Reflections on church, state, and culture in America

Some decades ago American Protestantism quietly retired from its post as acting chairman of our cultural heritage and assumed a nominal emeritus position. The circumstances of this remarkable event, as well as its exact time, remain obscured in mystery. Some have attributed it to ill health, others to mental disease. Yet by all appearances, the Church at the time of its retirement was at the height of its powers. According to its own reports and the best available statistics, it had just completed a “Great Century” and was well prepared to face the era that lay ahead. Yet when confronted with the challenges of rapidly changing social, moral, intellectual, and scientific standards, American Protestantism courteously stepped down with hardly a protest or an apology.

Today Protestants in America live with the consequences of our emeritus status. The churches we support, and even those we rebuke, are notoriously ineffective. They are, by and large, neither loved nor hated; they are merely patronized and ignored. Confronted with little but the evidence of our weakness, we may well ask, Why?

Although all must concede that a large part of the answer is found in the nearly irresistible secularizing forces in modern culture, few will exempt the Church itself from responsibility. Who or what, then, in the twentieth-century Church should be blamed?

A generation ago the answer seemed simple enough. Theological liberals and fundamentalists characteristically blamed each other. Today, however, we seem to have entered an era of reappraisal. Many of the heirs to each of these traditions now concede some weaknesses within their heritage. The vogue of terms like “neo-orthodoxy,” “neo-liberalism,” “neo-fundamentalism,” and “neo-evangelicalism” presumably indicates a desire to be dissociated from the programs of a generation ago.

Yet we err if we place the blame for the weaknesses of the Church in twentieth-century America primarily on the excesses of liberalism and fundamentalism. These after all developed only after the battle against modern secularism had been all but lost. The ineffectiveness of the Church today is not the result of those emergency measures devised in the midst of crisis. Its cause should instead be sought in the era of Protestant success. Only when we frankly confess to the weaknesses characteristic of American Protestantism even in its most prosperous years are we prepared to devise a renewal program that will be more than an attempt to revive the traditions of a lost cause.

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Our self-analysis could focus on any one of several aspects of our heritage. This essay will attempt, not to analyze the complex relationships that have shaped American Protestantism, but only to sketch outlines thematically related to one of the contributing factors—the response to legal disestablishment.

The Protestant Ideal

The Protestants who settled America were not champions of religious freedom. Indeed, except among a few radicals—Roger Williams and William Penn, for example—the dominant attitude of the seventeenth-century settlers was honest bigotry. Nathaniel Ward, the first (and perhaps the last) wit among New England’s Puritan clergymen, epitomized orthodox sentiments when in 1645 he wrote, “He that is willing to tolerate any unsound Opinion, that his owne may also be tolerated, … will for a need hang God’s Bible at the Devill’s girdle.” Anglican Virginia was hardly more “enlightened.” There the standing law of 1612 threatened the death penalty for speaking impiously against the doctrine of the Trinity or the known articles of the Christian faith. Such opinions and laws hardly seemed harsh to transplanted Europeans whose tradition of legal establishment was thirteen centuries old and who lived in an age when nations were commonly torn apart in the quest for religious uniformity. Their deepest religious convictions demanded that church and state be allied in ensuring that their society be unequivocally Christian.

Yet the state-church ideal could not long be maintained in America. The land was too large and the population too scattered for effective controls. More importantly, diversity of beliefs among immigrant groups forced recognition of tolerance as the only feasible path. Reluctantly, then, by the early eighteenth century American Protestants had had to give up their hopes for a state-enforced religious uniformity. In most of the colonies, however, they maintained a modified form of establishment, giving tax support and official sanction to the preferred religion, though granting grudging toleration to dissenters.

This is the background against which separation of church and state in the American Constitution should be seen. When the framers of the First Amendment declared that the new federal government “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion,” they were recognizing an accomplished fact—that America’s religious diversity made federal control impractical. Protestants acquiesced, but not always out of conviction. Separation of church from state support was something that happened to them, not something they had planned. As Perry Miller has said, “they stumbled into it, they were compelled into it, they accepted it at last because they saw its strategic value” (quoted in Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment [Harper, 1963]; Mead’s book and Winthrop S. Hudson’s American Protestantism [Chicago, 1961] provide documentation and elaboration for many of the arguments of this essay).

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Although they accepted official separation of church and state because they had to, few American Protestants gave up the essential aspect of their traditional ideal—that theirs would be a Christian nation. Yet it was now an era of spiritual crisis. The Revolution appeared to have unleashed the forces of Enlightenment skepticism and to have fostered widespread infidelity. With the weapon of state sanction gone, the churches were forced to turn to new strategy. They would Christianize America yet—if not by state coercion, then by evangelical persuasion. (Perry Miller elaborates upon this thesis in “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in Smith and Jamison (eds.), The Shaping of American Religion [Princeton, 1961].) The spearhead of their strategy was the simple gospel preaching and intensive evangelism of the revival. These techniques, having proved effective during the Great Awakenings of the colonial era, seemed ideal weapons with which to face the post-Revolutionary crises of infidelity and disestablishment.

Indeed they were. The American Protestant churches never showed greater sustained vitality than in the first half of the nineteenth century. With all hope of winning America to official state Protestantism now gone, they turned with renewed vigor to their mission of winning men to Christ. As Lyman Beecher, the indomitable general of many of the campaigns of this “Second Great Awakening,” observed when looking back on Connecticut’s disestablishment of 1818, it turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

Yet the strategy of the “Second Great Awakening” involved far more than the widespread evangelistic and missionary programs. It was a comprehensive interdenominational campaign to Christianize American society, not only spiritually, but intellectually and morally as well. In the intellectual sphere the churches stood in a strong position, virtually controlling America’s higher education. At mid-century nearly every college in the country still had an evangelical Protestant (usually a clergyman) as its president. As the nation had moved west, Protestant missionary zeal had inspired the founding of numerous new colleges in the frontier communities. Moreover, the Protestant theologians of this era had few intellectual peers, and a vigorous religious press was a formidable part of the nation’s communication system.

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Moral reform of the society was to complete the strategy. Militant evangelicals founded scores of “voluntary societies” to aid the denominations in combatting a host of national sins, most notably slavery, intemperance, and Sabbath desecration. When possible, they enlisted governmental support for these campaigns. Having inherited an ideal from the era of national establishment, evangelicals were convinced that the churches should act as moral guardians for the entire society. Not only should Christian ethical standards be maintained among the regenerate; they should be enforced among the unregenerate as well. National social reform, dealing largely with the externals of behavior, thus appeared as an integral part of the evangelical message.

Despite remarkable revivals and respectable intellectual achievements, the most spectacular success of nineteenth-century American Protestants came in this area of national social reform—in the Northern triumph over slavery. Whatever its political causes, the Civil War was to the Protestant churches a Christian crusade. Northern denominations readily adopted resolutions explicitly identifying the cause of the Union with the cause of Christ. The war was God’s judgment on covenant-breakers and sinners, they affirmed. Victory would hasten the millennial return of Christ. His truth was marching on. It was marching, it seemed, under Mead, Sherman, and U. S. Grant. The ideals of church, state, and Northern society were virtually identified.

Identification of Protestantism with Americanism in the Civil War symbolizes both the remarkable success and the great weaknesses of the American churches in the nineteenth century. Their strength was evident in their influence on the culture. By the second half of the century, their effectiveness in shaping the ideals (if not the realities) of the society was perhaps greater than any that official state support could have provided. They set the moral standards for a nation that was notoriously moralistic. At the end of the century, for instance, it hardly seemed incongruous for the President to propose that America should take the Philippines in order to “uplift and Christianize” the Filipinos. “In 1900,” observes Winthrop S. Hudson, “few would have disputed the contention that the United States was a Protestant nation.”

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Yet success had its price. In their zeal for national reform, the Protestant denominations had assumed the role of an unofficial American establishment. The cost had been an obscuring of their central message—that men must be redeemed in Christ. Retaining the ideal that the Church should supervise the behavior of the entire society, they increasingly blurred the lines between their message to the regenerate and their message to the unregenerate. Denominational involvements in political affairs, for instance, were indicative of the ambiguity implicit in the churches’ aspirations to act as national moral guardians. By advocating specific legislative measures, the churches inevitably confused their redemptive message with the platforms of American political parties. What’s more, they automatically alienated all those in the population who disagreed with them politically. The Northern denominations’ unqualified endorsements of Republican programs during the Civil War and their general identification with Republicanism throughout the rest of the century were the clearest examples of this confusion. But the legacy of political involvements continued to affect American Protestantism in later eras. The social gospel’s identifications with Progressivism, Prohibitionism, and New Deal Democracy, for example, reflected much the same establishmentarian ideal.

Participation in political programs was, however, symptomatic of a far deeper malady within the successful Protestant establishment of the late nineteenth century. The churches were identifying themselves with the culture. As with all alliances between church and society, the influences worked both ways. While the denominations were successfully acting as moral guardians of the American cultural heritage, they were adopting, no doubt inadvertently, many of the values of American society—particularly the popular moralism of the middle classes. Rather than continuing to challenge the culture with the radical implications of the biblical message, they allowed many of their standards and objectives to appear virtually indistinguishable from those of the “best people” of the secular society. As Sidney E. Mead has observed, “During the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred an ideological amalgamation of this Protestantism with ‘Americanism,’ and … we are still living with some of the results.”

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Success had also bred complacency. The methods of the successful programs designed to revive the new nation early in the nineteenth century were continued almost intact, even though industrialization and urbanization were radically changing American life. Successful revivals were still held, but increasingly large segments of the population were left unaffected. Intellectually, “common sense” philosophy designed to meet the challenges of the Enlightenment continued to be the chief bulwark of orthodox apologetics. Only in the moral sphere did the Church appear strong; but its challenge was muffled by its respectability.

The weaknesses of the successful churches became apparent early in the twentieth century as American culture was shaken by the modern cultural, scientific, and intellectual revolutions. The shocks of Darwinism, widespread confidence in the scientific method, higher criticism of Scripture, dynamic philosophies, technological advance, and social reorganization all struck almost simultaneously. Within a generation, from 1900 to 1930, the Protestant cultural establishment collapsed.

The development of theological liberalism and fundamentalism in the face of this impending crisis was symptomatic of the weaknesses inherent in Protestantism’s reliance on the cultural establishment. When the values of the culture changed, the Church was caught in the midst of a seemingly irresolvable dilemma. It could sacrifice either its Biblical message or its cultural relevance. The result was a tendency for American Protestantism to polarize around the two extreme alternatives. Theological liberalism attempted to maintain the churches’ traditional cultural and intellectual relevance, but at the expense of the Gospel. Fundamentalism preserved the Gospel, but often at the expense of relevance.

Despite the basic incompatibility of fundamentalism and liberalism, it is in their similarities that we can best see the characteristic aspects of the American Protestant heritage. The most conspicuous similarity is in their moralism. Of the two, liberalism was by far the more moralistic, defining its gospel almost solely in ethical terms. Yet, as we are all aware, fundamentalism also has been notorious for its moral proscriptions. Often it has also been accused of lacking social concern. But even in this it was not wholly unlike its liberal social-gospel opponents. Few liberals have shown greater zeal for cultural reform than have fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan and Carl McIntire. The only difference is that fundamentalism’s social gospel has been defined largely in terms of the nineteenth century, while theological liberalism has moved steadily with the winds of popular twentieth-century political doctrine.

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A second common characteristic of liberalism and fundamentalism that also seems typically American was their anti-theological tendencies. Again, liberalism was by far the more anti-theological, often explicitly repudiating all theological constructions. But fundamentalism too had its anti-intellectualist wing that tended to deprecate theological training. In neither movement was this characteristic universal, but in both it was prominent.

Despite a tradition of formidable theologies, American Protestants have always had a tendency to accentuate the practical, activist, and non-intellectual. If we are to believe foreign observers, these same traits have been characteristic of the culture at large; it is hardly surprising, then, that they have affected the churches. Protestantism’s most popular successes in shaping American life have been its practical campaigns for moral suasion. Accordingly, the tendency has been for theological concern, and eventually evangelism itself, to be submerged in fervor for national social reform. Doubtless this is not the sole cause of the weaknesses of the American church, but it does reveal some telling symptoms.

Still The Establishment?

American Protestantism today appears to be recovering from the religious debacle of the era between the world wars. The successors to the liberal tradition now speak increasingly of a gospel that will challenge the culture, repudiating the old social gospel’s confusion of the kingdom and the world. Yet the challenge remains obscured as these same voices call for renewed involvement in political power structures for the purpose of making the nation a better place to live. The American Protestant quest for social relevance (certainly a fine objective, if not the primary one) continues to dominate America’s most respected ecclesiastical councils. The idea still persists that Protestantism is the American establishment and therefore is not essentially in conflict with the best interests of the secular society. The vision of a Protestant America filled with community churches, open to the whole community regardless of creed, remains the prevailing ideal. Indeed there has been something like a theological revival, but certainly not yet a revival of theological relevance. Relevance is still defined in social and moralistic terms. And it is difficult to preach to a culture that it needs to be revolutionized by the Gospel when your practice indicates it can just as well be reformed.

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But the conservative successors to the fundamentalist tradition are no less in danger of seeing their recovery revert to a form of Americanism. We too have inherited the ideals of the respectable cultural establishment of the era of Protestant success. We too have our tendencies toward moralism, identification with current political philosophies, and anti-intellectualism. Doubtless there is much in our typically American heritage that is worth preserving, and indeed we must preserve some if we are to communicate to America. But as we do, we must distinguish sharply between that which is characteristically American and that radical challenge which is characteristic of the Word of God.

The problem we as Protestants face today is the same one the Church has faced in every new era. It is the problem of communicating to our culture while not identifying with its values. Two ingredients are especially necessary for such communication today. The first is intellectual relevance. There is no easier or more understandable excuse for today’s American to avoid listening to the challenge of Christ than the prevailing opinion that a biblically grounded Christianity is an intellectual absurdity. To regain an audience we must overcompensate for this with a strenuous promotion of all aspects of evangelical scholarship.

The second and most essential ingredient is genuine Christian love. Love is the foundation of effective communication. It demands an active display of sacrificial concern for all men in all aspects of their existence—socially, morally, and intellectually, as well as religiously. Although American denominations cannot afford to perpetuate the establishmentarian’s confusion of redemptive and political objectives, individual Christians in a democratic society must employ all their political and civil rights, as well as their personal resources, to manifest their self-giving love for all members of their society. To communicate in Christian love, whether intellectually, morally, or religiously, we must be all things to all men. Again, our record is bad and we must overcompensate. By and large conservative American Protestants have been one thing to all men. We have tried to preach the same sermons in the same language to all classes of society the same in 1967 as in 1867. The pious moralisms that appeared so relevant to middle-class America in the Gilded Age are far too often heard to echo in the Great Society. Love would demand as much concern to show the application of the gospel message—both by proclamation and by action—to the changing needs of our audiences as to preserve its integrity. The Gospel is relevant to every aspect of American experience. But until we learn how to communicate it without compromise, we have not witnessed to the love of Christ. We are as sounding brass.

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