Title: Wake Up America
Author: Tony Campolo
Date: 1991
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-061302-5
Length: 188 pages
Quote: “Has the spirit of idealism departed from our
collective consciousness without our being aware of it?”
Before he wrote this book, Anthony Campolo was a college teacher. I was one of the students who heard his call to us to be "radical Christians," the kind of Christians he studies in this book. It is thanks to his influence on the church in the 1980s that I still describe myself as a radical Christian.
(This statement of identity is crucial to understanding the political content that sometimes pops up at this blog. Radical Christians are political creatures but our focus is on Christian teaching and practice first, without partisan loyalty to any of our fallible fellow mortals. We support people who are doing what we believe to be the right thing. For some radical Christians that may mean consistently voting for or against one party. For me it does not.)
So much for personal loyalty and gratitude to the author. You want to know about the book. Right.
Although Anthony Campolo’s sixteenth book sold well, many
people still quote the title without having read the book. Some are referring to Robert L. Preston's 1973 book, Wake Up America: It's Later Than You Think, or to any of several other new books that have sunk themselves into oblivion by copying the title of a successful earlier book. Preston made "Wake Up, America" a slogan among the people who would later form a political bloc known loosely as the Religious Right.
And this book might be better placed on the Religious Left. Campolo addresses an audience
who were saying, “There must be deep spiritual reasons why democratic capitalism
has won.” In the first chapter he cites the way TV commercials try to appeal to
viewers’ emotional needs. He quotes Herbert Marcuse and Martin Luther King; his
examples of better ways to meet emotional needs than buying consumer goods include
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jimmy Carter, and the Liberation Theology movement.
Although my impression after reading several of his other books is that Campolo
tried to address (and unite) Christians on both “wings,” the only contemporary right-winger
who rates honorable mention in this book is Charles Colson.
The comparison that comes to mind, at this point, is with a
non-religious, business-oriented book that was also very popular in 1991. The
male author claimed to be trying to address, and support and inspire, women in
the audience too. I previewed the book at a library and didn’t buy a copy, but
as I recall every one of its 250 pages contained at least one quote, and of
those quotes only two were ascribed to women authors. Hmm...
Christians occasionally forget that Jesus never belonged to
a twentieth-century political party. We don’t really know what He would have
said to any twentieth-century political party, because He addressed an audience
that had no way to imagine twentieth-century politics. For His audience, monarchy
seemed clearly to have won over democracy. No political party owns the spirit
of Christ; all parties are equally entitled to try to represent Him. However, the “radical Christians” on the left
used to accuse right-wing Christians of acting as if Christianity were all a
matter of working out the correct interpretation of doctrine, or at best
meditating on Bible texts and contemplating the cosmos, rather than actively doing anything in this world.
In Wake Up America,
Campolo doesn’t mention until page 44 that he’s also met people whose theology
might be called “conservative,” even fundamentalist, but who have noticed that
the Bible tells us more about what Jesus did
than about which side He took in the theological debates of the day or how much
time He spent in meditation. Jesus did not call all of His disciples to trek
around the countryside with Him and the Twelve—a small group of
female followers seem to have followed them only on shorter travels in and
between a few nearby towns, and older disciples, like the family in
Bethany and Joseph of Arimathea, seem to have kept their homes and jobs with Jesus' blessing. But He did call them to do things, beyond just exposing
themselves to a sermon once a week.
In Wake Up America,
Campolo mentions charitable organizations led by Southern Baptists earlier and
more often than he mentions Baptist churches. Descriptions of what these
Baptists are doing alternate with descriptions of what left-wingers like the
Sojourners are doing. Stories about Mennonites alternate with stories about
Nazarenes; stories about Evangelicals alternate with stories about Catholics.
Campolo seems to have forgotten his brush with Seventh-Day Adventists, although
there are some “radically Christian” S.D.A. too. Campolo does not, however,
spell out in this book that he is more concerned with the successes of
Christians who’ve “awakened” to the need to act as Jesus acted in this world
than with counting how many of the ones he’s met belong to theologically
“liberal” and “conservative” denominations. He’s addressing the left side of
his audience, perhaps at the right side’s expense.
His stories are, nevertheless, inspiring, and by now it’s an interesting exercise to follow up on the stories he tells. How many of these groups and people are still active after all these years? All of them are, according to their web sites:
Prison Fellowship: prisonfellowship.org
World Vision: worldvision.org
Value of the Person: valueoftheperson.com .
Which ones are best serving Christ, and which have turned aside into political or emotional "work," you may judge. Current reality is that Christian-phobics actively interfere when anything organized as a church offers anything but feel-good blather.
Despite the imperative mood of the title, the text of this
book is not imperative. Campolo seems to have deliberately avoided writing
anything that could make readers feel as if he were standing in front of them
and asking, “What are you doing?” He
describes what other people have been doing and how he has reacted to it. If
you want encouragement to support someone else’s active ministry or organize
one of your own, here it is. There is no “call.” The book ends with
observations, not questions or exhortations. If you’re a sociologist reading
this book as a sociological or historical study, that’s all the book really
demands of you. If you’re a Christian seeking inspiration, you’ll probably feel
it.
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