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The Rise and Fall of Public Housing

Book Review:

From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors

By Lawrence J. Vale. Harvard University Press, 460 pp.

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Harvard University Press, 332 pp.



Social policy is inscribed on the landscape. And perhaps the most telling such inscription in U.S. cities is the public housing project, an inscription that is currently being erased. In the history of the building and unbuilding of these structures -- particularly the most massive projects such as Columbia Point in Boston or the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago -- one can read the story of the anemic American welfare state and the profound unease with which we have met the plight of the poor.

Two fine new books tell elements of this story. From the Puritans to the Projects is a compelling history of the treatment in Boston of "public neighbors" -- needy people unable to provide fully for themselves -- from the early 17th century to the present, focused on the construction and management of public housing in that city since the mid-1930s. American Project is a bold ethnographic account of "project living" in the Taylor Homes, which opened in 1962 and are currently under steady demolition. Although decidedly different in approach, both books are animated by the conviction that, as Sudhir Venkatesh puts it, the "public housing complex has become a contemporary mirror for American self-examination."

One of the several virtues of Lawrence Vale’s history is its broad canvas. He argues persuasively that the fate of public neighbors who have found their way into Boston’s public housing projects in the last 70 years must be imbedded in the longer, wider story of the treatment of such neighbors since the city’s initial settlement by the Puritans. These neighbors, as he demonstrates in an adroit survey of the "prehistory" of Boston public housing, were always regarded with profound ambivalence.

The Puritans felt a keen sense of obligation to these members of their community unable to care for themselves, but this obligation did not extend beyond the boundaries of the town and was often grudging. Outsiders in need of help were "warned out" of town, and support for needy fellow townspeople was often offered with a good deal of complaint about its costs. Nineteenth-century Bostonians sought to reform as well as aid the poor (an increasingly immigrant poor), and built substantial institutions such as the House of Industry and the House of Correction designed to isolate and uplift them. At the end of the century, tenement reformers and settlement workers led by Robert Woods attempted to remake impoverished, working-class, immigrant neighborhoods according to "the American standard" of propriety necessary to upward mobility.

All these efforts to assist and regulate the poor were governed by a crucial distinction between the "worthy" and "unworthy" poor, between those who could not be blamed for their dire straits and those who could, between those who were redeemable and those who were not, between public neighbors entitled to support and those subject to scorn. The most troubling of public neighbors were the able-bodied unemployed, and reformers endeavored to separate out those worthy poor who were the temporary victims of economic circumstances beyond their control and those unworthy poor immune to the appeal of the Protestant work ethic. The former were disciplined and rewarded, the latter disciplined and punished.

Whether the poor were transferred to almshouses and asylums or targeted in the tenements in which they lived, their housing stood in stark contrast to the American ideal: the detached, single-family home, preferably situated on a sizable plot of land. Vale nicely points out that insofar as the American state has sponsored an uncontested, well-funded program for housing the American public, it has resided in its extraordinary support of this ideal. From the Land Ordinance of 1785 to the Homestead Act of 1862 to the FHA mortgage insurance program begun in the 1930s, the national government has expended vast sums in support of this Jeffersonian norm.

Few of those who happily take the home mortgage deduction on their income taxes think of themselves as participating in a program of publicly subsidized housing, but they are. Many of the notable planners and architects who designed communities for low- and moderate-income residents in the early years of this century were wedded to this "retrograde ruralism," and their influence would be visible in later public housing projects that featured streetless "superblocks" marked by substantial expanses of empty (and often hazardous) space.

The onset of the Great Depression, in which the ranks of the worthy poor expanded dramatically, occasioned widespread experiments in the construction of housing projects sponsored by the federal and state government. Nearly all of Boston’s public housing projects were built between 1938 and 1954 under New Deal and Fair Deal auspices. As Vale demonstrates, these projects were designed and administered by the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) as "selective collectives" that aimed to serve the needs of the deserving poor, providing them with a way station on the path to eventual home ownership. Rents were set at a level beyond the reach of the city’s poorest residents, including many of those displaced from their oft-times decent homes in the oft-times decent neighborhoods cleared to build the projects. This intra-class discrimination was only enhanced by the preferential housing of war workers in the projects during World War II and of veterans in its aftermath. The projects were also marked by rigid racial discrimination, with Boston’s relatively small African-American population housed in separate and unequal projects in minority neighborhoods.

Although public housing met with bitter opposition in these years from private real estate interests who attacked it as the entering wedge of socialism, it was on the whole a popular program. Urban politicians worked hard to win projects for their neighborhoods, and incorporated the BHA and the tenant selection process into the sometimes corrupt practices of the Irish machine politics that governed the city. For some time, public housing well served the city and its tenants.

But, as Vale shows, this success and popularity rested on sustaining the projects as the home to a very narrow spectrum of the Boston poor, those deemed both deserving and respectable: two-parent, mostly white, single-earner, low-income, working-class families of good character in need of a temporary leg up -- a stratum "below the bulk of blue-collar employees but above that of the unemployed, the irregularly employed, and the welfare-dependent." Once this narrow sector of the poor was, beginning in the late 1950s, largely supplanted in the projects by those perceived as the less worthy, even unworthy, poor, the projects began a steady slide to collapse. Dependent for both financial stability and public support on enrolling tenants able to afford rents at or near relatively high ceilings, the BHA found itself increasingly hard-pressed to attract and hold on to such residents. The prosperous postwar economy fostered the exodus of an upwardly mobile working class from the city in search of the more genuinely American housing to be found in the suburbs, and at the same time, the entry-level skilled and semiskilled manufacturing jobs once held by project residents disappeared from the urban core. Applications for public housing from the deserving poor plummeted, and the BHA found it increasingly difficult not to grant space to the undeserving sort of families it had once been able to reject handily.

As early as the 1960s over half of the households in Boston projects received some sort of public income assistance. With the passage in 1968 of federal legislation mandating decidedly lowered rent ceilings, court rulings limiting discretion in tenant selection, and pressure from the civil rights movement to put an end to racial bias in tenant selection and assignments, this percentage increased. The BHA was thus further deprived of the capacity to make the discriminations necessary to ensure its solvency. Originating in a popular program in aid of a "submerged middle class," Boston’s projects had become untenable warehouses for those public neighbors toward which proper Bostonians were most ambivalent.

Forced into a four-year receivership in 1980, the BHA reinvented itself in the ‘80s and ‘90s principally as an agent for joint private-public housing initiatives featuring mixed-income, partially subsidized units. The most notorious of Boston projects, Columbia Point, was torn down and rebuilt as Harbor Point, an attractive community of this sort. Columbia Point contained 1,502 apartments for low-income residents; Harbor Point featured 400 such apartments. As BHA receiver Harry Spence (the closest thing to a hero in this doleful book) remarked, this "mixed-income" approach has been less a solution to the problem of public housing than a turning of a blind eye to roughly three-quarters of those in need of help.

Superb though it is, Vale’s history affords a view mostly from the perspective of public housing architects, planners, urban reformers, and policymakers. One gets little sense from his book of what it was like to live in a Boston project, and the voices of tenants are almost entirely absent from his account. This is unfortunate, particularly since Boston’s tenants were, for much of the history he recounts, largely white. Americans need all the reminders they can get that poverty and its associated pathologies cross racial lines. In the 1970s, the projects in white South Boston were no less despairingly hellish -- no less afflicted with alcoholism, drug abuse, gang warfare, domestic violence and teenage, unwed motherhood -- than those in black Roxbury.

The tenant’s-eye view (in this case, strictly African-American) is precisely what Venkatesh affords. His focus is narrower and more intense than Vale’s. An heir to the extraordinary ethnographic tradition of urban sociology at the University of Chicago, where he was a doctoral student of William Julius Wilson, Venkatesh bravely ventured into the dangerous territory of the gang-occupied Taylor Homes in the early 1990s and "hung out" with its residents for months at a time. Skillfully walking the line between empathy and detachment, Venkatesh offers an exceptional look at "project living" from the inside.

Located on Chicago’s South Side and comprised of 28 high-rise buildings holding 4,500 apartments and, by 1965, 27,000 residents, the scale of this project far outstripped any built in Boston. With outsized proportions came outsized difficulties, and by the 1980s the Taylor Homes had, along with another huge Chicago project, Cabrini-Green, become the unhappy paradigm of all that was awful about American public housing.

As in Boston, public housing in Chicago began as a program for the "worthy" working poor, but for the same reasons steadily found itself with quite another clientele. By 1992, 96 percent of the Taylor Homes residents reported themselves to be unemployed and 95 percent claimed no income other than public assistance. The typical resident was the exemplar of the "unworthy" poor: a single, young, African-American mother with several children, living on a welfare check.

Venkatesh does not dwell on the horrors of the project; indeed, if anything, he says too little about them. Rather he centers his attention on the manner in which the project residents, in the face of these horrors, nonetheless managed to make do, to "work with others, sometimes productively and at other times conflictually, to improve their living environment." He provides keen insights into the necessary "hustling" that tenants undertook to supplement public assistance -- illicit employment that ranged from selling cookies and baby clothes and car repair to smalltime drug dealing and prostitution.

Much of his account focuses on the work of the representatives of the Local Advisory Council (LAC), a tenant organization that mediated between the residents and the Chicago Housing Authority, local police and other outside institutions. These representatives were crucial agents in the building of an internal network of services and support necessary in the face of their absence in the surrounding community and the neglect of the project by the police department, the CHA and other supposed caretakers. The LAC representatives, most of them older women, emerge from Venkatesh’s account as hard-pressed, skilled, semi-corrupt infighters, who wielded influence, brokered deals and accepted payoffs in a manner that any seasoned pol could respect.

The narrative drive to Venkatesh’s story lies in the protracted effort of the tenants to come to terms with the gang that loomed increasingly large in the project’s history. He charts the devastating consequences of the transformation of this gang and others into high-stakes, often violent corporate enterprises engaged in franchised dealing in crack cocaine -- an entrepreneurial "black capitalism" that does not figure in conservative programs for urban renewal yet plays a significant role in the economic life of the inner city. Offering themselves as a soulful corporation with an interest in the well-being of their "community," the gang and its leaders came to exert considerable influence in the project by virtue of their charitable largesse and their efforts to exact tribute from hustling tenants. Venkatesh describes in detail the debate that sharply divided tenant leaders over whether to accommodate or resist the gang -- an account attentive to the terrible constraints imposed on both sides by circumstances beyond their control.

If Venkatesh gives a full hearing to the tenants that Vale neglects, his ethnography suffers from an inattentiveness to the wider context for project living that Vale so skillfully provides. Although he alludes to the importance of placing the life lived in the Taylor Homes in the expansive setting of local, national and even global politics and economics, Venkatesh does little of this, and hence his ethnography ironically replicates the insularity that afflicted the Taylor Homes. He affords little sense of the Chicago story in which the fate of the project rested, a story that Vale so richly narrates for Boston. Given their complementary strengths, one reads these two excellent books together wishing that Vale had turned his attentions to Chicago or that Venkatesh had hung out at a Boston project.

Vale believes that the large public housing project "seems headed the way of the old unclassified almshouse -- increasingly marginalized and ultimately abandoned." Like Spence he is skeptical that mixed-income projects will ever meet the needs of more than a tiny proportion of the poor, and he suggests that the best, though imperfect, policy might be a system of housing vouchers that disperses the poor by providing them with a subsidy with which to seek housing in the private market.

Venkatesh, admiring as he is of the resilient civil society that tenants built for themselves in the Taylor Homes, worries that such dispersal will deny them the setting in which to reproduce it elsewhere. Yet he offers no more hopeful solutions than Vale.

The obstacles in the U.S. to housing the poor adequately are profound. And those obstacles are less a matter of means and money than of will and ideology. At a time of huge government surpluses, universal shelter like universal health care is on the agenda of few politicians, who argue instead about how many billions of dollars to return to wealthy taxpayers.

In his foreword to Venkatesh’s book, Wilson speaks of the rights denied to American citizens to "basic economic welfare and security." Yet such rights, such a "social citizenship," have never been conceded in the U.S. More common is the view of a lawyer quoted by Vale: "The doctrine is a dangerous one that everyone is entitled to be well fed, well clothed, and well housed, and if one by reason of misfortune, incompetence or sloth cannot achieve that end by his own efforts the public will pay the bill. No permanent improvement to mankind can result from the attempt by government to remove the necessity of the struggle for existence." As long as this doctrine continues to be regarded as dangerous, Americans will continue to regard most of the poor among them not as neighbors in need of solidarity and support but as strangers in need of isolation and correction.

Nullifiers and Insurrectionists: America’s Antigovernment Tradition

A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government.

 By Garry Wills. Simon & Schuster

American intellectuals worthy of the name are thin on the ground these days -- hard to find amidst swarms of academics incapable of addressing wide audiences and media pundits capable of addressing them only in clichés. Garry Wills has for years stood out among those few critics able to convey complex arguments to a broad readership. Journalist, historian, biographer, newspaper columnist and sometime college professor, he has proved equally at home with the theology of St. Augustine and the movies of John Wayne. His studies of the American founding and of such iconic presidents as Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan are on the short shelf of books indispensable to an understanding of American political culture. He is the closest thing we have nowadays to Walter Lippmann.

In A Necessary Evil Wills marshals his usual blend of careful scholarship and vigorous polemic to make a case against the strong streak of "antigovernmentalism" that marks the American political tradition. He offers a catalog of the various forms taken by American distrust of government since the late 18th century; ventures to debunk the historical myths that have sustained them, and argues for government as a necessary good.

Wills began this book in the wake of the Republican triumph in the congressional elections of 1994, in which conservatives apparently rode to power on a wave of antigovernment sentiment, sentiment they promised to honor by taking out a contract on the national state which they labeled a Contract with America. But as Wills observes, Newt Gingrich was only the latest in a long line of American enemies of the state, and not the first to lay claim to the authority of the Founding Fathers for his efforts.

As Wills sees it, the peculiarly strong and long-lived hostility of Americans to government is the consequence of longstanding widely held beliefs and values that have often cut across the ideological differences that otherwise divide us. Behind opposition to government throughout our history he finds the persistent conviction that government is at best a necessary evil that should be minimized, and the equally persistent and widespread belief that "legitimate social activity should be provincial, amateur, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, organic, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational." These values he contrasts with other beliefs and values with which it is readily apparent he is himself in greater accord: "a belief that government is sometimes a positive good, and that it should be cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, articulated in its parts, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, and delegative, with a division of labor."

Antigovernment sentiment in the U.S. has, he claims, taken on added authority by means of a carefully constructed and well-maintained story about the nation’s founding which holds that the Constitution is itself an antigovernment document, designed above all to tether the power of the national state. By these lights, ours is a government intended by the Founders to be hamstrung by separated powers, checks and balances, and the inviolable reservation of individual and states’ rights. "Our very liberty depends so heavily on distrust of government," Wills notes, "that the government itself, we are constantly told, was constructed to instill that distrust."

In a whirlwind tour of American history and political theory, Wills finds at least some of his constellation of antigovernment values at work in the theory of nullifiers from John Taylor of Caroline, Thomas Jefferson (of the Kentucky Resolutions) and John C. Calhoun, who argued for the constitutional right of states to reject federal law, to contemporary "academic nullifiers" such as law professor Akhil Amar, who has offered a limited defense of jury nullification.

He finds these values as well in the handiwork of "insurrectionists" from Daniel Shays to John Brown to Timothy McVeigh, and in the arguments of neo-republican legal scholars such as Amar, Sanford Levinson and David Williams, who find a mandate for revolutionary resistance to oppressive government in the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Antigovernment sentiment takes on a different dress in the activities of vigilantes -- from the Regulator movement in the backcountry of colonial South Carolina to the Ku Klux Klan to abortion clinic bombers. Unlike insurrectionists who resist government because it is repressive, vigilantes "take arms to do the government’s work because the authorities are not repressive enough."

As some of these examples suggest, by "antigovernmentalism" Wills really means opposition to a powerful national state. Apart maybe from the handful of cranky intellectuals such as Henry David Thoreau featured in an odd chapter on individual "withdrawers," there are no anarchists in Wills’s cast of characters. Nullifiers such as Calhoun were acting against the power of the federal government in defense of the power of the state governments (and their authority to preserve local institutions such as slavery). The academic nullifiers and insurrectionists with whom Wills seems to have the least patience are, to be sure, arguing against strictly expert, elite and wholly delegative government, but they have done so on behalf of a full measure of amateur, popular and participatory government.

While the antigovernment values Wills lists have no doubt played an important role in shaping resistance to the power of the national state, he slights at least equally obvious explanations for it. Not least among them would be the very abuses perpetuated by the national state at home and abroad. Wills himself alludes to some of these, such as the extraordinary liberty Jefferson took with the liberties of his countrymen during the embargo he imposed on trade with England and the abuses of the national security state during the cold war. To these one might add such instances as the constitutional protection of slavery which led some radical abolitionists to repudiate that document; the massive violation of civil liberties during World War I; and the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. Moreover, American distrust of government has long fed on the abuses of state power abroad, whether by despotic monarchs, fascist dictators or communist tyrants. One need not be haunted by visions of black helicopters to have good reason to be wary of Washington.

At the same time, Wills says surprisingly little about the underpinnings of mistrust of a powerful state that lie in the faith many Americans have long had in the virtues of competitive markets free of government interference -- a faith conjoining odd fellows like radical Jacksonians and contemporary cybercapitalists. Complaints one hears about "big government" these days usually intone that faith (even when they come hypocritically from the beneficiaries of "corporate welfare").

Wills rightly says that effective markets require governments that enforce contracts and ensure fair bargaining (as the Russians have discovered), and so an antigovernment defense of markets is incoherent. But this much even the most adamant libertarians admit. Whether one calls this role for government a necessary evil or a necessary good, it is a modest and tightly circumscribed one. And one of little moment for those Wills terms the "real victims" of antigovernmentalism: "the millions of poor or shelterless or medically indigent who have been told, over the years, that they must lack care or life support in the name of their very own freedom" from a state that would actively intervene in the market on their behalf.

The greatest interest of Wills’s book lies in his efforts to dismantle the "fake history" of the early republic that he believes informs antigovernmentalism. Here he complains that we have been saddled with an ironically Anti-Federalist view of the Constitution as a charter for a shackled state. Calling upon the testimony of James Madison and other Federalist winners in the ratification debate, Wills seeks to demonstrate that the founders, far from seeking an enervated, divided, self-checking government, saw themselves as creating an effective national polity capable of necessary good. He disputes the claims of nullifiers that the federal union was a compact between sovereign states, argues that the founders sought coordination between the branches of government rather than a stalemate between competitive, coequal centers of power, and offers a strict construction of the Second Amendment as an authorization for state militias rather than a charter for the private ownership of assault rifles by potential revolutionaries.

Wills’s history is a useful corrective to a good deal of stubborn mythology. The Federalists’ Constitution was without a doubt a project designed to replace a weak, inefficient Confederacy with a much more powerful and efficient national state. But Wills weakens his case by overstating it. Though the nullifiers’ case for the Constitution as a compact among sovereign states is a lame one that flies in the face of the Preamble ("We the People," not "We the States"), Madison did lose some important battles to proponents of the prerogatives of the states. His proposal for a federal veto of state laws went down to defeat, and most dispiriting for him, his opponents in the Constitutional Convention won equal representation of the states in the Senate. (And this is the provision of the Constitution most difficult to amend since no state can be deprived of equal representation without its consent.)

Madison did seek an efficient division of function among the branches of the federal government, but he was not as averse as Wills suggests to the need for checks and balances between them. In Federalist 51, he argued that "the constant aim" of the Constitution was "to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check to the other." And he spoke of giving "each department an equal power of self-defense." Wills’s contention that Madison was a proponent of legislative supremacy among the branches is unconvincing given that it was the overweening power granted legislatures by the state constitutions that Madison and other Federalists sought to avoid at the federal level in the Constitution. Madison did indeed say, as Wills points out, that in a republic the legislature necessarily "predominates," but he did so in the context of arguing for the wisdom of dividing the national legislature into two bodies in order to limit potentially "dangerous encroachments."

On the whole, Wills moves Madison much closer than most historians would to Alexander Hamilton, the one Founding Father who can be said without question to have been committed to a national state geared strictly for efficiency and the effective exercise of preeminent power. Wills then has to scramble to explain Madison’s flirtation with nullification in the late 1790s after he moved into opposition to Hamilton’s project.

The most intriguing feature of Wills’s account of the founding is its neglect of the centrality of popular sovereignty to Federalist arguments. The great political genius of Federalist polemics in the ratification debate was the manner in which they appropriated this concept to deflect claims to state sovereignty, discount Anti-Federalist charges that they were undemocratic, and render the Constitution an expression of popular will. All this in defense of a document that left the ordinary citizen with little or no role to play in the new government.

Amar, along with other students of the Constitution such as Hannah Arendt and Gordon Wood, think the Anti-Federalists had a point when they objected that the Federalists, for all their talk of popular sovereignty, were proposing to constrict democracy. And Amar and others such as his colleague Bruce Ackerman (leaders of what Wills terms the "Yale school of nullification") have been arguing that the Federalists were not altogether successful, leaving room in our constitutional government for exceptional moments of popular intervention on behalf of a fundamental reorientation of American politics. Reconstruction and the New Deal, Ackerman has contended, were two such moments -- one in which the people mobilized for racial justice and the other in which they pressed for a more expansive welfare state.

Ackerman emphasizes that such moments are rare, and it is difficult to see an issue currently on the horizon that would provoke such a departure from the normal politics of elite bargaining. But one might imagine, for example, how the fierce debates over "globalization" that recently spread to the streets of Seattle might occasion yet another "constitutional revolution" in which the people insert themselves into the politics of international trade on behalf of either ceding or protecting the national sovereignty that the Constitution formally entrusts to them.

It may be that "nullifying" legal scholars are guilty of too much "law office history," tailoring historical inquiry to fit the needs of their client, the People. But the clear intent of this history is to find more space in the American constitutional tradition for the exercise of popular sovereignty than either Madison or Wills would like. They would have us understand the Constitution as promising a more democratic government than Wills would allow. With Madison, Wills believes that a popular role in good government begins and ends with the election of governing elites and labels "antigovernmental" those of more democratic inclinations. "Populism should give everyone a voice in government," Wills concludes, "but once that voice has elected certain officials, they become an ‘elite,’. . . and it makes no sense for the people to resent what they have themselves brought about."

In this respect, Wills recalls another aspect of Lippmann. "To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they are going badly," the latter wrote in 1925, "this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government." No one did more in his time than Lippmann to spread the word among his fellow citizens that government by the people was no longer something for which they need -- or should -- strive. Here too Wills has apparently picked up Lippmann’s torch.

In the Churches, in the Streets: Taylor Branch on ‘the King Years’

At the height of the watershed civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, as the battle in the streets turned in favor of the demonstrators, a jubilant Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed an overflow crowd at St. Luke’s Baptist Church and saluted those who had braved police dogs and filled the city’s jails. "There are those who write history," he said. "There are those who make history. There are those who experience history. I don’t know how many of you would be able to write a history book. But you are certainly making history, and you are experiencing history. And you will make it possible for the historians of the future to write a marvelous chapter."

Taylor Branch provides that marvelous chapter, and many more besides, in Parting the Waters (Simon & Schuster, 1062 pp., $24.95) , a massive chronicle of the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Building on the important work of Clayborne Carson, David Garrow, Aldon Morris and other historians who have preceded him, Branch has mined archives, newspaper files, and the records of FBI surveillance (which is an important part of his story) to produce the fullest and most compelling narrative we have of the early years of the struggle for black equality in the 1950s and 1960s. He leaves us -- a thousand pages into the story -- in mid-course, on the eve of the epochal triumphs and tragedies of 1964 and 1965, but, happily, he promises a second volume.

Branch subtitles his book America in the King Years, and Martin Luther King’s rise to ascendancy in the movement is at the heart of the story he tells. He begins with a finely drawn portrait of Vernon Johns. the charismatic minister who preceded King as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. A learned scholar, gifted orator, and irascible iconoclast, Johns worried white authorities by preaching sermons on topics like "Segregation After Death" and offended the sensibilities of the black bourgeoisie that filled his pews by upbraiding them publicly for their pretensions and by selling produce from his truck gardens on the streets in front of the church. When Johns began to market his wares from the church basement and hawk watermelons on the campus of Alabama State College where many of his stuffier parishioners were employed, the church deacons decided it was time to find another minister.

Eventually, they settled on King, a young preacher from Atlanta. Branch carefully follows King’s path to the Dexter Avenue pulpit, describing his often tempestuous relationship with his father and tracing his maturation from a dandyish Morehouse College undergraduate to a thoughtful scholar-minister with advanced degrees from Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University (where he met Coretta Scott, whom he married against the wishes of "Daddy" King) In one of his all-too-rare explorations of the intellectual underpinnings of the civil rights movement, Branch makes a solid case in these early chapters for the decisive influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on the development of King’s moral philosophy. King first read Niebuhr in his final year at Crozer, and Moral Man and Immoral Society shook him out of the ‘‘false optimism" of the sentimental liberalism that was the bill of fare at the seminary, one of the last outposts of the Social Gospel. Niebuhr, Branch says, touched King "on all his tender points from pacifism and race to sin," and, though the two men apparently never met, King took from Niebuhr an appreciation of a creative tension between love and justice that would henceforth inform his politics. In Niebuhr’s books he also found a compelling justification of Gandhian nonviolence not as a way of avoiding the dirty hands of power but as "a type of coercion which offers the largest opportunities for a harmonious relationship with the moral and rational factors in social life" -- the sort of coercion, Niebuhr advised, best suited to the needs of oppressed groups like the American Negro. In later years King would describe Gandhian nonviolence as "merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power."

With the beginnings of King’s political activism as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in the winter of 1955-56, Branch’s narrative spreads out, and King becomes but the central character in a large cast of actors. Seeking to knit together "a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch," Branch integrates into his chronicle brief biographies of movement luminaries like A. Philip Randolph, Harry Belafonte, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Farmer, Robert Moses, James Forman and John Lewis with those of lesser-known figures like E. D. Nixon, James Lawson, Fred Shuttlesworth, Jack O’Dell, James Bevel, Wyatt Tee Walker, Charles Sherrod and others.

Nonetheless, Branch succeeds remarkably well in the difficult task of telling the story of a diverse, often conflict-ridden movement. He decenters King when the story demands it, making it clear, for example, that it was not King but the young sit-in activists of 1960 and later the SNCC volunteers in Nashville and rural North and South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi who developed the strategy of seeking out nonviolent confrontations with white segregationists. Not until Birmingham did King abandon his role as the "fireman" called in to lend support to other people’s demonstrations and launch a direct action campaign of his own. And even in Birmingham -- King’s finest hour in these years -- the successes that the movement achieved owed less to King’s leadership than to the audacious mobilization of hundreds of children by "wildman" James Bevel and to the extraordinary courage of these children, who marched to jail and into the blasts of high-powered fire hoses renowned for their capacity to strip the bark from trees and rip bricks from burning buildings.

In his vivid descriptions of meetings, marches, mayhem and murder Branch makes the civil rights movement palpable as few have done before. As much as any writer can, he puts us on the bus, in the church, on the telephone, in the streets, on the podium, in the driveway:

In Jackson, all three Evers children, including toddler Van Dyke, tumbled in their parents’ bed, arguing over which television program to watch. Their mother had allowed them to stay up past midnight to find out what their father thought of the President’s wonderful speech, and they all rushed for the door when they heard his car. Medgar Evers was returning from a glum strategy session. All but nine of the seven hundred Jackson demonstrators were out of jail. Local white officials were claiming victory untainted by concession. Both the white and Negro press portrayed the Jackson movement as shrunken, listless, riddled by dissension. Privately, Evers had asked for permission to invite Martin Luther King to join forces, but his NAACP bosses ignored the heretical idea. Finally home, Evers stepped out of his Oldsmobile carrying a stack of NAACP sweatshirts stenciled "Jim Crow Must Go," which had made poor sales items in Mississippi’s sweltering June. His own white dress shirt made a perfect target for the killer waiting in the fragrant stand of honeysuckle across the street. One loud crack sent a bullet from a .30-’06 deer rifle exploding through his back, out the front of his chest, and on through his living room window to spend itself against the kitchen refrigerator. True to their rigorous training in civil rights preparedness, the four people inside dived to the floor, like soldiers in a foxhole, but when no more shots came, they all ran outside to find him lying facedown near the door. "Please, Daddy, please get up!" cried the children, and then everything fell away to bloodsmeared, primal hysteria.

Parting the Waters is, as was the movement it describes, a roller coaster ride through hope, fear, exhilaration, despair, courage, cowardice, conviction, doubt, envy and solidarity.

The fate of the civil rights movement, its leaders recognized, lay in its ability to convince politicians and administrators in the federal government that it was in their interest to enforce the law and defend the Constitution in the South in the face of the massive resistance by politically potent segregationists. Throughout his account of the struggle of the movement in the South, Branch effectively weaves the story of its efforts to win the support of northern liberals like John and Robert Kennedy. In a year that has witnessed a vigorous refurbishing of the aura of sainthood surrounding the Kennedys, it is useful to be reminded how equivocal they and most of their minions were in the face of the demand for black equality. Constantly concerned about alienating the southern wing of the Democratic Party, the Kennedys sought to channel the movement away from attacks on state segregation statutes, which, they claimed, were local conflicts in which federal authorities were powerless to intervene, and into voter registration efforts in which the national state could be of assistance. Yet after covertly helping civil rights groups set up a well-funded Voter Education Project in 1961, the administration failed to provide the protection that activists required if they were to survive the intimidation of segregationists and what passed for justice in southern courts.

Often, the Kennedys seemed to those in the, movement to be actively working for the other side. John Kennedy repeatedly appointed segregationist judges to the federal bench in the South, and the civil rights case that Robert Kennedy most vigorously prosecuted involved charges brought against Albany, Georgia, activists for violating the rights of a white storeowner by boycotting his business because he had served on a jury that cleared the sheriff who had shot a black man three times in the neck at point-blank range. This, the attorney general’s office contended, showed that the federal government was evenhanded -- and, moreover, because the defendants were black and the plaintiffs white, here was a case it could win in the South. King and others in the movement found themselves turning to judges appointed by Eisenhower for justice and to liberal Republicans (remember them?) like Nelson Rockefeller for aid. Against the prudent, realistic, hard-boiled legalists in the Kennedy administration like Byron White and Burke Marshall, a federal official of conscience and egalitarian conviction like John Doar (an Eisenhower holdover) emerges from Branch’s account as a lonely, embattled and courageous figure: a "man who talked like Gary Cooper" and acted like Gary Cooper in the streets of Jackson, Mississippi, where he calmed an angry mob following the murder of Medgar Evers.

Of course, King’s most steadfast and powerful enemy in Washington was J. Edgar Hoover, and Branch carefully retells the story of Hoover’s vendetta against King. The FBI chief regarded King as a dangerous subversive cleverly manipulated by his closest adviser, Stanley Levison. who Hoover contended was a Soviet agent. Without ever proving this charge, Hoover obtained Justice Department authorization for extensive electronic surveillance on Levison (and thereby indirectly on King). Far more worried about communism than racial inequality, the Kennedys forced King to break his ties with his closest white friend in the summer of 1963 as a condition for their continued lukewarm support of the movement. That fall Robert Kennedy, still eager for intelligence on King and now fearful that Hoover would reveal that the president’s wayward lust had led him to the bed of an East German woman who surfaced in the Bobby Baker scandal, authorized the wiretaps on King that uncovered evidence of King’s sexual infidelities, which Hoover then tried to use to blackmail and discredit him.

This lack of an interpretative sharpness to match the power of his descriptive accounts is most unfortunate when Branch fails to marshal some of his richest anecdotes in the service of arguments that might draw things together. For example, he tells the story of the early days of the Birmingham demonstrations when things were going badly for the SCLC, and King and his advisers were debating in their motel whether or not King should himself go to jail. When the voices of those around him died out, King withdrew into his bedroom and then reappeared:

When King stepped back into the other room a few minutes later, he wore a work shirt, blue jeans that were crisply new and rolled up at the cuffs, and a new pair of ‘clodhopper" walking shoes. It was a startling sight, as some of those in the room had never seen King wear anything but a dark business suit. This first glimpse of him announced that he would go to jail, which hushed the room.

What this change of clothing might mean Branch does not say, even though it cries out for explanation. It seems to me a very symbolic moment, for what King had done was exchange the uniform of the preachers who dominated the SCLC for the uniform of the young activists in SNCC, and in so doing he was arguably giving evidence of his sensitivity to the charge of the latter that the former were insufficiently attentive to the class divisions within the civil rights movement.

As Branch shows, the movement culture of the civil rights movement in these years was rooted in the black church, especially the black Baptist church, which meant that a movement for democratic rights was linked tightly to what was in many respects an undemocratic institution ruled by often authoritarian preachers, who delighted in the material and psychic rewards of their power and elite status. This was a point of attack for those in SNCC who contended that a movement for racial democracy must itself be radically democratic. King was very sensitive to this issue, torn between those he admired on both sides, and divided within himself. Branch presents an abundance of useful evidence suggesting a conflict within the movement (and within King) over its internal politics, but he rarely pulls this material together in summary fashion, and this is but one of several themes that are left largely bereft of sustained analysis and critical judgment. In the end his is a book held together by little more than chronology.

But despite its shortcomings, Parting the Waters is a moving and accurate narrative: the first if not the last book one should read on the civil rights movement. It is, as well, an antidote to Mississippi Burning, a dishonest, award-winning new film in which blacks wait patiently and fearfully in the background for deliverance by two white FBI agents, played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, who zealously bend the law in the interest of justice -- a film one fears will have a profound effect on the way many Americans view their nation in the King Years ("The Dream Dafoed," as the Village Voice put it). Yet, because it is doubtful that many of those fans of Mississippi Burning will read a thousand page antidote, we may hope not only that the second volume of Branch’s history will surpass the first, but also that someone will have the guts to make a movie that tells the truths of any of his marvelous chapters.

Landslide Lyndon

When I was a kid, in the early 1960s, my friends and I took a great deal of interest in presidential election campaigns. We regarded them as something like a third pennant race, overlapping as they did with the baseball season. We picked favorites, exchanged preferences, made wagers and attempted to root our candidate home to victory. I often found myself taking lonely positions in these contests, for my father was a Democrat, while most of my friends were the sons of the all-too-many reactionary Republicans in our small western Colorado city, and in this respect if in no other we hewed closely to paternal values. I remember most of all the abuse I suffered for my support of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and 1964, for Johnson was widely regarded in my circle as a southern buffoon.

It was, I think, precisely because Johnson was a southerner that I liked him so much, for he seemed to embody the southern New Deal liberalism that was for my father the good side of his own southern upbringing. Indeed, several years ago as I read Robert Caro’s vivid descriptions of Johnson’s campaign treks across the Texas Hill Country in the 1930s in the first volume of his monumental Years of Lyndon Johnson, I was reminded of the stories my father had told me of riding in the rumble seat of a Model A as he accompanied my grandfather on his travels around Arkansas in that same decade as a campaign manager for some of that states Democratic politicians. I hoped that LBJ would fulfill the promise of southern liberalism with which my father identified, a liberal promise that had till then waged a losing battle with the racism and reaction that often rendered him bitter and defensive about his homeland.

Well. Lyndon Johnson had me fooled: my hopes. which were widely shared, were never fully realized. The Great Society was lost at the Gulf of Tonkin, and, as Johnson tried to manipulate the public into supporting the war in Vietnam, many came to hate him. In the final years of his presidency, there were few places in the U.S. he could travel without being met by a chorus singing, "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?"

Now, thanks to Caro, we know how masterfully Johnson had been manipulating people well before he became a politician of national prominence. He fooled his parents; he fooled his classmates, in school and in college; he fooled his wife and he fooled his mistress. He used those he worked for and those who worked for him; he used congressmen and senators, state politicians and federal administrators; he used liberals and conservatives, poor men and millionaires. By the time he was 32 he had successfully manipulated such fearsome figures as Sam Rayburn, and he had even manipulated the Great Manipulator himself, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even before he was elected to public office, Caro contended, his character was "formed, shaped -- into a shape so hard it would never change." The betrayal many felt in the wake of Johnson’s presidency was felt over the whole course of his career by those men and women who discovered that Johnson was never what he seemed to be. There were, however, many who never knew they had been deceived, and for them Caro’s massive biography will be a revelation.

In the most eye-opening chapters of his first volume, Caro detailed Johnson’s work on the 1940 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In this election, in which many Democratic congressional candidates seemed doomed to defeat for lack of money, Johnson assumed personal control of campaign finance, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his financial backers -- such as the construction firm of Brown and Root -- to Democrats throughout the country. This effort, which secured a surprising Democratic victory, earned Johnson a measure of power on Capital Hill vastly disproportionate to his young years and marked a new stage in the development of the ever-increasing influence of money on American electoral politics. This was apparent in the spectacular and enormously expensive campaign Johnson waged in 1941 for the Senate seat left vacant with the death of Morris Sheppard. He lost this election, however, when in an uncharacteristic moment of overconfidence he allowed the official returns from the Mexican-American precincts he had bought in San Antonio and South Texas to be reported early on election day. This allowed the Texas liquor interests, who wanted to elect his prohibitionist opponent Governor Pappy O’Daniel in order to get him out of the state, to overcome Johnson’s lead with the late-reporting figures from the rural precincts they had bought in East Texas.

Despite this disappointing defeat, Johnson’s political future looked bright in late 1941. Another senatorial election was upcoming in 1942, and his impressive run against the popular O’Daniel and his close ties to President Roosevelt made him a leading contender for the Democratic nomination (which in Texas, as elsewhere in the South, was tantamount to election) Unfortunately for Johnson, World War II intervened, and he was tripped up by a campaign pledge to enlist in the event of war and "be in the front line, in the trenches, in the mud and blood with your boys, helping to do that fighting." On December 8 Johnson, who was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, signed on for active duty. Though he postponed as long as he could fulfilling his pledge to go to the front, Johnson finally left for the Pacific in May 1942 and reluctantly abandoned the Senate race in favor of former Governor James Allred, who had won Roosevelt’s endorsement. This doomed Johnson to six years of waiting for another shot at the Senate -- six years of frustration and declining influence as a congressman, a job that never held any intrinsic interest for him. Means of Ascent chronicles these relatively powerless years in Johnson’s path to the presidency and examines in intricate detail the election that he stole in 1948 from former Governor Coke Stevenson -- a make-or-break contest that put him back on course to the White House.

Johnson regarded his seat in the House as but a stepping-stone to greater things, and as his drive for higher office stalled in the mid-1940s he devoted even less attention to the duties of a congressman than he had in his first two terms on Capitol Hill. But Johnson’s enormous energy did not dissipate in the mid-1940s. It was redirected toward making himself a rich man (perhaps the wealthiest to be elected president). During the war, the foundations of the Johnson fortune were laid with the purchase of Austin radio station KTBC. Later Johnson would insist that the station and the radio and TV empire built upon it belonged to Lady Bird and that he had nothing to do with its affairs. But Caro has amassed compelling evidence that, though the station was purchased in his wife’s name, it was Johnson’s influence that greased the wheels with an ordinarily slow-moving and cautious FCC, enabling Lady Bird not only to win quick approval for the purchase but also to secure changes in the operating conditions of the station that made it a much more valuable property. Furthermore, much of the rapidly rising advertising revenue that made Johnson a millionaire by 1948 came from sponsors interested less in selling their products in central Texas than in securing the good will of a U. S. congressman.

But it was not money but power that Johnson desired most. "The hunger that gnawed at him most deeply," Caro says, "was a hunger not for riches but for power in its most naked form; to bend others to his will." The radio business, at best, allowed for reciprocity, not domination. As one of Johnson’s closest political associates put it: "He wanted people to kiss his ass. He didn’t want to have to kiss people’s asses. And selling [radio] time -- you have to kiss people’s asses sometimes. In business you have to. He liked power, and so he was unhappy in business." Believing that like many other men in his family he would die young, Johnson felt he had to get out of the House and into the fast lane to power, and thus he risked his political career on one more run for the Senate in 1948. Unlike the special election of 1941, this was a regular election in which Johnson could not run for senator and retain his congressional seat, and he told his closest advisers that, if he lost, he would abandon politics.

Johnson was a longshot in the race. O’Daniel, who had been re-elected in 1942, remained popular, Johnson had lost much of the statewide reputation he had won in 1941; and he no longer had the White House on his side. His hopes brightened when O’Daniel decided to withdraw amid reports of his profiteering in Washington real estate, but they then plummeted when the most popular governor in Texas history, Coke Stevenson, decided to enter the contest. Stevenson, a Hill Country rancher widely regarded as "Mr. Texas" and the "living personification of frontier individualism," had rolled up 85 percent of the vote in his previous campaign for governor in 1944 and was thought to be unbeatable. The bulk of Means of Ascent is devoted to a detailed account of the fierce and controversial battle between Johnson and Stevenson in the initial primary and the subsequent runoff, in the governing bodies of the Texas Democratic Party, and in the courtroom.

Employing huge sums of cash, radio spots, sophisticated polling, misleading negative campaigning, and a couple of helicopters, Johnson waged a modern, commercialized campaign against Stevenson, who continued to ply the old-fashioned politics of courthouse meetings and cowboy parades. This enabled Johnson to make substantial inroads into the huge lead Stevenson held at the outset of the race, but a week before the election he still trailed by a considerable margin. Johnson’s supporters then turned to more traditional Texas political methods and bought out the Mexican vote of San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, giving Johnson a 35,000-vote plurality in these areas. Johnson won the election by 87 votes, with the margin of victory provided by George Parr, the "Valley’s Boss of Bosses," whose enforcer, Luis Salas, cast 200 ballots for Johnson on behalf of nonvoters in the 13th precinct of Alice, Texas, several days after the polls had closed. Stevenson fought back against this fraud, taking his case both to the executive committee of the state party and the federal courts. But he was defeated by a single vote in the former forum and outwitted by the clever legal maneuvers of Johnson’s friend Abe Fortas in the latter. Stevenson retired to his ranch, and "Landslide Lyndon," as he became known, assumed a place in the U.S. Senate, a body he would come to dominate in less than a decade.

The Path to Power portrayed young Lyndon Johnson as one of the most unsavory figures in the history of American politics, and in Means of Ascent this portrait darkens even further. In his first volume, Caro acknowledged that Johnson’s story was not without its "bright thread." When Johnson’s personal ambitions coincided with the needs of the poor and dispossessed, his immense energy and skill as a political technician could work wonders. As the leader of the Texas National Youth Administration he developed imaginative programs for youth employment and proved extraordinarily successful in circumventing the red tape that blocked the efforts of so many other administrators. As a congressman he used federal money to rescue the property and salvage the dignity of the most destitute residents of his district. Most impressively, he bucked the powerful utility companies to bring electricity to the poor farmers on forks of the creeks. Rural electrification brought these people out of conditions that were virtually medieval, and, after the lights went on in November 19, one woman recalled that "all over the Hill Country people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson."

The tragedy of these accomplishments, Caro argued, was that Johnson viewed them not as important goals of liberal reform but as undertakings purely instrumental to the attainment of greater power for himself. This argument was not convincing, for Caro seemed so determined to reduce Johnson’s motives to a singular lust for power that he slighted evidence he himself provided that LBJ was a more complex man. He did admit that Johnson’s secret love affair with Alice Glass, the beautiful mistress of one of his wealthiest supporters, Charles Marsh, was inexplicable in terms of the pattern of Johnsonian motives he had drawn, but the same could be said of Johnson’s devotion to the outcast Mexican children he taught at Cotulla as a young man or the extraordinary efforts he made as a congressman on behalf of his poorest (often nonvoting) constituents. These suggested that Johnson was not without some populist sentiments and that these sentiments, at least for a time, coexisted uneasily with the practicalities of power politics -- even if, when push-came-to-shove, it was populist sentiments that gave way.

In Means of Ascent, Caro offers us an even more one-dimensional Johnson. Not only is he not credited with liberal principles, he is even denied credit for any liberal accomplishments. If Caro makes a good case for the submersion of any liberal convictions in Johnson himself in these years, it seems to me he decidedly underplays an achievement of Johnson’s that had significant consequences for the course of modern American liberalism: he beat Coke Stevenson. This is not an argument Caro entertains, for he builds Stevenson into a mirror image of Johnson’s amorality. In a parallel biography of Stevenson that is as wide-eyed as that of Johnson is skeptical, he invests the taciturn cowboy with the honesty, integrity and courage that he finds lacking in Johnson, and largely ignores the interests and ideology that Stevenson served as a politician. He portrays the contest between Stevenson and Johnson as a legendary Hollywood showdown, a confrontation between the white-hatted ex-governor and the black-clad congressman, a clash of outsized personalities in which the larger political context of the campaign is subordinated to a confrontation between Johnson’s "extreme pragmatism" and Stevenson’s "extreme idealism." In the movies, of course, the bad guy would have ended up face down in the dust outside the saloon, but here he rides into the sunrise toward Washington, leaving the reader no doubt that the better man lost and glad only that the widowed Stevenson eventually finds true happiness in the love of a good woman, his second wife, "Teeney," whom he married in 1954.

Structuring the narrative in this fashion makes for high drama, and Means of Ascent is as absorbing as Caro’s other books. Yet it distorts a history that calls for a more complex story. By the time they reach the mawkish tale of "the love between Coke and Teeney" at the end of the book, many readers will no doubt feel that Stevenson is too good to be true and will have noted the manner in which Caro’s indefatigable energies as an investigative reporter seem to have flagged when it comes to the career of his hero. Stevenson, Caro asserts, was a politician who could not be bought, and it is Stevenson’s honesty and integrity that contrast most sharply in the book with Johnson’s utter indifference to truth and principle. But other students of Texas politics are not as sure that Stevenson was as clean as Caro claims, noting especially his alleged involvement with phony oil leases on his land.

But even if Stevenson were the paragon of virtue Caro claims, the morality play of Means of Ascent would have to be judged wanting, for this good man was the servant of some very nasty ideas and interests, not the least of which was white supremacy. Caro’s treatment of Stevenson’s racism is extremely brief and unconvincing. "There were almost no Negroes in the Hill Country," he notes, "and Stevenson accepted all the Southern stereotypes about that race." Racism was a problem "to which his upbringing in that isolated country made it difficult to relate." But Johnson was also from the Hill Country, and, as George Brown said, "he was for the Niggers" even if he only worked on their behalf when it was politically expedient. Stevenson’s attitudes thus cannot so easily be explained away. Caro notes Stevenson’s pride in being named after Richard Coke, the governor who "redeemed" Texas from Reconstruction in 1873, but he fails to grasp that what, Stevenson inherited from Coke was not only a "distrust of all government" but a commitment to white supremacy. On more that one occasion Caro offers an interpretation of the "injustices of Reconstruction" long repudiated by historians, and he fails to observe that Coke’s administration, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, put Texas on the road to segregation and black disenfranchisement. This was the "lion-hearted Richard Coke" whose name Caro’s hero proudly bore.

Caro’s neglect of race is ironic since Means of Ascent begins with a moving account of Johnson’s finest hour as a proponent of black civil rights: his "We Shall Overcome" speech in March 1965 proposing the legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act. As Caro says, if Johnson had lost in 1948 he most likely would not have had the opportunity to make this speech. What he does not tell us is that not only Lyndon Johnson’s political career but the course of the struggle for racial justice would have suffered had Johnson gone down to defeat. The late 1940s were critical years in the development of the Democratic Party, years when race began to move from the periphery to the center of its concerns. And in 1948 Coke Stevenson was not only a racist, he was the senatorial candidate in Texas representing southern white resistance to any move toward racial equality, the candidate of Texas Dixiecrats who were determined to undermine the civil rights agenda of the Fair Deal even if it cost their party the White House. Johnson was allied with Democrats within and without Texas who were loyal to Harry Truman, and, for this reason, they supported him despite his own lackluster civil rights record, even when this meant winking at the corruption that secured his victory.

For Democratic liberals, Johnson was no prize, but he was no Dixiecrat and was the lesser evil. On matters of race, he may have shown himself to be an "extreme pragmatist," but, unlike Stevenson, he was at least no extreme ideologue. By these lights, Johnson’s election was yet another unintended victory for the "downtrodden" that accompanied his quest for power.

Once, we add this context to the story of the election of 1948, Caro’s moral showdown becomes suspect, even if we reserve our doubts about his claims for Stevenson’s pristine character. We find ourselves instead with a more unusual screenplay, a darkly ironic remake of Shane in which a strong, silent and principled Alan Ladd rides into town and helps the cattle barons, who share his principles, in their attempt to drive out the homesteaders, who in turn hire a sleazy Jack Palance to get rid of Shane in order to guarantee a more egalitarian frontier. This seems to me a more complex, more interesting story, and better history to boot.

It also restores to center stage what Caro himself says are the most important issues raised by Johnson’s life: those moral questions surrounding the relationship between means and ends in modern American politics. For it suggests that if Johnson had no "noble ends" in the late 1940s, he nonetheless served as their instrument, an instrument that left with dirty hands those just men and women who supported his corrupt politics.

In The Path to Power, Caro handled the questions about the use and abuse of power that Johnson’s life raises with the skill of a novelist; in Means of Ascent, he has turned cartoonist. Let us hope in the volumes to come that he regains the more knotty view of these questions and of Johnson’s career that he seems to have lost, and that no more heroes like Coke Stevenson intrude to obscure his vision. Let us hope, that is, that in this respect his extraordinary biography has not been ‘formed, shaped -- into a shape so hard it [can] never change."

Theologians Re-Imaging Redemption

The desire to re-image redemption may seem the height of folly or, worse, arrogance -- folly when one considers the extent to which we have been shaped by patriarchal Christianity and arrogance when one considers the profound healing that both women and men have experienced by embracing Christian truths. Yet a recent symposium was dedicated to addressing just this issue. "Re-Imaging Redemption: a Symposium on Feminist and Womanist Theologies," sponsored by the Anna Howard Shaw Center at Boston University School of Theology, sought to redress injustices by suggesting alternative ways of understanding the power that saves and heals us. Just as men have been criticized for excluding women’s experience from theology, feminists justifiably have been called to account for failing to recognize that white women’s experiences are not the same as that of blacks and other minorities. The net effect is to see the need to re-image redemption not only from a feminist viewpoint but also from one that recognizes all dimensions of oppression.

By appealing to imagination and art, the symposium fostered a variety of perspectives. The six theologians who led the event -- Carter Heyward, Barbara Gerlach, Rita Nakashima Brock, Gail Paterson Corrington, Jacquelyn Grant and Delores Williams -- challenged age-old assumptions about human life, divine power and Jesus Christ as the only true redeemer.

Artist and United Church of Christ pastor Barbara Gerlach, whose work was featured at the conference, began by describing her art as her "wit’s end experience" and connecting her courage to the inspiring words of poet Muriel Rukeyser, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Working from her own painful experiences of childhood abuse, she explained how self-disclosure is the vehicle of her own liberation. "Only when we see what is," said Gerlach, "can we imagine what will bind us up or set us free, and move toward deeper healing and wholeness, greater freedom and fulfillment." For Gerlach, the process of image-making takes precedence over any claim for the uniqueness or universality of any one image of redemption. Gerlach encouraged us to acknowledge and Utilize our own painful memories and experiences and then to "work out our own salvation in fear and trembling."

For example, Gerlach noted four images of redemption which have emerged and recurred in her art: "survivors" who refuse to die or give up; the "friends" who make it possible to go on; those "older and wiser" on whom she leans; and images of the need to "comfort and care for ourselves." Gerlach reminded us that as we confront our own pain -- and, as Carter Heyward argued, our fears -- we can build on the particularities of our individual lives to create images of wholeness and well-being.

Like Gerlach, Heyward, who is professor of theology at Episcopal Divinity School and one of the first women to become an Episcopal priest, emphasized and modeled the importance of profound honesty in the redemption process. She began by redefining the scope of redemption beyond the confines of Christian faith. Redemption is not just "God’s way of tidying up messy places in history or covering up ugly moments of our life together or our lives as individuals redemption is not about saving situations or justifying oppression or abuse." Rather, said Heyward, redemption is in part our mutual responsibility. "It is about saving people, other creatures and the Earth."

All Christologies past and present, Heyward claimed, have reflected a disempowering experience of fear. As our redeemer and our Christ, Jesus of Nazareth has all too often functioned theologically to help us master fear by way of denial. Rather than using Jesus as an "escape hatch" from fear, Heyward argued, we need an understanding of redemption that will allow us to engage our fears in their most terrifying dimensions. Instead of fearing life, ourselves or one another, as we do all too often, we should be afraid of that which alienates us from ourselves and one another. Indeed, we should accept our lives in all their ambiguity and struggle together for justice "in and through our conflict, confusion, anger and pain." Heyward spoke forcefully out of her own journey of recovery from alcoholism. She called for our mutual engagement in the redemptive process "not of escape, but of transformation; not of control or management, but of letting go" of our fears. She challenged the doctrinal claim that the christic power of Jesus is his alone. Through right relations with one another, we can and must lay claim to the christic power inherent in our humanity. At the heart of Heyward’s argument is her tenacious hold on the truths of living in right-relation wherein each of us, regardless of nationality, race or sexual orientation, may live faithfully and respectfully in nonabusive ways.

Rita Nakashima Brock, professor at Pacific Lutheran University and a woman blessed by a Japanese-American and Puerto Rican heritage, gleaned her re-imaging clues from familiar stories of biblical women who "defy patriarchal sexual codes to keep life going." Joining with other feminist biblical scholars such as Phyllis Trible and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Brock reinterprets the Bible in light of women’s experiences. Throughout her presentation she appealed to Trible’s translation of the famous Jeremiah text about Rachel weeping for her children and the phrase in Jeremiah 31:22, "the female surrounds the warrior" (Brock’s adaptation) , which witnesses to the powerful new thing that Yahweh promises for the restoration of her children. Brock’s decision to translate the Hebrew word Gebar as warrior is itself a further step in re-imaging. While Trible renders the final phrase "female surrounds man," the Jerusalem Bible gives us, "The Woman sets out to find her Husband again," and the New English Bible would have us believe that God’s new thing is "a woman turned into a man " -- hardly the stuff out of which women experience redemption. The sexism of these last two translations reminds us of the importance of scriptural translation in the task of re-imaging.

Brock also described the "eraser theory" of male theologizing which rubs women out of the picture -- though the Gospels themselves herald women who are models of faithful action. Brock noted that Luke describes the women who remained at Jesus’ cross, burial and tomb -- Mary of Magdala, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others who accompanied Jesus from Galilee -- despite the Twelve who desert him. Brock’s analysis suggests that it is the perseverance of love such as theirs, not the "lone heroism" of Jesus (advanced by patriarchy), which offers us true redemption. "We cannot rely on one past event to save our future," Brock argued. "No almighty power will deliver us. With each minute we wait for such rescue, more are slain. Like all these women at the tomb, it takes all of us, each and every one and more. Each of us is that important." Brock echoed the insights of Heyward and Gerlach: it is our actions in the "fragile, resilient interconnections we share with others" that bring us into the realm of sacred mystery, bind us together in love and empower us in face of suffering and pain.

While Brock found images of redemption in Scripture, New Testament scholar Gail Paterson Corrington found hers in pre-Christian figures such as Isis and Sophia, ancient female divinities whose legacy lives on in apocryphal literature in the figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus. "Struggle as they might, the patriarchs could not make Mary Immaculate into Mary Manipulate," she writes. Unfortunately, Corrington noted, patriarchal Christianity identifies Jesus with God exclusively. It is not so much the gender of Jesus by itself to which feminists object, but rather the fact that by making Jesus the sole model of salvation, all other mediators of salvation must then be male. Anyone who doubts this logic need only be reminded of the Roman Catholic theologians -- including, most notably, John Paul II -- who insist that priests must be male because mediating salvation requires "male characteristics." Moreover, the pope maintains that "in calling only men as his apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner" (see "On the Dignity and Vocation of Women")

Corrington documented the way the female has been excluded from the personae of the deity in Christianity, detailing the numerous arguments that present the female nature as flawed and limited. At the same time, she took issue with the well-known Martha and Mary story wherein Mary presents the model of an ideal disciple by sitting at the feet of a famous rabbi. While many interpretations of this story are possible, Corrington raised the issue of gender. Mary takes on the role of the male student sitting at the feet of the male rabbi, she pointed out. "Far from indicating the equality of men and women in the discipleship of the Kingdom of God, . . . the use of Mary as the model disciple suggests that women must become men in order to receive the ‘better portion."’ This "ironic choice" for Mary and for all women-that the better choice is not to see oneself as female -- is reinforced by the words of Jesus in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas: "For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." (Note again the New English Bible’s translation of Jeremiah 31:22 that suggests that Yahweh sanctions transforming the woman into a man.) To "be a real woman," as we are admonished by so many of our patriarchal admirers, seals our self-destruction. Only men can enter the kingdom and be saved. In the face of this Mary, a distorted model of redemption, Corrington’s treatment of Mary the mother of Jesus is a model of wholeness and liberation.

Carrying the re-imaging process a step further, womanist theologians Jacquelyn Grant and Delores Williams reminded white women especially that their anti-sexist critiques frequently disregard the injustices borne by women and men of color (this is one of the reasons that some black women have elected to appropriate Alice Walker’s term "womanist" to name their theological stance) Speaking of her own family’s effort to keep her from the pitfalls of domestic service, Grant, associate professor of systematic theology at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, took the notion of servanthood to task: black people know all too well that "some are more servants than others." As "servants of the servants" they often suffered overwhelmingly demeaning moments at the hands of white women and their sexually abusive husbands. Despite legal emancipation, freedom was an empty word for most domestic workers. Health cards, not report cards, determined their status, as the ‘Three D’s" -- dirty, diseased and dishonest -- took precedence over the ‘Three R’s" of educated and privileged whites. All of this presents Grant with a theological dilemma:

How do you justify teaching a people that they are called to a life of service when they have been imprisoned by the most exploitative forms of service? Furthermore, how do you propose that we are called to service to Jesus, the one who has been sent by God to redeem us, when both God and Jesus have been principle weapons in the oppressive [white patriarchal] arsenal to keep blacks and black women in their appropriate place?

that we can construct a redemptive present." To re-image redemption, Williams explores the painful ambiguity of coerced and voluntary surrogacy which functioned uniquely as a "structure of domination in black women’s lives" -- most notably in the role of "mammy." Standing in the place of the slave owner’s wife, the mammy became the "premier house servant who, though given considerable authority by her owners and admired for her expertise in domestic matters.

Grant resolved the dilemma first by enlarging on the insights of W. E. B. DuBois and his reference to the double consciousness of black men, who understood themselves through their "twoness" -- being black and American. Grant speaks of the "triple consciousness" of black women: Americans discriminated against on the basis of sex as well as race. Yet black women such as Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Fannie Lou Hammer were constantly "liberating Jesus as Jesus was liberating them," through their own theology. The birth of the black church, says Grant, was an important public declaration that black self-understanding took precedence over the definition of the white world. The black church gave black women the "possibility of experiencing a liberating Jesus even as they were given a racist and sexist one." Reminding us that womanist theology is committed to bringing holism to black women’s lives, Grant concluded:

Being a servant of the Redeemer means joining the struggle of the Redeemer against oppression wherever it is found. Where is redemption? Redemption happens where the struggle for liberation is. Who is the Redeemer? The Redeemer comes to us through whomever engages in the redeeming struggle of liberation.

Delores Williams, assistant professor of theology and culture at Drew University Divinity School, offered a sociohistorical approach to womanist theology, "to shade in a context, to find a usable past so that we can construct a redemptive present." To re-image redemption, Williams explores the painful ambiguity of coerced and voluntary surrogacy which functioned uniquely as a "structure of domination in black women’s lives" -- most notably in the role of "mammy." Standing in the place of the slave owner’s wife, the mammy became the "premier house servant who, though given considerable authority by her owners and admired for her expertise in domestic matters, remained captive. Despite its limitations and the significant abuse women suffered as a result of it, Williams argued that the mammy role was "the most powerful and authoritative one slave women could fill."

Why have black women through the ages clung so tenaciously to Jesus of Nazareth as a redemptive symbol? This question haunts Williams’s research and she answered it forcefully: "This is the rub: Jesus is the ultimate surrogate figure for our redemption." Questioning the logic of the substitution theory of atonement, Williams asked, "In his life, then, was [Jesus] a divine mammy, nurturing other people’s children, giving them the sustenance they needed to stand between themselves and the cold, cold world?" From the perspective of Afro-American experience, "Jesus became human to be made mammy."

This insight moved Williams to advance the possibility that in black women’s identification with Jesus as surrogate Lord they risk being "passive to the oppressive operation of surrogacy in our lives" and "oblivious to forces at work influencing us to stand in somebody else’s place, to be at the beckon of somebody else’s call and to forever service the needs and goals and tasks and responsibilities of somebody else. What about our unwed mother?" Arguing that black women must be suspicious of the divine status of "mammying," as exemplified by Jesus, Williams offered no conclusive answers to her hard christological questions. She did, however, offer a ruling principle from her vantage point as a womanist: "To re-image redemption is to re-image creation and to re-image creation is to re-image relation."

More than a few questions linger in the wake of these six attempts to reimage redemption: How, one may ask, can we experience the process of letting-go without falling victim to the surrender imagery that has done such harm to women and children, particularly in abusive situations? Can we enlarge on the insights of artists such as Gerlach, whose creative gifts depend on the process of letting-go or opening, to receive imaginative insights from a Spirit greater than ourselves? Can we accept Brock’s radical thesis that each of us is important for the redemption of all life, by virtue of what Heyward calls the christic power in each of us? Can we expand our experience of redeemer figures to allow female images to shine through and bless our lives in relation? Can we construct a new order of ministry based on love as care without falling back into tradition, which demands that women be caretakers, or falling into the subtleties of surrogacy? Can feminists learn from their womanist sisters that Jesus’ iconoclastic ministry offers strength for the redemptive journey? Can womanists take more seriously the interrelationship of sexism and racism even as feminists strive to deal with their own culpability?

The construction of a new humanity, a new way of being in relation, and the radical transformation of culture inform much of the christological critiques exemplified by these scholars. A significant lack of clarity about the nature of sin and radical evil in the context of a new humanity looms in this project. It is at least clear that there is more than one perspective for understanding how Jesus sets us free. The word of God remains important for many women even if the authority of the Christian canon does not. So, too, do insights regarding resurrection and the cross as a symbol of nonredemptive suffering. The interpretation of these theological realities now requires reflection and commitment in ways not always appreciated or even allowed. Orthodoxy has always had its challengers and its heretics, but heresy (to use patriarchy’s term) now has more room to breathe. Together, in the midst of our differences, we can dare to think anew about the liberating character of Christian faith.

Practicing Liberation in the Black Church

Black theology has apparently been dialoguing with everyone except "Aunt Jane" and the black preacher. Few ministers and laypeople laboring in the trenches are aware of black theology, and those who are remain somewhat indifferent to its teachings. Ironically, while black theology theoretically relies heavily upon expressions of the people, such as freedom and sorrow songs and sermons, the more academic elites of black theology -- those who have the luxury of tenure and endowed professorships in prestigious white seminaries and universities -- seem to have little respect for the modern black church. Meanwhile, black churches that have succeeded in white-dominated society tend to neglect aspects of black theology that preserve and celebrate African-American culture. While black theologians like J. Deotis Roberts and Gayraud Wilmore have called for a nexus between theology and ministry, to date the relationship remains undeveloped.

Theology is both an academic discipline and a practical responsibility of the church. In its academic form, it is generally foreign to the church. After completing theological school, most young ministers have to struggle to make their new knowledge relevant to the ordinary folk who constitute the church. Most churchgoers are not interested in arguments about the existence of God or the nature of God. They are interested in what God has done and can do to help with their particular concerns and problems.

Black folk expect the preacher to reassure them of God’s power, not to question or doubt it. They expect the pastor to help them cope with joblessness, poverty and discrimination by transforming their despair into hope. Black theology needs to provide the content and method for changing the social, economic and political obstacles for blacks.

Somehow, academic theology is thought to be more important and profound than the practical theology that grows out of the black church experience. This is why black theologians, following their white counterparts, often articulate the black experience in language that is meant to impress one other rather than the "folk" about whom they speak. The language needs to be understandable to the masses. As long as the vocabulary of black theology -- like theology in general -- remains arcane, James Cone’s assertion that "black theology is not academic theology" will continue to confound black preachers while they desperately try to interpret the meaning of such statements. Black theology will have meaning and power when the masses of blacks begin to understand and practice it.

This cannot happen without the direct involvement of black preachers and parishioners. For example, black pastors question how the Society for the Study of Black Religion really can understand the religion of blacks when absent from this group are black preachers who minister to those who are unemployed, underemployed, addicted to alcohol and drugs, illiterate and apathetic. Academic theologians should not place the black church on the same level as prominent secular institutions. The church deserves a more influential role in shaping black theology. The two should inform each other.

Its major proponents describe black theology as situational, contextual and liberation-oriented. Cone sees liberation as the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. and a persistent theme in the Old and New Testaments. The history of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt and their subsequent freedom is a critical corollary to the experience of black folk in America -- except that the Pharaohs of modern times continue to oppress us. Cone makes it clear that the church, in order to be authentic, must actively participate in human liberation.

Wilmore’s theology emphasizes black self-affirmation with the understanding that God wills black folk to be free, equal and at peace with themselves. Major Jones, in The Color of God, asserts that black theology encourages black folk to be free "from their traditional fear of whites, so that they not only can articulate their feelings but also so that they will act upon them." This suggests that black theology should enable blacks to stop victimizing each other, such as through black-on-black crime, or perpetuating the poor self-esteem engendered through years of living in a racist society. Black theology should be the method of analyzing the gospel’s concern with breaking the chains of oppression. Theory and practice should join hands to counter oppression and injustice.

The black church needs a practical theology that can help liberate it from social, political and economic oppression. Though academic black theology purports that Jesus is the liberator and that God sides with the oppressed, these assertions, however hermeneutically sound and exegetically valid, fail to deal with the systemic poverty and suffering that disproportionately affect the black community.

One obvious point of division between black theologians and black church people is that black theology is not generally taught in black churches, state and national conventions, regional associations, ministers’ conferences or Christian education congresses. Pastors must begin to do liberation theology on a microcosmic scale -- within the local church. Clergy and laypeople spend much of their time debating parochial questions of internal authority and power, conforming to a white evangelistic model of the church patterned after the approaches of Billy Graham, Robert Schuller or Oral Roberts. These white high-profile preachers seldom, if ever, relate the gospel to injustice and oppression. They do not provide an appropriate model for black churches -- in fact, they are part of the problem.

The black church, on the other hand, has a moral obligation to free its people from the despair and powerlessness that grip their bodies and souls. It can use black theology as the framework for this. In their mutual pursuit of black liberation, the black church and black theology need to expose and replace the myriad religious icons that contradict black Christian experience and consciousness. The prominent display of pictures and murals of a white Jesus in black churches is a slap in the face to those who understand Jesus as the liberator of oppressed blacks.

One of my most difficult experiences as a pastor arose when I removed a mural of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane that had graced the sanctuary for many years. Several members became quite indignant and disturbed. God may be black for academic theologians, but this perspective has not trickled down to the majority of folk who preach and worship in the black church.

Miseducation, poor self-esteem and the failure of black Christians to understand and appreciate their own history and culture is a real problem in black churches. This is evident not only in the absence of black icons but also in the rejection by many black churchgoers of the term African-American. Churches can use black theology to help people overcome oppressive images of the past and present -- in some cases, paradoxically, white images that have been financed and constructed by blacks.

Sexism against black women should also be addressed by black theology and the black church. Women in black churches outnumber men by more than two to one; yet in positions of authority and responsibility the ratio is reversed. Though women are gradually entering ministry as bishops, pastors, deacons and elders, many men and women still resist and fear that development. When our church licensed a woman to the preaching ministry over a decade ago, almost all the male deacons and many women members opposed the action by appealing to tradition and selected Scripture passages. Black theology and the black church must deal with the double bondage of black women in church and society.

Two ways they can do so are, first, to treat black women with the same respect as men. This means that women who are qualified for ministry must be given the same opportunities as men to become pastors and to serve in such leadership positions as deacons, stewards, trustees, etc. Second, theology and the church must eliminate exclusionist language, attitudes or practices, however benign or unintended, in order to benefit fully from the talents of women.

Improving the economic conditions of black folk will also hasten their freedom. Too many blacks survive from paycheck to paycheck while simultaneously trying to keep up with the Joneses. Most black churches are independent and financially solvent. But the individuals who constitute the church and community are often plagued by poverty and hampered by discrimination, underemployment and racism. Economically secure blacks within the church have a moral obligation to use their success to enhance the wider black community.

Every black churchgoer, especially the economically secure, should understand that tithing or some larger form of proportionate giving significantly affects the liberation of black folk. A tithing church will be able to influence public policy issues such as housing for the poor and equal-employment opportunities. It would not have to spend time and energy raising money to meet the ordinary demands of ministry and mission. It can actually do ministry by using its financial resources to develop ways to stem the tide of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, divorce and family violence.

Black churches can also adopt public schools, into which they can send volunteers to "testify" to young blacks about he value of a quality education. Churches could provide "education mentors" to work with teachers and counselors in order to help children increase educational achievement, develop self-esteem, and enhance moral and intellectual integrity. This would be the first step toward a decentralized educational structure that would enable communities and churches to take control of the future of our young people. In this scheme, churches would monitor the progress of their young parishioners from kindergarten through 12th grade and find tutors or provide volunteers qualified to teach subjects in which children need help.

Third, black churches need to pool their financial resources by withdrawing funds from institutions that do not address the development needs of the black community. In our society, money talks. Therefore, black folk should assume control of their hard-earned money and invest it in financial institutions that will challenge traditional models of risk management. Thus they will begin the process of nurturing our neglected communities back to health. The fiscal integrity of the black church and community depend on biblical ethical principles such as working together, loving one another and caring for the poor. In order for the black community to become a viable place for external investment, blacks will first have to invest in themselves. The church must invest in black youth and in the black community before society will invest in the black community.

Fourth, each black congregation should assess the needs of its constituents within a certain radius of the church. This will enable the pastor and staff better to understand their ministry context and to address specific community needs. For example, some neighbors need to learn how to read, while others may need better access to medical care. Still others may simply need to know that there are people nearby who care about their families and are willing to offer a helping hand.

Black theology teaches self-respect and self-esteem in spite of social and political condescension to and oppression of blacks. Black pastors should put this into action by developing programs and policies to transform the status of the poor. They could do this by sharing historical and biographical stories of black accomplishment. Blacks have to regain the confidence that they can persevere despite modern pandemic manifestations of oppression and injustice. These lessons on determination, freedom and faith can be correlated with biblical stories that express similar virtues.

As a pastor, I invite my church’s young people to speak or read during the worship service. Moreover, I publicly acknowledge their educational accomplishments by recognizing the high achievers and encouraging others to strive toward excellence. This helps to develop their self-esteem, sense of achievement and social skills. It also gives me an opportunity to work closely with those who may need to be motivated or encouraged. I have encouraged the church to provide opportunities for young people to develop leadership skills that can be transferred to other areas of life.

These kinds of activities should start early with children and youth in order that they may become self-supporting individuals, committed to the betterment of the family, church and community. Black folk have built some beautiful, expansive and glorious church buildings. Now they should harness that same creativity and commitment to building up the economic security of the black community.

Practicing Christianity has for African-Americans meant turning the other cheek, walking in humility, and enduring cruel and debasing treatment. During three centuries of slavery, black folk learned how to sublimate their anger; they increased their chances for survival by tolerating the oppressors. This constitutes real faith in the promise of God -- i.e., faith as action. Blacks still sing, "There Is a Bright Side Somewhere" and "Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain," and all understand and identify with these words of suffering and hope, jubilation and reflection. Black theology uses the language of the masses to make plain the feelings, hopes, dreams, experiences and practices of black folk.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency for socially and economically successful black Christians to ignore black theology’s call to remember this history. These blacks often imitate the white style of worship, with services characterized by brevity, quietness, and pomp and circumstance. They regard this behavior as a reflection of their sophistication and education. This lack of solidarity with the masses obscures the struggle for freedom and unnecessarily dichotomizes the black church and community. The model suggested by black theology should remind these Christians of the reality of their heritage, and help them become proud of the struggles that their parents and forebears endured. Cultural pride should manifest itself in not being ashamed to say "Amen" in worship services or to testify about difficult experiences. Jesse Jackson’s references to the slop jar and the slave ship in his speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention reflects how his heritage and struggle to survive shaped his ideology and his commitment to equity, fairness and justice. All black folk should acknowledge this aspect of black experience in America.

Black upper-middle-class Christians generally attend the Episcopal, Methodist or Baptist church in their area that fits their socioeconomic circumstances. These blacks often practice a cooled-down version of black religion. They act as if they are trying to forget the days that Jackson chronicles. Some don’t seem to appreciate gospel music, youth choirs, innovative worship structures, or the use of musical instruments in the worship setting other than the organ and piano. This imitation of the oppressor’s style of worship distances these churches from the rejoicing and weeping of their less-advantaged black brothers and sisters.

Black theology has little practical value apart from the black church because liberation cannot be achieved without the church. Cone, in his very compassionate book For My People, says that "black liberation is, in part, dependent upon the attitude and role that the church assumes in relation to it." Although black preachers and theologians may disagree on the relation of black theology to the church, the time for antagonism between preachers and theologians has passed. It is now time for unity and action -- time to practice what we teach and preach.

The Secularist Prejudice

Michael Dukakis, well educated in other ways, was not prepared to deal with religious ardor. Asked which book most influenced him, Michael Dukakis instantly mentioned Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind. He read it shortly after its appearance in 1950, when he was in high school. For a man whose preferred reading would, in later years, be project papers, this volume was something to stir the imagination. It sings the praises of the Tennessee Valley Authority and describes public planning as a special expression of the American genius.

Commager argues that the American mind is pragmatic, optimistic and secular. He castigates as un-American-minded any "irrationalists" -- a hospitable category that includes people as different as Ernest Hemingway and Henry Adams. Artists are especially prone to irrationalism, whose leading indicators are "an obsession with sex," a "rejection of the concept of normality," and a glorification of "subhuman louts." Instead of busily building dams and setting up government programs, artists -- people who succumb to the lure of Gertrude Stein -- bog us down in "the quagmire of futility." Having given up on science (like Henry Adams), such people easily become pessimists, retaining practically no American Mind at all.

For Commager, religion is clearly as irrational as modern art, but he is comparatively benign in his description of it. It puzzles him, by its anomalous perdurance in a people as rational and secular as those who possess the authentically American Mind. But religion does not disturb him as much as dirty poems. He decides, to his relief, that people do not really mean it when they say they believe in the old creeds: "For three hundred years Calvinism had taught the depravity of man without any perceptible effect on the cheerfulness, kindliness, or optimism of Americans."

If it seems strange that Commager can get so worked up about an assault on reason mounted by e. e. cummings while remaining, tranquil about religion’s "flight from reason," that is because he cannot imagine that anybody would take a preacher as seriously as a poet. For him, "no American could believe that he was damned." All real Americans have "preferred this life to the next," so their religious professions. are a cover for something else -- luckily, for something quite useful: "The church was, on the whole, the most convenient and probably the most effective organization for giving expression to the American passion for humanitarianism." When the church is not being useful, it is neutered; so support for it is harmless: "The church was something to be ‘supported,’ like some aged relative whose claim was vague but inescapable." A meaningless religion is a rather nice thing to have, since it does not interfere at all with dam-building, and it gives people something to do with their spare time.

Almost 40 years after Commager defined the American mind, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., returned to the task and found the same qualifying traits. In a widely publicized inaugural address at Brown University, Schlesinger argued that secularity is the leading characteristic of Americans: "The American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical irreverent, pluralistic and relativistic." Yet Schlesinger, unlike Commager, is nervous about religion, which some people in 1989 were taking altogether too seriously. Schlesinger sets the canons of Americanism in an exclusive way. We are told who are "the two greatest and most characteristic American thinkers" -- Emerson and William James. We are told who was the "most quintessential of American historians" -- George Bancroft (no doubter of American virtue, like Henry Adams) We are told what is the (one and orthodox) "American way" -- "Relativism is the American way." We are even told what is "the finest scene in the greatest of American novels"-- the point when Huck Finn decides to help Nigger Jim escape. In fact, we are told that this last scene "is what America is all about."

Like a nativist facing immigrant hordes, Schlesinger multiplies the defining (and excluding) social signs of "our sort." Our sort have no truck with "reverence." We are committed to "our truth." Even relativism helps us to keep up standards here: "For our relative, values are not matters of whim and happenstance. History has given them "to us." They are like descent from the Mayflower. "People with a different history will have different values. But we believe that our own are better for us." How lucky, then, that history did not give us religious values. It is not enough that pragmatic, irreverent relativism be a high ideal for Americans to aspire to. It must be a "given," like the liberalism Louis Hartz, the consensus historian, said was the American situation (rather than its creed). It is something one need not argue for, since one cannot escape it in any event: Our values "are anchored in our national experience, in our great national documents, in our national heroes, in our folkways, traditions, standards."

Schlesinger obviously has a different understanding of America’s "folkways" than did the author of "the finest scene in the greatest of American novels." Twain’s novels, and especially the one Schlesinger cites, are filled with folk superstition, religion, prejudice and dogmatism. Even in the scene offered (rightly) to our admiration. Huck does not escape the presumptions of the entire culture around him. In fact. Huck at his supreme moment performs an act Professor Commager called impossible for any real American -- Huck not only believes in hell, but believes he is going there now that he is helping Jim. He defies, while still believing in, "the American way" of everyone around him, the way of sin and damnation.

Huck cannot escape, even in rebellion, the categories of the circumambient religious culture (which Twain clearly thought was America’s culture) Schlesinger, in the grip of an even stranger blindness, cannot see the circumambient culture. He is an American historian for whom much of American history simply does not exist. If religious figures pop up here and there, from the time of Jonathan Edwards to that of Flannery O’Connor, they are freaks or sports, somehow not as truly American (or truly great) as Emerson or William James. The demon-haunted world of Melville, Hawthorne, Poe simply ceases to be American in the world where Commager’s TVA is the secular icon. Even Twain gets into the canon by a perverse misreading of his central scene’s deepest irony.

Commager and Schlesinger are to American history what Michael Dukakis was, in 1988, to American politics. Much of American (indeed, of human) experience is off their mental maps. They have a serene provincialism, dismissive of the ordinary torments of people less optimistic, irreverent and pragmatic than they. Those people are not simply treated as if they did not matter. They are not visible. America’s encounters with religion are, for these learned men, what Kitty Dukakis’s pill-taking was, something too embarrassing to be adverted to.

In 1959 the British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow stirred up a famous controversy by saying that the intellectuals of the developed world were split into "two cultures" -- scientific and nonscientific -- that no longer spoke each other’s language. Many objections were made to Snow’s argument, some almost as silly as the argument itself, but the best answer to it is contained in Snow’s own presentation, which has the form of unwitting self-caricature. What Snow presents as a tragic gap between cultures is the difficulty Cambridge dons of different disciplines had in talking shop across the "high table" of Snow’s college in Cambridge. It seems not to have occurred to him that his two factions of academia represent aspects of a single thin stratum in much larger "cultures" -- English. British. Western. Seen in that context, their interdisciplinary squabbling -- however unfortunate -- was, in the fullest sense intramural walled off from larger worlds, of which (whether they recognized it or not) they were also members, yet from which their psychological distance was greater than any that could be measured across the dons’ table when the port was going round.

In one way, Snow’s perspective is broader than Commager’s or Schlesinger’s. He at least admits two factions into his dining room. He clearly favors one, the scientific, but he admits the existence of another, however much he might deplore it. For Commager and Schlesinger there is only one "real" American culture, with scattered exceptions that rate not even a seat at their American equivalent of the "high table" where the American Mind communicates with itself.

Without using Snow’s unfortunate language of cultures, one might conclude from Commager and Schlesinger that there are, in the great amalgam of American culture, two attitudes toward religion that would like to be mutually exclusive. The religious try to extrude, as invaders of God’s country, those who question religion’s centrality in public life. Reciprocally, and somewhat unexpectedly, pragmatic "Americanists" make their own attempts at excommunication. Nor is this confined to the world of professors like Commager and Schlesinger, or politicians like Dukakis. Some journalists also think there is something-un-American about religion, as they demonstrated in a 1988 flap -- what a New York Times reporter called "a form of low-intensity intellectual warfare" -- over the appointment of a president to the New York Public Library. Professor Schlesinger gave his address at Brown University at the installation of the school’s new president -- Vartan Gregorian, who had vacated the library post. The library board had appointed six persons to a search committee, and then approved the committee’s recommendation -- the Reverend Timothy S. Healy, S.J., at the time president of Georgetown University, though he had held high office (vice-chancellor for academic affairs) in a secular academic institution (City University of New York) for seven years. Journalists like Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin objected to the appointment of a Jesuit priest, not reflecting perhaps that they were instituting a religious test where there had been none before Their warrant, Talese said in a letter to the Times, was that Vartan Gregorian had been not only successful but "unquestionably secular." Henceforth, apparently, anyone of questionable secularity would be disqualified. The test would presumably be: Is the prospective librarian at least as secular as Dr. Gregorian? If he were more secular, that would be a bonus.

Noting that Father Healy had taken the customary religious vows, including one of obedience, Talese asked: "Obedience to whom? To his church? Or to those who disagree with his church?" It seems fairly obvious that, whatever the reach of Father Healy’s vow, it did not commit him to "obey" enemies of his church. Was Talese suggesting that it should?

It was mentioned, at the time, that voters had been able to install John Kennedy in the White House and Robert Drinan (a Jesuit) in the House of Representatives without observing a religious test; but Healy’s critics, who now included the novelist Joseph Heller, said that the librarian’s post was even more sensitive than that of the president of the United States. The latter has only nuclear destruction at his disposal; the former can favor or disfavor ideas.

I do not suppose any New York City librarian, even the exemplary secular Gregorian, has been entirely neutral about moral values, nor has that ever been considered a condition for upholding free speech. If Healy’s critics were not demanding so entire a neutrality in the librarian (a ludicrous position it would be an insult to attribute to them) , and if they were not just expressing anti-Catholic bigotry (which it would also be unworthy to suspect in them) , they must have been saying that a librarian should typify the American Mind as defined by Commager and Schlesinger -- relativist, pragmatic and nonreligious (or nonmeaningfully religious, in Commager’s terms) The only values such a librarian could espouse would be the quintessentially American values of these professors -- certainly not the aberrant, irrational values that Professor Schlesinger fails to find anywhere in "our tradition, documents, and folkways."

Once one has taken this position on the presidency of the New York Public Library, it seems captious to say one should not hold it, as well, for such a political office as the presidency of the nation. The chief executive has in his custody all the amendments, not merely the first; and he, even more than the librarian, should adhere to -- if not, in fact, typify -- the pragmatism that is his country’s orthodoxy. By expecting an adherence to that orthodoxy, we will have reversed colonial America’s first (preconstitutional) demand of officeholders, that they take religious oaths upholding at least a minimally Christian creed (as defined by the community) , substituting a kind of "irreligious test," demanding the safe-guard of a minimal secularity (one that would reach the benchmark of, say. Dr. Gregorian’s)

This informal demand, rarely spelled out so specifically as in the case of the New York Public Library appointment, is what modern evangelicals call the standard of "secular humanism." But, for their own legal purposes, the evangelicals do not call this position irreligious. They call it a religion. Thus anyone trying to impose it is guilty of establishing a religion. In their zeal for the First Amendment, the secularists, it is claimed, undermine the First Amendment, and the evangelicals must come to the rescue of the Constitution!

What the evangelicals now call a religion would never have met their ancestors’ definition of belief in God. For immediate tactical advantage, the believers rely on people they normally treat as enemies, the social scientists, who define religion as anyone’s most comprehensive symbol-system. If the secularists’ most comprehensive symbol-system does not include God, the argument goes, then their very godlessness becomes their religion. But that would not have been enough for a modern secularist to meet the old religious test of political office -- he could not have sworn that he believes in religion because he does not believe in God. And evangelicals who suddenly express a preference for Clifford Geertz’s anthropology -- over, say, Increase Mather’s theology -- as a test of religion are acting in bad faith. We can see that when they oppose tax exemptions for "secular humanists."

Yet we should not let the opportunism of the assault on "secular humanism" as a religion distract us from the problem posed by secularity as an irreligious requirement in modern society. Is it true that the only way to be sincerely neutral toward religion in public office is to have no religious beliefs in private life? If so, then John Kennedy was not really acceptable as a Catholic in the presidency He was acceptable only to the degree that he did not really believe in his religion (as Commager assures us, no real American does) This, certainly, is going beyond any expectations of the Constitution’s framers. They did not suppose that the absence of religious oaths for holding office entailed, logically, irreligious officeholders.

Clearly, in our society, two large groups are talking past each other. One fails to see legitimacy in religious values not comprehended by the American Mind. The other fails to see legitimacy in irreligion: If secularity is really religious, then it is diabolic -- a plot against God, not mere indifference to God. Thus, when school textbooks steer as clear as they can of religious subjects, Pat Robertson does not see in this the work of timorous publishers trying to avoid subjects about which state school boards can be nervous. For him, it is the result of a great conspiracy against God:

And one of them [a humanistic schoolteacher] said. "So what if Johnny can’t read? We will have him for sixteen years, and we will be able to drive from him every vestige of the Christian superstition."

On the other hand, when Frances FitzGerald, in her book America Revisited. ‘describes how publishers’ timorousness and school boards’ importunacy determine the content of our schools’ history texts, she concentrates on the shifts in attitude toward social groups (blacks, women, Native Americans) and political issues (Reconstruction, cold war, Vietnam) , but does not notice the odd silence of such texts on the huge and embarrassing role of religion in our history. Even the controversy on evolution receives only passing reference. To her, the real issues are ethnic, political and economic. No wonder that when she came to write about evangelicals in her book Cities on a Hill, she found Jerry Falwell’s old-time gospel comparable to the Rajneesh cult, or a retirement community in Sun City, Florida, or a gay neighborhood in San Francisco. To put Falwell in this company of recent eruptions shows no sense of the depth or continuity of evangelical belief.

Secularists, unlike C. P. Snow’s scientists and their foes, are not confined to a donnish little world. They speak in large part for what right-wing politicians call the "Eastern establishment." They are heavily represented in the communications industry and in the "new class" of intellectual mediators that has come under attack from neoconservatives. Warned by the wreck of Snow’s grandiose terminology, we would do well not to call this secularist bias a "culture." It is one way of looking at American culture, a prejudice about it, which is paired with the opposite prejudice, that of religious people who cannot recognize a legitimate secularity (one not the declared enemy of religion) Most classes and regions of the country have some people affected by these two prejudices. One might suppose that they simply represent, the forces of modernity and of tradition; but in that case one would expect the traditions to be fading and the modern attitudes to be prevailing, as surely as modern technology is prevailing in our life.

Yet Michael Dukakis, the first truly modernist candidate in our politics, as trustful of secular values as of technology, was a man isolated from his fellow citizens, while George Bush was accepted by ordinary Americans as their spokesman, despite his elite (verging on effete) background. The secularist prejudice may be useful to those wanting to get ahead in certain fields; but in politics one does better to cultivate, as have all our recent presidents, the religious prejudice. No one did that more than George Bush in 1988.

A Chesterton for the Religious Right

While I was traveling with the antiabortion activist Randall Terry, I asked one his staff members about C. S. Lewis’s popularity among evangelicals. This man, an ordained product of Westminster Theological Seminary, himself a Christian reconstructionist, said: "Some of us now consider Lewis as food for beginners. The real meat is Chesterton."

Implausible as it seems, the bibulous celebrant of pre-Reformation Christianity is becoming a hero to the religious right in this country. Nothing would have amazed Chesterton more than to be adopted by the heirs of those Puritans he assailed with more energy than understanding. (He said the real Thanksgiving Day should be celebrated by the British for having got rid of America’s sour first settlers.)

There is much in Chesterton that might commend itself to the right wing in America: his militarism, antifeminism and anti-Semitism. But, to the credit of the right wing, these are less emphasized than Chesterton’s populism, his opposition to experts and his distrust of modern science. What they like about Chesterton is what Jay P. Corrin has called "the battle against modernity" and especially against Darwin.

The most embarrassing of Chesterton’s positions, in this refashioning to evangelical tastes, is his deep and omnipresent opposition to capitalism. However eccentric himself, he shared with his beloved Samuel Johnson an opposition to the absurdity of individualism as a principle of community. He sincerely loved tradition, and rightly saw untrammeled consumerism and the glorification of the entrepreneur as destabilizing -- what Belloc called the attempt to use explosives as a social glue.

So the first task for American conservatives who want to use Chesterton is to explain away his anticapitalism. This Michael Novak attempts to do as part of the extraordinarily wrong-headed reprint series of Chesterton’s works appearing from Ignatius Press. Novak argues that what Chesterton really opposed was more monopolism, rather than the competitive principle itself (a grave misreading of Chesterton’s debt to John Ruskin). And he takes comfort from Chesterton’s opposition to socialism. Novak shows the divided nature of the right wing’s own cultural heritage when he praises Chesterton as a productive and innovative journalist and, at the same time, celebrates his "devastating criticisms of modernity."

If Chesterton were an artist or thinker on the scale of Ruskin, this opportunistic discipleship could do him little harm. But most of what Chesterton ground out in the journalistic productiveness Novak praises was formulaic trash. With a sure instinct, the right-wing celebrants behind the Ignatius Press edition have not only accepted but are highlighting the worst aspects of the man’s work. They are actually printing, with pseudo-learned footnotes, 11 volumes of his lamentable columns for the Illustrated London News (1905-1936) The terms on which Chesterton wrote this weekly column were stultifying. It had to fill one of the ILN’s large pages (1,600 words) , and he was not to deal with religion or politics. The editors rightly note that he circumvented the ban on subjects that mattered most to him, but he did it in indirect ways that gave his style the arch and trivializing tone that offends (rightly) so many.

Chesterton’s strength lay in verbal economy. No one could compress an argument into an epigram with greater precision. Forced to bloviate for over 1,000 words before or after he made his telling remark of the week (if he had one) , he resorted to rhetorical flourishes. Then, because he was a genuinely modest man, he tempered the large verbal gestures with self-deprecating exercises that helped fill the rest of the space (and became as labored as the bravado)

In the four volumes of these columns that have so far been published, the bluster is made even more ludicrous by annotators who can only guess at historian Freeman’s identity and who mistake the great critic Richard Bentley for Chesterton’s friend Edmund Clerihew Bentley. This is sad, especially for those who appreciate the small body of work that shows Chesterton’s one important gift -- the ability to imagine his own being against a backdrop of nothingness, an act that became his homeopathic cure for despair.

Though Chesterton never grew as a thinker, the statement of his central insight is always stunning, in whatever genre, before it is dulled by repetition. Thus he wrote one brilliant biblical essay (on the Book of Job) , one superb piece of Shakespeare criticism (on A Midsummer Night’s Dream) , one neglected masterpiece in narrative verse (The Ballad of the White Horse) , one great fantasy-novel (The Man Who Was Thursday) , one dark joke of a playlet (The Surprise) , one gripping short story ("The Flying Stars") , and assorted short prose passages on nightmare, myth and creativity scattered through books like those on Dickens, St. Francis and St. Thomas. Here, for instance, is his description of the crisis that broke and reforged the spirit of St. Francis:

We used to be told, in the nursery that if a man were to bore a hole through the center of the earth and climb continually down and down, there would come a moment when he would seem to be climbing up and up. . . . We cannot follow St. Francis to that final spiritual overturn in which complete humiliation becomes complete holiness or happiness, because we have never been there. . . . We have never gone up like that because we have never gone down like that. . . . The symbol of inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers, hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the world upon nothing. . . . The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.

Those are the words of a great spiritual writer, no matter what use people make of his tawdrier work.

The Thoroughly Modern Mysticism of Matthew Fox

Mysticism: it begins with mist, centers on "I" and ends in schism. Or so I was taught in my conservative Protestant upbringing and then at a Presbyterian seminary. I also recall learning that mysticism was vaguely medieval and Roman Catholic. Not until 1970 -- late in my graduate school training -- was a profound and intellectually stirring side of mysticism presented to me, thanks to the work of Evelyn Underhill and the Quaker Douglas Steere. Since that time, Christians have renewed their interest in spirituality and matters mystical, with popular writers such as Thomas Merton, William Johnston and Henri Nouwen leading the way.

Into this changing situation has come Matthew Fox, a Dominican scholar promoting a modern and accessible mysticism. Director of the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California, and guru of the creation spirituality movement, Fox is on the road much of the time giving lectures and leading workshops (or "playshops") around the world. Fox is author of a number of books on "creation-centered mystics," including Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality (Bear, 1983) and his new book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (Harper & Row, 1988) Fox is such an eclectic and elusive thinker, still in midcareer, that a fair summary of his thought may not be possible. But I am certain that Fox is a mystic. (Happily, he’s certain of it too.) The sort of mysticism he expresses can be significant for (particularly Protestant) Christians today.

What exactly is mysticism? Fox’s definition is marked by a commendable range together with a stress on ordinary experience. Mysticism is that form of religious practice centering on firsthand experience of the divine. Mystic practices belong to the core of all religions, for believers retain vital belief in a transcendent reality only as long as they can communicate with that reality by direct experience. Insofar as everyone is potentially religious, one could say that there is a mystic in all of us.

The practice of mysticism, Fox argues, has two essential elements that correspond to two meanings of the Greek word mystikos: to "shut one’s senses" and to "enter the mysteries." The rhythm in all mysticism springs from the fact that these two meanings are related. To be more fully open to the mysteries requires the purification or shutting down of one’s senses -- pulling the plug on the television, going out into the woods, or calling a halt to marathon reading. The mystic shuts down the senses not because they are evil, but because they are such blessings that they deserve a periodic rest and cleaning to be renewed and restored.

Fox focuses on what he calls the "primal sacraments": sea, land, wind, fire, life -- the universe itself. The great passion of mystics, he writes, is to enter the awesome mystery of the universe and our existence within it. By returning to what he believes is the foundation of all religions, Fox hopes to return sacramental liturgy to its proper setting, to the source of its energy. This move further serves to remind the church that its own tradition points to natural mysteries no institution could possibly control or manage.

Fox’s favorite illustration of a mystic entrance into the mysteries is the experience of astronaut Rusty Schweikert in 1969. While temporarily stranded outside his Apollo capsule high above the earth, in complete silence, this typical macho fighter pilot had a shattering and transforming encounter with his home planet. Looking back on the earth, "a shining gem against a totally black backdrop," Schweikert was so overcome he wanted to "hug and kiss that gem like a mother does her firstborn child." The political divisions on our planet that meant so much to him before he entered space faded away entirely. The rivers didn’t seem to pay any attention to them; the clouds didn’t stop at the border between Russia and Europe; the oceans served communist and noncommunist worlds indiscriminately. Schweikert had never read Tolstoy, but from his perch in space he didn’t need to: there are no nations.

The theological tilt in Fox’s mysticism is toward creation. His project is not only to be creation-centered in his spirituality, but to warn the world about any version of Christianity in which creation appears as an afterthought, versions he calls "fall/redemption" or ascetic spirituality. In slightly different terms, Jurgen Moltmann makes a similar point in God in Creation. As I’ll say later, I’m not at all certain that Christians should center themselves as Fox does, but his understanding of creation strikes me as wise. His work provides the clearest possible example of how a lively sense of divine creation blocks both the sex-negativism and the indifference to public life that have bedeviled the mystical tradition through the centuries.

Fox’s mysticism issues in a new quest -- not for the historical Jesus but for the Cosmic Christ. The new quest is for the divine pattern that connects, say, the crab nebula in the sky with crawfish on earth -- personalizing the connection by grounding it in the joy and suffering of the historical Jesus. For precisely in Christ, Fox says, one becomes connected with the entire world in a new way. On the cross, a cosmic upheaval follows the most violent possible disruption between humanity and divinity: the Father withdraws, letting the Son cry, "My God. my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But this leads. paradoxically to connection as sin’s power is broken and God raises Christ from the dead. Through this New Man or Cosmic Christ, Christians are reconnected not only to their places, their races, their social classes and their political friends, but to everything -- to the animals (who surrounded Christ’s birth) , to the sick, to the outcasts, to the little and forgotten ones, to the land.

For Fox, this is the Christ of Colossians, "the first-born of all creation . . . in him were created all things in heaven and earth: everything visible and invisible . . . he holds all things in unity" (Col. 1:15-17) This Christ is "the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of God’s nature, sustaining the universe by God’s powerful command" (Heb. 1:3) This is the cosmic ruler to whom "every knee should bow in heaven and earth and under the earth" (Phil. 2:10) Only the quest for such a Christ, Fox believes, can free the church from its captivity to a truncated, anthropocentric "personal savior Christianity."

If the Cosmic Christ is so evident in the New Testament, why is the concept so foreign to most Christians today? Fox’s answer: the Enlightenment. The individualism of the Enlightenment and the industrial age, combined with Isaac Newton’s theory of a desacralized, machinelike universe, convinced Christian theologians that they should put aside their living cosmology, symbolized religiously by the "Cosmic Christ," and focus on personal salvation. Capitulating to a culture driven increasingly by scientific investigation, industrial development and medical advances, the Christian West became more interested in itself than in God or the fate of God’s nonhuman creation. The brilliant New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann is perhaps typical in the way he shifts the interpretive focus of theology to anthropology, the doctrine of the person. As even a brief visit to an Eastern Orthodox cathedral will make clear, the Western church lost its Cosmic Christ.

This is not to say that the Enlightenment’s quest for the historical Jesus was a waste of time. According to Fox, any theology of the Cosmic Christ must be grounded in the historical Jesus -- in his words, his life and his liberating deeds. Fox simply means that it is time for a new quest that builds on the old, but goes in a different direction: it reimagines a living cosmology for Christians in our time. Fox writes: "The holy trinity of science (knowledge of creation) , mysticism (experiential union with creation and its unnameable mysteries) , and art (expression of our awe at creation) is what constitutes a living cosmology."

Such a direction would signal a dramatic shift in the way seminaries train students. Science courses would be mandatory, because to understand the dynamic character of the Cosmic Christ we must first understand 20th-century scientific revelations about the creative and vibrant nature of our universe. Sustained attention to the spiritual disciplines and to mysticism in the broadest sense would become integral to the curriculum: We could not teach theology without art as meditation or without laboratories in painting, music, dance, poetry and other activities that Fox claims allow students to listen to the cosmos within and around them, and to give birth to a creative theology.

Though he uses psychology in his work, Fox is not at all happy with the overt dependence on psychological data in Christian ministry courses. He sees "psychologism," or the reduction of spirituality to psychological categories, as a pathological pseudo-mysticism rampant within U.S. seminaries today. Psychologized religion is religion that has lost its mystic center. In seminaries where more attention is given to clinical pastoral education than to mysticism, Fox argues, an entire generation of potential spiritual leaders is often sacrificed to the God of counseling. To use a Foxian image, perhaps it is time to back huge moving vans up to our seminaries, load up all those "practical theology" books and pamphlets cluttered with psychological jargon, and channel our educational resources in a different direction.

Not that Fox is preoccupied with the state of our seminaries or with church curricula. His sweeping proposals for change include but go far beyond the institutional church. A few examples:

Deep Ecumenism. Because the Cosmic Christ is rooted in the witness of the New Testament, this Christ permeates or at least lies dormant in all churches and groups that call themselves Christian. Moreover, the Cosmic Christ connects us to all people ("he holds all things in unity") and can be discerned within the wisdom traditions of all world religions. Fox terms the movement to unleash this wisdom for the common good "deep ecumenism." The heart of the Cosmic Christ is the figure of Jesus as Sophia or Wisdom -- for Fox the perfect bridge between Christianity and other faiths.

Why, one might ask, should we expect a deeply ecumenical era to begin now? Sustained and often mass contact between Christians and other religions has been going on for some time. If the Cosmic Christ has been there all along, why hasn’t this era already begun? Once again, Fox’s answer is simple: the Enlightenment tradition is too powerful. The West is thoroughly out of touch with its own mystical heritage. The Western church can’t engage in dialogue with the East about mysticism or wisdom when it does not know its own mystical roots. Yet authentic and profound contact between Christianity and other religions may lie ahead. The great encounters between Christianity and native people and between Christianity and Eastern religions have occurred only during the past few centuries -- during precisely that period in the West when Newton, Descartes and the Enlightenment deposed the Cosmic Christ.

The Greening of the Religious Life. In biblical language, Fox is anticipating a new Pentecost, a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the entire human race. For Christians of European heritage, this will often involve self-criticism of a deep and painful sort. They will have to let go of liberal, Enlightenment-sponsored worldviews that deny mysticism and lack a cosmology. They will have to accept instruction from the same religions of the earth they customarily dismiss as primitive and superstitious. They will be required to enter a global religious awakening without trying to control it. According to Fox, the color of the coming religious transformation of contemporary culture must be green. In and through the Cosmic Christ, after all, everything in heaven and on earth is created. And Mother Earth is dying before our eyes.

From the Mediterranean to Alaska to the Soviet Union to the California coast, we encounter news of ecological disaster. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Topsoil is being destroyed around the world at an alarming rate -- 6 billion tons per year in North America alone. It is estimated that Iowa, a state traditionally rich in topsoil, will be a desert by the year 2020 if the current rate of soil depletion continues. The world’s forests are disappearing -- largely to satisfy First World appetites -- and in these forests dwell incredibly diverse species of plants, animals and birds. As forests go, species go. We are currently in the midst of an "extinction spasm of immense proportions. Ordinarily, a species of plant or animal dies out about every 2,000 years. Currently, species are disappearing at the rate of one every 25 minutes. If this rate continues, we will eliminate 10 percent of the remaining species (100,000 per year) in the next ten years. Some believe that the only parallel to this pace of extinction is found in major geological and climatic upheavals in the ancient past.

In this global crisis, Fox argues, political programs and voluntary activity will not be enough. A spiritual response is also required -- the enormous resources of our religious heritage. The earth will continue to bestow its blessings of soil, forest and rain, but are we responding as we should -- with gratitude, restraint, appropriate reverence and the proper rites?

Worship. The end of Fox’s new book contains the most intriguing program for liturgical renewal I’ve ever seen. His primary concern is to arrest "the anthropocentric deterioration of worship in the West" through renewed attention to the Cosmic Christ. Fox finds that worship on the part of non-Christian peoples often possesses a trait Western churches need: a cosmological sense. Native peoples do not worship anthropocentrically. In their dances, ceremonies and rites, they see themselves as members of a mysterious and sacred universe.

Fox peppers this section of the book with stories (I could add to them) of priests and ministers reading richly cosmic biblical texts, creeds or traditional prayers and then completely ignoring the cosmological dimension in their exposition or commentary. What might happen to worship if church leaders were retrained in a cosmological context? What if, for example, brides and grooms at weddings were encouraged to explore and express the mysterious cosmos of their own bodies by reading parts of the Song of Songs to each other, with the congregation playing the role of the chorus? Fox is usually right in claiming that he is not abandoning Christian traditions but delving deeper into them.

Most standard criticisms of mysticism simply don’t stick to Fox. For example, Fox doesn’t wallow in subjectivism, making it up as he goes along. Any fountainhead of ideas like Fox is bound to appear subjectivistic, particularly when some of these ideas are, well, unlikely. But there is a personal element in all theology. Recall also that Fox is second to none (perhaps only to James Gustafson) in attacking anthropocentrism. But the most telling answer to the charge that Fox is too subjective is that he consistently works out of a coherent tradition alongside Francis of Assisi, Hildegaard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Roger Williams, George Fox, John Woolman and others.

Nor is Fox’s mysticism quietistic, wasting its substance in playful aestheticism and luring us toward a religious withdrawal from public affairs and social issues. Dip into any Fox book, and you will meet a man pervasively and consistently engaged in political questions. Fox would concede that his tradition displays dualistic and quietistic tendencies, which is a major reason for his tilt toward creation. But Fox’s supreme test for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic mysticism is "justice-making and compassion as Jesus taught."

It is more likely that the opposite is true: with leftist sympathies visible on every page, Fox could be accused of politicizing the gospel, a temptation that Donald Bloesch identifies in Essentials of Evangelical Theology as ‘the principal challenge to the evangelical church in our time." Yet Fox is simply too mystical in the classical sense, too interested in the inner life, to reduce Christianity to a scheme for social and political transformation. His call for a change of heart, for a "resurrection of the human psyche," is clearly a prerequisite for social change, which makes Fox as "conversionist" as any Christian evangelical.

Other criticisms, however, are not as easily, dismissed. Fox’s work reminds us why the church has never been completely at ease with its mystics. For one thing, his evaluation of the institutional church is almost entirely negative. His writings reflect no interest in Christian institutional practice -- a trait that appears to me to be characteristic of most Christian mystics. It is not clear how the church might be authoritative for him, even in a proximate or penultimate sense. On the other hand, Fox is obviously and deeply interested in movements of all kinds -- Christian and non-Christian, artistic, philosophical, social, political, economic, literary, scientific and spiritual.

Another bothersome yet historically predictable feature of his work is its idiosyncrasy. In his newest book Fox calls Christianity to a rebirth and a new quest that would entail some of the most cataclysmic changes in its history. And then he writes, "A Cosmic Christ who does not accomplish the renaissance I speak of is not the true Christ." Such a line will strike most readers as perhaps a tad overstated. Indeed, what does Fox think has been happening for the past 20 centuries, when nothing even approaching his "renaissance" has taken place? As others such as William Thompson in Commonweal (June 16, 1989) have noticed, this trait in Fox may be linked to a certain theological vagueness throughout his work concerning the difference between the creator and the creator’s deeds and effects.

But all these shortcomings tend to be limitations of mysticism as a historical movement within religions, and we would be hard-pressed to find any significant movements displaying no theological limitations. Furthermore, we need more Christian mysticism today, not less. Dead liturgical formalism together with doctrinal or biblicistic rationalism are so strong in some quarters of the church that some sort of a recovery, of the mystical side of faith is an absolute necessity. Protestants in particular have much to learn from the contributions of Fox’s inner circle -- the great mystics of catholic Christianity.

Fox’s most damaging flaw is that in Christian terms he is not mystical enough. He presents us with a Christianity so worldly -- so wedded to his own time, so confident of the superiority of post-Enlightenment categories -- as to be almost religiously incoherent. The New Testament, after all, is hardly silent about heaven (as opposed to our time and place) , an afterlife and a severe judgment on this world. Fox is silent about these things; his creation-centered spirituality excludes them. There is nothing even approaching world-suspicion in the man -- a trait common among Christian mystics from St. Anthony in the third century to T. S. Eliot in our own. To be sure, he is suspicious of the religious and political right wing, but this is suspicion of a different kind.

Fox subscribes to the "common factor" school of mysticism, which helps him but doesn’t help us. It helps him because it accepts the notion that the most diverse spiritualities all have a common basis; only subsequent interpretations distinguish one mystic experience from another. Thus Fox can draw freely from religions as archaic as Taoism and as primal as Lakota Indian spirituality, since their insights are assumed to be ultimately compatible with Christianity.

But why should we assume that interpretation is always extrinsic and subsequent to the mystic experience? Such a view eliminates the cognitive dimension of the experience, reducing it to sensation. Discerning a certain family resemblance between, say, Shinto and Christian mystical experiences hardly establishes that they share a common foundation. Is it not at least as likely that even mystical experience has a specific ideal content of its own, and that therefore there is no such thing as mysticism in general, but only Jewish mysticism, Buddhist mysticism and so on?

Nothing more clearly reveals Fox’s accommodation to modernity than his rejection of original sin. I admire his candor. Since 1983 he has been completely open about his intention drastically to shift the traditional Christian paradigm from original sin to original blessing. Fox’s target appears to be the Manichaean notion of sin without creation, the idea that we come into this world despised, worthless, ugly and powerless. This state of low self-esteem is then easily and too often displaced onto a scapegoat, such as racial minorities, women or homosexuals. As damaging now as it was in the ancient world; such a mind-set is indeed a worthy target for criticism. But Fox throws out too much. Creation spirituality needs a profound sense of sin. Without it, his grasp of evil -- not to speak of his impact on orthodox Christianity -- is severely compromised. Creation and redemption are brought so close together in Fox’s work that his programs for social transformation are almost inevitably simplistic. And in his call for personal transformation ("a resurrection of the human psyche") he can sound faintly like a Robert Schuller of the left.

The good news is that nothing in creation spirituality requires these shortcomings. My troubles with Fox -- the blurred distinction between creature and creator, the diminished sense of the church and sin, the absence of world-suspicion -- stem in the end from his wholesale and catastrophic rejection of Augustine, the great bête noire of the Foxian version of church history. Augustine is Fox’s honorable opposition, like Barth’s Schleiermacher. But Fox has yet to learn from Augustine as much as Barth learned from Schleiermacher, and herein lies his eminently soluble problem. Plunge more deeply, Father Fox, plunge more deeply.

No good reason remains for Protestants to continue to ignore Christian mystics. Blessed with an agile mind, Fox has more range and creativity than any mystic writing in English today. His stress on individual freedom in religious matters, on ethics and on ecumenical concerns will appeal to many Protestants. But perhaps his greatest contribution will be to awaken us to "sacred spaces" that go unrecognized in our hectic, distracted lives -- meetings and places where time is suspended in the midst of time, where space "fills" with Christic experience of the Eternal Now, an experience that has always been the highest promise of the peculiar tradition known as mysticism.

The Winning That Is Everything

One recent Sunday morning my pastor called to the front of the sanctuary four members of the local high school basketball team. The team had just won the state tournament and the pastor, caught up in the enthusiasm of a little town swept away by such glory, wanted to congratulate these boys. To his credit, he seemed to sense that the church should recognize the players for something more than crushing their opponents. But he had some trouble articulating what else that might be. He went on to call forward the four members of the school speech team who attended their state competition, and then all the junior and senior high school students who had helped the high school win the "sportsmanship" award at the basketball tournament. Teachers and administrators were also asked to stand. The remaining congregation then joined in a sustained round of applause for all these winners.

Perhaps it was only envy that made my applause brief and faint. Perhaps it was because no team I had ever played on had won a tournament, and I had never earned a first-place ribbon or a championship trophy. Perhaps I just resent winners. But I don’t think that’s it. For I wonder just how Christian it is to celebrate winning. Doesn’t it contradict our assurances to our friends, children and others that we want them only to "do their best"? Isn’t it a little odd that we congratulate people not for maximizing their potential but for beating whoever else happened to show up to compete that day -- which is really all that winning is? How, then, should Christians view winning"?

Several different experiences have challenged me to reconsider even the notion that one should only aim to "do one’s best." For instance, my wife once wondered aloud why I was not satisfied with my racquetball matches unless I had played my "best." I was a little hurt by this, I confess. I thought I had done well to mature beyond feeling compelled to win outright. (Some of my opponents might question this self-assessment.) Now I had to consider whether it was appropriate to aim even at playing my "best," to consider whether in fact this goal was so extreme as to tempt me to play beyond my physical limits and so risk injury, or to play beyond my spiritual limits and so jeopardize my appreciation of the pleasure, camaraderie and exercise that sport provides.

Students of mine often ask my advice about setting priorities in their lives. How can they excel at schoolwork, they ask, if they also want to play a sport, perform in a musical ensemble, act in a play or help in a nursing home? Some of them get unhappy about grades lower than they’d like and say, "Well. I guess it’s because I didn’t do my best." What does this mean? I ask them. That you should have curtailed all cocurricular activity in order to study more? That you should not have helped friends in trouble in order to study more? That you should have cut down on devotional time, church attendance, Bible studies and so on (this is a self-consciously Christian college) in order to study more?

Frankly, some of them do need to cut down on cocurricular activity in order to study more. But I try to impress upon them that God’s vocation for them is broader than just "student," along the lines of "Christian person serving God in various ways and maturing thereby." I myself could produce more writing if I neglected my teaching. I could write and teach better if I neglected my family. I could accomplish more as both professor and family man if I neglected church activities. At least in theory. But one’s vocation is not just one particular job, it is all of life -- a life that balances as well as one can the various activities to which one is called by God.

And by the way, I tell my students, one cannot expect that if one does follow God’s call to a properly balanced life, God will somehow compensate him or her for the time not spent wholly in any particular activity. I will surely write and teach better in some respects if I have healthy relationships at home and am properly involved at church. But there are people who are so devoted to writing and teaching, neglecting all else, that they may well do more and better work than I -- not because I couldn’t match them if I were as narrowly focused as they, but because my energies and time are diffused more than theirs. (Of course, they may well be simply more gifted than I am and I never could match them anyway.) If these scholars advance professionally further and faster than I will, then I must decide that that’s just tough (on my pride), and do what pleases God, regardless.

The students usually leave encouraged by what wisdom there is in this, and I sit back happy to have helped. Occasionally, however, I recall uneasily a colleague’s suggestion at a faculty meeting a couple of years ago: "I would like us to consider whether we should continue to designate students’ degrees as cum laude, magna cum laude, or summa cum laude. As a Christian institution, should we be following this worldly pattern of honoring people for success relative to their peers rather than success relative to their gifts and callings?" Several seconds of uncomfortable silence constituted the only response to this question, and then the chairman moved on to the next raised hand, the next issue. How, I have wondered since, does this pattern of recognition at commencement square with the values I attempt to teach these students in my office?

There is another way to evaluate students. For example, the little Bible school I attended for one year had its students during the first week of classes write examinations that assessed their academic ability and preparation with particular focus upon theological background. The professors then together assigned a secret "base grade" for each student to serve as a benchmark for their subsequent achievement. Assignments were evaluated only relative to this grade, with a grading scheme of 5 percent increments. Therefore, a grade of plus 3 meant that one had scored 15 percent above one’s base grade, and students had to score an average of plus 2 in order to graduate. Students who started with a poor high school background or little previous church involvement could still excel if they applied themselves, and they often did.

This system does have some important problems. Beyond the obvious question of how well the school actually can assess relevant background knowledge and experience is the fact that the system does not take into account other worthy commitments in a student’s life, like work or ministry responsibilities outside the school. On the other hand, this scheme reinforced graphically at least one of the values the school was trying to teach. "Success" was a matter of using well one’s own talents and opportunities fully in God’s service -- a question of excellence relative to each individual, rather than a matter of merely accomplishing more than others in a certain group.

Another experience that brought this issue even closer. to home for me was our faculty’s recent discussion of merit pay. Now we. the graders, would be graded and rewarded according to our work. And the evaluation would be relative not to each individual’s gifts and calling, but to one’s accomplishments relative to one’s peers -- that is, relative to whoever else happened to be on the faculty. In some ways, this was more just than the former system: why should people who contributed more toward achieving the college’s goals get paid the same as those who contributed less? It nonetheless raised some disturbing ideas about our "we-are-a-Christian-community" slogans (since we were to apportion salary solely according to performance rather than also, say, on need) and about our endorsement of responsible family and church involvement (since the new system would tempt people financially to neglect these other responsibilities in order to work harder at school)

While I cannot resolve these thorny issues, I can suggest some approaches to the general issue of "winning." Christians believe that one day our Lord will render the final, infallible and alone-important judgment on our lives. On that day the One from whom nothing is hid and to whom all is open will set the record straight. This is our hope that is to guide our every decision. Perhaps we should, in our schools, churches, families and so on, refrain from honoring certain kinds of accomplishments, since the implications might confuse others -- or even ourselves -- about our values. What might the boys on the local basketball team assume if they do not win the state tournament, or fail to have a so-called "winning season," and then do not receive any sort of recognition?

We should consider honoring people in new ways for other things, declaring our Lord’s valuing of a variety of gifts and callings. Schools could recognize faculty members for effective committee service as well as for teaching and research; churches could honor those who pray and visit as well as those who preach and sing; families could praise helpful and encouraging children as well as the athletic or beautiful.

Let’s also consider affirming each other much more than we do. If we truly esteem a well-examined and godly life, let’s praise each other for good decisions and values, especially unusual ones: for giving up a prestigious job to serve where one, is more truly needed; for staying home to care for the children rather than participating in an important church or civic group; for disciplining one troubled individual rather than leading a large Sunday school class. Indeed, few people know any particular person well enough to judge the excellence of these quiet decisions, much less the whole pattern of someone’s life, so those few of us who can affirm a person in these respects surely ought to do so. In the name of the Lord and in the light of God’s own revealed values, we can and should anticipate something of God’s final judgment when we have opportunity.

"Winning" over others may not be something Christians should ever affirm. "Doing one’s best" is a concept easily perverted into workaholism and pride, and so we must keep the idea of "one’s best" as full and broad and particular as God’s whole call to each individual’s whole life.

We should learn from the testimony of the apostle who, far from seeing success as accomplishing more than others had accomplished, measured it against the call of all Christians with whom he hoped to share the reward (II Tim. 4:7-8) :

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.

This kind of winning is everything, and for everyone.