I’ve mentioned before (you probably don’t remember) how much culture matters to Protestantism. It’s a tricky position to make clear because Irish culture shaped
Irish Christianity and saved civilization (says Thomas Cahill, who has a point), and certainly Roman Catholicism was/is shaped by culture. But the decline of Catholic alliance with monarchies has separated Rome from the world in ways that first made Catholics defy the world (persistence of the Latin Mass, for example), but more recently stand athwart the world while not condemning it as the world, while not condemning it as corrupt
per se.
That latter posture is peculiarly Protestant, so much so it is mistakenly taken as being fundamentally Protestant. It isn’t, at all; and that’s the point. But in the struggle of Christianity to be in the world but not of the world, a struggle rooted in the books of the New Testament themselves, Protestantism is peculiarly shaped by culture, if only because it doesn’t have a single hierarchy to set the boundaries and the guidelines. Protestants set their own standards for what is “correct” in their worship and their practice, which is why there are so many flavors of Protestantism. The church I pastored told the story of how that congregation broke apart over the subject of buying carpet for the sanctuary. A splinter group left, went down the street (literally), and started a new church, supposedly sans sanctuary carpeting. Neither church is the church it was anymore.
When I grew up, everyone went to church. Most people couldn’t really tell you why: it was just what you did. Most of the people in my congregation as a pastor were old people (my age now, but this was 25 years ago) who came to church out of lifelong habit. My parents finally stopped going to their church. Too much had changed in the world; too many of their friends had moved; moved on; changed churches (in a world that emphasizes individual choice, why not? “Cafeteria Catholics” got nothin’ on Cafeteria Protestants). It was never their church so much as it was their congregation; and it wasn’t, anymore. I know the feeling. I stopped regularly attending services (not for the first time in my life) about 20 years ago, now. I doubt I’ll ever look for a church now.
Church attendance overall is in decline. But that’s the nature of Protestantism. And oddly enough, Russell Moore recognizes that without recognizing it at all. Because his argument is that, once, church (as he regards it, i.e., conservative Southern Baptist Protestantism) set the standard of virtue for the world; but now the world sets the standard for the church. I’m not saying he’s wrong; but I don’t think he understands the importance of what he’s saying.
As Graham says, a raunchy “boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.” (This article you are reading right now represents something of this shift, as I spent upward of 15 minutes pondering how to quote Graham’s article without using the word boobs.)
Graham’s analysis is important for American Christians precisely because the shift she describes is not something “out there” in the culture but is instead driven specifically by the very same white evangelical subculture that once insisted that personal character—virtue, to use a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.
The appeal to the “Founders” is of a piece with my argument, if only because few of those “Founders” (who are they, anyway?) would agree with Moore’s definition of “virtue.” They were practical men who made their peace with slavery for the sake of a national government. I’m unclear how “virtuous” that was.*
I think he’s right, this shift isn’t “out there” in the culture; but that’s largely because the culture isn’t “out there” for the church he describes. If anything, that church controlled the culture, until it didn’t. And in losing that control, that church lost its claim to virtue, too.
The town I grew up in was dominated, culturally and demographically, by Southern Baptists. It was the county seat of a “dry” county. The hoariest joke in town was that the only time two Baptists wouldn’t speak to each other in public was when they met in the liquor store just across the county line. My father’s favorite joke was how you kept a Baptist from drinking beer all the beer when you’re out fishing: bring along another Baptist.
Baptist virtues were a flexible, and cultural, matter. And don’t get me started on the works v. faith issue again. Baptists were far more interested in God’s blessings for them than in their blessings for others. That was a stalwart of American Protestantism, too; so again, culture matters far more than the gospels.
But Moore’s argument rests, not on how Baptists should be a light in the world, but on how Baptists ultimately follow the world. The world (culture) changed, and that changed Baptists, is his thesis. And he’s not wrong; but he doesn’t see what that says about the fundamentals (!) of Protestantism.
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? 🤔
*For example:
the midst of the late-1990s Clinton scandal, a group of scholars issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency,” which stated:
We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy.
Those words seem far more distant than a Tocqueville quote now.
Moore’s own words are already distant from his point. “Virtue” is in the eye of the beholder, and a matter of whose ox is being gored.
