Dialogue between religious leaders, liberals is fading
When a public person you know and care for dies too soon, there is a temptation to elevate their historical significance, to cast them as an era’s representative figure in order to persuade easily distracted readers to pay closer attention to the life they lived.
I’m going to give in to that temptation in this column. In the life of Michael Cromartie, an evangelical-Christian impresario dead of cancer last week at 67, you could see a larger generational story in archetype — the story of certain boomer-era evangelicals who tried to abandon anti-intellectualism and separatism and to establish a new religious center for a fragmenting and secularizing age.
Like many young evangelicals of the 1960s and 1970s, Cromartie began as a pacifist and radical, a Christian of the left, who opposed the Vietnam War and sojourned with the left-wing evangelical activist and author Jim Wallis.
Like many in his cohort, he was eventually drawn into a form of neoconservatism — a literal mugging, in which he was tied up in his hotel room and relieved of his watch and $33, played a role — that was rooted in anti-communism and opposition to abortion, but different in its fundamental values from the Republican Party that it entered and transformed.
And like many evangelicals, he ended up working in the peculiar outsiderinsider world of conservative Washington, influencing the Republican Party’s counsels even as the wider establishment continued to regard his faith and movement as exotic, disreputable, possibly dangerous.
But more than most, Cromartie did not accept this suspicion and mistrust as permanent or necessary. His great work, which occupied much of the last two decades of his life, was a distinctive exercise in dialogue and encounter: Twice a year, he invited prominent journalists, members of one of America’s most secular professions, into extended conversation with religious leaders, theologians and historians, the best and brightest students and practitioners of varied faiths. These conferences were purpose-driven junkets, intended to prove that religious believers and professional media elites did not have to be locked in a cycle of misunderstanding and mistrust.
And in the discussion sessions that Cromartie ran, they weren’t. There were tense moments and hostile interactions here and there, but for the most part when you were inside his conferences, you could imagine that pluralism could actually work, that religious views could advance by persuasion without encouraging intolerance, that the religious and nonreligious could argue and listen in good faith, that conservative believers could be taken seriously by the media and extend greater trust and understanding in their turn.
The world is not a Cromartie conference, however, and the generational story that he was part of has not had a happy ending. When he began his conferences the evangelical right seemed to be in transition from a pugilistic old guard to a younger and less chauvinistic leadership. The arc of evangelical engagement with the culture seemed like it might be bending upward, in the direction that Cromartie’s own efforts pushed.
But the secular backlash was intense, and in the Republican Party, ethnonationalism replaced religious conservatism as the coalition’s strong cement.
Meanwhile, my own Catholicism was pulled back into its 1970s-era civil war, while Cromartie’s fellow evangelicals have slipped backward as well. As he was being killed by cancer over the last two years, his cobelievers were embracing a defensive anxiety that helped justify support for Donald Trump, and that has elevated caricatures to prominence and influence — not dynamic orthodoxy but prosperity preaching and Christian nationalism.
In this darkened atmosphere, pessimism about the future of pluralism is rampant among religious conservatives, and the hope of persuasion and dialogue has dimmed. In its place there is a renewed interest in separatism and retrenchment, and a turn toward exhortation and anathema — a combination that defines the recent conservative-evangelical Nashville Statement on homosexuality and gender identity, and that has generated counter-anathematization in its turn.
This sense of pessimism, the fear that fragmentation may be irreversible and mutual incomprehension inevitable, are feelings that I often share.
But my present work depends on the belief that something less balkanized and polarized and desperate is still possible. And because of Michael Cromartie’s work and example, I can cling to this belief as something more than just the evidence of things not seen. In the small but important world where he made a difference, he will be sorely missed. May God grant him a safe lodging and a holy rest.