Liberal evangelist Tony Campolo, a prominent Obama supporter, is
challenging Darwinism and discomfiting traditional allies on the
left. Campolo served on the Democratic Party platform committee
last year, amending the party’s abortion language slightly to
assuage pro-life evangelicals. In the 1990s, Campolo was arrested
in the Capitol Rotunda in protest against the new Republican
Congress. A prominent defender of Bill Clinton before and after
Monicagate, Campolo served as one of Clinton’s three advertised
spiritual counselors.
So left-wing bloggers feel somewhat betrayed that Campolo has
challenged orthodox Darwinism in a recent
column published in Britain, which also appeared last year in
the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Darwin’s writings, when
actually read, express the prevalent racism of the nineteenth
century, and endorse an extreme laissez faire political ideology
that legitimates the neglect of the suffering poor by the ruling
elite,” Campolo opined.
Campolo’s critique that hard-line Darwinism exposes the poor and
weak to exploitation echoes another dome-headed liberal
evangelical, William Jennings Bryan. The Democrats’ thrice
presidential standard-bearer, Bryan is most recalled as the
public relations disaster of the 1926 Scopes-Monkey trial, where
he defended Tennessee’s prohibition against teaching evolution in
public schools. Wary of his Christian “fundamentalism,” most
modern Democrats prefer to forget that Bryan transformed the
Democratic Party into the party of liberalism. Bryan’s populism
touted state control of the economy beyond what even the New Deal
later would propose.
A not insincere champion of the downtrodden, Bryan opposed
Darwinism not so much on scientific as moral grounds. Like
Campolo, he expected that doctrinaire Darwinism, in its social
ramifications, would diminish the humanity of persons already
vulnerable because of poverty or physical weakness. Unlike
Campolo, Bryan did not critique Darwinism as racist. Although
probably not personally racist, Bryan’s populist coalition and
the Democratic Party included the segregated South, so blacks
were omitted in his appeal to the common man. Sadly, Bryan’s
final great political act was urging the 1924 Democratic
Convention, successfully, to table an anti-Klan resolution.
Not similarly constrained, and frequently the pastor of a black
congregation, Campolo condemned Darwin as a racist, asserting
that Darwin advocated the elimination of “savage races whose
continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.”
Campolo claimed that Darwin’s classic The Descent of Man
(1871) ranks ostensibly lower races in proximity to gorillas. And
Darwin, according to Campolo, warned that the higher birth rates
of supposedly inferior races would potentially exhaust “the
resources needed for the survival of better people, and
eventually dragging down all of civilization.” Campolo also has
Darwin dismissing the insane and the deformed as not worthy of
survival. Darwin’s dismissive views on “inferior” people make him
sound like a Nazi, Campolo surmised, and eventually inspired Nazi
theorists who orchestrated the Holocaust.
Campolo urged that creationists who fear Darwin’s refutation of a
literal biblical creation should instead rebut Darwinism’s
“ethical implications” and its “great threat to the dignity of
our humanity that they suppose.” Whatever “science discovers
about our biological origins,” Campolo concluded, humans retain a
“mystical quality” that “makes each of us sacred and of infinite
worth.” There is an “infinite qualitative difference between the
most highly developed ape and each and every human being,”
Campolo insisted. Darwin never recognized this distinction, which
is why “his theories are dangerous.”
Angry blogging responses to Campolo, while admitting that he has
traditionally been a friend in common battles against the
Religious Right, vow that Campolo has misunderstood Darwin. After
all, they say, Darwin opposed slavery, and his overall racial
views were no worse than was a common in the 19th century. They
contend that Campolo confused Darwin with Herbert Spencer’s
extreme view of laissez faire expressed through “survival of the
fittest.” And they aver that Nazism exploited and misconstrued
Darwinism, and that Darwin is no more responsible for Hitler than
is the Bible responsible for slavery proponents who cherry picked
Scripture for support.
Although a long-time sociologist at Eastern University, Campolo
is more an impulsive pulpiteer than a careful scholar. An aging
survivor of the protest generation, he remains naively wedded to
the 1960s era belief that the Great Society can be achieved by
government fiat. Campolo’s Red Letter Christians, which
is both a book and a movement for liberal religionists,
superficially ascribes elevated importance to the red-lettered,
Jesus-originated words of some Bibles. This Jesus-only emphasis
among some evangelicals falsely pits Scripture against itself,
minimizes Christian moral traditions, and ends up posing absurd
questions for political effect, such as “Who would Jesus bomb?”
But give Campolo some credit for his Darwin op-ed. He commendably
risked the irritation of his liberal allies by openly wondering
how to protect vulnerable persons, ostensibly liberalism’s goal,
against a worldview that, in its strictest form, views human life
as accidental and utilitarian. Campolo, at times, may be as
bumbling and wrong-headed as William Jennings Bryan often was.
The modern welfare state that Campolo acclaims no more ensures
human justice than would Bryan’s proposed nationalization of the
railroads. Yet Campolo, like Bryan, proclaims a transcendent and
unique moral purpose for humanity that their secularist critics
never could.
