The Protestant Mind - Newsletter V1.0 (2)

Protestantism is a movement. ‘Twas ever thus. Nowhere is this view of Protestantism more apparent than in the American experiment, in which protest and reform remained at the center.

Christianity as a whole “but particularly in Protestantism and in America, must be understood as a movement rather than as an institution or series of institutions,” wrote H. Richard Niebuhr. He went on in The Kingdom of God in America to claim that the church is an organic movement, not an organization. Just two decades earlier, the founders of the Assemblies of God had enshrined the claim that “the church is an organism” in the first iteration of their Statement of Fundamental Truths. If Protestantism is a movement, then the church must be a dynamic and living organism rather than an institution.

The European compromise of “whose region, his/her religion” created, in the American Protestant telling, Protestant state churches at the expense of protest and reform. No monarch or parliamentary body should be able to determine the religion of the people. In one irony of American history, the people refused to allow Congress to establish religion and then went about establishing religion in the life and culture of the nation. In this important sense, Americans rejected the “magisterial” reformers.

Even the attempt to maintain forms of establishment Christianity in the early republic could not overcome the protesting instinct. American heroes have always been reformers who protested something in America for the sake of America. Frederick Douglass preferred the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” over “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” The current mistrust of institutions stems from this deeper part of the American psyche. Enshrined in the first amendment, the principle of protest reflected the more fundamental right to freedom of religion in opposition to political authority.

Yet, this principle governing American Protestantism never stopped the intentional drive to create a “righteous empire,” as Martin Marty put it in his history of the Protestant experience in America. Written at the end of the turbulent sixties, Marty divided his history into two parts. The first part examines the attempt to create an empire rooted in the spirituality of the Reformation. He ended his first part in 1877 not only because of the massive influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, but also because of the failure of Protestants to heal the land after the Civil War, resulting in the creation of what Marty called the “two-party” system.

In a lecture given before the American Antiquarian Society in 2007, Marty noted that the most enduring claim of Righteous Empire was that American Protestantism had fractured into public and private forms. Public Protestantism engaged the political and social order of the republic, leading to the creation of the social gospel in the attempt to make of America the kingdom of God on earth. Seizing the name evangelical, private Protestantism focused on individual salvation and the moral life of the person. The mainline became the public party and the evangelicals the private party in Marty’s two-party system.

In 2007, Marty acknowledged that his division of American Protestantism into two parties was no longer tenable. What surprised him was its resilience as a model for interpreting the movement. One could find it lurking behind historical accounts such as George Marsden’s examination of fundamentalism and sociological analyses like James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars.

Writing in the wake of Trump’s first election, Frances FitzGerald freely borrowed Marty’s two-party system to explain white evangelicalism. The title of her opening chapter in The Evangelicals borrows directly from Marty the phrase “the evangelical empire.” Like others before her, she explains the rise of the Christian Right in terms of how evangelicals went from private Protestantism focused on the soul to the public Protestantism of political engagement. The plot seems smooth until FitzGerald puts Southern Baptists into the same chapter as Pentecostals after discussing Billy Graham and evangelicalism. Addressing both groups in the same chapter broadcasts to the reader that FitzGerald doesn’t know how they fit the narrative, but fit they must.

As illuminating as Marty’s description of American Protestantism divided into two parties was, it is even less tenable today. All historical accounts of Protestantism in America have had to deal with the shift in the 1970s when evangelicalism entered the political sphere. The question is whether this was a genuine shift or a continuation of empire building from the nineteenth century. In their commitment to building a new righteous culture (if not empire), evangelicals had never given up on the desire to recover G. K. Chesterton’s observation that America was a nation with the soul of a church.

The mainline Protestantism of the post-Niebuhr era has yielded terrain, choosing instead to move between ecumenical engagement and polemical disputes with evangelicals over the social order. In an ironic twist, mainliners express outrage at the evangelical attempt to serve as “chaplains” to a new informal establishment, which they claim to reject while occupying the halls of social and political power.

In his 2007 lecture, Marty suggested that the primary public role representatives of the mainline play is as critics of the American experiment. The role of critic happened under the category of being a “prophet” against the social order. These days, however, the mainline use of the African-American tradition of prophetic protest must contend with the apostles and prophets of the new charismatics. The entire landscape has changed.

Mainline institutions and scholars have been outflanked in their prophetic protest by the use of prophecy to establish a new version of the American experiment. The new charismatic prophets are men and women of different ethnicities who embody the very racial and gender diversity the old prophets called for. Coming from the margins, these new prophets assault the center. The old prophets, conversely, tend to be predominantly white, educated elite who occupy the very positions and institutions of cultural and political power they decry.

Nowhere was this contrast between the old and the new more apparent than when Bishop Mariann Budde confronted Trump during the inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral. From her perch of Episcopalian cultural and political power, she lodged a prophetic protest without the slightest irony. For the new charismatic prophets, she was and is the establishment that must now be overthrown.

This observation yields yet another reason why Marty’s two-party system must be finally abandoned. American Protestantism has in its bosom a capacity to remake itself over and over in the name of protest and reform. We are in the midst of such a time of remaking. Those who have written its epitaph in the name of secularism have been wrong again and again. The end of Protestantism in the American experiment is always the beginning of Protestantism. Protest and reform simply take on new ways of being the church in America.

Back in 2013—which seems another lifetime—my Evangelicals and Catholics Together colleague Peter Leithart wrote on the end of Protestantism in First Things. It was an intriguing call for the end of the theology of protest so ingrained in American Protestantism. He argued that to lodge identity in protest was a negative enterprise (“I am not Catholic”) that must be abandoned.

More particularly, Leithart was trying to exorcise the anti-Catholic spirit still inhabiting some sectors of evangelicalism. What he wanted was a more robust form of Reformation theology that acknowledged its own catholicity alongside of the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church.

The article garnered enough response that Biola hosted a debate, also partly sponsored by First Things, on the topic. Fred Sanders, Peter Leithart, and Carl Trueman all gave speeches and then engaged in an extended discussion of the topic. In a follow-up article to the debate, Brad Littlejohn suggested that the differences between the three came down to a “difference over the nature of history.” What Littlejohn meant was whether there was a historical (positive) essence to Protestantism. I wonder if any of the four would see this essence as a movement of protest and reform calling Christianity to embody its true self, however that may be defined.

Captured by the Reformation motto semper reformanda, the end of Protestantism is always the beginning of Protestantism. Leithart’s article and the subsequent debate occurred between 2013 and 2014. Leithart followed up this initial round with a longer argument he published as The End of Protestantism in the year Donald Trump won the presidency. One might say that in that year, the end of Protestantism had already come in the form of the independent networks of charismatics some of whom formed the New Apostolic Reformation. Wedded to Marty’s two-party system, Frances FitzGerald never saw these new charismatics even after the so-called Trump prophecies.

One of the challenges of American Protestantism is to see the whole movement all at once. Few observers of American politics noticed the emergence of apostolic networks of charismatic Protestant Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century until they publicly prophesied about Trump as a kind of Cyrus figure. Looking back on the Biola debate over the end of Protestantism, Leithart and Trueman represented that tiny yet potent world of Reformed orthodoxy. From this Reformed vantage point, the debate is over how to maintain the magisterial European forms of Protestantism over against American Protestantism.

Protestantism is a movement of protest and reform within Christianity. Rooted in the idea of reforming the image of God through Christ in the Spirit, Protestantism advances toward a catholicity glimpsed partially in this form or that but awaiting the eschaton for its final emergence. It is the once and future movement.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

Francis Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism

Marty E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America