New York Times columnist David Brooks looks this morning at a United States senator who has been, Brooks writes, at the helm of virtually every major anti-poverty initiative this decade, from job training to fair housing for people with AIDS to Third World debt relief. The senator has also, Brooks says, been an advocate of global human rights, even winning the praise of the ultra-hip Bono. The senator is not political rock-star Barack Obama. He is Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) who is, it seems, destined to lose his Senate seat in next week’s election.
What is interesting is not that Brooks, an ideological kaleidoscope of “pro-choice” urban libertarianism and hawkish neo-conservatism and “National Greatness” corporatism, should praise the conservative senator. What is interesting is the reason Brooks gives for why most Americans won’t join him in their recognition of Santorum’s anti-poverty work.
He’s pro-life. And vocally so.
Citing Jonathan Rauch, Brooks notes where Santorum departs from the typical prototype of American postwar conservatism. Where Barry Goldwater viewed the individual as the basic unit of society; Santorum views the family as the basic unit of society. Goldwater and his heirs sought to fight collectivism with individualism; Santorum seeks to counter individualism with an organic vision of the family.
Citing the anti-poverty, anti-AIDS, and human rights emphases of the senator, Brooks concludes: “If Santorum were pro-choice, he’d be a media star and a campus hero.”
This column ought to earn the attention of conservative Christians, and not because of whether or not we support Santorum or his pro-life Democratic opponent Bob Casey. We ought to pay attention because Brooks has discovered something about the kind of acclaim many evangelicals seek from the ambient culture.
Critics are right that some of the more politicized evangelicals have ignored some pivotal issues for too long, such as poverty and AIDS and creation protection. Some evangelicals believe the way to remedy this is to mute our emphases on such issues as abortion and euthanasia. By accentuating the positive, they argue, we can win relevance in the culture. By becoming Barack Obama, we can win the attention of those who listen to Bono.
We need to be more attentive to economic desperation and to human suffering and to a shamefully polluted environment. But we can’t do it at the expense of shutting our mouths about the least of these, the unborn, those whose suffering isn’t even allowed to be recognized by the mainstream of this culture. We must be the most dogged fighters against poverty, but we need not think we will be perceived as hip, when we share the news that a man must be born again even as we seek to deliver him from economic peril. We must bring Christian revelation to issues of economics, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be considered cuddly. After all, someone has to ask what the hyper-capitalist dual-income lifestyle is doing to American families. We must care for those who have AIDS, but we must remember that we’ll never get the attention of the culture-mavens unless we distribute condoms.
The answer to all of this is not more United States senators. The answer is churches that don’t care what the New York Times, or David Brooks, or Pat Robertson, or Bono think about them. They love babies. They love the poor. They love the creation. They love Jesus. They’ll seek to love their dying neighbor, whether the neighbor is perishing in an urban alley or in a suburban abortuary.
This means, yes, seeking a just economic system. It also means caring pro-life centers for pregnant moms in crisis situations. It means churches that help single moms pay the bills and raise their children. It means seeking legal penalties against those who would poison the air, and those who would poison babies in the womb. And it means, above all, personal and verbal witness to the old gospel of salvation from sin and death through faith in Jesus Christ.
Such things won’t win any political power for these churches. And it won’t get their pastors’ faces on the cover of Sojourners or Relevant magazines. But they won’t care. After all, it is easier, they remember, for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man or a rock star or a campus hero to enter the Kingdom of God.
