The American Spectator : George Shultz's New Evangelical Left Friends

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George Shultz's New Evangelical Left Friends

By Mark Tooley on 7.17.09 @ 6:07AM

Nuclear disarmament advocates make common cause -- or is Reagan's former secretary of state being used?

A new Evangelical Left group has enlisted George Shultz in promoting nuclear disarmament. The Two Futures Project (2FP) was unveiled in late April with a media conference call involving Reagan's Secretary of State. Two Futures advocates a "multilateral, global, irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative."

According to Shultz, the Two Futures Project is a "vital new movement to build popular support" for nuclear abolition "from a rising generation of American Christians" that he "strongly" supports and whose message should be "heard loud and clear, from campuses and churches to the halls of power alike."

Shultz may simply be echoing Ronald Reagan's original idealistic vision of a world free from nuclear weapons. Two Futures may have a more complex agenda than he realizes.

Enlisting evangelicals in political causes of the left is now de rigueur. Evangelicals are now America's largest religious group, perhaps 30 percent of the population. And because evangelicals are overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, an otherwise liberal cause that can tout evangelical support automatically broadens its perceived base.

Evangelicals whose endorsement Two Futures prominently advertises include National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) President Leith Anderson, evangelist Tony Campolo, Emerging Church guru Brian McLaren, Christian ethicists David Gushee and Glenn Stassen, Evangelicals for Social Action chief Ron Sider, Christianity Today editor David Neff, Florida mega-church pastor Joel Hunter, Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels, monastic activist and author Shane Claiborne, and former NAE lobbyist Richard Cizik.

Two Futures prominently features a seeming endorsement from Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson, whom some media have cited as a Two Futures supporter. But Colson's quote, although used with permission, dates from last fall, when he praised Shultz's views on nuclear disarmament, as first expressed in a 2007 Wall Street Journal column, before Two Futures was founded.

The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, who calls nuclear weapons "enacted blasphemy," is the young Baptist minister who heads Two Futures. He professes to have "dedicated much of his adult life to the abolition of nuclear weapons." Formerly he worked for and still serves on the board of the anti-nuclear Global Security Institute, founded by former California Democratic Senator Alan Cranston. And he counts the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the 1960s era anti-war activist and outspoken Yale chaplain, as a formative influence. Wigg-Stevenson, who's in his early thirties, himself attended Yale Divinity School and worked for the chapel there.

Besides heading the newly formed Two Futures, Wigg-Stevenson also until recently headed Faithful Security, another religious anti-nuclear group comprised of more overtly liberal Mainline Protestants and Unitarians, and based out of United Methodist Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. He remains as a volunteer Policy Director for Faithful Security.

What Two Futures and Faithful Security advocate and what Shultz advocates may diverge. Shultz has hosted a symposium at the Hoover Institution and has co-authored two Wall Street Journal op-eds with Henry Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn and former Defense Secretary William Perry, espousing Reagan's dream of a de-nuclearized world. Most recently, all four retired statesmen met with President Obama at the White House. Practical steps they are urging include enhanced security for nukes, reducing forward deployed missiles, strengthening the Non-Proliferation and Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaties, and seeking multilateral ballistic-missile defense and early warning systems, especially to guard against Middle East nuclear proliferation.

Missile defense was central to Reagan's dream of a nuclear-free world. No utopian, Reagan believed his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) ultimately could obsolesce most nuclear missiles. Shultz et al. frequently cite Reagan's nuclear free vision laid out at the 1986 Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. But the summit famously failed to produce agreement because Reagan refused to abandon missile defense.

Two Futures seems not directly to talk about missile defense, instead emphasizing the diplomacy requisite for global nuclear disarmament. But Wigg-Stevenson, and his other group, Faithful Security, seem hostile to missile defense. In 2000, he criticized President Bill Clinton's plans for National Missile Defense (SDI's successor), deriding it as a "Maginot Line," a frequent allegation against Reagan's SDI.

Faithful Security includes the Episcopal Church, United Methodists, Quakers, liberal Catholic orders like Pax Christi, the Islamic Society of North American, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the National Council of Churches. It has warned against assertive U.S. policies against Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs and urged diplomatic solutions. Such a predictably left-wing coalition, comprised mostly of declining religious groups, would not generate media attention or gain endorsements from former secretaries of state.

So Two Futures has stepped forward as the ostensibly evangelical voice for nuclear disarmament, though how it substantively differs from Faithful Security is not clear.

Two Futures, since its launch in Austin in April, has gained attention in USA Today, the Washington Post, the Tennessean, and the Dallas Morning News, among others.

"I know when most people think of the elimination of nuclear weapons, they think of tie-dyed activists," Wigg-Stevenson told the Tennessean. "It's not about conservatives becoming in favor of a liberal issues. It's about evangelicals raising an authentically Christian voice about a nonpartisan issue." He predicted: "The generation of Evangelicals currently coming into maturity, however, will decreasingly understand itself in contradistinction to more progressive politics, as the previous generation has largely done."

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topics:
Nuclear Weapons, Ronald Reagan, Missile Defense, Evangelicals

About the Author

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (16) | Leave a comment

Tim| 7.17.09 @ 8:33AM

"The generation of Evangelicals currently coming into maturity, however, will decreasingly understand itself in contradistinction to more progressive politics, as the previous generation has largely done."

I don't know any honest people who talk like that.

Steve| 7.17.09 @ 10:18AM

Let me translate, Tim. In the past, Evangelicals understood that progressive politics is a religion all unto itself, one in opposition to the Evangelical understanding of Christianity; the current generation of Evangelicals is being effectively suborned by progressive politics, giving way to new Evangelical understanding of Christianity.

I thought Mr. Tooley was remarkably pithy, absolutely not dishonest.

The larger question, of course, is: are the current Evangelicals simply trodding the path walked by stylish lefties since the days of the Transcendentalists: that is, the path out of Christianity altogether? My guess is that hey probably are.

Liberal Reader| 7.17.09 @ 11:29AM

I certainly understand people who argue that a nuclear free world is a kind of pipe-dream that could be dangerous to American security, and I largely agree.

However, when thinking in the longest possible terms, that is, the survival of human civilization over the next few hundred years, nuclear weapons MUST be considered a permanent threat.

For now, let's face it: we're getting because of one not-too dependable situation. The people who tend to have control of nuclear weapons are highly successful within their respective societies, and they are highly educated. People such as this are often morally dependable.

This state of affairs cannot last forever. We've not had a terrorist nuclear strike or an accidental launch or detonation because of something a little more comprehensible than good luck but something less than predictable and reliable.

Eventually, these things will fall into the wrong hands unless they are done away with. Perhaps not entirely. But the huge stocks available in the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union, represent a continuing threat to human civilization and even to the survival of the human race. The faith-based approach has stood us in good stead, but it won't forever.

pete the mediocre| 7.17.09 @ 4:13PM

The presence of nuclear weapons with the threat of MAD has kept Europe from instigating WWIII for the past 64 years. We may not like the danger posed from nukes, but I'm not ready to give up the protection they provide.

Dai Alanye| 7.17.09 @ 9:10PM

I am in favor of universal disarmament, nuclear and conventional.

But you go first, please.

bluecollarbytes| 7.17.09 @ 9:50PM

How does one go about burying technologies? And who enforces it, and with what? 'well uh you guys signed these agreements. Snot fair you should go ahead and develop more nukes. Better stop. We mean it.'

jordan 6 rings| 7.17.09 @ 10:42PM

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دردشه| 7.18.09 @ 7:34AM

I am very interested in it, could you please tell me some more imformation? Thank you

David Neff| 7.18.09 @ 4:51PM

I base my opposition to nuclear weapons on the classic Christian just war criteria. That's conservative, folks. How that be tagged as "left"?

Pentecostal Pimp| 7.20.09 @ 7:13PM

A proud flag waving pimp who has even pimped out my granmother.

Land of the Free and the Brave, I use religion to sell almost anything including Homosexual Congress men, and Peadophiles in the White house. We are the new Sodom, hell on earth, we live to kill and invade Arab countries to kill their babies to keep the population down.

Todd Johnson| 7.21.09 @ 1:40PM

Dear Mr. Tooley,

I couldn't agree with you more. Dr. Schultz, that poor simple man--having served as US Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State after having held professorships at U of Chicago and MIT --is probably being taken advantage of by Wigg-Stevenson and his cohort of "evangelical left" boogeymen who you seem to think are hiding in every closet. Speaking of closets, you were right to bring up the relationship between Two Futures and admitted homo tolerator, Richard Cizik. Since the NAE has a lock on defining what it means to be an "evangelical" and the NAE fired Cizik, then clearly Cizik must be another leftist *pseudo* evangelical seeking to undermine the true remnant . . . of which you are fortunately a member. Simply by association, Two Futures is discredited.

I don't know if anyone has informed you, Mr. Tooley, but the cold war ended a couple decades ago. Just to locate the event historically, that was *after* Vietnam and *before* Desert Storm--perhaps around the time you and your CIA buddies were perfecting the finer points of water boarding. Skinny jeans may be back, sir, but Raegan is dead and Gorbachev is continually attempting to establish democratic political parties in Russia. Move on you clown. Everybody else has.

Finally, let me just say that, aside from being a paranoid wahoo, you are also an awful writer. Now lest I be held to the same standard of judgement I levy on you, here, I'd like to draw a genre distinction. What I'm writing is a personal attack on you, because I think you're an arrogant pea-brained asshole. The standards for such writing are, shall we say, somewhat fluid. You, on the other hand, were supposed to be writing an informative article wherein you might rightly be expected to state and then argue a thesis for the sake of "proving" it out to your readers. Instead, you managed to insult George Schultz's intelligence, decry Wigg-Stevenson, an ordained and remarkably orthodox Southern Baptist minister, as a scheming leftist, congratulate the NAE for their reprehensible behavior in firing Richard Cizik (also shedding light on your own implicit homophobia), and generally just make an ass of yourself. If it was your intention to reason your way to a conclusion, you did not do so. For future articles you might want to try that. I will include a sample syllogism below and you may copy and paste it for your next article. Don't forget to change the premises and conclusion, though, or you'll wind up looking even *less* educated and *more* inarticulate than you do now. By the way, thank you for contributing this piece of journalistic brilliance for our collective enlightenment. It's truly a gem.

Syllogism: 1) The IRD is an institution comprised entirely of misguided soapbox preachers too enamored of their own "God and Country" narrative to have any idea what "biblical and historical Christian teachings" might really look like.
2) You are, quite appropriately, the head of the IRD.
3) You are the ultimate misguided soapbox preacher.

In my opinion, you should quit your job, get off your soapbox, go back to school, learn how broad and diverse "biblical and historical Christian teachings" really are, and try to serve some positive function in society. Perhaps you could be George Schultz's paperweight. Just a thought.

XO,

Todd

George| 5.10.11 @ 7:50PM

Wow thank for writing this article, it was really interesting! I think we need to talk about new things like this more often. I hope you keep writing like this.