[Dialogue] Christian Faith and Life Center, UT Austin

[David Dunn]

I book has just come to light that I have not heard mentioned in our
conversations before:

The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in
America. By Doug Rossinow. 1998: Columbia University Press. 500 pp. $32.50

On the face of it it looks interesting, but note especially the discussion
of the Christian Faith and Life Center [look for the *** below] in a review
that I've pasted below.

David Dunn
---
Director of Publishing, Institute of Cultural Affairs USA

³ICA's mission is to release the capacity to create positive sustainable
futures in every individual, organization and community.²




***

The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in
America. By Doug Rossinow. Columbia University Press. 500 pp. $32.50

Reviewed by Scott McConnell

It is jarring to discover that the history of the 1960s is now being written
by people who‹as the young historian Doug Rossinow describes himself‹had
"never heard" of the New Left before entering college in the 1980s. But
after recovering from such confirmation of one¹s relatively aged status, it
is possible to concede that "historical" study of the tumultous decade can
shed light on topics that have elsewhere been neglected. One such topic is
explored in the early sections of Rossinow¹s The Politics of Authenticity:
Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America‹the role played by a
certain kind of explorative or "existential" Protestantism in the political
and moral education of some white students who went on to become active
leftists later in the decade.

This seems a genuinely new wrinkle in the discussion of how American
religious faith intersected with the ¹60s left. It is of course widely
understood that the civil rights movement germinated first in the black
churches in the South, and that its key leaders came from the black clergy.
It is less broadly trumpeted but hardly disputed that the white student left
in the early 1960s was predominantly Jewish‹in this case a description of
ethnicity more than religious practice. As delineated most thoroughly in
Roots of Radicalism, the seminal work by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert
Lichter, the early New Left, at least on the campuses where it first flexed
its muscles, was an outgrowth of the Old Left. A substantial number of its
early cadres were the children of parents once or even still in the orbit of
the Communist Party, and thus American Jews of a particular stripe. The
background of these so­called "red diaper babies" sometimes manifested
itself in displays hardly typical of the irreverent 1960s, as when students
engaged in sit­ins at Berkeley during the 1964 "Free Speech Movement" held
Hanukkah services and sang the Israeli national anthem.

As the Vietnam War escalated, the New Left began to expand beyond this
relatively elite group attending a handful of highly competitive colleges.
The year 1965 was a watershed, as new recruits from the larger state
universities in the Midwest and Southwest flooded into Students for a
Democratic Society (the main radical student group); unlike their
predecessors, the newcomers generally did not come from left­wing families
or even liberal professional homes, and though still disproportionately
Jewish, they were so to a much lesser extent. The students of the so­called
"Prairie Power" influx tended to be more deeply rebellious‹engaged in
ferocious battles with their own conservative parents as well as with
American society at large.

One SDS leader from Texas described the differences thus: "We were by
instinct much more radical, much more willing to take risks. If you were
from Texas, in SDS, you couldn¹t go home for Christmas. Your mother didn¹t
say, ŒOh isn¹t that nice, you¹re involved. We supported the Republicans in
the Spanish Civil War . . . and I¹m glad to see you¹re socially concerned.¹
In most places it meant, ŒYou Goddam Communist.¹"
This coterie of students tended to drink more heavily, drive faster, and be
less hesitant about violence; they were not so easily depicted by
sympathetic liberal social scientists as the brightest and most sensitive
members of the new generation.

To this red diaper baby/prairie power dichotomy Rossinow adds a third and
seemingly new element: a tributary of Christian "existentialists" flowing
early in the decade from the student YMCAs and YWCAs and other Christian
institutions for the young‹first into civil rights protest and then headlong
into the revolutionary white left once the sixties began to break open.

Rossinow¹s inquiry is narrowly focused (the book originated as a doctoral
dissertation) on the University of Texas at Austin and its periphery. Texas
was then very arid soil for any kind of leftist movement: football and
fraternities dominated college social life; beyond the campus, a liberal
community revolving around figures like Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger
was small and individualistic‹more a cranky band of dissidents than a real
force, relying on a respect for civil liberties and tolerance to stay afloat
at all.

In such an environment, Christian groups provided a sort of sanctuary for
people who thought differently, and where a New Left could begin to
germinate. At the U of T, a key locale was the Christian Faith and Life
Center (CFLC), a religious training and study institute headed by
charismatic former fundamentalist preacher John Wesley Matthews. Some
considered Matthews manipulative and unreliable, and Dugger dismissed him as
a fraud. But Tom Hayden, an SDS founding father who married his first wife
Casey at a CFLC ceremony in 1961, described the center as a "liberated zone"
on the Texas campus. The Port Huron Statement, the keystone New Left
document largely drafted by Hayden the following year, resonates with
language drawn from CFLC pamphlets‹about young people engaging in a "search
for meaning" amidst "an old world passing away and a new world being born."

The actual intellectual and political content of all this remains fuzzy.
Students at the CFLC (who took courses there in addition to regular
requirements) read Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich; several were active
protesting segregation on the campus and in surrounding Austin. What seems
most distinctive about these liberal Christian groups was their tone,
earnest and questioning: "What does it mean to be a person?" and "To whom
and what am I responsible?" were typical titles of U of T YMCA­YWCA
pamphlets. Rossinow labels these concerns existentialist‹a fair enough usage
of a notoriously vague label.

In their practical political judgments, the young Christians could be
extremely gullible. One young U of T woman returned from a 1961
YWCA­sponsored summer tour of the Soviet bloc to give a series of talks in
which she observed, among other things, how much socialism had done for the
Polish people, though it might not be appropriate for America. Pro­Castro
sentiments were rife. But despite this philo­communism, there were stark
differences from the political style that would later characterize the full
blown New Left. CFLC and other young Christian concerns were expressed in
language that seems dated and easy to satirize, overly sincere and a world
apart from the hip, ironic, and deconstructive sensibility that flourished
in the sixties and now permeates much of American culture.

While this exhumation of a prodromal Christian New Left in Austin is
intriguing, Rossinow¹s claim of real linkages between "existential"
Protestantism and the decade¹s radicalism isn¹t convincingly established. A
great deal of the argument seems to turn on the personage of Casey Hayden, a
singular woman from Victoria, Texas, who may have been the only person who
was involved in both the student Y¹s and the CFLC, was present at Port
Huron, and was active in the early SDS. Other Texas students did move from
the Christian groups into civil rights activism, but not many seem to have
fully embraced the New Left. Yes, the Y¹s and CFLC did provide a haven for
people to question societal arrangements. But even Rossinow has to concede
how tentative is his argument, pointing out that "young white activists in
later years were far less likely to recall the religious roots" of their
outlook. After 1962‹early in the narrative scheme of a book that eventually
turns into a full­scale history of the white New Left‹one hears scarcely a
word about Christianity in any form.

Yet one comes away with a sense that there might be more possibilities in
Rossinow¹s general thesis than he actually pursues. A study more national in
scope would surely have something to say about such a figure as California¹s
Episcopal bishop James Pike, an early ¹60s rebel of a sort. And surely there
are others who, like Pike, were trying to tear away at the standards and
conventions of American middle­class life well before the ¹60s revolt took
full flower. Politicized ferment in Protestant theological circles, like so
much else about American Protestants, is a comparatively unexamined subject.

We are now at the beginning of a new wave of academic writing about the
1960s, produced by people who never saw a shut down campus, or heard
policemen called pigs, or watched highly touted cultural figures express
uninhibited admiration for Communist dictators and unrelenting scorn for
their own elected politicians. It is a virtual certainty that many authors
of these histories, like Rossinow himself, will evince some nostalgia for
the decade, some regret that the New Left eventually cracked up without
winning substantial political power. What they may not recognize is that, in
ways both subtle and obvious, the ¹60s radicals won. If not in electoral
politics then in countless other realms, the ¹60s left altered American
mores, language, education, law, and social policy. The nation¹s sense of
itself was altered and diminished.

It is regrettable that of all the strands that fed ¹60s radicalism, the sort
of open, somewhat guileless, questioning attitudes described by Rossinow
seem to have left the smallest imprint of all.

Scott McConnell is a writer living in New York City

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9904/reviews/mcconnell.html