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.

The origins of “Let go and let God”

Kevin DeYoung turns his blog over to Andy Naselli for a day to explain and critique the Keswick view of sanctification.

Book Review: Douglas Wilson, “Black and Tan”

While looking at Doug Wilson’s blog one day, I happened to notice that he wrote a book on slavery and culture wars.  Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America seemed to be a great book to pair with America’s God, since both books discuss 19th-century American Christianity.

The story of this book begins in the 1990s when Wilson and his fellow Presbyterian minister Steve Wilkins wrote a pamphlet called “Southern Slavery as It Was.”  Controversy erupted when they argued that the abuses of Southern slavery were exaggerated.

Black and Tan reiterates the main points of that pamphlet and discusses the controversy that resulted from it.  The central points might be listed as follows:

• The Bible does allow for slavery within certain guidelines, although as the gospel does its work within nations, slavery will be abolished because the institution of slavery is against the logic of the gospel
• Racism and the slave trade are roundly condemned by the Bible
• Slavery was abolished in the United States in a radical and unbiblical way rather than that gradual way that it should have been if the gospel had done its work in American culture
• The Civil War empowered the federal government in such a way that it overthrew the truly federal system of government that the Constitution provided for, and this empowerment of humanistic instead of Christian values (which he compares to the French Revolution) paved the way for the current culture wars over abortion and gay marriage by, for example, giving the Supreme Court the power to overturn all states’ abortion laws

This blog post by Wilson also gives a good insight into his purposes.

Book Review: Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

My first response to Noll’s work is to express my appreciation and respect for the amount of research and expertise that went into writing America’s God.  Noll has a tremendous grasp of the different theological traditions of 18th- and 19th-century America, and displays impressive familiarity with the broader history of the United States in the same period.  He shows convincingly that theology in America was adapted to the national culture of republican government, suspicion of tradition and claims to authority, and commonsense moral reasoning.

Noll realizes that a history of theology and intellectual developments doesn’t make a history of America, and he acknowledges that this does focus on an elite set of intellectual theologians.  But he makes the case that these ideas were important for the broader society and that theology imported ideas from the broader society.

America’s God can be difficult to follow at times, and I sometimes felt like I was backtracking over the same ground that had been discussed earlier.  Noll writes in his introduction that the length of time that it took him to write this book may have taken a toll on the clarity of the arguement, and I think that’s probably true to some extent.  There are also times where the exploration of theology is incredibly deep, and others where I felt that brief summaries needed to be fleshed out more.  At the same time, the scope of his work probably necessitated that this would be the case.

America’s God is a challenging book.  For someone with a professional, academic interest in American religious history, I would strongly recommend it.  I think that is Noll’s goal: to make a contribution to the field of early American history that includes theological development.  For others, it would depend on your interests.

In his comments on this post, Joel asked me what Noll’s point of view is.  In the conclusion of the book, Noll writes that he finds Jonathan Edwards to be the best American theologian “for the purposes of understanding God, the self, and the world as they really are.”  He agrees with the intellectual and theological depth of the Calvinism of the Puritans, Edwards, and George Whitefield, but also appreciates the evangelistic and social activism of the 19th-century American evangelicals in a cultural environment “with tradition, heirarchy, and deference to historical precedent discredited by the ideology of the Revolution.”  He states:

It is an oft-stated truism, but worthy of repetition, that if the theological and ecclesiastical changes described here had not taken place, it is not humanly conceivable that American religious beliefs and practices would have remained, by comparison with the rest of the Western world, so relatively vigorous as the remain to this day.” (444)

At the same time, he believes that the Civil War greatly damaged this American theology, meaning that “American theology lurched, rather than self-consciously thought, its way into the modern world” (445).  I’d be interested to hear his explanation of what followed it.

Lincoln bests the theologians

The last major chapter of America’s God compares the subtlety and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865 with the way that theologians talked about the Civil War, which Noll finds predictable and self-righteous.  Noll writes that while American theologians in the mid-19th century often believed that they could interpret God’s sovereign will with great certainty, Lincoln displayed no such hubris in his Second Inaugural.  Here is the most theological section (you can read the whole thing here, and it’s not very long):

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Noll does not believe that the American theologians never plumbed great theological depths or that Lincoln was always deep or even orthodox.  He argues, though, that evangelicals had almost conquered America too thoroughly, leaving a “domesticated” evangelical theology that no longer challenged Americans.

Noll believes that this domestication engendered two unfortunate trends (he even uses the word “tragedy”).  For thinkers who found the American theological synthesis inadequate, like Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Lincoln, the quest “to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts — or in the Bible, or in the sweep of events” pushed them away from the orthodox American church.  For evangelical Protestant theologians, their tendency “was to rest content with a God defined by the American conventions God’s own loyal servants had exploited so well” (438).

I found the conclusion of this chapter very powerful.  It has always happened that each new culture to which Christianity spreads will adapt Christianity to its own culture, and we in America are no exception.  The problem comes when we adapt it so thoroughly that it becomes domesticated and we become less willing to see the necessity of living lives that truly reflect Christ.  It’s a challenge that Christians of all times must wrestle with.

American hermeneutics and slavery

After chronicling the Americanization of Calvinist and Methodist theology, Mark Noll in America’s God turns to American biblical hermeneutics, the way that Americans read the Bible, in Chapters 18-20.  Noll argues that the American approach to Scripture in this period also came from both their Protestant heritage and their revolutionary/early national circumstances.  Noll has argued that republican government and commonsense moral ideas replaced the traditional authorities that held sway in the colonies, and that society was becoming increasingly democratic.  Evangelicalism often followed these trends even as it created what Noll calls “a formidable Christian civilization” (437) out of the former colonies, displaying a willingness and sometimes even a preference to work in the wide-open marketplace of religious choices, offering a view of human nature that owed quite a bit to Scottish Enlightenment ideas, and expressing theology in language drawn from Enlightenment and republican ideas.

Calvinism and Methodism get Americanized

Chapters 13-17 of America’s God consider the process by which the two major theological traditions in early America became Americanized; in other words, each began using the language and assumptions that fit with the broader culture’s republican and commonsense philosophies.  This meant the softening of beliefs about man’s inherent and inherited depravity into a more free-will belief that people chose to sin, influenced by the fall of Adam.  This meant modifying the traditional Calvinist belief that naturally sinful people had to be called by God, and the traditional Methodist belief that naturally sinfully people were rendered able to choose only by God’s “prevenient grace” made possible by Christ’s universal atonement (in other words, only God’s grace rendered people able to choose or reject Christ).  In both traditions, there was also a greater confidence that human beings could know the truths of religion through common sense and a “Baconian” approach to the Bible that imitated the scientific method.  There was also a greater effort to speak about God not as an absolute ruler of the universe, but as a benevolent ruler that did not engage in tyranny, showing the concern of the republican culture in America.

Noll believes that both Calvinism and Methodism became Americanized through different paths, although both involved debate with theological opponents.  For Calvinists, there was a great concern that a healthy society demanded continued revivals, and that the traditional Calvinist emphasis on God’s initiation of salvation did not provide a good foundation for revivals.  The most radical example of this from someone in a historically Reformed denomination is Charles Finney, who believed that overturning the traditional Calvinist beliefs was the only path to revival.  Another part of the Calvinist changes was the debate with the Unitarians, who denied the Trinity.  These debates also helped to “Americanize” Reformed theology.  Noll believes that the modified Calvinists who emerged in the early 1800s did not seek to change theology for the sake of change, but rather to defend and revive the Christian church.  For them, a strong church led to a strong and free society.  Even a conservative leader like Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary adhered to the Baconian view of reading Scripture, used the rhetoric of common sense, and believed in the agreement of Christian and republican ideas, although his Calvinism remained much more traditional.

Methodists, on the other hand, already had the idea of free will embedded in their theology,  but they did not defend it in American terms (i.e., using commonsense philosophy).  Through the influence of American Methodist leader Francis Asbury, Methodist theology stayed grounded in John Wesley’s interpretation of the Bible.  Noll believes that the Americanization of Methodism occurred as they debated with the Calvinists, and began to explain Methodist free will theology in philosophical terms rather than in Wesley’s terms.  The exception was the “Holiness” strain of Methodist theology pioneered by Phoebe Palmer, which retained its strongly Scriptural base but also did not make much impact in intellectual culture.

Here is Noll’s summary of the different paths toward Americanization:

Methodist theology Americanized as it sought to win respectability and to win over Calvinists, whereas the older traditions from the colonial era had Americanized in order to forge a national destiny under God. (364)

Theological innovations in the American republic

Chapter 12 of America’s God explains the tenets of what Noll calls “American theology.”  He believes that as American evangelicals built a new culture, they also absorbed its assumptions; having torn down traditional authorities, they instead defended Christianity or their denominations with the language of republicanism and commonsense moral ideas rather than relying solely on the theological traditions of their European heritage.  He describes the following developments:

• A greater emphasis on human will to accept God, as opposed to the Calvinist teaching that God’s grace needed to enable a person to believe
• A bolder assertion that individuals could interpret the Bible without any help from tradition, even Protestant traditions
• A diminished focus on the mystery of God in favor of a more confident approach to explaining God’s purposes according to rational principles (for example, Charles Finney’s manuals on how one could guarantee successful revivals by proper planning)
• An identification of human sinfulness with actual sins committed, as opposed to traditional ideas of a sinful nature inherited from Adam
• A new vocabulary to talk about theology that used the language of republicanism and commonsense ideas: “benevolence, common sense, conscience, consciousness, freedom, government, interest, justice, power, primitive, reason, science, simple, virtue” (232)

Not everyone incorporated all of these developments to their fullest extent, of course, but Noll gives examples of how they showed up in disputes between denominations as well as in disputes between Christians and skeptics.

The idea that Christianity could be explained and proved through common sense, Noll argues, was very pervasive.  He also includes some of the criticisms by contemporaries who disagreed (for various reasons) with the appropriation of Enlightenment language and ideas into Christian theology.  This was the most cogent, I thought:

[Common sense theology] reasons from time to eternity with vast dexterity and ease; establishing, by strict Baconian comparison and induction, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the truth of revelation; but it is all in such a way as turned eternity itself into time, and forces the whole invisible world to become a mere abstraction from the world of sense. (250)

In other words, it imposes our logic on God.  This, it seems to me, is the danger of the developments that Noll describes in this chapter.  If the truth about God is easily seen through common sense, what happens if common sense is more malleable than we think?  What must have seemed like permanent common sense 200 years ago was probably shaped by Christian assumptions.  If that shifts, will Christian teachings always seem like common sense?  Furthermore, it seems risky to think that God can be so easily explained by human logic.  This always risks capturing God in our assumptions.

There’s always a place for appealing to common sense when we explain and defend our faith.  But there’s also a risk in relying on it too much.

The free market and American Christianity

In my last post, I summarized Mark Noll’s (America’s God) belief that American evangelicals in the early 19th century generally accepted the developing free market, which brought great economic and social change to the new U.S.  I thought that Noll’s fuller explanation deserved an extended quote:

European Protestants, who for the most part maintained the ideal of Christendom, regularly thought in terms of all-encompassing models of life-as-a-whole, including economics, [sic] But since the United States’ disestablishmentarian evangelicals had given up earlier ideals of Christendom, they often found themselves reacting to changes and circumstances in the economic arena over which their ancestors had once tried to exert self-conscious control.  In their choice for voluntary spiritual suasion, they set aside self-conscious attention to the structures of society.  American evangelicals largely stopped trying to construct complete worldviews; in practice, their pietism drove them to a function division of life into a sacred sphere, which received comprehensive and self-conscious attention, and a secular sphere, which did not…. By limiting the goals of their activity [to transforming society through religious revivals, which were successful], the evangelicals also increased the likelihood that dimensions of society they now neglected would influence them unself-consciously. (224)

Today, when politically conservative American Christians talk about a “biblical worldview,” the free market seems to find its way in as nearly an article of faith.  (Please correct me if I’m in error about this.)  Don’t get me wrong: a compelling Christian case can be (and often has been) made for free market capitalism governed by Christian ethics, and it’s a system that I think is the best, even with its flaws.  But I don’t buy the idea that free market capitalism is the only logical economic philosophy that one can draw from the Scriptures.

Noll writes in the footnote to the passage that I quoted above that American Christians did not begin to write in a disciplined way about  “political economy” until the 1830s and 1840s.  The new market system had developed for several decades by that time.  Noll’s explanation might help to explain the entrenchment of the free market in American Christian thought.

Influences on American theology: republicanism, commonsense morality, and the market

Noll now explores the changes in American theology that came after independence.  Noll believes that the new, republican order that overturned the religious and social establishments of the colonial period needed new institutions, and the expanding evangelical churches provided just that.  See this post for my summary of his explanation.

Chapter 11 of America’s God shows the ways that different trends impacted American theology.  Here are my brief explanations of his points:

• Republicanism, oftentimes rooted in ancient Roman, Renaissance, and English Whig ideas and associated with the upper-class, began to be influenced by liberalism, which focused more on individual political and economic freedoms and saw a place for greater individualism, competition, and the clash of competing interests.  Though some have placed them in opposition, Noll believes that they existed together.  Churches even helped this synthesis by preaching both individual responsibility and membership in a religious community.
• Virtue, so important to republican thinkers, was thought of as primarily a responsibility of the family.  This actually increased women’s significance because of their occupation of the domestic sphere.
• The North and South (he probably should say elites in the North and South, in my opinion) held different attitudes about republicanism.  Northern thinkers, from a more commercial and liberal society, embraced the liberal ideas described above.  Southern thinkers argued that an agricultural, slave-holding society was a better basis for a republic, and they tended to be skeptical of commercialism.
• The commonsense moral philosophy provided a new basis for morality in a nation without a hereditary monarchy or official church.  Morality was plain to the average person, not the province of elites.  My thought: this is pretty much the basis of most political appeals from our two major parties in America today.
• Christians often expressed their theology in the terms of republican ideas and commonsense morality.
• Noll argues that the growing commercial market of the early 19th century did not have as much influence as one might think on theology.  Rather, American religious thinkers accepted the market while also holding on to Protestant ideas about how to manage money.  Noll writes that American evangelicals believed that nearly complete religious freedom was an environment in which their faith could flourish, and he believes that they may have applied this same attitude (more freedom is better) to economics.