Lessons from the Evangelists

“Amen?!”

One word, but what an effect. This “amen” was a command and a question, an exclamation and an accusation. This “amen” reached out and grabbed you.

I was sitting in the Oak Grove Baptist Church in Gray, TN, trying to look like I belonged there. The pastor, Ronnie Brashear, was talking about “sowing the seed” of Christianity in the community. But the subject of his sermon wasn’t what impressed me. Brashear had an amazing ability to get everybody involved. He didn’t berate the congregation, but when he said “amen” he wanted you to say it and mean it.

It worked like this. He’d say something that needed the approval of the group—like “you’ve got to sow the seed”—and then he’d say “amen?!” like he was asking for our approval. Our job was to say “amen” back at him. If he didn’t hear enough responses, he’d start picking out individuals from the crowd of about 100 people and asking them individually.

“Isn’t that right, ma’am? You know, women can say amen in this church too.” The crowd laughs, and the woman says “amen.”

I was visiting my girlfriend for the holidays, so the preacher didn’t know me well enough to get me in on the action. As a Jew from the Southwest, this brand of Southern Christianity was new to me. But sitting in the pews and watching Brashear do his thing, I wanted to be a part of this congregation. I wanted to be prodded and made fun of and forced to participate. I wanted to be such an important part of the community that the pastor needed my “amen.”

Pastor Brashear had learned that by asking for more from his congregation, he made church a better place to be. Democrats might learn something from him.

For the past 50 years, evangelical Protestant denominations, like the Southern Baptists, have been growing, while “mainline” Protestant churches, like the Episcopalians and the Methodists, have been slowly losing members. This should be a shock to those of us who think organized religion can be just a wee bit constraining. Groups that ask you to give up an hour a week can’t keep people in the pews, while those who ask you to rearrange your whole life can’t build new churches fast enough.

Watching Pastor Brashear talk to his flock, I began to understand why he would have so much success while mainline Protestant congregations were failing. Brashear keeps track of a lot of his parishioners. You got the sense he knew who hadn’t been to church in a while, and he probably had some sense of what each churchgoer was doing outside the church’s walls. And Brashear wasn’t just asking his congregants to live inoffensive lives and come back next week. He wanted them out in the community bringing in new members. Mainline Protestant leaders are looking for congregants; Brashear wants apostles. And that’s why I wanted to join. By asking for full commitment, Brashear was offering a chance to participate in a modern crusade.

The Democratic Party needs to ask for more. First, it needs a campaign organization that is as inefficient as possible. The Democrats may be able to run an effective campaign with a handful of highly paid advisers and a couple of staff out knocking on doors, but they shouldn’t. If it takes twenty volunteers to do the work of one paid staffer, they should recruit twenty volunteers. If they get more people involved, they’ll have more people giving money, talking to their friends and getting out to vote. Involvement leads to more involvement.

Even our platform needs to ask for more. Democrats have pursued a strategy that asks as little as possible while offering as much as possible. But the Democrats could learn something from the trend in organized religion. The denominations that succeed are the ones that ask for sacrifice, the ones that are difficult. When he introduced his economic policies, John Kerry used to start off by letting the audience know that he didn’t favor taking from the rich to give to the poor. His programs, he claimed, were all about the middle class. Kerry didn’t win the middle class (depending how you slice it) and he clearly didn’t get the kind of victory he needed from that group. Whatever he had to offer them wasn’t worth it.

Democrats need to tell voters they have an obligation to help the poor, an obligation to defend the disenfranchised and the oppressed. Voters are sick and tired of being appealed to like consumers. They want to feel like their vote is more than something they trade in for a tax break or a subsidy. That’s why the evangelicals do so well. They don’t offer salvation on the cheap, but they do offer a chance to be part of something larger than the individual.

When Brashear said “amen?!” he was making services more difficult, but he was also sending the message that everybody in his congregation mattered. The Democrats, by asking voters to participate in a crusade for social justice, can give them an opportunity to feel like they matter. By asking more, they can send the message that they have the power to do more, not just to help themselves but to help their country.

“Amen?!”

Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears regularly.