I'm not comfortable with the word"liberal" myself, because I do disagree with the worldview of what Krubner describes as the"foundation texts" of Western liberalism:

The foundational texts of liberalism are those of John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill - all of which emphasize the rights of the individual against the state and society. Locke suggested a social contract existed, and people held certain rights in their natural state which they did not abandon when they joined human society. These texts also suggest that individualism, even extremely selfish and self-centered individualism, is good for society. Consider Smith's insistence that an individual, pursuing their own self-interest often does more for society than the person who sets out to do good.
If Schwyzer has a way of reconciling liberalism to communitarianism, I'd like to hear it. That would, indeed, be very original...

Perhaps Krubner is pushing the individualism of these classical liberals too hard. But if he is accurate, then of course, there is an ideological and theological divide between evangelical Christianity and liberalism. One problem in this country is that the left is split between its"libertarian" (classical liberal) and"social justice progressive" (communitarian) wings, in much the same way that the right is split between its"libertarian" and"social conservative" branches. A number of evangelicals whom I know are comfortable in the"social justice progressive" camp, but not the"libertarian" group. In other words, we believe that Christians have a spiritual and moral obligation to strive for justice and peace. These are biblical mandates for us. But the extension of justice and peace is not coterminous with maximizing individual freedom! Indeed, it is often quite the opposite, as it seems certain that much injustice results from the abuse of personal freedom.

Krubner worries about the Christian (and secular communitarian) concern with community, and how it undermines classical liberalism. He writes:

What do people really mean when they say they want more community? I'm wary. America seems to me an easy country to meet new people. There is a great variety of organizations to join. It takes very little effort - a free hour or two each week and you can join up with a new group of people who share at least one interest in common with you. In fact, forming community, in this sense, is so easy, that I'm fairly sure that when people talk about wanting more community, they are talking about something else entirely. I'm wary, as I said before. I'm wary - I worry that people are actually talking about non-voluntary forms of community. (Emphasis is mine).

With all due respect to Mr. Krubner, the idealization of solely"voluntary" communities is, I think wishful thinking. The most basic form of community is the family, which in most instances one enters in a decidedly involuntary fashion. We don't pick our parents, our culture, our homeland. Our earliest human experiences are formed not in a democratic community, nor (ideally) in a totalitarian dictatorship. Good families do impose involuntary obligations on their members (ranging from changing one's children's diapers to changing one's mother's diapers), but good families also allow their adult members to choose to opt out of family life.

Christian political thought, back to Paul, used the image of the body as the best way to represent the interconnectedness of the human family and the church. Paul says"the eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you". As a social justice progressive, I worry that classical liberalism is taking the side of the eye! Radical individualism (which has historically been an ideology which only wealthy men could practice) is the denial of the very kinds of basic responsibilities which Christians see as central to our vision of the body and community. Feeding the homeless, caring for the immigrant, providing health care to the sick -- these are not choices. They are obligations. A progressive vision that I can and will embrace will insist that those among us who see ourselves as least bound by obligations to the larger community begin to take notice of the hands, the feet, and the other parts of the body.

So, no, by the classical definition, I am no liberal. Perhaps on issues where our beliefs coincide (like opposition to the war in Iraq, concern for the poor in this country, opposition to capital punishment) Christian progressives and secular liberals can work together. But on other issues (most obviously the"life" issues like abortion and euthanasia), we may be forced to take opposing sides from our dear friends.

I'm tired of liberalish Christians telling me it's my job to reach out to Christian moderates who feel that"the Left" is hostile to them. Screw that. It's time for liberalish Christians to tell their slightly more right-leaning brethren that those of us who fight to maintain the separation between Church and State do it to protect freedom of religion - not destroy it.

I'll just throw in a few of my own thoughts:

My politics are derived from my faith, not the other way around. When I was younger, and a secular liberal, my politics were the only faith I had! Since coming to Christ (and yes, I do call myself"born again" without embarrassment), I have had to rebuild my politics from the ground up. When I consider political questions, I am forced to ask myself what position I believe Christ calls me to. This isn't easy, for any number of obvious reasons, starting with the fact that the New Testament is not a modern political manual. This is why I can't merely allow myself to hunt and peck through Scripture, finding passages that support my already-in-place suppositions about justice. (Many liberal and conservative Christians alike do this; it's an understandable habit, but a bad one). Rather, I have to be open to what the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and my church community are telling me about right, wrong, peace and war and so forth.

I belong to a church that embraces pacifism as the fullest understanding of the Gospel. I belong to a church that opposes the death penalty and abortion, seeing them both as fundamental evils even while recognizing that the latter takes far more lives than the former in this country. Some Mennonites are Republicans, largely because (while pacifist by doctrine) they see abortion as the number one social evil of our age. Most Mennonites lean to the left, building coalitions with pro-choice secular liberals on issues ranging from capital punishment to Iraq to immigration to poverty, all the while willing to gently but firmly diverge from our non-believing friends on issues like abortion and therapeutic cloning.

I have to say that most secular liberals whom I meet impose a double standard on me. When I quote Scripture on the subject of war and justice, ala Martin Luther King, they applaud. When I quote Scripture to explain my position on abortion, they are enraged at my effort to"impose my personal beliefs on them." Obviously, I am as guilty of"proof-texting" as the next person, but I am tired of the double standard.

I've often recommended this First Things article by Stephen Carter, Liberalism's Religion Problem. It's a brilliant piece, I agree with virtually every word, and I love his summation:

Liberal theory continues to be unwilling to accommodate itself to the systems of meaning preferred by the most religiously committed citizens of the nation. Instead, liberalism has grown ever more muscular, pressing theories about education and the public square that few religious citizens will ever support. That is a flaw in liberal theory, not a flaw in religion. For serious religion understands that the life lived without attention to the basic question is life not worth living. In traditional Christianity, discerning God’s will and doing it is prior to everything else. If God’s will is that we suffer, the Christian must suffer. If God’s will is that we change, the Christian must change. If God’s will is that we fight, the Christian must fight. Even when, in secular terms, the battle the Christian is fighting seems to be an appealing one, the Christian’s motive for the struggle must always be to glorify God—and the Christian must never be afraid to say so.

There will be times when this leads us into coalition with liberals. But there will be times when we are far, far apart. The Christian left must be faithful to Christ first, not secular dogma. Where our agendas and our understandings coincide, so much the better. But at times, we will stand with our Christian brethren on the right of the political spectrum, not out of sectarian loyalty but out of a sense that, as Carter said,"discerning God's will and doing it is prior to everything else."

It is no easy thing to claim to have discerned God's will. No wise Christian tries to do it alone. We do it in the light of (thanks Wesley) Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience; above all we do it prayerfully, humbly, and together.

First, is there such a thing as"Christian History"? Do Christian historians do"history" differently because of their presuppositions about God's role in human affairs?

Second, is there an equivalence between an explicitly Christian approach to history and a"feminist", or"Marxist", or"Post-Structuralist" approach? If we accept Marxist and feminist historians -- and their ideological commitments -- within the secular academy, why do we not also accept evangelicals? Or is there some explicit difference between Marxism and Christianity that makes the former more palatable than the latter?

Third, to what degree can a Christian historian in a secular academic environment honor both his obligations to his profession and to the Great Commission? Can we use history as an evangelistic tool in a public institution without betraying our commitments to Caesar, our employer and paymaster?

Let me do things out of order and tackle the third question -- which is perhaps the most obviously" charged" of these -- first.

Among other things, I've been"googling" about, looking for more on the subject. I came across this paper from 1999 by a Robert McKenzie of the University of Washington, entitled"Christian Faith and the Study of History: A View from the Classroom". McKenzie is discouraged by the rise of"postmodern relativism" within the culture and its impact upon students' willingness to think deeply and critically about the"meaning of life". He and I seem to have similar students:

...the most common type of student I have encountered appears to possess no deeply-held convictions of any kind, much less anything approaching a consciously articulated world view, however immature. I find it relatively easy to show such students the nihilistic implications of philosophical relativism, but getting them to care is a more difficult matter. And in spite of all the talk about the"angst" felt by"generation X," I doubt that this is an entirely new phenomenon. More than a half-century ago, C. S. Lewis noted that,"for every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be guarded from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts."

This does not make the job of the Christian historian impossible, however:

The good news is that, for scholars who wish to do so, it is a simple task to structure their history courses in such a way that they touch regularly upon"Permanent Things," i.e., questions of explicitly religious significance. This need not be orchestrated artificially, furthermore, but rather develops naturally when students are encouraged to use history as well as understand it, to evaluate the past as well as describe and explain it. Indeed, I would argue that, at least for the teaching of history, it is the exclusion of religious questions that is artificial. This should not be surprising, of course, given that history as a discipline focuses so centrally on the experience of humans, including the ultimate questions that they have always confronted"about the nature and meaning of the world, and of [their] existence in it."

But in our contemporary academic culture of what I choose to call"militant secularism", the prospects are bleak:

Although it may be encouraging to note how relatively easy it is to inject religious questions into the history classroom, it is also essential to remember the larger institutional context in which those questions are raised. Therein lies the bad news. In the secular classroom, the believing historian may pose religious questions but never answer them, introduce religious perspectives but never endorse them, demonstrate the contradictions of other belief systems but never proclaim the good news of a consistent alternative...

Well might we contemplate, before closing, the sober query of Psalm 11:3:"If the foundations are destroyed, what will the righteous do?" At the very least, this is a question that every believing scholar on a secular campus must reckon with, implicitly if not explicitly.

Nine or ten years ago, when I was a pup, one of my older female colleagues asked me why I wanted to teach women's history. Given that she was on my tenure review committee, I made some weak and diplomatic answer, stressing the goal of"teaching students about important women from the past whose stories have been neglected within the dominant narrative." My reviewer shook her head, and asked me"Do you want to know why I teach women's history? I teach it to raise up young feminists!" I've never forgotten that, and I have come to adopt her position wholeheartedly (though she and I disagree mightily about some of the finer points of what constitutes feminism!)

Now that I am a"born-again evangelical" (albeit one whose politics do not match the stereotype conjured up by that image), what does that mean for my teaching of Western Civilization? I would never say that I want to"raise up young Christians!" But I can say that I do intend to do the following in my courses: structure an overall narrative -- and ask certain questions -- with the intent of leading students to what McKenzie calls the"good news of a consistent alternative" to our culture's thin diet of relativism.

In the field of Chicana literature and history, Anzaldua was a giant. In 1981, wiith Cherrie Moraga (from whom I took classes at Cal), she edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. In 1987, she published La Frontera/Borderlands. The title poem included the memorable searing lines:

Cuando vives en la frontera people walk through you, wind steals your voice, you're a burra, buey, scapegoat forerunner of a new race, half and half - both woman and man, neither- a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to put chile in the borscht eat whole wheat tortillas speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent; be stopped by la migra at the border check points...

The obit in the Times drily notes:

The author's intensely personal style broke the conventions of scholarly writing and kept her outside the mainstream of academia, a position that Anzaldua, who published widely in alternative journals, did not seem to regret.

I know that my own desire to infuse the classroom with personal narratives was rooted in my own response to Chicana/Latina feminist writers and academics like Anzaldua, Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Norma Alarcon. More than their"white" sisters, they refused to de-legitimate emotion and personal experience. In 1990, Anzaldua wrote:

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women-of-color. Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus we need teorías that will enable us to interpret what happens in the world, that will explain how and why we relate to certain people in specific ways, that will reflect what goes on between inner, outer and peripheral 'I's within a person and between the personal 'I's and the collective 'we' of our ethnic communities. Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries-new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. We need theories that will points out ways to maneuver between our particular experiences and the necessity of forming our own categories and theoretical models for the patterns we uncover. We need theories that examine the implications of situations and look at what's behind them. And we need to find practical application for those theories. We need to de-academize theory and to connect the community to the academy. 'High' theory does not translate well when one's intention is to communicate to masses of people made up of different audiences. We need to give up the notion that there is a 'correct' way to write theory.

It's a big loss.