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

[walters@alaweb.com]

I never heardd of Jon Wesley Mathews - have you?

David


> ** Original Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Christian Faith and Life Center, UT Austin
> ** Original Sender: Marge Philbrook <icaarchives at igc.org>
> ** Original Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 06:17:19 -0600

> ** Original Message follows... 

>
> 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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> >
> >  
> >
> 
> 
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