secularists. In their own way, they recognized that the jeremiad (with its mode of denunciation for the sake of recovery) works more effectively than an argument that the American project was rotten at the foundation (e.g., that Thomas Jefferson was a theological heretic and George Washington a spiritual slacker—and both slaveholding hypocrites). Frederick Douglass knew the value of the jeremiad, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., even though both also knew just how wedded slavery and racism were to the founding. (Turning to pop culture, a significantly more specious example of the preference for historical recovery is the stoner character in Dazed and Confused, whose implicit argument for marijuana legalization involves praising Martha Washington for having had “a big fat bowl waiting” for George after a hard day’s work.) History usually provides profoundly limited resources for truly progressive change. That fact is kind of baked into the cake (or the brownie) of progress, for those who believe in such a thing.

This kind of “exception that proves the rule” case study is what I would like to do at some point with the history of the Mennonite tradition in the United States (Yeah, I’m still getting around to it . . .). The problem here with the Mennonites concerns what you might call their propensity toward world-historic modesty. The Covenanters were proud and expansive chauvinists. They wanted to proclaim their God as the guardian of society, including the state. The Mennonites, not so much. Well, they have been chauvinistic at times, but usually toward the end of maintaining church purity. In other words, Mennonites are historically comfortable with being a sect. Mennonite nostalgia, if that is the right word, points toward martyrdom, not power. (To be sure, there is a version of Mennonite nostalgia that can also point toward the kind of pre-Bolshevik theocracy that existed in certain Mennonite colonies, mostly in the Ukraine. Even then, that version of Mennonite Christendom amounted to an exemption from full involvement in the Russian Empire.) The Covenanter tradition grew out of the failed attempt in the seventeenth century to turn Scotland (and then Britain) into what Moore calls a “Presbyterian empire.” Covenanters pushed back against being relegated to sectarian status, even as they betrayed all of the stereotypes of sectarian behavior, namely a propensity for splitting.

The true test of Covenanter influence, Mennonite influence, or any sort of sectarian influence might lie in what others have made of their marginality. So, who is the Francis Schaeffer of the Mennonite tradition? Stanley Hauerwas? – Steven P. Miller

I recently had the pleasure of reading Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford, 2016), by the historian Daniel K. Williams. What follows is a largely visceral response to the book, written mostly during my daughters’ afternoon naptime, so I should state upfront that I am not really trying to recreate the finer shades of Williams’s arguments. I have known Dan for over a decade and was unsurprised by the all-around quality of his second book. It is a smart, patiently-executed study that chronicles the modern pro-life movement as it emerged in the postwar era and coalesced in the face of early abortion reform laws and, of course, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The book is written from the perspective of the pro-life movement, but is not a brief for it.*

Defenders of the Unborn provides a rounder portrait of the pro-life movement than is typically available in either academic or popular forums. Williams argues convincingly against simplistically conflating the anti-abortion cause with the other forms of “family values” conservatism that took off in the Seventies. He cites many examples of left-of-center activists and politicians whose first instinct in response to mid-1960s calls for abortion liberalization was to defend the legal status of unborn life. That in and of itself is not a revelation to those who know something about Catholic and African American politics, but Williams pushes back against the tendency to downplay the fact that many early pro-lifers were not otherwise social conservatives. Not until the mid- and late 1970s did the familiar pro-family package (anti-abortion, anti-ERA, anti-gay rights, etc.) fully emerge. Here, it is quite apparent (to me, at least) that evangelicals sealed the deal. Defenders of the Unborn suggests that many evangelicals folded their anti-abortion positions into an existing conservatism that, while not always partisan in the pre-Reagan era, had long featured a deep skepticism about the liberal state (including the judiciary). A turn to the right was the price of evangelicals making the pro-life movement a bigger, less-Catholic tent. Williams’s book is a quiet rebuke of those historians who imply that the support for moderate abortion law reform proffered by some evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s was akin to what we would now consider a pro-choice position. It was not. In the post-Roe era, most such evangelicals changed their minds pretty quickly.

Williams also tweaks the narrative of abortion liberalization in an important way. While momentum for reform surged in the mid- and late-1960s, it slowed and in some cases was reversed in the early 1970s (foreshadowing, it is worth noting, the trajectory of the ERA). In other words, Roe arrested a partially successful counterattack. Roe came as a surprise even to many supporters of abortion rights. It ultimately emboldened the conservative wing of the pro-life movement, shaping its successes and failures ever since.

For Williams, though, the pro-life cause has endured because it is not as wedded to politics as we are led to believe. He shows how pro-life standards, such as the use of Dred Scott as an analogy, pre-dated Roe and thus were not desperately snatched from the historical ether. He convincingly contends that the movement fundamentally has been about human rights, even if (as he concedes) the arc of its rhetoric has bent toward gender traditionalism.

Williams clearly laments the disappearance of pro-life progressivism as a political force. The simplest explanation for this development is that, by 1976, the Republican Party was much friendlier turf for abortion opponents. The opposite was the case in the Democratic Party. Williams references the growing influence of second-wave feminism in the national party. The implication is that Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and countless others converted to the pro-choice cause largely because they wanted to remain electorally viable as Democrats. Perhaps—and one could say the same thing about Republicans George H. W. Bush, arguably Ronald Reagan, and certainly Donald Trump (whose track record suggests a longer-standing fealty to the Hugh Hefner wing of abortion rights). But the activists and voters who effected the party-based herding process surely were far less cynical than their chosen candidates. If many evangelicals became more pro-life once they started caring about the issue, then it is just as likely that many progressives (Catholic, secular, and otherwise) moved in the other direction once they thought things through. We can debate why people care about abortion, but less so that they actually care.

Defenders of the Unborn deserves a broad readership because it pulls off the tricky task of clarifying a messy subject. I was glad to see that it received a favorable review in The New York Times precisely for this reason. In the epilogue, Williams cites recent polling data on abortion as an indication of the durability of the pro-life movement, despite a half-century of disappointment. I see those numbers as instead showing the steady opposition of most Americans to strict bans on abortion, regardless of whether they embrace the pro-choice label. In my reading, a narrow interpretation of Roe (one that, say, allows for strict limits after the first trimester) better reflects the will of the people on abortion than does the leadership of the House of Representatives. But I don’t expect the pro-life movement to retreat, and nothing in this book gives me reason to think that it will.

* Williams is pretty clearly pro-life. To his credit, and at the risk of limiting his professional horizons going forward, he does not really try to conceal that fact. For the record, I am pro-choice, but have long believed that the Democratic Party should make a point of welcoming the many pro-life progressives in its midst—not because doing so is likely to win over anti-abortion hardliners, but because it is completely possible to be progressive and pro-life. Abortion is too complicated an issue to be reduced to a litmus test. It is also too important an issue to exclude anyone’s perspective. Everyone—female or male—considers abortion through an inexhaustibly variegated blend of moral criteria and personal experiences. In my case, the second-hand awareness that women I know have had abortions reinforced my support for keeping abortion safe and accessible. As Williams’s introduction suggests, becoming a parent solidified his pro-life position.

– Steven P. Miller

Recently, while not dining on liver, onions, or hamballs at the Oregon Dairy, Lancaster, P. A., I witnessed the following exchange between two senior citizens whom I’ll call Bertha Strongberger and Les Hefthalter.

“Bertha! Do you know who this is? It’s Les Hefthalter. I used to work at the store.”

Bertha, with a flirty lean accessible only to elderly widows who wear knitted prayer coverings: “Of course. I’m turning 90 in the fall. Can you believe it? How old are you?”

Les, whom I imagine last worked at Strongberger’s Store when he was 20 or 25: “I’m 74.”

Bertha, despite the ghost of her husband whispering Bert! Be quiet!: “Surely you’re older than that!”

Les, with an inverted smirk pared by scores of humility: “Oh, I guess my hair does make me look older.”

Moments like this one lighten the load of those still-weighted words, “Lancaster County.” For me, as for plenty of North American Mennonites, Lancaster is a burden as unavoidable as it is unbearable. I went to Goshen College in the 1990s partly because it struck me as the antithesis of Lancaster-style Mennonitism. As it happened, a near-majority of my first-semester friends hailed from there. Another word for Lancaster, then, might be irresistible. As a Mennonite and a first generation non-native, Lancaster is a font of nostalgia for memories that are not actually my own. Yet, when old photos of plain coats and meetinghouses yield to present-day sightings of SUVs and Bible churches, I begin again to view Lancaster as embodying a kind of false theory of Mennonitism.

Every time I think I’m being too hard on the place, or fancy that I am finally mature enough to get over it, Lancaster goes ahead and confirms the caricature. The latest example is the likely departure of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference from the Mennonite Church USA, potentially reducing the denomination’s membership by 14 percent. The specific issue is homosexuality, but the willingness of the conference’s leaders to leave harkens back to the days when knitted coverings would not have sufficed. The connecting thread is the assumption that Lancaster, separate and above, is one of God’s preferred metaphors for Christian. Like many Americans, many Lancaster Mennonites have unthinkingly confused being big with being representative.

It’s a form of evasion, I know, but I often think that Lancaster is better seen than heard. And, for me, the seeing part includes place names on road maps or township signs: Elm, Ephrata, Bird-in-Hand, Terre Hill, any garden spot that is not directly off the dreaded Route 30. Such names remain strangely comforting, even enchanting, as long as I don’t fully pay attention.

I wonder if the secret middle ground between sight and sound is found in growing old and in the spirit of looking past that can come with age. Maybe it’s something you just come into. I hope so. This kind of aging, blunt but full of grace, is probably only possible when the parties involved have lived fundamentally upright lives, a contingency that is undoubtedly true for so many Lancaster Mennonites, whatever the qualms I have about their collective ethos. I don’t really know what was going on between Bertha and Les, but the goodness of their moment is what I am choosing to see, to hear, and to make into my own memory.

- Steven P. Miller