Methodists, Elizabeth Warren, the Financial Crisis, and Free Market Fundamentalism

Ask Elizabeth Warren, scourge of Wall Street bankers, how they treat consumers, and she will shake her head with indignation. She will talk about morality, about fairness, about what she calls their “let them eat cake” attitude toward taxpayers. If she is riled enough, she might even spit out the Warren version of an expletive.

“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she exclaimed in a recent interview in her office here.

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about Methodists lately. Sure, I farmed out John Wigger’s new biography of Francis Asbury out to a couple of our blog contributors, and recently I was surveying a manuscript of a journal article which discussed the red-baiting spewed at some Methodist Church leaders in the 1950s (one of whom responded with admirable humor and restraint, I thought). But Methodists seem so, umm . . , nineteenth century somehow -- that was the Methodist century, after all. Even my several weeks at the Methodist archives at Drew University were spent in the service of a larger project that had less to do with Methodism per se than religion and civil rights more generally. Methodists just aren't that cool.

All this struck me today while reading about one of my contemporary heroes -- Elizabeth Warren, a Methodist Sunday school teacher, professor of law at Harvard Law School, congressional overseer for the TARP program, and the best-known advocate for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (opposed unanimously by Senate Republicans -- thanks, guys, plus Olympia Snowe and what’s-her-name from Maine, for your heartwarming diplay of bipartisan spirit on a major national issue). The Senator from my home state, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, is apparently too busy fulminating about denying Viagra to sex offenders to worry about a consumer financial watchdog agency. I mean, why spend time worrying about the national housing crash, predatory lenders, pay-day loan scams, and the entire structure of too-big-to-fail “insurance” companies (yeah I’m talking about you, AIG) when there is the slightest possibility that some dude somewhere might snooker his physician into getting him some Viagra. And of course the other congressional wingnuts have been preoccupied egging on the very same Tea Party protesters who hurled racial and homophobic insults at John Lewis and Barney Frank, and are now targeting Rep. Betsy Markey in my current home state of Colorado -- check Sarah Palin's Facebook page, and you'll see that I mean the term "targeting" quite literally. There's a bullseye on you, Betsy, that will make you regret voting for a very modest, limited expansion of health care to some uninsured people.

Apropos of that, I believe it is Warren that I first heard point out that medical costs were the number one cause of bankruptcy in America -- reasonably common knowledge now, not so much a few years ago when I saw her explain that.

A brief description of Professor Warren:

She is an Oklahoma native, a janitor’s daughter, a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School and a former Sunday School teacher who cites John Wesley — the co-founder of Methodism and a public health crusader — as an inspiration.

I’ve heard Ms. Warren on the radio, and seen her on television a number of times, and she seems equally at ease on both Jon Stewart and on Dave Ramsey -- the latter being the current reigning guru of radio financial advice. (Confusingly, Ramsey mixes sound financial advice and common-sense platitudes about staying out of debt with near-daily nonsensical screeds against Social Security and in favor of the kinds of market fundamentalism which have, in part, created the legions of people calling into his shows seeking emergency financial advice). Warren seems equally able to piss off the right-wingnuts and Timothy Geithner at the same time, an unusual quality right now.

In her pitch for a consumer financial protection agency, she speaks forthrightly to Congress, fear of failure be damned:

If that happens, Ms. Warren will still have her own platform, starting with her nearly constant stream of television appearances. Hosts and cameramen love her: she has the friendly face of a teacher, the pedigree of a top law professor, the moral force of a preacher and the plain-spoken twang of an Oklahoman.

Historically, Methodists have been pretty resistant to fundamentalism, and perhaps that helps explain why Warren, an old-fashioned and principled conservative in many ways, has emerged as the strongest proponent of consumer protections against free market fundamentalism.

Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Review)

Religion in American Politics: A Short History
(review reprinted from the newest issue of Journal of Church and State; pdf available here)

Paul Harvey
Religion in American Politics: A Short History. By Frank Lambert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 294pp. $24.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

In this readable synthetic text, Frank Lambert provides a reasonably brief, accessible, and fair-minded survey of the broad history of religion and American politics from the era of the American revolution to the present, including the 2008 election. He follows broad trends, such as the debates between proponents and opponents of "America as a Christian nation" and zooms in on specific controversies (the 1800 election, Sunday mail delivery, slavery, the New Deal, and contemporary fights between the religious right and religious left) to illuminate those broader themes. Eight chronological chapters follow religious controversies in the era of the founding, the formation, and then breakdown of Protestant unity in antebellum America (where Lambert proposes a useful critique of Mark Noll's thesis in America's God), the gospel of wealth and critical social gospel in the post Civil War years, the Scopes Trial and the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the early twentieth century, the connection between religious liberalism and New Deal politics in the mid-twentieth century, the civil rights movement as a religious revival, and finally corresponding chapters on the Religious Right and Religious Left. The early chapters, which come from periods of Lambert's greatest scholarly expertise, are the strongest in terms of scholarly sophistication. The middle chapters tend more or less to be summaries derived from secondary literature and have less original argumentation. The final two chapters doubtless will draw the most interest from readers outside academia interested in the author's take on contemporary religio-political fights.

One basic conflict reappears throughout the book and serves as Lambert's central theme. On the one hand, Lambert follows how "religious coalitions seek by political means what the Constitution prohibits, namely a national religious establishment, or, more specifically, a Christian civil religion" (5). Seeking to influence public policy, religious groups "develop moral agendas that become the centerpieces of their political campaigns." On the other hand, from Eza Stiles Ely's call for a "Christian party in politics" in 1810 to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1970s and his descendants today, "religion in American politics is contested," and "any religious group's attempt to represent the nation's religious heritage or claim to be its moral conscience" always meets opposition. This basic conflict, between religious visions of a Christian America and secular individualist notions of a politics free from religiously inspired divisions and free to pursue a pluralist polity, has defined the story of religion and American politics.

Lambert implicitly stakes his claim in the Madison/Jefferson school at the end when he joins in these Founders' warnings against sectarian religion as a divisive force in public affairs: "they knew that, given the country's pluralist culture, any expression of religion offered as a guide to national policy would be labeled sectarian and would be contested as such. Two hundred and twenty years after the new republic's birth, critics of both the Religious Right and the Religious Left think the delegates were wise to keep religion out of national politics" (250). The founders, Lambert implies, were wise to make the Constitution a "godless" one and let citizens work out their religious quests on their own.

Protestants remain at the center of the story throughout, with Lambert defending that choice by insisting that Protestants in fact have been in power for much of American history, and in earlier periods represented the vast majority of the population of the country. While this choice is defensible in some regards, it also means that the deep Catholic tradition of thinking about religion and politics is almost completely ignored here, an unfortunate exclusion especially when dealing with the anti-Catholicism that went into nineteenth-century notions of "separation of church and state," as well as the major influence of Catholic social gospelers and New Dealers on twentieth-century social legislation. Except for the civil rights chapter, African Americans make virtually no appearance, and Native peoples are given one paragraph briefly mentioning the ghost dance. In other words, for alternative visions of religion and politics, and alternative ways of defining the category of "religion" itself, readers will have to look elsewhere. This book achieves what it intends: a fair survey of mainstream Protestant conflicts of the relation of religion and politics from the founding to the present.

Things I Wish Were True

by Matt Sutton

1) I found the following over the weekend on the internet (so it must be true): In the 1930s Huey Long impregnated Aimee Semple McPherson and the fetus was preserved cryogenically for thirty-some years until it was implanted in a surrogate. The result was Sarah Palin. Too bad I missed this scoop when I was working on my book.

2) That Focus on the Family was irrelevant. Instead they pulled off what has to be the most sophisticated anti-abortion ad ever—by not making it about abortion. I was amazed when I actually saw the Tebow Superbowl ad. That Focus successfully got the talking heads and bloggers discussing and debating a ministy’s right to run an anti-abortion ad for months before the ad aired got the abortion issue back into the nation consciousness. Then, to actually see the ad and realize that it wasn’t even about abortion… Focus deserves a lot of credit for playing me and a whole lot of other people for suckers. You can see the ad here.

3) That the Denver Broncos were still coached by Mike Shanahan and quarter-backed by Jay Cutler. Oh yeah, and that they won the Superbowl.