Randall Balmer: August 2008 Archives

This year the Republicans have a decidedly uncharismatic and relatively untelegenic candidate pitted against a fairly unexperienced Democrat who nevertheless knows how to give a good speech and motivate the masses. At a time when the nation and the world are looking for inspired leadership, after eight years of moral bankruptcy in the Oval Office, the Obama candidacy has captured the imagination of millions of Americans and, not surprisingly, the citizens of the world.

So how do the Republicans propose to counter Barack Obama's appeal? In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, they are seeking to portray the presumptive Democratic nominee as the Antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelation.

Others have offered detailed analyses of John McCain's ad, "The One," that depicts Obama as a nefarious force on the world stage. And there is no doubt that the ad plays effectively on evangelical fears of the Antichrist and a "one-world government."

But attempts to stir evangelical fears, based on premillennial sentiments (Jesus is coming at any moment) and the nineteenth-century teachings of John Nelson Darby, miss a larger point: Evangelicals are no longer as devotedly premillennial in their convictions as they once were.

Premillennialism became popular late in the nineteenth century when evangelicals felt marginalized in American society because of industrialization, urbanization and the influx of non-Protestant immigrants. They carried premillennialism into the twentieth century in large measure because it comported with their own sense that they were marginal figures. Jesus would come back at any minute and avenge their sufferings.

Despite concerted efforts on the part of leaders of the Religious Right to stoke those sentiments of marginalization, however, evangelicals no longer feel as peripheral to American society as they once did. They are overwhelmingly middle-class and upwardly mobile. They have, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, achieved remarkable successes politically, economically and socially over the last half century so that the siren song of premillennialism no longer has the same appeal it once did.

When I was growing up as an evangelical in the 1950s and 1960s, the mantra was always, "Lord, come quickly." Now, with evangelicals feeling more and more comfortable in American society, despite the rhetoric of their leaders, the mantra (albeit unspoken) is "Lord, take your time; we're doing okay."

That's not to say that the McCain ad is not effective. The popularity of the Left Behind series suggests that premillennialism still has a hold on many evangelicals (though I suspect that much of the appeal lies in a kind of lingering curiosity rather than heartfelt conviction). Evangelicals, in their heart of hearts, however, may no longer be the Pavlovian premillennialists that the Republicans think they are.

This patter has been going on for so long now - Limbaugh celebrated his twentieth anniversary on the air just last week - that many Americans now believe that anyone who calls himself a liberal is either deranged or akin somehow to a mass murderer or a pedophile. (Savage, if memory serves, even wrote a book whose title asserted that liberalism was a species of mental illness.)

The ritual castigation of liberalism obviously is good business for people like Hannity, Savage and Limbaugh. In some peculiar alchemy of hatred, they've transformed their venom into fortunes. That's their business - literally! But what's even more distressing is that liberals themselves now run from the term and take refuge in synonyms like "progressive" or "moderate."

"Moderate" is a comforting word, I suppose, and surely, by the standards of Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage, liberals are indeed "moderate." But the word always reminds me of Jim Hightower's famous maxim that the only things you'll find in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

Similarly, "progressive" is pretty inoffensive. But it really refers to a particular movement in American history that was allied with the Social Gospel against the ravages of unbridled capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century.

It's time to reclaim the terms "liberal" and "liberalism" from the distortions of the right. Liberalism is responsible for some pretty noble achievements in American life - and, arguably, for the very existence of the nation itself. Most Americans think that slavery was a pretty bad system and that equality for women is a reasonably good idea. Both the antislavery movement and the women's movement were animated by liberalism. In addition, liberals pushed for the formation of common schools in the nineteenth century, and public education (for all of its current faults and inadequacies) remains one of the bedrock institutions in our democratic society. Social Security was a liberal idea, as was Medicare. All but a tiny slice of Americans believe that a society has an obligation to help provide for its elderly. The G.I. Bill of Rights, pushed through Congress by liberals in 1944, allowed veterans, including the sons of immigrants, the opportunity to attend college and thereby to toe the bottom rung on the ladder of upward mobility. The civil rights movement, populated overwhelmingly by liberals, called on Americans to live up to the liberal ideals of our charter documents.

Have there been excesses associated with liberalism? Of course. That's part of the nature of political life and discourse, the back and forth of debate leading to synthesis. But to assert that liberalism is bad or somehow shameful belies any responsible reading of American history. Besides, are the denizens of the hard right really prepared to extol the salutary effects of conservatism over the past eight years?

Mark me down as a liberal, and proudly so.