Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez fears for his life, not due to threats from dissidents or opposition rivals, but because of American television religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.
Speaking at Russell House last Thursday, University of North Carolina Professor Christian Smith explained that Robertson’s recent appeal for Chavez to be assassinated by the U.S. Government is precisely the sort of thing that leads most people to see Evangelical Christians like him as self-righteous, overbearing, and sometimes, just plain scary.
“Evangelicals are often cast by one side as sort of angels, the last bastion of true morality, and by the other side who thinks of them as more demonic,” Smith said, elaborating on the lecture’s title, “Demythologizing the Angel/Demon: Towards Understanding American Evangelicals.”
Smith’s talk focused on understanding ordinary, contemporary American Evangelicals. He said that his main hope was to make Evangelicals, if not more likeable, at least a bit more understandable.
The bulk of Smith’s speech was devoted to tracing the historical milestones of Evangelicals in America, pointing out trends along the way.
He discussed the struggles Evangelicals face with regards to the independent interpretation of Christian ideology and its initial emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy. This eventually shifted towards an emphasis on personal, inward experiences of commitment to the Christian faith, and the need to be spiritually on fire in some ways.
“My heart is strangely warmed,” Smith said as he explained the subsequent change from a dependence on centralized papal authority towards an individual spiritual experience. He tailored this quotation to his Wesleyan audience, as founder John Wesley originally said it.
He then spoke about ambivalence of Evangelicals towards politics.
“[Evangelicals were] sort of like the person at Harvard Square, handing out pamphlets, [they were] very out there,” he said, speaking about the reform movements of the nineteenth century that saw a surge in Evangelical efforts to make changes in their social and moral environments.
He said that even now, there exists a residual memory of a time in America’s history when Evangelicals were active and influenced social movements. To Smith, average American Evangelicals may know little of their own history, but are actually part of a long history that has gone through serious political struggles such as movements for poorhouse and prison reform, abolitionism and temperance.
“I learned a lot about the historical and sociological aspects of Christianity in America,” said Joel Ting ’06. “He gave an interesting insight into the subject.”
However, the split between fundamentals and modernists in the 1920s left the fundamentalist movement feeling humiliated and ridiculed, especially after their uncomfortably narrow win in public debates on evolution. According to Smith, they avoided cultural and political reform as hopeless, preferring to focus instead on saving souls.
“Politics is a diversion; politics is a waste,” Smith said. “Forget that. Get out there and save some souls because the world’s going to hell in a hand basket.”
According to Smith, fundamentalists were forced to look for other ways to reach out to communities because of their alienation from mainstream Christianity. Evangelicals developed entrepreneurial skills in radio and television evangelism and gospel preaching. The transposing of radio skills to television saw a resurgence of political voices and a renewed desire to engage in politics once again.
“We should be radicals,” Smith said. “Jesus was a radical. He raised hell until they killed him.”
In the end, Smith concluded that there is a deep ambivalence among Evangelicals towards politics. On one hand, they believe that politics can be a legitimate way to exert Christian influence on society, but on the other hand, politics are seen as a purely external force that never leads to change.
He considered Evangelicals neither angels nor demons, but merely ordinary citizens who share many basic values with other groups. According to Smith, many Evangelicals are often embarrassed by the extreme views of some self-proclaimed Evangelical leaders like Robertson and do not support him.
“It was interesting,” said Elena Won ’06. “I didn’t know so much about Evangelicals. I do come from a Christian background, but I never thought about the different tensions that do exist within the same groups.”
Smith is the author of “Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want” and is a leading scholar of American Evangelicalism. His lecture on Thursday was the first in the “Evangelicalism, Conservatism, and the Future of American Politics” series sponsored by the Christian Studies Cluster.
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