When You Don't Know The Subject, You Can Conclude Anything About It

The New Yorker attempts to review American ecclesiastical history:

The historic European Protestant traditions that were the forebears of the American church placed great emphasis on learning and on doctrine, but the result was a faith that tended to be aristocratic and élitist. Revivalism democratized Christianity. It elevated a new class of spiritual leaders—people who could hold a crowd in their thrall. They preached that salvation was open to all and exhorted congregants to forge their own moral destinies. Sutton argues that the effect of this movement was a distinctly American faith, one in which “the ideals of political democracy and religious democracy went hand in hand.”

Well, yeah. Maybe .But the Church of Rome started out far more democratically, too. Augustine converted to Christianity, and later was pressed into service as a bishop by the people. There were no “ideals of political democracy and religious democracy” in Europe, and especially in the Roman Empire, except among the first century Christians (Paul’s house churches put family and their slaves on equal grounds, at least for worship; and Luke describes early believers gathering together (apart from Paul’s influence), and holding everything in common, make and female. As Paul told the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Radical stuff even today. The Roman church took on the character of feudal Europe after Constantine, which is why the Desert Fathers fled to the desert: Christianity was becoming too worldly, i.e., too much like the world.  And feudal Europe owed a lot to the Roman Empire. French, Spanish and Italian are variants of Latin. Piccadilly Circus is from the Latin word for “circle.” The British admired the Romans so much they treated Latin as a “better” language than their own for over 100 years, because Willie the Shake had “little Latin and less Greek.” Bishops became “princes of the church” in order to stand equal to the feudal nobles, and the Bishop of Rome for some time held power over the monarchs of Europe, a power that began seriously ebbing with Henry VIII, a power Rome fought with Elizabeth I to recover. The church was very much of the world at that point. (Henry taking all their property in England to dole out to his dukes and earls and barons like the feudal lord he was didn’t help matters with Rome very much.)

Monks founded the great universities of Europe to keep literacy alive so the religious could read the scriptures and the works of the church fathers. Literacy was not widespread until about the time of Gutenberg (who needed it until then?), so education was, of course, connected to the church. The European churches that were not just the Anglican Church brought those traditions with them. In the 19th century German settlers in St. Louis, a city already dominated by the Roman Church (I spent a weekend in a retreat in a former Catholic seminary, built to house priests-in-training. The hallways were so wide I joked I could drive my MG Midget down them, and turn it around at either end. It was a much bigger facility than the seminary I would attend for four years.). Those settlers built a seminary, an orphanage, a hospital, and a mental health facility, all within a few years of their arrival. And all are still operating, over 100 years later. The break with that tradition is very American, but hardly a defining feature of American Baptists. One of my oldest friends grew up in the Baptist church and attended a Baptist seminary. I still remember his father talking about Baptist preachers he knew with doctorates. He spoke as if he expected his son to ascend to such lofty heights. Most of the pastors I know at the largest Baptist churches are referred to as “Doctor” (never “Reverend.” Too Catholic.)

Sorry to digress so long, and get so far from my point. The point is simply that the American church is distinct from the European model in some ways; but those differences stem from historical circumstances. Too many Americans assume they grow from “corrections” we made as “free men” (which never means quite the same as “free people”). For example, some denominations accept women as pastors, priests, or part of the church judicatory (bishops; Conference Ministers; titles vary). Others resolutely refuse to. Some accept LGBTQ+ as members and clergy. Some refuse to accept them into the latter category, some refuse to accept them at all. Why? Culture, primarily. The members start with culture, and then interpret scripture, traditions, teachings, as it suits them.

Same as it ever was.

But considering how many denominations in American Christianity are rooted in European culture (starting with the divide between Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches), and how many denominations in America are rebranded European denominations, starting with the Methodist Episcopal Church. John Wesley was an Episcopal priest, and the church still has bishops (an episcopate). The Lutheran church has bishops, too, though the ELCA is a merger of Lutherans and German Evangelicals, the latter itself a forced merger out of Prussia of the Lutheran and Reformed denominations in that country. The even more uniquely American Lutherans are the Missouri Synod, who broke from the rest of the Lutherans in America over questions of purity, and the Wisconsin Synod, who broke with the Lutherans and the MO Synod over the same questions.

That’s probably a more American distinction in churches, as they fight within themselves, and merge with other churches to survive (creating the ELCA or the United Methodists (a merger with the United Brethren), or even my church, the UCC.

I’ll stop now, but that’s the point. There is no one distinct American church, and dividing it on who has a theological education in the pulpit, and who doesn’t, is a mug’s game. Congregational churches were once (circa 17th century) divided between the men on the side with the pulpit, and the women and children on the other, every Sunday morning (I pastored a German Evangelical church (originally) where some members were old enough to remember the same divisions there, earlier in the 20th century). The men listened intently to the sermon, and later corrected the pastor on anything they considered apostasy, or error.  The first universities in America were founded by Congregationalists. You’ve probably heard of them.

It’s true there was (is still?) a Cumberland Presbyterian denomination, which didn’t require its pastors to be trained by a seminary, a distinction from other Presbyterian churches (or was before the merger of the “north” and “south” denominations, split by the civil war and not rejoining for 100 years or so afterwards.) The merger prompted a splinter group, the “Continuing Presbyterian Church (the north was too liberal; I don’t know why. This was long before “gay” meant anything but “happy,” so that wasn’t it.), and now I know of at least one “Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And they didn’t merge with an old German Lutheran/Reformed denomination. What education level they require of their pastors, if any, I don’t know. The Cumberland branch started because Presbyterians were heading west through the Gap and needed pastors. But if pastors weren’t following, they were going to raise up their own. Distinct American egalitarianism? Or hard necessity? Two conditions that often appear alike, and I’ve found circumstances drive decision making far more than ideals do. At least in the final analysis.

Mark Noll, a historian of religion, argues that revivalism in America brought vitality to the church but left it intellectually impoverished—a “scandal of the evangelical mind.” Nevertheless, the revivalists got their results. Religious adherence surged in the nineteenth century; by the twentieth, the majority of Americans belonged to a church.

When in the 20th century? In 1906 only 41% of Americans claimed church membership. 

As you can see from the chart, that number rose slowly until the 1940's.  Church membership exploded in the years after WWII, which is why the Boomers think everyone in America always went to church. The boom in churches was hardly because of revivalism or people passing out in worship. Middle America was not getting dressed up on Sunday to have ecstatic experiences. This was the age of Peter Marshall and Norman Vincent Peale; the age when TIME magazine declared Reinhold Niebuhr America’s theologian, and people knew what they meant. It was also the time, as Harvey Cox was pointing out at Harvard Divinity School, of the genesis of the Pentecostal movement, the “holy rollers” returned from the Second Great Awakening. Professor Cox, a Baptist himself, would argue that of such would be the future of Christianity in America. Except for a few TV preachers in the ‘70’s, though, who disappeared in scandal and sinking ratings, Pentecostals never really overcame their working class roots. This is America: we still prefer a distinction between labor and man, between first class and steerage. Even if we can’t afford first class ourselves.

I can tell you as a pastor at the end of the 20th century that most church rolls listed members who hadn’t been near the building in decades; if they were still alive. Claiming church membership from the mid-forties on had as much to do with business connections and social status as anything else. When I was younger and just out of law school, my father approved of me returning to a church because I’d make business contacts there, as he had done at my age. He was being practical, not baldly mercantile. Church had many purposes at the time. It has fewer of them now.

There were “revivals” in the Baptist churches where I grew up; usually week long events that didn’t involve glossalalia or passing out in divine ecstasy (the parts of that which don’t show up in Acts make their appearance in the lives of the saints, so, again, not peculiarly American, nor Protestant). I went with my Baptist friend (it was his church), and took notes like an anthropologist in New Guinea. The most emotional part was the altar call. I went to a Billy Graham revival in a stadium with a church group, for reasons I can’t remember, but mostly curiosity. It was the closest I came to feeling drawn to the altar during the call. But I wasn’t ecstatic, and I didn’t go.

The New Yorker article jumps to a quick summary of the birth and rise of fundamentalism, without noticing, as Martin Marty did decades back, that it is an international phenomenon largely in reaction against modernity and “the other.” That lacunae is important, because, well, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself:

It’s inarguable, however, that Donald Trump’s ascendance has nourished a darker, more volatile version of the phenomenon. Tapping into the lineage of white evangelicalism, with its charismatic leaders, anti-intellectualism, and political militancy, the maga movement has placed a nostalgia for a Christian past at the center of a grievance-based politics.

Barton’s pseudo-scholarship furnished Christian nationalists with valuable ammunition, but the movement needed foot soldiers. In 2012, an eighteen-year-old named Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a nonprofit organization meant to promote fiscal conservatism among young people. Kirk had been a Christian since childhood, but he was initially circumspect about his faith, arguing that religious conservatives had erred by imposing their beliefs “through government policy.” In 2019, however, Kirk met Rob McCoy, a pastor who challenged Kirk to more aggressively bring his Christian world view into the public arena. The following year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Kirk lauded President Trump for understanding “the seven mountains of cultural influence”—an evangelical vision, dating to the nineteen-seventies, that calls on believers to influence the realms of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Kirk embraced the idea himself, building a media empire and organizing a grassroots army to turn out Trump voters during the 2024 election. Last year, after a gunman shot and killed Kirk at a campus event in Utah, his wife, Erika, a former Miss Arizona who started her own ministry organization and a faith-based clothing company, vowed to carry on her husband’s legacy, “fighting the good fight for our country.”

We can ignore the “pseudo-scholarship” discussion for our purposes. What’s missing in this brief history of the rise of fundamentalism as "the unequivocal winner in America’s religious economy,” is the base reason for that rise. It wasn’t evolution in the ‘20’s (presented as the cause of fundamentalism in the first place. It actually had more to do with theology than Darwin) that made people accept it in the last decades of the 20th century; it was racism. The civil rights movement of the ‘60’s didn’t, as Dr. King stated, bring American churches to embrace desegregation. Church in America (except, ironically, among some Pentecostal churches when Cox was writing about them), was, and still is, the most segregated hour in America. King publicly lamented the refusal of white Christian churches to support his movement. There’s a reason white people still quote King’s Washington speech, but don’t know his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And it’s the same reason they don’t remember why King was in D.C. to give that speech. Racism and classism go hand in hand in America. And it was racism that drove people out of “liberal” churches far more than it was the “embrace” of Darwin or science, at all. Pastors who could preach about evolution, didn’t dare preach about race in America. They still can’t.

Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are both bluntly racist in ways Jesse Helms and George Wallace never were; and yet that goes unmentioned in the New Yorker article. We still can’t have an honest discussion about race, because it’s so polarizing all discussion ceases. It’s still the elephant in the American room we can’t admit is there. Ironically, the article mentions Jerry Falwell as an architect of the rise to cultural dominance of fundamentalism, without commenting on what a known racist he was.  Can’t clutter the discussion with such inconvenient truths.

Although only about two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christians—compared with just under ninety per cent in the nineteen-nineties—a recent Pew Research Center survey concluded that the erosion in belief has likely levelled off. New data from Gallup show a surge of religiosity among young men. It seems possible that Christianity is once again on the upswing in America.

If James Talarico is a harbinger, it’s probably of a more “liberal” Xianity, or at least one more counter to the religious culture fundamentalism created.  That goes a long way to explaining Dan Patrick’s concern, which I think leaves the mere political and jumps into the theological.

The sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued that, historically, the most popular religious bodies tend to exert a countervailing force on the culture at large. They demand sacrifice from their adherents but also promise temporal and eternal rewards. Expecting churches that preach a distant, unresponsive God to be attractive to new believers is akin, Finke and Stark write, to believing that soccer fans would buy tickets to matches with “players who, for lack of a ball, just stand around.” In this way, they explain the extraordinary rise of evangelicalism.

Well, that’s certainly borne out by history, although the RC isn’t going anywhere, and it would appear “liberal” church ideas might yet have their day. Certainly the Church of Meaning and Belonging starts out as the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging, but honestly, it can’t stay that way for long. Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Or any sociologist of religion; or any ecclesiastical historian.

Part of the problem with this discussion is that fundamentalism has defined the popular notion of Christianity, but it has hardly supplanted other Christian churches.  Fundamentalism was largely popular from the 80's until the 2020's because it was espoused by TV evangelists first, and so became the image of Christianity in America (if it's on TeeVee, it must be true!).  And then journalists picked it up as normative, supplanting more traditional Protestantism and Catholicism.  But the ascent of Pope Francis and then Pope Leo shows something else is happening in the Roman church (which never, despite Opus Dei, accepted fundamentalism as a replacement for tradition).  And while some churches broke away from traditional "mainline" churches over "liberal" teachings (like accepting LGBTQ+, etc.), most of those churches found life no better outside the denomination than in it.  I've also seen many congregations close because no one was left there but the elderly.  The popular explanation for that, echoed in the New Yorker article, is that those congregations were too "liberal," i.e., not fundamentalist enough.  The realiy is something else entirely.  I pastored two congregations where I, in middle age, was one of the youngest people in the church.  And I was too young and "liberal," in the sense of different from the majority, for those congregations.  Both wanted to "grow," but both understood that to be necessary merely to survive.  They wanted, in other words, to be social clubs and hire a new director who would recruit new members.  But they didn't want to accept new members, especially younger members.  They wanted everything to stay the way it was, but new people to come and fill their coffers and make them feel a bit less alone and alienated.  But they were alone, and alientating, because they wanted to keep control of the ship (not an errant metaphor,  The nave of the church is the hold of a ship, the timbers of the roof (in most Protestant architecture, anyway, the beams of the ship upturned.  I did a whole sermon on this in one of my churches.)  In the church I grew up in, my parents' generation ran things, and there were a few "old people," in their '60's, maybe one or two in their early '70's.  Those people left the church operations to the "younger people," like my parents.  I was encouraged to be responsible for church governance when I was confirmed, so the church would pass to the next generation.  That encouragement faded at some point, as my generation stopped going to church, and returned only to raise their children there.  But by then, the "old guard" had settled in, and nothing was allowed to change without their agreement.  It could be small things, like how the church was decorated for Xmas; or big things, like what hymns should be sung every Sunday morning.  I had one church member insist to me that returning the denomination name on the sign to the one that no longer existed, but had in the 1950's, would bring people flooding back to the sanctuary.  No one but her remembered that denomination, and since it was "E&R," Evangelical and Reformed, it would have been very confusing in the present age.  Outsiders would have expected a very different church from the one they would find there.  The elderly members wondered why no new members joined, why young people stayed away; but they didn't want to know what the reason was.

Those congregations have "died."  Not because the elderly passed on, but because the congregation shrank so much, it couldn't stay open.  I knew people my age and younger who wouldn't come to "my" church because no one else there was younger than their parents.  The few who were, were not really welcomed in, and had no children for their children to associate with, as I did when I was young.

Demographics is killing the church much faster than theology.  My grandfather's died at 68.  My father lived to be 90.  People who knew they'd be dead before 70 tended to let go of the world, and leave it to others.  People who live longer and healthier, tend to think they should still be both active and "in charge," and there the real problem lies.  Would they attend a church with James Talarico as their pastor (he's a seminary student at Ausin Presbyterian Seminary)?  Probably not.  Would their grandchildren?  Maybe.

The issues, you see, are more granular and particular than they appear to be from 30,000 feet.  Is Xian fundamentalism still culturally powerful?  You might as well ask if Islamic fundamentalism is (I told you it was an international matter).  Was the latter ever the whole of Islam?  Was it ever the whole of Christianity?

Where you start determines where you end up.  Especially if you don't pay attention to the people you're talking about; or over.