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Early America was "pluralistic" within a Christian context. No one was obliged to worship God according to the manner of one particular group—e.g., Congregationalist, Episcopal, or Baptist—but it was rather generally taken for granted that most Americans would worship God within the framework of one or another branch of the Christian tradition. Those who placed themselves outside the tradition—Jews and other members of non-Christian religions, freethinkers, and atheists—were few in number, and society could easily accommodate their diversity without danger to its fundamental cohesion.

To speak of "pluralism" in a context in which those who wish to revere God and those who militantly deny his existence have equal status would certainly be awkward, but even this would not be an absurdity for the Christian. If he were expected to accept the fact that public institutions and ceremonies would at times be indifferent to God and appear to presuppose the autonomy of man, he could also expect that the atheistic minority, in the name of pluralism, might tolerate the occasional expression of public reverence for God and the presupposition of leis sovereignty in certain public institutions and ceremonies. But this is precisely what "pluralism" as currently understood does not do. It never allows public institutions to reflect the views of the theistic and nominally Christian majority; in fact, it demands that they explicitly repudiate them and affirm the autonomy and self-sufficiency of man, a concept as odious to Christian minds as it is untrue to objective reality. It is as absurd to think that substantial actions could be launched to prevent astronauts from public reading of Bible texts while traveling at government expense as it would be to suggest that they ought to be prevented from not reading them. But somehow a commitment to "pluralism" permits the one and inhibits the other. It is just another element in the mythology that effectively keeps Christians in America from contributing any of that which is most precious to them to general public discussion, even when it is concerned with ultimate values and the nature and destiny of man.

Another area of modem American life in which the substantial weight of the Judaeo-Christian ethical tradition has been explicitly rejected in favor of a permissiveness derived from paganism is the continuing controversy over abortion on demand. From the historical perspective, the overwhelming testimony of Christians from the earliest days to the present has been one of opposition to abortion except in cases involving a serious threat to the life of the mother. Major Protestant ethicists, including in our own generation figures as diverse as Barth, Bonhoeffer, Thielicke, Ramsey, Outler, and Schaeffer, agree on this point. Yet, as it happens, several major American denominations support not merely a limited liberalization of abortion but the unique access to abortion on demand created by the Supreme Court in January, 1973.

What has led denominational Protestant executives to break so dramatically with the ethical standards of Christendom during almost two millennia? What consideration could be strong enough to persuade not only many leaders of liberal or less-than-biblical denominations but also a number of conservatives thus to repudiate a major and constant element of the Christian ethical heritage?

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51