As I began reading E. J. Dionne’s Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right, a memory kept coming to mind, a memory from my college years in the 1970’s.

I should begin by confessing that I am an Evangelical Christian born of Evangelical Christians. Admittedly, my status as an Evangelical these days is questionable: Time Magazine listed me as an influential one, but I get the feeling that some notables at Christianity Today would be less enthusiastic to do so. Whatever my current status, I grew up swimming in the deep end of the Evangelical pool, and like a lot of my Evangelical peers, I was strongly influenced in my college years by the work of the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer.

Schaeffer was, arguably, a fundamentalist, but he was also brilliant, educated, and lived in Europe – all of which made him stand out to Evangelicals whose leaders tended to be suspicious of too much high-falutin’ learning and whose roots were in the American Southern heartland, not the Swiss highlands. Schaeffer invited conservative Christians to take culture seriously. His books reflected on contemporary film, architecture, art, philosophy, and literature – a rarity in those days for Evangelical authors. While it’s easy to fault some of his either/or analyses (John Calvin = good; Thomas Aquinas = bad; Soren Kierkegaard = very bad), he gave us Evangelicals permission to enjoy “secular” culture and he invited us to engage with the world outside our religious ghettos. C.S. Lewis was dead, but Schaeffer was alive, and he was the smartest living Evangelical Christian many of us knew about.

Reading Dionne, I keep recalling a sunny day between classes in about 1974, sitting on a lawn reading Schaeffer’s new book, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century. Coming from a conservative background but feeling the pull of progressive politics, I remember these words taking my breath away:

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo… If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.

But something happened to Schaeffer right around the time of the Reagan Revolution. Through his books like How Should We Then Live and A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer began promoting a kind of conservative political activism that leaned toward militancy on occasion, even evoking the unlikely (and to me, scary) reactionary example of Oliver Cromwell. I remember being shocked to see Schaeffer appear on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club one afternoon, and thought, “Who’s changing, Pat or Francis?” It turned out to be Francis. Beginning in the early 1980’s, Schaeffer’s work became a bridge for many of the brightest and best of the boomer generation – including many of my friends, counter-cultural participants in the Jesus Movement - to become indefatigable foot-soldiers of the Religious Right.

One of the ideas Schaeffer constantly attacked was “Hegelian synthesis”: the idea that we pursue truth through a kind of historical pendulum-swing moving from thesis to antithesis, eventually settling into a synthesis of the two (which then becomes the next thesis, and so on). Schaeffer urged his readers to stand for “antithesis” and resist “synthesis,” but I wonder if recent history doesn’t show this very thing, that the secularist/leftist movements of the 1960’s and early 1970’s provided a thesis to which the later Francis Schaeffer and the Religious Right provided the antithesis, and now, voices like those of Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and E. J. Dionne are providing a needed synthesis. These words from the end of Dionne’s first chapter articulate the synthesis as well, I think, as anyone ever has:

Religion is, necessarily, both conservative and progressive. Religion is rooted in tradition and survives through development and change within the tradition. It applies old truths to new circumstances. It also reexamines old truths in light of new circumstances. The conservative insists that the tradition not be distorted merely to accommodate passing fads and fashions. The progressive insists on purifying and clarifying the tradition by freeing it from the distortions of cultural encrustations of the past. The conservative keeps the tradition alive by honoring it. The progressive keeps the tradition alive by adapting it, and sometimes by challenging it.

Both conservatives and progressives, Dionne concludes, “need each other more than they know,” and therefore should respect one another in dynamic solidarity – not turn on one another in the rhetoric of culture wars. Evangelical Christians could have opted for this solidarity and balance nearly thirty years ago, but we didn’t. Perhaps it’s not too late. Perhaps beyond religious right and secular (or religious) left, there is a new synthesis of dynamic solidarity waiting to be created.