[Oe List ...] Christian Faith and Life Center, UT Austin

[Marge Philbrook]

I never heard the Christian Faith and Life Community called the 
Christian Faith and Life Center before. And it's interesting that he 
relates this to Joe rather than Jack Lewis the founder and still there 
after Joe came to Chicago.
This article reminded me of watching my children serve coffee to UT 
students in line at the theatre across the street from the campus. 
(Black students could go to school but couldn't go to the theatre or 
have a cup of coffee anywhere near the campus.) The students devised a 
system to get to the window and ask if they would sell a ticket to 
everyone who was in this line. The person would say "no" and the student 
would not buy a ticket and go back to the end of the line. This was in 
the late 50s.
I think of the "civil rights movement" as both black and white 
instigated. I would be glad to think that "whites" "figured it out" 
rather than being "forced" by blacks to rethink the meaning of life and 
our political situation. I wonder how South Africans describe their 
political transformations.
I 'm looking forward to reading Bishop Jim's book.
Marge Philbrook in Chicago where I'm having a great time working with 
and in the International Conference Center. Please come and see us 
sometime. We love to have guests.


David Dunn wrote:

>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
>
>
>
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