The cultural footprint of liberal theology

About three years ago, I noted Christian Smith’s (via Peter Leithart) contention that liberal theology has enjoyed cultural success while losing its institutional strength. Mark Edwards’ two-part interview of Matthew Hedstrom, author of The Rise of Liberal Religion, reminded me of this point. Hedstrom brought up Smith (and other scholars in Part I), and Part II contained this exchange:

ME: The very title of your book suggests a kind of liberal cultural ascendancy. How does your work intersect with the idea of a “mainline” religious establishment that crumbled during the 1960s and 1970s?

MH: I’ll start with an extreme argument and backtrack from there: liberal Protestantism, at its very core, wants to achieve its own extinction, or at least its own irrelevance. Postmillennial theology desires the Kingdom of God on earth, and believes that human beings, with divine grace, can achieve it. The idea is to redeem the culture—redeem the world—through full participation in it. This is in contrast to a bunkered fundamentalism that aims to save souls but otherwise remain safely removed from a corrupt and corrupting world.

So, from this vantage point, cultural success and institutional decline should go hand in hand. And in many ways they have. The liberal focus on ethics, progress, and this-world salvation means religious liberals can achieve their righteous ends by working for the Peace Corps or Amnesty International or the Human Rights Campaign, or through social work or psychological counseling, or through cultural efforts like literacy promotion. If saving souls is your metric, you’ll do that work through churches or parachurch ministries. But if redeeming the culture and world is your goal, many more avenues are available for doing your religion. Most scholars of American Protestantism seem to have implicitly accepted the terms of the debate offered by religious conservatives, and look only at church life as a measure of religious vitality.

Now the backtrack. The categories of course are not this neat. Religious liberals care about church life, including the saving of souls, however that might be understood; and religious conservatives have done immense social and cultural work (for good and ill, I’d add). The whole Religious Right stands in contrast to what I have presented, in a way. But I think the larger, basic point remains: institutional decline and cultural victory can go hand in hand, and in this case, I think, have.

My book is not primarily political, so I don’t write much about the ways religious liberal impulses have been sublimated into social and political activism, though it does come up here and there. My story is more about culture and spirituality—the term I use, along with spirituality, is “religious sensibilities”—and so I argue that book culture was a critical mechanism for the broad dissemination of liberal religious sensibilities, especially psychological, mystical, and cosmopolitan spirituality.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the decline of liberal Christianity which is often a subject of discussion. Also, I realize that Hedstrom’s characterization of postmillenialism doesn’t work for orthodox postmillenialists who see the church as continuing, not fading away, as the gospel spreads throughout the earth.

Evangelicals try to win back New England

Slate had a piece today by Ruth Graham about efforts to plant evangelical churches in New England, which Graham calls “the most proudly and profoundly secular region in America.” She opens with the following anecdote:

The pastor of a small church in rural Vermont is not the kind of guy you’d expect to speak with a slow North Carolina drawl. But Lyandon Warren felt a calling to New England ever since he heard a speaker in his college Christian Studies program explain that less than 3 percent of the region’s population is evangelical Christians. By his denomination’s definition, those numbers indicate an “unreached people group”—a whole population without a viable Christian community. “My heart was opened,” he says. “To be a foot-soldier on that battleground is a joy and a privilege.”

In 2006, Warren moved to Vermont to open a new Baptist church in a town whose last church had closed its doors the year before due to lack of attendance. His congregation, which meets in the closed church’s old white clapboard building, grew slowly but steadily, and in early September, Warren opened up a second new church in a nearby town. Similar churches have sprung up throughout the region: New England has become a mission field, and there are seeds of a revival sprouting.

In her story, Graham links to this post by Collin Hansen about a regional Gospel Coalition conference held in Boston, and one of the people connected to this, Presbyterian minister Stephen Um, is a major figure in Graham’s story.

The religiously unaffiliated

You may have heard about the Pew Report from a few weeks ago. John Turner at The Anxious Bench wrote about the survey and linked to Mark Tooley’s article on the report. Tooley puts the report in some historical context. Here’s a key quote, part of which Turner quoted as well:

The myth that America was once a solidly Christian and church going nation that only recently has secularized is widely believed by religious and secular alike. But the 40 percent of Americans who’ve regularly across the last 80 years at least claimed they attend church regularly is almost certainly higher than church going was in the 19th century, which itself was likely higher than the 18th century, as a footnote in the Pew study briefly admits.

If America now today seems more secular, it is because cultural elites 100 years ago, including college presidents and faculty, publishers and newspaper editors, were likely to be churchmen. Fifty years ago, cultural elites were less churchy but remained at least respectful of religion. Today’s cultural elites, joined by popular entertainment and broadcast journalism, clustered in coastal cities or in university towns in between, are neither respectful nor even very aware of religious America. Almost certainly the 6 percent of Americans whom Pew reports are atheist or agnostic are disproportionately represented within their ranks.

I think that Tooley underestimates the importance of the cultural shift, but his article is still worth the read. As my friend Kevin pointed out when I shared the link on Facebook, Tooley seems to equate churchgoing with Christianity. It’s important to think about the wider cultural atmosphere. I wonder if there were some people in, say, 18th- and 19th-century America who didn’t attend church regularly who may have had a more Christian outlook than some who are regular church attenders today, simply because the cultural environment (the “plausibility structures,” as sociologist Peter Berger calls them) supported Christian belief more than it does now.

Roots of the New Calvinism

From where I sit, the most dynamic trend in evangelicalism today is the re-energized Reformed movement. I ran across an old post by Justin Taylor that brings together some resources analyzing the movement. They’re all by people inside the movement (Mark Dever, Trevin Wax, and Collin Hansen), but they’re valuable nonetheless.

As Joel noted some time ago, Molly Worthen is doing some valuable analysis from outside the movement.

Liberal Christianity in the US and Britain

Ross Douthat’s July 15 column on the decline of liberal denominations produced some discussion on the definition of liberal Christianity. Douthat defined it as focused on social reform, while British Baptist pastor and theologian Steve Holmes took a more philosophical view, arguing that liberal Christianity essentially bases itself on the idea that the “human experience” can be spoken of in the singular (and thus the various religions are ways of interpreting this experience). Holmes also makes two arresting observations in his post. First, that Anglican liberals tended to support British imperialism, eugenics, and racism, before taking a turn that is more recognizably “liberal” to Americans in the 1960s and after with support of the sexual revolution, “racial equality,” and environmentalism.* He believes that this comes from liberal Christianity’s tendency to follow the culture in which it is embedded. Secondly, this tendency has become a weakness in the postmodern age. The section in italics reflects my emphasis:

This also explains the reason that the, heretofore extremely successful, liberal tradition of Christianity is currently in meltdown. It is not difficult to see that the idea that true notions of the divine can be derived from an examination of universally shared human experience is vulnerable to at least two, apparently devastating, lines of criticism: the claim that human experience is no guide to reality (a claim made classically by Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, and forming the basis of neo-orthodox criticisms of liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century); and the claim that there is no universally shared human experience to serve as a basis for the argument. This latter line has become extremely powerful in contemporary theology. The early liberation theologians developed a postcolonial critique of such claims: supposed accounts of ‘normative’ human experience are in fact an attempt to force others to conform their experience to norms created by white male Europeans. The explosion of contextual theologies demonstrated the power of such a criticism in contemporary culture: every proposed account of shared human experience is, on this analysis, a hegemonic attempt to impose a false consciousness on others. So African-American women properly refused to be assimilated to the project of feminist theology, seeing the accounts of human experience offered as too white, and properly refused to be assimilated to Black theology, seeing the accounts of human experience offered as too male. Instead, they constructed their own narration, womanist theology. (The great womanist theologians are poets, not just theologians: Emilie Townes somewhere entitles a chapter ‘To love our necks unloosed and straight’ – why can’t I write like that?!).

The effect of all this is to make classical liberalism – ‘we all feel like this, so…’ – culturally incredible. For two centuries, it caught the mood of a culture which believed in metanarratives; for the last two decades (or more) the culture has been incredulous towards metanarratives, and so has been profoundly unreceptive to classical liberalism. Today, liberalism sounds like cultural imperialism; when it tries not to, it simply sounds incoherent. (The best example is also the obvious and tedious one: White, metropolitan, Western culture regards the acceptance of gay/lesbian relationships to be an ethical imperative; the churches of sub-Saharan Africa (to give only one example) see the matter differently; one may be affirming of gay/lesbian people by dismissing the moral intuition of Black Africans, but not otherwise. To claim that gay people and Nigerian people share moral intuitions, or to claim to be simultaneously attentive to gay people and non-Western people, alike appear simply incredible.)

This observation fits with my own, less informed sense that pre-1950s liberal theology seemed much more grounded and Christian, even though deficient, than its current form. This seems to me a good explanation of why this is the case.

Douthat’s response, through which I became aware of Holmes’ post, grants the point on the definition, but contends that liberal Christianity has been different in the American and British contexts:

However, this quest has gone in different directions in different times and places, and in the United States from the late-19th onward, it found its most important and enduring expression in the Social Gospel idea that Christianity would be vindicated in an age of science and skepticism to the extent that it confronted social evils as well as private sins, and made the kingdom of heaven more visible on earth. Certainly other theological traditions, Catholic as well as evangelical, have linked personal conversion and social reform; certainly liberal Christianity can’t be reduced to that link and that link alone. But for a long time, from the era of Walter Rauschenbusch down to the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., the liberal churches had good reason to see themselves as the primary custodians of a socially-engaged Christianity. Indeed, the historical importance of their role explains why many religiously-literate Americans today still simply conflate ”liberal Christianity” with “the religion of Christians who are politically liberal.” That’s far too broad a definition, certainly, and one that gives theologians hives with its capaciousness. But it’s also one that reflects the lived reality of American politics and religion for long periods of the twentieth century….

Some of [what Holmes says about British liberal Christians' mirroring of British culture] maps on to the American experience: The United States, too, had its liberal Protestant imperialists and eugenicists, and of course we have our liberal Christian environmentalists today. But the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement are both absent from this story (in this country, liberal Christians were arguing for civil rights long before the 1980s), and when you lose them you lose a huge part of liberal Christianity’s direct impact on American religion and public life, not to mention its second-order impact on movements (from WWII and Cold War-era neo-orthodoxy to post-1970s neoconservatism) that were both its critics but also to some extent its practical heirs. Nor, in turn, can you understand the point that the intellectual historian Gary Dorrien makes in the essay that my column quoted, about how the leading liberal Christians of the American past often managed to ground progressive politics on “a gospel of personal faith” expressed “in biblical terms,” rather than just on the kind of ecumenical appeals to “shared human religious experience” that are more characteristic of, say, liberal Episcopalianism today. (I think of Bayard Rustin’s line about M.L.K., which I quote in my recent book: “I was always amazed at how it was possible to combine this intense, analytical philosophical mind with this more or less fundamental — well, I don’t like to use the word ‘fundamentalist’ — but this abiding faith.”) Such a biblical and even dogmatic grounding was possible, I think, precisely because in the American landscape the specific cause of social reform was often more central to the self-definition of religious liberalism than the general prioritization of personal experience that came in with Schleiermacher.

The end of Holmes’ post includes an update in response to similar comments from Alan Jacobs:

UPDATE: Wesley Hill kindly pointed me to some comments made by Alan Jacobs of Wheaton (@ayjay) on Twitter, to the effect that in the above I wrongly conflate American and English (sic…) liberalism, ignoring the profound effect of Rauschenbusch had in redefining US liberalism. This seems to me a very fair point in terms of my account of liberal ethics in ‘so what point 1′ above, which I accept is rather parochial and based on UK examples; I think my broader point, ‘if you have to come up with a one sentence journalistic definition of the heart of liberal Christianity, what would it be?’ stands; Rauschenbusch provided a compelling narration of a particular set of religious experiences – pastoring in Hell’s Kitchen for him, but of course wider for others – that gave the US conversation a particular shape (just as the experience of the 1914-18 war gave the European conversations particular shapes – very different in Germany and the UK), but I think the heart of the issue remains the same.

*This is just a broad characterization of “liberal” and “conservative,” I realize. Even the word “liberal” has been used differently in American and British politics, I believe. And I also realize that liberal denominations in America supported eugenics and imperialism. And racism is not an essentially “conservative” position either, although certainly some conservatives have been racists along with people of different persuasions.

Discipleship, not mass production

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, Eric Metaxas reflected on David Kinnaman’s book You Lost Me, about young people leaving the church. I can’t speak for the book, since I haven’t read it, but this part of Metaxas’ commentary stood out:

Many dropouts still believe the tenets of Christianity. What they need from the Church is a renewed effort at disciple-making, an effort that meets them where they are; lets them express their questions, ideas, and doubts; and encourages them to grow in Christ.

And what do we do about those younger teens who haven’t yet reached that point where so many drop out? Kinnaman says that we adults need to form one-on-one relationships with them, instead of trying to mass-produce young believers. He writes, “I think we are constantly building, tearing down, and rebuilding our youth and young adult development regimens based on the fallacy that more is better…We need new ways of measuring success.”

So, he suggests, one metric of success might be to connect young people to older people — mentoring relationships. Kinnaman says, “These relationships would not be solely focused on spiritual growth, but should integrate the pursuit of faith with the whole life.”

Hallmarks of the Reformed tradition

Last year, James K.A. Smith wrote an article for The Banner, a Christian Reformed Church magazine, that urged CRCers to preserve and restore their Reformed heritage, rather than de-emphasize it. Like Todd Billings’ article that I linked to a couple of years ago, Smith’s article points to a tradition that includes the famous Five Points of Calvinism but also a great deal more:

What attracted me to the Reformed tradition? It was not any one thing. Instead, it was a kind of seamless cloth of related emphases that, I think, are the unique “apostolate” of the Reformed tradition, and the CRC in particular. That is, the CRC is a unique expression of the Reformed tradition that tends to hold together an array of gifts that in other places are separated. I’ve especially appreciated the following four distinct emphases:

1. A celebration of a covenant-keeping Lord. Central to the Reformed tradition is a unique emphasis on both the unity of the narrative of Scripture and a strong sense of our communal identity as “a people.” There is an entire theology packed into the pronouns of Scripture. From the opening us of the creational word in Genesis 1:26 (“Let us make human beings in our image”), to them in Genesis 1:27 (“male and female he created them”), to the plural you of the creational mandate in Genesis 1:29 (“I give you every seed-bearing plant”), God’s creation is laden with plurals!
   And all those you’s throughout the Bible are plural. Those of us formed by the individualism of North American culture tend to read Scripture as if it were addressed privately to each of us (to me). But I think our indigenous and Korean brothers and sisters hear Scripture more clearly on these matters: the you is us. It’s not me, but we. It’s just this sort of communal emphasis that the Reformed tradition’s covenant theology highlights—which is also why it yields a holistic, unified reading of Scripture as the one unfolding story of God’s covenant with his people.
2. An affirmation of the goodness of creation. Contrary to the dualism and functional Gnosticism of wider evangelicalism—a focus almost exclusively on the spiritual—the Reformed emphasis on the goodness of creation (especially as taught by Abraham Kuyper) is one of the real gems in the Reformed treasure chest, and one that distinguishes the CRC’s heritage from other, narrower versions of Reformed theology.
3. An exhortation to “make culture” well. Growing out of an affirmation of the goodness of creation, the Reformed tradition values good work as an expression of God’s calling. But it is also discerning and knows that God desires culture and institutions made for the flourishing of creation. It is precisely this emphasis on culture that informs our concerns about justice: think of the laments in Our World Belongs to God [a CRC statement of belief], which recognize the range of ways God wants to delight us but also the plethora of ways that we’ve fallen short, creating institutions and practices that run counter to the grain of the universe.
4. A connection to our catholic heritage. This might seem a little strange, but for me, becoming Reformed was a way of becoming “catholic.” What do I mean by that? The Reformers were not revolutionaries—that is, they were not out to raze the church to the ground, get back to some “pure” set of New Testament church principles, and start from scratch. They didn’t see themselves as leapfrogging over centuries of post-apostolic tradition. They were re-forming the church. And in that respect they saw themselves as heirs and debtors to the tradition that came before them. Indeed, they understood the Spirit as unfolding the wisdom of the Word over the centuries in the voices of Augustine and Gregory the Great, in Chrysostom and Anselm.

To say the Reformed tradition is “catholic” is just to say that it affirms this operation of the Spirit in history, and thus receives the gifts of tradition as gifts of the Spirit, subject to the Word. This is inscribed in the very heart of the Heidelberg Catechism, which explicates the Christian faith by unpacking the Apostles’ Creed—a heritage of the church catholic.

How Richard John Neuhaus remembered Martin Luther King, Jr.

The First Things blog re-posted Neuhaus’ essay from 2002, reviewing a Penguin biography by Marshall Frady. Since Neuhaus was active in the civil rights movement and knew King, he’s able to review both the book and King’s life in the context of the times and his personal experience. I’d recommend the whole thing if this is a topic that you’re interested in.

As a side note, Neuhaus quotes Frady’s insightful characterization of the national tenor of the civil rights movement: “The civil rights movement became the nation’s latest attempt to perform in the South an exorcising of its original sin, and it turned out our most epic moral drama since the Civil War itself.” That’s a great way to put the usual attitude toward racial injustice in the South, conveniently exonerating the rest of the country. To be sure, a race-based ideology of slavery and the Jim Crow system were coarsely obvious in the South, but the South hardly had a monopoly on personal, systemic, or institutionalized racism. Neuhaus portrays this well (although Malcolm X was already dead by the time that King went to Chicago):

The effort to take the movement to the North, to Richard Daley the Elder’s Chicago, was a disaster. King’s courtly Southern ways did not resonate with the slum dwellers of the North. He was not angry enough. As he said, “You just can’t communicate with the ghetto dweller and at the same time not frighten many whites to death.” At that time, Malcolm X was exulting in frightening whites to death, and King looked moderate—i.e., weak—by comparison.

He led marches for housing desegregation through white neighborhoods of Chicago, meeting with outraged anger. At one point he said, “I have never seen so much hatred and hostility on the faces of so many people as I’ve seen here today.” Frady writes, “He had in fact come up against the innermost reality of racism in America.” The larger fact is that King had no plan for the racial integration of Chicago, nor did anyone else. Nor, except for a few mainly upper-income neighborhoods, has anybody come up with a successful plan for integrating housing to this very day.

The Puritans vs. liturgy

Peter Leithart notes Horton Davies’ summary of the English Puritans’ scaling back of Calvin’s Reformed structure of worship services. They celebrated monthly rather than weekly communion and dropped written liturgies, the Apostles’ Creed, absolution, confirmation, and confession. Leithart’s post concludes: “Davies attributes this to the Puritan “fear and detestation of the Roman Church” that led them to ignore “the customs of the primitive Church” and even of “the Reformed Church on the Continent.”

This might help to explain the general American evangelical allergy to liturgy. Not only is there an association of liturgy with Catholicism, but the Puritans and their successors have had a major cultural influence in the US. Doug Wilson has recently been making the point that many interpreters have throughout our history: Americans have an essentially Puritan “DNA.” (You can see what he’s talking about here, especially in the posts “An American Reformation,” “Repent Like an American,” and “Four Kinds of Puritan.”)

What makes a Christian nation?

And is the United States a Christian nation? In a short post that I’ve quoted in its entirety here, Peter Leithart ventures forth:

Is America a “Christian nation”?  A perennial puzzle, and finally impossible to answer without many “in what respects?” qualifiers.

One distinction might help: Presuppose a nation full of Christians, as America was for much of its history.  That nation might take various forms, and the distinction I want to introduce is that between a biblical nation and a Christian nation.

A nation where the rite of royal anointing includes explicit references to the king’s iconic relation to the Anointed Jesus is (in that respect) Christian.  A nation where the rite of inauguration includes an oath  with a hand on a Bible, but includes no reference to Jesus or the Trinity or even God, may be a biblical nation but isn’t (in respect to this rite) a Christian policy.

Another example: Many American Puritan writers, and many American writers long after, considered America “God’s New Israel” (for a great selection from John Winthrop to Ralph Reed, see Conrad Cherry’s God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny).  That is definitely a biblical trope.  But it hardly qualifies as a Christian one, for it is self-evident in the New Testament that the church alone is God’s new Israel.  Insofar as the American experience is read through the lends of America-as-Israel, America is a biblical but not a Christian nation.

In two other recent posts, Leithart also looked at the church and state question in America. First, he noted and echoed Frederick Mark Gedicks’ point that civil religion in “a radically plural  society” (the situation of much of the modern West) civil religion “both sufficiently broad to command the assent of most citizensand, at the  same time, sufficiently  deep to  contain serious theological  content.” Second, he quotes Gedicks’ criticism of the idea that “the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment] requires the government to remain neutral between ‘religion and irreligion’ and between ‘belief and unbelief.’ “