When Jesus Was a Democrat by Jackson Lears 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Post date 04.01.06 | Issue date 04.10.06
>...According to the Social Gospel, as Hofstadter dryly remarked,
"Everyone was in some very serious sense responsible for everything."
...
One of the great achievements of A Godly Hero is that it brings to life a good man with a benign social vision but apparently little inner life--certainly no inner demons--and makes him an interesting, sympathetic, even arresting character. But all that does not quite make him a model for contemporary leadership. No matter how desperately the Democratic Party needs inspiration from the past, Bryan cannot simply be lifted out of his time to speak to ours. As Kazin remarks, he embodied a persistent "yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives." The question is: who gets to say what's virtuous? To wed politics and virtue, while defining virtue as conformity to conventional norms, is (at best) to risk terminal boredom--as William James recognized when, after a week at Chautauqua, he craved "the flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye, anything to break the unlovely level of ten thousand good people." It was a world for decent liberal optimists--one without the dread of ennui and disbelief, the awareness of metaphysical darkness that James could never forget for long: a world for people like Bryan...
he distance between Bryan and contemporary Democrats stems from a variety of complex developments in American politics and American Protestantism. Some of the most decisive changes involved the struggle for racial equality. Race was simply not on the Progressive agenda in the early twentieth century--unless it was the disfranchisement of black people in the name of "good government." Though he advocated women's suffrage, Bryan tacitly accepted the exclusion of African Americans from politics. The Populist movement may have begun (at least in the South) as a biracial insurgency, but when it entered the Democratic mainstream it was a lily-white affair. Demands for economic justice were less complicated when they avoided challenging Jim Crow.
By the time Bryan was leaving the political stage, the Progressive tradition had begun to turn into something more akin to modern liberalism. The suppression of free speech during World War I--not to mention the chilling effect of Prohibition--had led Dewey and other intellectuals (including a number involved with this magazine) to place a new value on civil liberties and the protection of minority rights. It would be decades before the minorities in question included African Americans, but still the change in tone was significant. The new liberalism was more secular, pluralistic, and pragmatic than the old Progressivism. As the Social Gospel faded, Protestant Christianity and radical politics pulled apart. The looming specter of Bolshevism and the Red Scare orchestrated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer reinforced a fundamental shift in radical iconography. In the popular imagination, the radical was no longer the pitchfork-wielding farmer, but rather the bomb-throwing (and frequently Jewish) foreigner. White evangelical Protestantism retreated from overt political involvement for half a century, until it emerged in the 1970s in a guise that would have been unrecognizable to Bryan. By the Reagan era, Jesus was no longer a prophet of economic justice; he was a proponent of surefire personal success. <SNIP> http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060410&s=lears041006&c=2
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