However much contemporary American politicians advocate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights on the global stage, and however striking the progress toward recognition of those rights within the United States (US) itself over the past decade, the US is also home to a substantial share of the world's most incendiary anti-LGBT discourse and activism. Other issues related to sexuality are just as fraught, with much of the pushback against sexuality-related rights stemming from movements associated with the Christian religious right. That amorphous yet organized category of actors has significantly shaped both rhetoric and policies around LGBT and reproductive rights in the US, and is often the source of exported ideas, texts, and activists (see Burack's review of our Global Homophobia in this issue).
In popular parlance, the Christian “religious right” tends to be taken as a relatively unified whole when it comes to these “culture war” issues. However, in this insightful study, Cynthia Burack traces two primary but ideologically divergent, even if practically connected, strands within the Christian right, focusing her attention on a “compassionate” strain that contrasts politically and doctrinally with an earlier and extant “abomination” strain. While elucidating where these perspectives align and diverge, her purpose is the implications of compassion politics for category formation within the body politic, as well as, ultimately, policy advocacy.
Burack argues that a still-evolving “compassionate” strand has gained increasing relevance among the American Christian right. Anti-LGBT and “pro-life,” this strand encourages Christians to embrace repentant or “struggling” fellow Christians who battle same-sex attraction or have had abortions, rather than casting out these sinners altogether. Compassionate Christians still toe an anti-gay/lesbian, anti-choice policy line, yet draw the boundaries of their community differently. While she grants some veracity to popular critiques of “compassion” discourse as politically expedient, compassionate Christianity is more than merely opportunistic, Burack insists. Also therapeutic and pedagogic in its implications, this ideology requires that its proponents allow forbearance to trump disgust at what they deem sinful behavior, among a more inclusive community of Christians. In contrast to “liberal compassion,” compassionate conservatism still holds the line on moral good and evil, yet the latter allows for penitence and redemption, e.g., among “ex-gays” and women who suffer remorse (and a purported syndrome of other ill effects) from prior abortions.
Drawing on the theories of Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand, and Melanie Klein in particular, Burack insists that Christian compassion remains ultimately at odds with democratic equality. In tune with others in the Christian right, the compassionate would still apply a sectarian moral metric to policymaking (contra Arendt's disparagement of compassion as dangerous to politics and her advocacy of an “enlarged mentality”), and still condemn undeserving sexual and gender nonconformists within a capitalist political economy (in line with Rand), even if drawing those boundaries somewhat differently. Moreover, extending Klein's psychoanalytic lens, Burack shows how the expediency of Christian compassion might be in the disavowal of responsibility for what harm their practices and preferred policies have done: ill effects come from immoral behavior, not from stigma and exclusion perpetrated by Christian conservatives.
Given the export of both “culture wars” and “compassionate conservative” rhetoric, we are drawn to where Burack's work could press further, indicating the breadth of the research agenda Burack broaches and the room for further interlocutors in this still-evolving field. A cross-cultural lens raises questions about sectarian specificity within the global politics of sexuality — something Burack only addresses in the difference between liberal and conservative Protestant movements — and would engage, for instance, efforts by scholars to explore the nexus of other religions and homonationalism. Extending Burack's analysis globally would compel us to ask if “compassionate Christianity” can take hold as securely elsewhere as in the US, given local discursive terrains. Moreover, how does the specific salience of both reproductive and LGBT rights — and their clout as voting issues among a significant share of the electorate — shape the relative balance of religious right ideologies in the US and abroad?
That line of questioning suggests another possible extension. Burack focuses exclusively on LGBT and reproductive rights (primarily abortion access), suggesting at least some degree of convergence between attendant claims as part of “a particular kind of reproductive order” (112). But the discussion here of same-sex attraction, for instance, touches on gender roles and behavior, issues that bear further elaboration in their own right. Mobilization around norms of femininity and masculinity, for instance, may have less of a policy anchor than those related specifically to sexual behavior (everything from sodomy laws to marriage equality), yet is arguably just as key to understanding how the religious right socializes its flock. Indeed, the Christian right's insistence on gender difference has taken hold outside the US, with the politics of “gender theory” a companion to anti-marriage access campaigns. Welfare policies, too, are intertwined with religion and LGBT rights, so we might ask if Burack's deconstruction of Christian compassion follows on this terrain.
Lastly, in terms of that larger argument, Burack makes an important overall claim regarding democratic practice: that the sort of “compassion” promoted by Christian right leaders and followers is fundamentally exclusionary. To make this point, she draws principally on Arendt, Rand, and Klein, whose theories ultimately buttress Burack's reading of the political dangers of Christian right compassion as a political mode. Even so, in the three theoretical chapters, Burack looks for statements on gender and sexuality, or for concordance with the claims she wants to make, more than she engages relevant theories to illuminate the Christian right (e.g., to resuscitate its intellectual roots or highlight revealing parallels). Each of the three does play a role in her analysis of boundary-drawing, political mores, and culpability — and these are her primary contributions to understanding the compassionate turn — yet the reader is left to wonder whether these theorists are really the most germane and the extent to which Burack stretches their ideas to fit, a possibility she addresses in her conclusion.
Regardless, Burack's work is a valuable addition to the literature on the Christian right as a part of the American political landscape and on approaches to LGBT and reproductive rights — and the would-be bearers of these rights — in the US. Clearly written and cogently presented, the book will be accessible both to a general audience and to more academic readers. Perhaps most importantly, Burack's analysis makes clear how fundamental such frames and struggles are to the timbre and content of politics and identity broadly — and how much more we have yet to learn about the implications of such struggles for the quality of democracy.
