American Christianity's Fate (The Book)

 

It is perhaps a paradox of contemporary society and politics that "Americans in the twenty-first century find themselves in an increasingly secular society saddled with an increasingly religious politics." Paradox or not, David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at Berkeley proposes to explain this phenomenon from within the larger scope and context of the history of American religion, specifically American Protestant Christianity, in Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Many associate the increasing power and politicization of conservative evangelicalism, but Hollinger stresses that "Trump took advantage of a white evangelical culture that was well in place before he came along and is likely to remain a factor in American public life after he is gone." But evangelicalism has long been in competition with another strain of American Protestantism, what we typically call "mainline" or even "liberal" Protestantism, but which the author labels "Ecumenical Protestantism," which "channeled through Christianity the Enlightenment's perspective on belief and its generous view of human capabilities." Contrary to what he sees as the popular view "that evangelical churches flourished because they made greater demands on the faithful," he argues that "ecumenical" churches sought to impose greater social obligations, "especially the imperative to extend civil equality to nonwhites," while "Evangelicalism made it easy to avoid the challenges of an ethnoracially diverse society and a scientifically informed culture." A more nuanced position perhaps might acknowledge that more conservative Churches have been more demanding in matters of belief and sexual morality, while liberal Churches have put more emphasis on social justice and accepting the challenges of modern science.

In any case, he contends that the once powerful mainline American Christianity has been "hollowed out" by the departure of those he calls "post-Protestants" (among whom he includes himself), who have been replaced  "by white evangelicals allied with conservative Catholics on issues of sexuality gender, and the limits of civic authority." In large measure, much of the book is an account of how this came to be.

He adopts Martin E. Marty's terminology of American Protestantism's "two-party system," which persisted throughout the 20th century and into the present century. Two important changes which opened things up, he argues were Jewish immigration and the broadening experience of American Protestant missions abroad. Urbanization also played a role as did the increasing de-Christianization of academia, which he sees as somewhat Jewish-influenced, along with the increasing replacement of ministers "by mental health professionals as authorities for dealing with personal problems." During the interwar years, the Protestant "two-party system was on full display." At its post-war zenith, the liberal, "ecumenical" party "took for granted that Protestant Christianity was the proper foundation for world order and that it was up to Americans to establish it."

To a certain extent, ecumenical Protestantism's impulse "to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it," opened it to increasing secularizing challenge. a gap developed between "cosmopolitan leaders" and small town and rural laity and pastors, and the growth in higher education encouraged an exodus of young people out of the more liberal churches, while those who remained began to have fewer children. Ecumenical leaders "abandoned to opportunistic evangelicals the classic missionary goal of conversion, the powerful claim of a proprietary relationship to the American nation, and a host of other aspirations to which many white Americans remains attached," meanwhile accommodating "perspectives on women and the family that reduced their capacity to reproduce themselves."

By the 21st century, "post-Protestants and post-Catholics began to go on record about their lack of religious affiliation." (More than one-third of born Catholics no longer identify as such in the U.S., and about 17% of such post-Catholics profess no affiliation.)

Meanwhile, the "transformation of the global Christina profile" has "greatly strengthened the claims of American evangelicals that they - not the mainliners - were the true exemplars of the ancient faith." This may be exacerbated by the liberal churches' relative decline in interest in issues of economic inequality in favor of identity politics and a suspicion of the older "universalist ideology that had been a defining feature of ecumenical Protestantism, and that served as a justification for its progressive engagements of the 1940s, 950s, and 1960s."

What the author considers the most significant challenge to conservative Christianity's increasing dominance in the U.S. is "the vitality of African American Protestantism." African -American Christians are often doctrinally conservative evangelicals, but African Americans "have had a worldly education in American social practices that inoculated them against many of the ideas white evangelicals found compatible with evangelically flavored theologies."

Apart from historical interest, why should contemporary secular liberals like this book's the "post-Protestant" author care about all this? The author is clearly an advocate for a liberal secularized fulfillment of the spirit of ecumenical Protestantism, which he worries is now in retreat as evangelical Protestantism increases in political power, imperiling (in his understanding) the variant of democratic politics which political and cultural liberals have cherished. Thus, he revealingly regards the 1940s "conscience exceptions" to conscription as not a threat to democracy, but he does see a threat in the contemporary application religious liberty (which he revealingly puts in quotes) to groups he is less ideologically sympathetic to. Of course, he is correct in recognizing that in the contemporary intersection of and conflict between religious liberty and an increasingly intrusive anti-discriminatory legal regime lies one of today's great religious and cultural battlefields, the resolution of which will in part depend upon the extent ot which religion continues to be valued by enough of contemporary society for it to continued to occupy the privileges accorded it by the Constitution.

Even apart from specifically spiritual reasons, religion remains a powerful force for many people, as the author acknowledges, because "churches have long been vital centers of community, sustainers of cultural tradition, and settings in which to contemplate some of life's terrors and enigmas."

The author concludes with the curious claim that "American Protestants have always been subject to conflicting appeals, voiced by two of Christianity's greatest figures, the Apostle Paul and Immanuel Kant." I wonder whether even the "ecumenical" Protestants whose heritage the author would apparently like to see a revitalized version of to compete with the now dominant evangelical form of contemporary Protestantism would so readily accord Kant a position - as a Christian figure - on a par with Saint Paul. Perhaps the inability to locate an alternative to evangelical Christian politics in a more universally recognizable manifestation of authentic Christianity than Kant highlights the very problem the author aspires to resolve!