Pat Robertson Again

Pat Robertson's TV comments that the U.S. should assassinate Hugo Chavez ("If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it") are a reminder of how easy it is for a crackpot to rise to a place of prominence in the evangelical Protestant world. (These of course aren't the first examples of Robertson making wacked-out statements (go here and jump to to "A controversial public figure").) I don't know how much to be disturbed by this, because Robertson's political influence (for example, in the Christian Coalition) seems to have waned a lot in recent years.

To relate this to our blog's concerns: The crackpot phenomenon is possible because, as pointed out by historian Nathan Hatch (The Democratization of American Christianity), evangelicals have a strong populist streak that permits the rise of leaders who are not necessarily well grounded in the main channel of Christian thought, and who certainly are unconstrained by any broader Christian institutional perspective. "Populist" is pretty euphemistic as applied to Robertson's comments on Chavez, but they do seem to reflect -- as opposed to any sort of Christian thought process -- a gut-level response to "take out" anyone who we Americans think might be a threat to us. In that sense, the comments grow in part out of the general populist nature of American evangelicalism. I tried to explore this a bit in the "Religious Conservatives and the Death Penalty" piece linked at the right:

Unlike Roman Catholics, evangelicals do not have a single institutional body speaking theologically for their community, let alone an individual like the Pope, who so speaks. Instead, American evangelicalism is a complex "mosaic" of many different groups with different leaders who enjoy influence not because of an institutional position, but because of their ability to appeal to the rank-and-file of believers. In the words of historian Nathan Hatch, evangelicalism has historically been a "democratic" movement: decentralized, populist, distrustful of tradition and of formal theological reasoning. As Hatch has shown, these tendencies run as far back as the massive revivals of the early 1800s among common folk, the "Second Great Awakening," and the tendencies remain apparent today. . . .

As Professor Hatch notes, the populist orientation of evangelicalism has always meant that charismatic preachers could attract followers and dominate their thinking, much as charismatic political figures can rise to power through populist appeals to voters. Hatch shows how this "authoritarian mantle" was exercised by some nineteenth-century preachers, but he also sees it in the careers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. . . .

The reliance on "common sense" intuition has advantages, especially in keeping Christian faith vital among average people rather than just among the committed few. But it also means that evangelicals' religious attitudes can be strikingly shaped by the culture surrounding them rather than by the distinctives of the Christian message. What seems to be simply common sense is typically the product of cultural assumptions so natural that one does not even see that they exist, like the air we breathe. A prime example in modern politics is how so many southern white Protestants failed to overcome the racial prejudices of their region during the civil rights era, notwithstanding the New Testament teaching that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek." Indeed, it has been argued that evangelical religion became dominant in the South from the 1800s forward only by adopting preexisting features of southern culture, such as an emphasis on honor, masculinity, and the legitimacy of violence. Likewise, because evangelical churches are "democratic" institutions highly accountable to their members, they can be more captive to the community's general social attitudes than is a more hierarchical church. Again, the civil rights era provides an example: Roman Catholic bishops in several southern cities ordered the desegregation of their parochial schools in the early 1950s, a number of years before the general, largely Protestant society in the South accepted the process in public schools.

Fortunately, the decentralized structure of evangelicalism also means that someone like Robertson doesn't run the whole show. And the institutional-hierarchical orientation of Catholicism certainly isn't optimal in all situations; it can tend in the direction of monolithic and slow responses in some cases where flexibility may be more appropriate. But the Catholic structure is generally better at discouraging a bishop from developing or publicizing wacked-out views like Robertson's. (Which makes it all the more disturbing that the structure failed, at the very least, to constrain some bishops in their mishandling of child sex abuse cases.)

Tom B.