Religion: Politics and Conscience

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Either Christ was God and Savior and Lord or he wasn't; and if he were, then he had to have all my time, all my devotion, all my life.

The words sound almost as if they could have been spoken by the Apostle Paul himself. They are, rather, the words of a U.S. Senator, Oregon's Mark O. Hatfield. In a straightforward new book, Conflict and Conscience (Word Books; $4.95), Republican Hatfield explains how his conservative Protestant theology* has impelled him to become one of his party's leading liberals.

Most of the book is a collection of speeches and writings by Hatfield over the past few years. But much of it, directed originally to evangelical audiences, will be new and startling to many who have known Hatfield only for his politics. His direction has been clear, he explains in one brief, unemotional passage, ever since a night in 1954 when he sat in a room at his parents' home thinking about the purpose of his life. "I could not continue to drift along, going to church because I had always gone," he writes. "I saw that for 31 years I had lived for self, and I decided I wanted to live the rest of my life for Jesus Christ."

The price of that choice is spelled out in the book's best selection, a 1970 commencement address at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Hatfield's growing opposition to the war in Viet Nam had already earned him a healthy amount of thinly disguised hate mail from "fellow Christians." The letters faulted the Senator for criticizing the President and accused him of encouraging antiwar protest. He came to the occasion in obvious anguish.

Half the Gospel. Theological liberals, he began, may sin by overemphasizing social action and underemphasizing the need for personal conversion, but conservatives can be just as one-sided in rejecting social involvement. "Insofar as we preach only half the Gospel," said Hatfield, "we are no less heretical than those who preach only the other half." As for presidential authority, declared Hatfield, respect for the office had got so out of hand that it carried "a potential of idolatry." Social issues of the day, he said, are everyone's problem, and Christians must not only accept their "collective guilt," but also seek opportunities for "collective good."

Hatfield made it clear that the war in Southeast Asia was for him "morally indefensible." On racism he was equally candid: "Why has the church failed so miserably?" he asked. "Why is it that one of the bastions of racial hate in this country is located firmly in the so-called Bible Belt? Why is it that the overwhelming majority of evangelical churches are still segregated both in spirit and in fact?" Defending governmental intervention to aid the poor, Hatfield asserted, "the evangelical conscience takes its authority not from John Locke's concept of property or William Buckley's concepts of strictly limited government, but from the New Testament."