[Dialogue] Christian Faith and Life Center, UT Austin

[opossum2@att.net]

-------------- Original message from David Dunn <ddunn at ica-usa.org>: -------------- 


> 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 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> Dialogue mailing list 
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20060317/91d63eca/attachment-0002.htm