In the Spring 2006 issue of The American Scholar, Marilynne Robinson writes about liberal Christianity ("Onward, Christian Liberals"). She points out that liberal Christianity has a distinguished history in this country, although of late liberal Christians seem to have lost their nerve when it comes to making a case for their beliefs in the public arena. And she argues that liberal Christians have at least as good a claim – perhaps a better claim – to the mantle of John Calvin than their conservative rivals. She does not dispute that conservatives are actually Christians, but certainly she quotes enough Scriptural texts to suggest that they are somehow on the wrong side of Biblical commandment.

In contrast though, a consistent subtext is her expressed puzzlement that conservative Christians no longer consider liberals to be Christians at all. She attributes this state of things to an ineptitude on the part of liberals in getting their message out, writing:

So far, so good. There can be nothing wrong with calling the supporters of a particular position back to remember the ground which lies underneath that position, in order to understand or re-examine it. And certainly there have been so many interpretations of Christianity over the centuries that no single one of them has any reasonable claim to being the only right one. But there are things in Robinson’s essay that perturb me, for two different (but related) reasons. In the first place, she does not seem to have a very clear understanding of the evangelicals whom she opposes. And in the second place, she does not seem to grasp how strange some of her beliefs and interpretations might sound to others who do not fully share them.

In many ways I am the wrong person to write this essay. I have never belonged to any particular church, and would not be exactly happy submitting to an inquiry that asked me to define my beliefs too closely. My understanding of the evangelical community is based on my observations of, and conversations with, a number of specific people that I know in the town where I live: all of them members of one or another conservative, "Bible-believing" church. This may not be a large enough data sample to draw on. At the same time, if Robinson’s characterizations of evangelicals hold water, they should go some way towards explaining my friends and acquaintances. And I think that in a number of significant respects, they do not.

To begin with what may be purely a verbal quibble, Robinson talks a great deal about "personal holiness," or at any rate she suggests that evangelical Protestants talk about it. I have never heard my friends use the term. I’ve heard them describe men and women as "godly" – always others, never the speaker himself. But nobody ever suggested that this was a quality akin to sinlessness. Every one of my evangelical friends has acknowledged to me that he still fights the temptation to sin – and that too often he loses. None of them has ever suggested that Mr. John Doe, whom they have just characterized as a righteous and godly man, is any different in this respect. So I don’t think that godliness – and this may be what Robinson means by "holiness" – entails any kind of settled perfection. At best, it seems to be a kind of perpetual striving and failing, tempered only by the knowledge that the godly man has his heart in the right place and by the confidence God will save him in the end. This confidence, or faith, is what my friends are thinking of when they sometimes quote to me the bumper sticker "Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven."

In another early obiter dictum, Robinson alludes to "the rise in this country of a culture of Christianity that does not encourage thought." It is true that she immediately adds "I intend this as a criticism not only of the so-called fundamentalists but, more particularly, of the mainline churches, which have fairly assiduously culled out all traces of the depth and learnedness that were for so long among their greatest contributions to American life." But as the rest of the article emphasizes repeatedly the intellectual contributions of liberal Christianity to America, one is left with the vague implication that evangelical Protestantism is stupid. This has been said many times before, and of course the insinuation is indefensible at a personal level. What is more, even as a movement the evangelicals have started to address their public image as untheoretical yahoos. (I think inevitably in this context of men like the learned and accomplished evangelical theologian William Lane Craig.  Craig may have his faults, but stupidity is not one of them.) But I also have to wonder something else: while thought – I mean here theoretical reason – is a magnificent thing, should the churches in particular be the ones to encourage it? Presumably the churches, like anybody else, can’t encourage everything at once; presumably they have to pick their battles. And it should be no surprise if they choose to emphasize the things that they believe truly central to salvation, letting the rest of it go. Does Robinson, as a Christian, really believe that this includes theoretical reason, rather than (say) the love of God or the cultivation of the soul? I am not familiar with any Christian denomination that teaches that thought or knowledge are the keys to salvation. Gnosticism used to teach that, and some forms of Platonism. But never Christianity.

Deeper into the article Robinson makes it clearer who her antagonists are, by identifying them with the political positions that they support. She tries to show that their political opinions are not very consistent with their religious opinions, and at one level this should be no surprise. Jesus was an outspoken critic of so many established institutions that it is easy to quote him as a firebrand radical; by the same token it can be perversely difficult to squeeze him into any political package whatsoever. His insistence that "My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) should remind us that trying to enlist him in support of any public policy faction is a losing proposition. But the particular examples that Robinson chooses to make her point do not seem to do justice to the facts.

For example, Robinson expends a great deal of effort linking evangelical Christianity with support for laissez-fair capitalism and Social Darwinism. But I think she misses an important distinction here. It is very true that the evangelicals with whom I have discussed politics are all opposed to the extension of what Peter Drucker used to call the Nanny State. It is not unusual for evangelicals to support lower taxes, fewer government programs for the poor, and less regulation of the economy. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that they are simply supporting the greed of the rich, or that they propose to throw the poor heartlessly and thoughtlessly onto the street. The evangelicals that I know all care for the poor and dispossessed in one way or another. This one volunteers at a local homeless shelter. That one organizes community outreach events to support local children in need. Another one – worth millions – tithes to his church’s charities annually and gives unstintingly to other charities as well, often anonymously and always without batting an eye. And one man I know quit his job of many years as a senior project manager for a local engineering firm because he felt clear direction from the Holy Spirit to do something different with his life. He now works – for free, last time we spoke – for an organization dedicated to connecting evangelical Christians who feel a calling to help with people that need the help. So I would have to say that the evangelicals I know (admittedly an unscientific sample) all show what some liberals might call a "strong social conscience."

In that case, why do they vote for lower taxes and fewer government programs? Not because they are indifferent to the poor, but because they do not trust the government to help. They see the State as Caesar, fundamentally tyrannical. They see government agencies – federal, state, or local are all of a muchness here – as largely staffed by frustrated authoritarians whose only pleasure in life comes from bossing other people around. And they conclude that any higher taxes they pay in the name of fighting poverty will all go to support officious bureaucratic leeches and never actually reach the poor. So they would rather help the poor themselves than pay middlemen to botch the job. I do not say that their view of our government is necessarily true or right. But certainly the healthy distrust of government is a venerable American tradition, and to blame this distrust on thoughtless greed is simply false.

In support of the social gospel which she attributes to liberal Christians, Robinson quotes Matthew 25:34-45, where Jesus says that in the final judgment he will reward those who fed and clothed the least among us as having fed or clothed him; and those who did no such thing will be cast into eternal punishment. And she insists that modern evangelicals seem to have ignored this passage or not understood it. I have said above that her accusation is hardly true. At the same time, I have to agree that I too am very fond of the passage she cites. I agree with her as well in liking Matthew 7:21-23, where Jesus warns that not all those who say "Lord, Lord!" will enter the kingdom of heaven. And yet, to be fair about it, I have to admit that Jesus says a lot of different things, some of which do not sit easily with any kind of inclusive social gospel. The same Jesus who urges a paramount concern for the poor in Matthew 25 is able, only a chapter later, to speak about them with cool indifference, saying "The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me." (Matthew 26:11) The same Jesus who has so little patience in Matthew 7 for those that cry "Lord, Lord!" can nonetheless say "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) This doesn’t mean that the liberal social gospel is wrong. What it means is that anybody who wants to extract a consistent doctrine from the sayings of Jesus has his work cut out for him, and that he will probably fail. Both sides can quote proof texts for their positions, but it is only fair to admit this fact rather than painting the conservatives as unbiblical.

Sometimes Robinson alludes to a political division without engaging it, in ways that lead her to say things which are downright strange. At one point she writes that "The neo-fundamentalists …. speak of a right to life, an oddly disembodied phrase that, isolated as it is by them from human context, tends to devalue the incarnate person and is therefore … unbiblical …." Now what is that supposed to mean? I could be mistaken, but her use of the political slogan "right to life" makes me think that it means "The neo-fundamentalists oppose legalized abortion but they are wrong and unbiblical to do so." On the other hand if that’s what Robinson means, I do wish she had said so more clearly. It is very hard for me to assign any determinate sense to a phrase like "devalue the incarnate person," but I can understand my version. What’s more, my version is clear enough that you can tell it is preposterous. For while it is certainly true that the "neo-fundamentalists" tend overwhelmingly to oppose legalized abortion, and while it is at least arguable that their position might be wrong at the level of public policy, it is absurd to claim they are being unbiblical. I would ask Robinson to cite a single verse in the Bible that has anything good to say about abortion. Now, in fairness I do think Robinson is trying to say something here that is not simply foolish. I think she is trying to say that Christianity requires us to be sympathetic towards the suffering of others, and that in some cases sympathy towards a woman who is pregnant but does not want to be might mean offering her a way to terminate the pregnancy. Well I suppose it might. But I think that one could find oneself led in the opposite direction for reasons besides hard-heartedness. Does a squeamishness about homicide (which is how fundamentalists and evangelicals classify abortion, in overwhelming numbers) mean that one is unsympathetic? Does a deep sadness about a new mother at war with her own child, treating her child as a hostile enemy, mean that one is hard-hearted? For that matter, does Robinson herself, who is so critical of Social Darwinism, remember that the drive for legalized abortion came out of the closely-allied eugenics movement? Both movements justified themselves on the grounds that they would sweep away the unfit from society: Social Darwinism by allowing them to fail economically (and thereby starve), and eugenics by preventing that they ever be born in the first place. Both movements considered themselves to be modern scientific advances over the old superstitions that used to hold men in thrall: duty to others, shame, guilt, sin. It should be no surprise that conservative Christians reject such a package when they become aware of it; what is a little more peculiar is that liberal Christians, or at least Robinson, seem to fault them for doing so. In any event, it must be admitted that there are people of good will and good conscience on both sides of the abortion debate. The question which legislation makes for the best public policy is complicated by a host of factors that I do not propose to discuss right now. But it is hardly fair for either side to characterize the other as uncaring or irreligious.

Several times, Robinson expresses incomprehension towards the evangelical aversion to America’s popular culture, and I have to wonder what it means that she does not see the same things they do. She criticizes the evangelical movement for being "full of pious aversion toward so-called secular culture – that is, whatever does not give back its own image – and toward those whose understanding and practice of religion fails to meet its standards." And, a little farther on, she writes of the teaching of self-doubt and inescapable human fallibility that:

In the abstract this is all unobjectionable, but I have to wonder if Robinson truly means every word of it as ingenuously as she seems to. A common space is fine, after all – even necessary – as a marketplace or meeting ground where people can talk politics and conduct business before they go home again. But nobody should have to live there. Everybody should be able to go home at the end of the day. What has happened in this country in the last fifty years (starting with the postwar advent of television) is that the common space has gotten larger and larger, until it has absorbed the homes of many, many people. All too many people now live in the common space twenty-four hours a day, and this is what makes the evangelicals so uneasy. The simple answer would be for them to pitch their television sets in the junkpile and spend their evenings with more wholesome kinds of entertainment, but to ask this is to ask them to be a lot more self-denying than any of their non-evangelical neighbors. (Privately I suspect most families would benefit from doing the same thing, but I am not so foolish as to think anyone will follow my advice.) It doesn’t help that there are plenty of entertainments in the common space which evangelicals believe (rightly or wrongly) to be harmful to everyone, co-religionists or not. When advertisements for blue jeans are frankly sexual and advertisements for pickup trucks pitch the vehicles as consolations in time of divorce, I think the evangelicals can be forgiven for finding these messages socially corrosive because of something essential in human nature that the messages brutalize. At this point, the issue is not simply that evangelicals are narcissists, who cannot bear to look at "whatever does not give back [their] own image"; and at this point we are no longer talking about a purely common space. This is the water we all swim in, and the evangelical point is that we are sharing the pool with sharks.

At the beginning of this essay, I criticized Robinson for two things: misunderstanding the evangelicals whom she opposes, and expressing her own beliefs in a way that makes them sound very strange. My remarks on the evangelical distrust of our nation’s common culture is in some ways a bridge between those two topics: on the one hand, Robinson fails to understand why the evangelicals believe what they do, but on the other hand her very failure to see this calls her own beliefs into question. Does she really not mind the brutalizing messages that have become so common in our popular media? Or have they become so familiar to her that she no longer notices them? (A third possibility is that she never watches television; if this is true I congratulate her, but in that case I think she may simply not be aware of the things that so disturb the evangelicals.) I noted above Robinson’s puzzlement that conservative Christians have written off their liberal brethren as no longer Christians; but surely this is because there is no other way for the conservatives to understand how liberals cannot see what they themselves find so obvious, or how liberals can be so relaxed about what they themselves find so troubling.

There are other places, too, where one has to wonder if Robinson truly believes what she says. In distinguishing herself from what she sees as the intolerant exclusivism of conservative evangelicals, she writes, "Liberal that I am, I would not presume to doubt the authenticity of the religious experience of anyone at all." While this sentence pretends to be a simple declaration of her own brand of Calvinism (which, she says, forbids "the idea that human beings can set any limits to God’s grace"), two words make it into a challenge, a gauntlet thrown at the feet of conservatives. Those two words are "at all." Logically they add nothing to the sentence, which would mean the same thing without them. But rhetorically, they pick a fight. The baffling question is why, if Robinson is as devout a Calvinist as she says, she should choose this particular fight instead of some other. Because this is a fight that no religious liberal, arguing fully in good faith, can possibly win. "Anyone"? "Anyone at all"? What about the tax evader who sets up a church specifically for the purpose of tax evasion? What about the huckster who sells religious titles – including priest, minister, and pope – for ten dollars apiece on the Internet? Does Robinson truly mean that she does not presume to doubt the authenticity of their "religious experience"? This is the kind of statement that makes conservatives shake their heads and conclude that liberals are idiots. Since Robinson is plainly no idiot, the only other alternatives appear to be either that she doesn’t really mean it or that she doesn’t take religion very seriously. But neither of these explanations is a whole lot better.

The most astonishing move that Robinson makes in her entire essay, though, is to give away the whole game to her opponents right at the outset. It is remarkable that she appears not to realize she has done so. Her topic is personal holiness, and she announces her position on the subject as follows:

This may be a stirring credo, but how can it be called Christianity? I would have sworn that Christianity teaches God alone is holy; Man may have been made in his image, but that does not make us divine. Is the teaching not that we occupy the middle position on the great chain of being, above the beasts but below the angels? And surely even the angels themselves, who are supposed to be above us, are not actually holy. For Robinson to confuse us with the brightest angel and to call humanity "holy" sounds for all the world like she is preaching the worship of Man, not God. But if she is preaching the worship of Man, then her whole point that liberal Christians are the true heirs of Augustine and Calvin is made irrelevant at the outset, and all the Scriptural citations in her essay become so much window-dressing. If this is truly the heart of liberal Christianity, it is not so hard to see why other Christians have rejected it after all.