Theologically orthodox and a respected scholar of 20^th century theological titan Karl Barth, Hunsinger emblemizes the growing evangelical left in academia.

Vociferously opposing the Iraq War as nearly criminal, alleging that the U.S. is complicit in torture, opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez as U.S. Attorney General, and chastising President Bush for supposedly exploiting religious imagery to justify U.S. imperialism, Hunsinger has become as politically obtuse as he is theologically perceptive.

Reportedly, Hunsinger has even likened himself to anti-Nazi theologians in Europe, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.  Like them, he is supposedly resisting fascism and militarism.  Only this time, the threat is American rather than German and Italian.

In an interview with The Nation magazine last year, Hunsinger recalls that he was energized after 9-11.  “I found myself spending more time on the internet than I care to remember trying to get a handle on what was really happening,” he remembered.  “I could see the ominous implications for war as well as for a crackdown on liberty at home.”

Hunsinger wrote an “Urgent Appeal” opposing the invasion of Iraq on just-war grounds, though gained the endorsement of prominent pacifist absolutists like Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School and activist Jim Wallis, along with another long-time Religious Left fixture, the now late William Sloane Coffin, Jr. 

Of course, Wallis eagerly published Hunsinger’s “Urgent Appeal” in his Sojourners magazine.  “I started flooding the inboxes of my friends each day with what I found by scouring the net,” Hunsinger told The Nation.   As a religious critic of Bush, of course he began getting quoted in the media.  “We have a president who is about to plunge the world into chaos by starting an unjustifiable war and he does that in part by wrapping himself in the mantle of religion,” he told The Financial Times of London in early 2003, feeding European stereotypes about American religious zealotry.

Hunsinger admits he was “pretty much just a guy alone in his office with a computer” until the Abu Ghraib scandal.  He penned a new anti-war statement and set up a fundraising website “a la Howard Dean” to underwrite an ad in The New York Times right before the presidential election called “An Appeal to Recover America’s Moral Character.”   The ad was also published in Ohio and Pennsylvania newspapers, seemingly to influence those key battleground states.   CFBA emerged as an anti-Bush organizing tool for religious activists, and its website continues to post anti-war sermons, op-eds and poetry.

“The right-wing take-over of religious discourse in America” needed rebutting, Hunsinger told The Nation.   Meanwhile, he noted that the Left was not always hospitable to religious people.  “The renewal of a progressive movement in our country may well hinge on whether that can change,” Hunsinger observed.

Hunsinger also organized a manifesto against the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination was “a national referendum on torture.”   The combination of Gonzalez, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and President Bush’s soaring rhetoric about expanding democracy disturbed the Princeton theologian.  “Enormities like torture are increasingly papered over with democratic rhetoric and pious falsehoods,” the complained to The Nation.  “Anti-democratic forces in America tighten their grip,” he fretted, while “elements of atrocity, manipulation and indifference add up to a spiritual crisis.”

Left-wing politics are not new to Hunsinger.  He recalled to The Nation his campaigning for Father Robert Drinan’s congressional campaign while Hunsinger was a Harvard seminarian.    In the late 1970’s, Hunsinger worked for William Sloane’s Coffin’s Disarmament Program at New York’s famously more-liberal-than-thou Riverside Church. 

Now, his activism having shifted to a post-Cold War world in which America is still the main problem, Hunsinger is demanding a special prosecutor to investigate U.S. supposed torture practices.  He calls the U.S. actions in Iraq, where it is “destroying entire cities,” a “form of terrorism” that is “immoral and futile.”   Plans for permanent bases in Iraq must be “exposed” along with the “shameless profiteering.”   Iraq’s “long-suffering” people deserve reparations from the U.S., who is the chief source of their suffering, Hunsinger naturally assumes.

Although supposedly opposing the Iraq War on traditional Christian just war criteria, Hunsinger seems to more to rely more on harsh anti-Americanism that presumes America’s worst intentions.  Profiteering, oil and U.S. bases are the actual objectives, not democracy for the Iraqis.  He has written that a “new secret police force is being planned by the CIA “to ensure that a superficially democratic Iraq will actually do America’s bidding.  “The real intent seems to be to continue the occupation by other means,” Hunsinger surmised.  He has quoted the Nuremburg Trials to pronounce that a “war of aggression” is the “supreme international crime.”  For the Princeton seminarian, the U.S. war in Iraq does not seem to be morally different from the Nazi invasion of Poland.

The U.S. role in the world has become so sinister that even the U.S. State Department’s annual report on Human Rights really cannot be taken seriously, Hunsinger has implied.  “It is tragic that the United States has so recklessly squandered the moral authority it once had in the field of human rights,” he said in response to this year’s report, which chronicles the abuses of Islamist Iran, Stalinist North Korea, theocratic Saudi Arabia, and ongoing basket case of communist Cuba, among many others.

The crimes of those regimes do not seem to captivate Hunsinger.  “A democratic nation that refuses to cry out against its government’s complicity in torture and abuse – and to ban them without loopholes – is approaching spiritual death,” he responded.

Hunsinger stresses that his activism is aimed at religious people, especially seminarians and church activists.  “Republican Senators who profess to be believers, for example, have no business voting for torture,” he intones, simplistically.  “Through creative new faith-based initiatives, perhaps they too can be reached,” he has suggested, in the tone that Western missionaries once reserved for describing overseas heathen.

A Presbyterian minister and theologian, Hunsinger’s writings and media quotes provide an ongoing reminder of why members of the clergy usually do better to stick with their original vocation.  Attuned to theological nuance, he seems tone deaf and almost clueless on political events.  To “prove” his case that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq without justification, he quotes the feckless former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil.   For further “proof,” he quotes General Wesley Clark’s assertion that the Bush Administration had secret plans to invade seven countries.  Clark casually made the claim during his short-lived presidential campaign, and eventually admitted it was only a Washington rumor.

Hunsinger trots out the usual dark rumors about Halliburton profits and Vice President Cheney, while repeating facile talking points about what “enemies” Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were.   Although a capable theologian, he seems unable to construct rigorous arguments against the Iraq War and other aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, he relies on sloganeering from the generic anti-war movement.

“Everything depends, in short, on wresting the reconstruction of Iraq away from the militarists and the profiteers,” Hunsinger hyperbolically writes, in a typical bromide that could easily have been penned by his former mentor William Sloane Coffin, 40 years ago, in reference to a different war.

Hunsinger’s “Church Folks for a Better America” is an offshoot of “Coalition for Peace Action,” (www.peacecoalition.org) a 26 year old peacenik group founded to oppose the Reagan military build-up in the 1980’s.   Its “sponsors” include the late William Sloane Coffin, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, the late George Kennan, the late Coretta Scott King, along with living but aging luminaries of the Left such as Harry Belafonte, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Marian Wright Edelman and Andrew Young.  After 30 and 40 years, do these people ever move on to new causes, or at least new things to say?

Although modeling himself after the anti-Nazi theologians of occupied Europe, Hunsinger is securely tenured at one of America’s premier universities.  Despite the angry rhetoric about “fascism,” there will be no late night knocks on his door by the empire’s secret police.  Instead, he will be surrounded by affirmation and approval for his “courageous” witness against the Bush regime. 

Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other anti-Nazi theologians of 60 years ago were morally significant because they dissected Nazism’s unique spiritual evil.  Some, as in the case of Bonhoeffer, were willing to risk martyrdom to illustrate their point.  In vivid contrast, Hunsinger and his theological cohorts confuse the defects of democracy with the sinister intent of totalitarianism.  More perversely, they seem willfully indifferent to radical Islamist and surviving Communist regimes, under whose depredations the true successors of Bonhoeffer continue to risk and suffer martyrdom.

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