Keeping the Church Doors Open

By avoiding political alignments, the church has been able to reach all classes.

The United States is the world’s most thoroughly modern, industrial, and technological society. Yet by many measurements, it also appears to be one of the world’s most religious nations. This is a surprise.

The odd combination of modernity and religion defies conventional wisdom about secularization, and differs strikingly from the situation in other Western industrial nations.

Studies show that two out of three adults in America still maintain fairly bedrock religious beliefs. In a recent Gallup Poll that asked how important religion should be in life, 41 percent of young Americans (ages 18–24) answered “very important.” In France, Germany, and Great Britain, less than 10 percent of young people gave the same response.

On any given Sunday morning, over 40 percent of the population in the United States attend church. In Canada and Australia, this number tails off to about 25 percent; in England, to about 10 percent; and in Scandinavia, to around 5 percent—despite the fact that 95 percent of the population are confirmed in the church.

How does one begin to explain the religious continuity and vitality found in America? In the 1830s, the French visitor to America Alexis de Tocqueville said it was because churches could not be identified closely with any given political persuasion. Religion in Europe, he said, “by allying itself with political power … increases its strength over some but forfeits the hope of reigning over all.… Unbelievers in Europe,” he continued, “attack Christians more as political than religious enemies; they hate the faith as the opinion of a party much more than as a mistaken belief, and they reject the clergy less because they are representatives of God than because they are friends of authority.”

What struck de Tocqueville about America was not merely the formal separation of church and state, but the nonpolitical character of American denominations. In stark contrast with Europe, he found Protestant and Catholic clergy here generally avoided political entanglements. He concluded that such independence strengthened the influence of religion in the long run by protecting the church’s integrity and keeping its doors open to all. “By diminishing the apparent power of religion, one increases its real strength.”

In the same vein, two sociologists, the American Theodore Caplow and the Englishman David Martin, have recently drawn upon empirical evidence to make similar conclusions about contrasting trends between European and American religion. Both seek to explain why, since World War II, Christianity has declined so precipitously in Europe and Great Britain while maintaining its vitality in the U.S.

In a recent article, Caplow has argued that church and state are still intertwined institutions throughout Europe, including Eastern bloc countries. Consequently, any religious affiliation in Europe has a political connotation. He cites recent studies showing that in Europe, an individual’s position on the political scale from left to right permits one to predict, at least statistically, the importance of God in the person’s life. In every European country, political opinion and religious beliefs are closely related and mutually determinative, the standard correlation linking conservative politics and religiosity, on one hand, and radicalism and hostility to religion, on the other.

By contrast, Caplow finds that the religious affiliations claimed by nearly three-fourths of the adults of the United States do not tell us very much about their political views. The linkages between religious and political preferences are weak and changeable, and there is little connection between religious association and social class. Religion flourishes precisely because it is not encumbered with extraneous features that in themselves have the power to repel.

David Martin’s book A General Theory of Secularization (1978) draws similar conclusions. Because religion and politics in America have been unhinged at the center, he argues, religion has come to disassociate itself from social and political authority and high culture. Martin notes that dissent in America has become universal and that religion has adapted itself to virtually every status group. “The result is that nobody feels ill at ease with his religion, that faith is distributed along the political spectrum, that the church is never the axis of dispute.”

These studies suggest that in its overall configuration, American Christianity has been able to remain politically nonaligned. This is not to say Christians have retreated from political involvement, but that they have rarely been able to speak on matters political with a unified voice. The multiplication of denominations (which de Tocqueville witnessed) destroyed any single vision of Christian politics. Such pluralism released American churches from a close identification between the church and conservative political orders—an affinity that, according to these interpretations, came to cripple the effectiveness of European churches.

Is Nonalignment Desirable?

The real question raised by these studies is whether this pattern of nonalignment by American churches is a heritage to be shunned or cherished. Today this question is even more acute because voices clamor from the left, center, and right of the political spectrum calling Christians to more serious political engagement.

Oddly enough, many of these exhortations appeal to the American past, urging Christians to reclaim the vision of a Christian social order. The irony is that in the early American republic the differing, even opposite, conclusions reached by sincere Christians undercut the claims of any authoritative political agenda. We should give thanks that the American denominational scene was sufficiently fragmented that most were not beguiled by political success. Left to their own devices, they could do little else but go about the primary business entrusted to the church.

But in circumstances where the church does feel burdened by political responsibility, it should weigh long-run liabilities against short-run gains. From these perspectives three liabilities are worth noting:

1. Naïveté. As a rule, Christians are not sufficiently self-critical about the dangers of the political process. Charles Colson reminds us that Christians are among the most gullible players in the game of hardball politics. We too easily defer to the powerful and influential, too easily overestimate the impact of our own endeavors, too easily are ensnared by the political limelight, and too easily allow the gospel to become hostage to a given political ideology. Too often we imagine that a given problem, however complex and intractable, is capable of a “Christian” resolution.

Finally, we are readily driven by the impulses of the moment and are unaware of how deeply ironic the political process can be, turning good intentions into spoiled results. One is reminded of the advice given to the clergyman and activist Reinhold Niebuhr by his brother H. Richard Niebuhr: “An activism which stresses immediate results is the cancer of our modern life. It is betraying us constantly into interfering with events, pushing, pulling, trying to wriggle out of an impossible situation, and so drawing the noose tighter around our necks. We want to be saviors of civilization, and simply bring down new destruction.”

2. Depersonalizing the gospel. The glory and the besetting sin of politics is the heady notion that the actions of a few can significantly alter the lives of many. Most political issues considered worthy of attention are addressed on a grand scale: poverty, education, abortion. Such issues are important, but none of them is all-important. Each pales before what Scripture sets out as the principal calling of the Christian—which is profoundly personal—to grow in heartfelt love to God and neighbor.

It was for this reason that C. S. Lewis warned repeatedly of the danger of Christians substituting grand but impersonal schemes for the intensely personal though mundane pilgrimage to which most of us are called. “Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors” (“The Weight of Glory”).

3. Giving unnecessary offense. In troubled times, religious people are likely to align the gospel with political ideologies that offer coherence and purpose. In the wake of the French Revolution, when society seemed to be unraveling, churches cemented their ties with traditional elites and conservative politics. As a result, at the dawn of the industrial age, many churches forfeited the possibility of Christianizing working-class culture. In solidifying its position with one sector of society, the church alienated others.

The same danger exists in our own day when Christians align the gospel too closely with any given political framework. The fault lines of politics often follow demarcations of race, class, age, gender, and occupation—barriers that the church has the responsibility to transcend. The biblical mandate for the church is to encompass all groups, breaking down ethnic, socio-economic, and political barriers. Christians need to be willing to take unpopular political stands, decrying oppression and espousing justice. But they should do so only after much study, after seeking the wise counsel of a broad spectrum of the church, and after differentiating carefully between beliefs that are central and unassailable and those that are peripheral and open to debate.

In times of political turmoil, both in this country and abroad, churches will be pressured to increase political involvement. Before jumping immediately into the fray, Christians must remember that to speak in God’s name carries awesome responsibility. To allow mere political creeds, devoutly held, to drive persons from the help of the church is to take the name of the Almighty in vain. Dare we jeopardize the church’s offer of living water to those who acknowledge no reality higher than the mere give and take of politics?

NATHAN O. HATCH, Contributing Editor

Dr. Hatch is associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters,

University of Notre Dame

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