Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 5/1/08 Section: News

Claremont McKenna College will add a new professor to its renowned Government department this fall. Mr. Jon A. Shields comes to Claremont from an assistant professorship at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. After graduating with his Ph. D. in Political Science, Shields taught at Cornell University before obtaining his current post. Most recently, he has taught classes on the Culture Wars, Evangelicals and American Politics, Political Inquiry and Political Interest Groups.

Drawing inspiration from his mentor Peter Skerry, esteemed political scientists James Q. Wilson and Richard Fenno, and also Alexis de Tocqueville, Shields studies political ethnography through immersion in political subcultures -- social movements, bureaucratic agencies and party factions. He took the time to have this conversation with the CI about his political science philosophy and religious conservatism.

Sucheski: What unique take on American politics do you bring to the Government department at CMC?

Shields: My work and teaching has focused on religion and public life, the politics of bioethics, and social movements. And I have investigated these subjects through a mix of interviews, participant observation, and quantitative analysis.

Nonetheless I share a lot with other faculty members: with Rod Camp and Chris Nadon I share an interest in the relationship between religion and democracy; with Andy Bush an interest in social conservatism; with Jack Pitney and Joe Bessette an interest in deliberation; and with Rod Camp a methodological orientation toward field work. In the largest sense, though, I share the department's commitment to asking big questions of normative importance and exploring the relationship between democratic theory and the empirical realities of democratic life.

Sucheski: Tell us about your forthcoming book, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.

Shields: The book argues that the media's attentive vigil over the most sensational personalities in the Christian Right has grossly distorted our view of one of the most important movements in the twentieth century. Critics need to reconsider the right's contribution to democratic values. First, the Christian Right has fulfilled New Left hopes by mobilizing one of the most disaffected and alienated groups in the last century. Consistent with New Left aspirations, it has also helped realign politics around contentious moral questions that invigorate American democracy. Second, the vast majority of Christian elites encourage their activists to embrace deliberative norms in the public square, including the practice of civility and secular reasoning. Elites teach these norms because they want their movement to succeed. Yet they also shore up these strategic motives by grounding these secular, deliberative norms in Scripture.

My book further highlights a deeper tension between participatory and deliberative ideals. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the critical role moral passions play in energizing civic participation. Movement elites must constantly excite the moral passions that sustain their organizations. They also can not encourage a genuine openness to alternative points of view least they compromise the very convictions that drive activism. This is simply the price of a more participatory democracy. On the other hand, movements also foster important deliberative norms that contain civic extremism, sharpen the thinking of activists, and raise the level and tenor of political debate for the rest of us.

Sucheski: To what degree do you think moralism has contributed to the increasing shift towards polarization in American politics? Does moralism oppose pragmatism as a force in politics?

Shields: In the 1953 Daniel Boorstin wrote a famous book called The Genius of American Politics. From Boortsin's perspective, America's genius could be found in its pragmatic political tradition. Unlike Europe, which had been torn apart by extreme ideologies, Boorstin concluded that America was great because it had no public philosophy.

Both the right and left turned sharply against this view, which tended to dominate 1950s social science. Buckley and the conservative crowd that swirled around National Review thought politics should be guided by principles, even if they are divisive. Meanwhile, the New Left came to a remarkably similar conclusion.

So, in one sense, these views are starkly at odds. A public philosophy grounded in a pragmatic opposition to ideology is necessarily in conflict with one that is ideological. But in another sense pragmatism is not the enemy of ideology. In a democracy ideological activists usually must compromise, appeal to moderates, and tone down their rhetoric to be successful. So cultural warriors often embrace a kind of pragmatism as a strategy, but not a public philosophy. You might think of them as principled pragmatists or deliberative partisans.

Sucheski: What have you found most interesting about the current presidential election?

Shields: That's a tough call! I've been struck by what a small tent the Democratic Party has become. The race between Obama and Clinton is so close partly because there are hardly any substantive policy differences between them. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, different candidates threatened to split the conservative coalition. Had Giuliani been nominated, social conservatives may have walked out of the party; and when Huckabee was riding high after Iowa, it looked like the economic conservatives and foreign policy neocons might leave. So, the GOP now seems like the party of diversity and inclusion. Can you imagine a pro-life or pro-war nominee in the Democratic Party these days? Yet, on the Republican side, you've got a pro-choice Giuliani and an anti-war Ron Paul.

Sucheski: What is a common misconception about religious conservatives?

Shields: Recently, media elites have been trying to make sense of the diversity in the evangelical world (e.g. Robertson's support of Rudy, Michael Gerson's enthusiasm for Catholic social teaching, and Rick Warren's campaign against global warming).

Such diversity and individualism is perfectly consistent with a long tradition of evangelical politics, which has always been very fluid and unpredictable. Evangelical elites endorsed Roe in '73, opposed WWI, and abandoned a long tradition of supporting social programs in the 1920s. I believe that such fluidity is largely because of the moral individualism and non-traditionalism of evangelicals. In other words, these developments only make sense if we abandon our axiomatic assumptions about evangelicals, which is that they are bound to rigid moral doctrines and a common tradition.



Shields will be teaching classes on the culture wars and on democracy and religion next year. Until then, he recommends two books: Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares (Basic Books, 2006). "It is probably the best book on charity ever written," Shields told the CI. "It shows how both religiosity and opposition to redistribution are among the best predictors of personal charity even after controlling for the kitchen sink." He also recommends Charles Dunn's The Future of Conservatism (ISI, 2007), which "offers a very good collection of essays on American conservatism." • Laura Sucheski is a freshman at CMC.

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