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

[george]

Makes you wonder about all those stories about King David, doesn't  
it.  I can hardly wait for the story on E. I. written by some Ph.D.  
candidate 10 years from now.
–george holcombe

On Mar 17, 2006, at 6:57 AM, Herman Greene wrote:

> It is strange that such attention was given to the Faith and Life  
> Community
> without any attention to the tremendous work of the Ecumnical  
> Institute that
> came from it.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net]On
> Behalf Of David Dunn
> Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 5:35 PM
> To: 'Dialogue' Listserv; OE Community
> Subject: [Oe List ...] Christian Faith and Life Center, UT Austin
>
>
> 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 so called "red diaper babies" sometimes manifested
> itself in displays hardly typical of the irreverent 1960s, as when  
> students
> engaged in sit ins 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 left wing  
> families
> or even liberal professional homes, and though still  
> disproportionately
> Jewish, they were so to a much lesser extent. The students of the  
> so called
> "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 YMCA YWCA
> 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
> YWCA sponsored 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. Pro  
> Castro
> sentiments were rife. But despite this philo communism, 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 full scale 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 middle class 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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