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In an attempt to transcend the culture wars, journalist Alisa Harris writes in Raised Right about her political migration from a “God and Country” conservative to a “Blue State” Obama devotee. Making her memoir interesting, Harris arrives at her political convictions despite a spotless conservative pedigree as a graduate of Hillsdale College, the premier conservative college in America, and as a former writer for WORLD magazine, the editorial home of “compassionate conservative” architect Marvin Olasky. With poll after poll telling of a (supposed) political shift amongst young evangelicals, Harris represents yet another voice burnt out with the politicization of faith, especially the Christian Right.

Passionate but Misguided

Memoir is a difficult genre to review since any disagreement can be seen as a personal attack on the author. I hope such is not the case. In a collection of anecdotes, Harris narrates her past as a passionate, though misguided youth who was catechized by all things Christian, Republican, and yes, even Ronald Reagan, which now embarrasses her. Playing the part of a political provocateur, Harris prided herself on being the hardnosed Christian who would challenge both professors and classmates in a battle of worldview wits while dismissively mocking Hillary Clinton in pageant-like flare during county fairs.

If there is such a thing as political excess, Harris lived it, and criticizes it well. Her political goals, she confesses, were not simply political but messianic (38). From her youth into early adulthood, she states:

Politics gave my faith meaning. Politics expressed my faith . . . . My faith was so intertwined with conservative politics that I viewed them as one and the same (5).

Through her many adventures, the ambiguities and complexities of adulthood began to reveal that her zeal was fraught with a false sense of certainty and arrogant polarity—the balkanization of humanity into false categories (58–59). She grew weary categorizing people and instead insisted on simply loving them. Her frustration, she discovers, is captured in James Davidson Hunter’s now influential book To Change the World and his theory of ressentiment—“the belief that my enemies are committing a wave of atrocities against me, that I am a disenfranchised victim seeking the will to dominate my enemies because they are snatching the privileges I’m entitled to. When we operate from this perspective, every question—and every answer—is political (40).” Refusing to play the victim or the warrior, Harris decided to chart a new politics. In a quote that captures the tone of Harris’s book, she writes:

We seek in one another the assurance that there is just one correct interpretation of the world, that everything is so simple anybody can see it unless they’re malicious or stupid or willfully ignorant; and we punish one another for proving with our differing conclusions that truth is not that easy. We think we must suppress dissension to present the unified front we need to gain power over our enemies. But there are pro-life Democrats, pro-choice Christians, feminists who love their families, and conservatives who care about poor people. Not all of them are right, but neither are they heretics. (147)

Without detailing every story in the book, the book highlights her broadening political horizon and increasing uneasiness with all things evangelical. She embraces feminism, and even attends a meeting of the impossible—a cadre of “Christian” Democrats at a Bible study in New York City. By the end of her book, we find Harris highlighting her existential jubilation at the election of Barack Obama to the presidency because he and his movement represented a “politics transcended” (161).

‘Beware the Politically Obsessed’

Harris gets a lot right in her book—namely, that “something is deeply wrong with the evangelical politics in which our childhood were immersed” (8). Her volume reminds us that however we vote, we must be vigilant and chastened in how we arrive at the decision. Truly, no party in American politics is the Christian party, for no party up to this point in time has adopted (nor should they) any particular religious creed into its platform. Her book offers both an important reminder in how Christians often wrongly use their rhetoric to support their positions and also a strong rebuke to the “politically obsessed.” She approvingly quotes Peggy Noonan, who warns, “Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their nature; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.” A wise warning, indeed.

What the reader will notice, however, is that Harris’s call for love, justice, and a truce in the culture wars results in the now predictable angst-ridden liberalism. She may wish to escape such labels, but her voting record and newfound political principles reveal it. This story has been told before. Whether it be Donald Miller’s youthful protest, Anne Lamott’s introspective self-doubt, or Jim Wallis’s liberalism, Harris’s volume is but another in a long litany of what Marvin Olasky calls “self-hating evangelical” manifestos.

Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics

Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics

Waterbrook Press (2011). 230 pp.

Meet the new breed of Christians shaping our culture.

Alisa Harris grew up in a family that actively fought injustice and moral decay in America. She spent much of her childhood picketing abortion clinics and being home-schooled in the ways of conservative-Republican Christianity. As a teen she firmly believed that putting the right people in power would save the nation.

But as she moved into adulthood, Alisa confronted unexpected complexities on issues that used to seem clear-cut. So, she set about evaluating the strident partisanship she had grown up with, considering other perspectives while staying true to the deep respect she held for her parents and for the Christian principles that had always motivated her.

Waterbrook Press (2011). 230 pp.

There are other concerns I have with Harris’s proposal. One is the nature of the memoir industry itself. Whether it’s responsible to allow an individual in her 20s the opportunity to write a personal history is an issue of legitimate debate for a publisher. Harris acknowledges this in the preface, and I appreciate it. I say this not as a swipe against Harris but in general: As a 20-something myself, I’m not sure I want to take any advice from an age group so readily in flux. This is not to disparage all the contributions of this particular age group, but to warn against the excesses of overselling one’s certainty.

What Harris’s political interests portend is not a softer, friendlier, or even more “compassionate” conservatism as one might expect. No, as we see time and time again with some leftward trending evangelicals in America, responsible self-improvement is measured by implicit devotion to liberalism—liberationist sexual ethics, feminism, economic redistribution, and statist inclinations. Apparently, rejection of conservative values is the equivalent of a butterfly shedding its cocoon. Harris seems unaware that there are intelligent and Christian reasons to remain conservative—reasons demonstrated in Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner’s excellent volume City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.

Harris shows that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain one’s evangelical theology while following the trajectory of political liberalism; not surprisingly, she inches closer to theological liberalism. Harris embodies this accusation when she adopts more pacifistic, anti-military attitudes along with an expressed ambivalence on the issue of abortion. The political Left has an unflinching commitment to sexual liberationist ethics. And while Harris may not adopt its platform outright, her comments express a reluctance to condemn it.

Harris forces politically minded evangelicals back to the drawing boards to ask: Is it theologically wrong for one political party to be more heavily saturated with evangelicals? I don’t think it is. Harris is right that Christianity qua Christianity is not synonymous with one political party. And yet, Christian ethics may comport with conservative views more than liberal views. This is routinely seen in the fact that should, for example, Party A support a policy that is in principle sinful, and Party B oppose such a principle, then Party B may (and ought to be) more compatible with a traditional expression of Christian ethics.

Truth Except in Advertising

In the end, Alisa Harris has written a piece that probably does represent the frustrations of younger evangelicals. Her remedy, unfortunately, I cannot recommend. How one supposedly “untangles” her Christian faith from conservative politics, but then seemingly intertwines a newfound liberalism, is beyond me. Seen this way, the subtitle of her book is simply misleading. One does not have to subscribe to American conservatism to be evangelical. And one does not expect nor require Harris to retain her conservative bona fides; but neither is it right to advertise bipartisanship while wearing the halo of liberalism—political or theological.

If the intention of the book is a simple re-telling of how one evangelical migrates to a different political position, then Harris tells her story with passion and stylistic excellence. If her intent was to persuade others to undertake a similar leftward migration, Harris fails to make the case.

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