6
We have lost the South for a generation.
—LYNDON JOHNSON, 1964
ECUMENICAL PROTESTANTISM began the 1960s with an unprecedented spasm of collective self-interrogation, often touching on self-flagellation. While evangelical leaders were encouraging their tribe to increase pride in their own tightly knit communities and to double down on their ostensibly clear and stable faith, their mainline counterparts were giving hell to ecumenical churchgoers for being slow to modernize. In one scorching critique after another, ecumenical intellectuals accused privileged white Christians of avoiding the social and political implications of the gospel and of being prisoners to ideas long since discredited by modern learning. A new cohort of ecumenical polemicists had been deeply affected by the missionary witness to the world’s diversity and its inequalities. This cohort sided with anticolonial movements in the Global South, embraced Jews as full partners in creating a more just America, and expressed strong support for the church-centered African American struggle against white supremacy. These ecumenical intellectuals opened to full bore the engines of the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism.
In My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic (1964), an Episcopal layman who spent seven years living amid poverty in Harlem while serving as a lawyer to indigent Black people excoriated his fellow white Christians for failing to confront racial and economic inequality. “The churches of white society in America have largely forfeited any claim to leadership” in tackling these evils, William Stringfellow complained, while offering page after page of earnest instruction on how a truly Christian approach, as he understood it, would engage a color-defined population still not incorporated as fully American. In The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (1961), Gibson Winter of the University of Chicago Divinity School challenged Christians to go beyond their sheltered lives and address the panorama of injustice that surrounded them.1 Economic justice, downplayed during the 1950s, returned with a vengeance in the new round of manifestos. Adamantly universalist, these writings addressed the injustices suffered by particular groups within a presumably single moral, religious, and national community.
Although the missionary project had already been substantially reformed, this group of writers complained that the colonialist-imperialist past remained a serious impediment to missionary success even as a service enterprise. In The Unpopular Missionary (1964), Ralph E. Dodge, a senior Methodist missionary to Angola and Rhodesia, warned that if the American churches did not turn more control and resources over to the Indigenous churches, missions were doomed to go the way of colonial governments: out for good, and for the same reasons. The basic problem was that the missionary project was still hesitant to accept Indigenous peoples on their own terms as “human beings” and as “full brothers in Jesus Christ”—not as copies of Christians in Memphis and Minneapolis. The church, he wrote, “must reject categorically all attitudes and practices of racial superiority.”2 James A. Scherer, a Lutheran missionary to China, sounded the same notes of anger and warning in Missionary, Go Home! A Reappraisal of the Christian World Mission (1964).3 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a former missionary to India, warned Christians that they had yet to sufficiently renounce their inherited notions of spiritual and racial superiority; they must recognize that they were just one group among many. Human life henceforth was to be “cast in a multicultural context,” he insisted, employing the term multicultural three decades before it became popular.4
The most widely discussed books in this polemical package were more ambitiously theological and yet more radical. Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (1961) and Paul M. Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963) established the vogue of the “death of God theologians.”5 But these departures from the traditional supernaturalism of the average churchgoer were tame compared with Honest to God (1963), by Anglican bishop John A. T. Robinson. Although written in England by a clergyman best known at the time for his court testimony against the censorship of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this colloquially phrased manifesto gained instant notoriety in the United States, well beyond the seminaries. Robinson attacked as hopelessly anachronistic the ideas about God and Jesus that were common among Christians, mocking the mystifications that suggest “that Jesus was really God almighty walking about on earth, dressed up as a man … taking part in a charade.”6 Much of Robinson’s message was already incorporated into the discourse of liberal seminaries as a result of the calls for “demythologized” and “religionless” Christianity made somewhat cryptically by theologians Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich. But Robinson’s breakaway best seller popularized as never before the strivings of a theological elite to update Christian teachings in relation to contemporary culture and modern, scientific standards of truth. For a prominent cleric to characterize as downright dishonest the sincere God talk of the average churchgoer exposed as never before the gap between the people in the pew and the increasingly cosmopolitan church leaders.
Robinson and his champions were quick to insist that the Christian faith was just as true as ever, once properly understood. Among the ecumenical leaders who hailed the book was John C. Bennett, who called its publication “A Most Welcome Event.”7 Still, many of Robinson’s colleagues condemned the book as dangerously misleading because of its sensational vocabulary. This debate was ostensibly intramural for believers, but it undoubtedly diminished the credibility of the specific beliefs that Robinson attacked (for example, the notion of a God “out there”) more than it enhanced the credibility of the beliefs he defended (for example, God is our “ground of being”). Taking to a new extreme a classic impulse in ecumenical Protestantism to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it, Robinson dramatically legitimized the diverse world of contemporary culture as an arena for sympathetic engagement, not to be held at a biblically warranted distance. Robinson made the generic ideal of honesty, rather than any specifically Christian doctrine, the touchstone for his testimony, and he blurred the line between what most people took Christianity to be, and the enlightened, humane dispositions of the left-liberal intelligentsia.
Two years later, a young American Baptist minister pressed the same line of thought in a more carefully argued book. Harvey Cox’s manifesto, The Secular City (1965), made the case for a politically engaged religion organized around human responsibility for the destiny of a world that many Christians wrongly assumed to be in God’s hands. The book soon sold more than one million copies. Cox celebrated “secularization” as a liberation from “all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” While insisting that God was no less present throughout secular domains than within what traditionalists called “religion,” Cox concluded with the extraordinary suggestion that the very name of God was so misleading that it might make sense to stop mentioning God altogether until our worldly experience gives us a new vocabulary. “Like Moses,” he wrote in the book’s concluding sentence, let us be “confident that we will be granted a new name by events of the future.” But for now, he concluded, “we must simply take up the work of liberating the captives.”8
Cox doubted that the average provincial Christian was equipped to deal with the wider world that the theologians had come to master, and which they had an obligation to explain to the faithful. “Secularization” took place “only when the cosmopolitan confrontations of city living exposed the relativity of the myths and traditions” once thought to be “unquestionable.” Convinced of the virtues of “heterogeneity” and “the color and character lent by diversity,” Cox pressed the case for “pluralism and tolerance” throughout the world, but especially in the United States, where the recent “emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and others” from “an enforced Protestant cultural religion” boded well for further diversification. “It would be too bad,” Cox reflected, “if Catholics and Jews, having rightly pushed for the de-Protestantizing of American society and having in effect won, should now join Protestants in reconstituting a kind of tripartite American religion.… At this point, Christians should support the secularization of American society, recognizing that secularists, atheists, and agnostics do not have to be second-class citizens.”9
Cox and the other writers of this early 1960s ecumenical effusion condemned the failings of their own churches without apparent fear. Their radicalism could also be construed as an attack on the ideas and practices of evangelicals, even guiltier, it would seem, than the ecumenical rank and file of the errors these polemicists exposed. But these polemics were not aimed at the evangelical party; rather, they were directed against the liberalizers for not liberalizing enough, for failing to press yet harder the campaign to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. While Billy Graham was making Christianity simpler and more accessible, the ecumenical intelligentsia was making it more demanding.
The self-assured, if not complacent ecumenical leadership took increasingly forthright and controversial stands on issues of the day.10 Mainliners were among the earliest and most vociferous opponents of the American military action in Vietnam. This was a particularly sharp point of tension with evangelicals, the overwhelming majority of whom wanted nothing to do with the antiwar activities of the liberals. The NCC supported Palestinian independence from Israel, endorsed the resumption of normal relations with Cuba, put money and legal resources behind the United Farm Workers of America, rallied to support the American Indian Movement during the siege at Wounded Knee, and took sides with Soviet-backed African insurgents against Portuguese colonial regimes. Impatient with the parochialism of denominational cultures, top church officials, including Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake and Episcopalian James Pike, called for massive mergers eventuating, perhaps, in a single, unified Protestant church for the United States and even for the world. Blake was way out front on the matter of Jim Crow and was arrested at a civil rights demonstration in Maryland in 1963, the same year the Christian Century published Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The ecumenical-evangelical divide as it existed in 1963 was on full display that August when Billy Graham, asked to comment on the “I Have a Dream” speech King delivered at the March on Washington, was candid about evangelical priorities. “Little white children of Alabama will walk hand in hand with little Black children,” Graham explained in crisp and clear language, “only when Christ comes again.”11 No one etched more vividly the political coordinates of the ecumenical-evangelical divide at that historical moment.12
Ecumenical support for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was a pivotal event in the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. King’s national stature was greater than anything achieved by previous Black leaders supported by the FCC and the NCC. Benjamin Mays, Channing Tobias, and Howard Thurman were not household names for the white public, and the initiatives they led, however courageous and heroic, were not at the center of American politics. King’s actions, however, were so much at the center that it became common for historians to refer to his time as “the King Years.”13
With the coming of King, African American churches became a more important, integral part of ecumenical Protestantism. When the ecumenical leadership created the Consultation on Church Union, the structure within which denominational representatives were to meet to talk over the possibilities of actually creating a single, national Protestant church, three of the nine most involved denominations were African American. Although the representatives of the Black denominations reminded the white delegates of the economic inequality among the various churches and asked that resources be redistributed, the very fact of their involvement marked the desire of the white officials to find a way to integrate the churches ethnoracially as well as doctrinally and signaled how distant the ecumenical leaders were from their evangelical counterparts.
The Consultation on Church Union eventually failed for many reasons, especially the refusal of churchgoers and their pastors to give up their long-standing identities and structures of authority. The venture foundered also because the conferees could not agree about what amounted to reparations for the Black churches. Evangelical periodicals attacked the liberalizers for substituting politics for religion. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a key ally of white evangelicals in the struggle to maintain a broadly Christian-infused regime of white supremacy, published a series of articles in Christianity Today charging that the liberal church preachers and officials were serving the interests of the Soviet Union.14
Rank-and-file white churchgoers in ecumenical churches were aware of these critiques and sometimes worried about them. Had their own Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopalian leaders become too radical, not only on race, but on Vietnam and a host of other issues? The gap between the cosmopolitan leadership and the provincial laity (and many small-town and rural pastors) within ecumenical churches widened.15 Church officials found themselves increasingly on the defensive in national and regional governance bodies. The people in the pews and many of their pastors refused to approve funding for projects they did not like. The budget of the NCC nosedived in the 1970s. Employees had to be laid off.
And just then, at exactly this late 1960s, early 1970s moment, the ecumenical denominations began their much-discussed decline in membership. The experience was all the more striking since it got going just after church membership had reached all-time highs and was expected to grow further as more and more upwardly mobile evangelicals would join the mainline denominations. But instead the Northern Presbyterians (northern and southern Presbyterian denominations did not become United Presbyterians until 1983) lost nearly 20 percent of their members between 1965 and 1975. Episcopalians reached their highest numbers in 1967, but by 1975 had lost about 9 percent. The Methodists’ zenith was 1964, but they then lost 11 percent of their membership in the next decade and by the end of the century were down 28 percent.16 The United Church of Christ had more than two million members in 1957, when it was formed through a merger of the Congregationalists and the German Reformed, but sixty years later it had 850,000, a decline of 63 percent. As late as 1976 the seven denominations known as the core of the mainline still could count 31 percent of the nation’s population as members, but only a dozen years later they could claim only 19 percent. By 2018, membership in the same denominations had dropped to about 12 percent of the national population.17
What happened?
Did people move from ecumenical to evangelical churches? Yes, some did. About 10 percent of self-identified evangelicals in the 1970s had once been members of mainline denominations.18 But this migration was not nearly enough to explain the magnitude of the ecumenical decline. Several other factors were more decisive.
Increasing numbers of children reared in ecumenical congregations decided during their teens or twenties not to affiliate with the churches of their parents. Liberalizing church leaders were pushing their campaign too far and too fast for some of their older members, but not far and fast enough for many young people who were attentive to the cultural and political movements around them. Ecumenical parents were likely to encourage their children to explore the world and make their own decisions about it. They did just that, and they took advantage of the expanding opportunities to form communities beyond the churches. Young people departed their natal churches in droves. Evangelical parents, by contrast, encouraged their children to be leery of the world beyond their own communities and eventually became heavily committed to homeschooling.
The migration of young people out of ecumenical churches followed in part from the unprecedented growth and prestige of higher education. Never before had so many young people gone to college, and never before had campuses presented such a dynamic, multifaceted, and attractive setting for youthful experimentation. Sociologists and journalists reported that academia was where the action was, politically, intellectually, and spiritually. “There has fallen to the universities a unique, indispensable, and capital function in the intellectual and spiritual life of modern society,” the famous writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote in the New Republic in 1966. Cultural leadership belongs to the academy “rather than, let us say, to the churches or the government,” Lippmann explained, because our scientists and scholars have proven to be our most reliable authorities for understanding “the nature of good and evil” and for showing us how “to ascertain and to recognize the truth and to distinguish it from error.”19
The domain of higher education, unsurprisingly, was more directly influenced by both Jewish and missionary cosmopolitanism than any other institutional segment of American life. In teaching and in research, professors extensively engaged the world beyond the North Atlantic West. Undergraduate curricula, doctoral programs, and disciplinary professional associations all made Asian societies, especially, more familiar to those in the orbit of higher education. Jewish Americans were well represented in the classrooms and in university governance. Higher education was the single most culturally strategic space for these two demographic transformations of American society to register. On campuses, missionary cosmopolitanism and Jewish cosmopolitanism converged as nowhere else.
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s classic account of the impact of education on the ecumenical-evangelical divide rings true after more than three decades: “It was the better educated, both among laity and clergy, who pushed religious organizations in a more socially activist direction, first in the civil rights movement and then in the protest movement against the Vietnam War. These were the persons who came to favor greater cooperation between the different faiths and denominations, who registered lower levels of prejudice and misgiving toward members of other faiths, and who themselves were more likely to switch denominations, to visit other denominations, and to marry outside of their own faith tradition.”20
Evangelicals were correct to identify universities as threats to interests they held dear. Christianity, so long protected from rigorous scrutiny in American classrooms, was losing its authority. Summarizing a three-year workshop on religion and higher education sponsored by the Lilly Foundation in the late 1990s, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff noted with some disbelief that so many of his colleagues, heirs to the most hegemonic cultural project in the entire history of the North Atlantic West, had become convinced that “Christians, both faculty and students, are being victimized on account of their Christianity.”21
Registering the increased cultural importance of college campuses, ecumenical churches increased the financing that enabled denominationally sponsored campus ministries to expand their services. Yet, as Dorothy Bass shows, these campus ministries were caught between the priorities of their denominational sponsors and the tendency of their student constituencies to embrace radical ideas that were hard to reconcile with an attachment to organized Christianity. William Stringfellow, Harvey Cox, and their kind encouraged young Protestants to think beyond the church, practice their faith in the world, and even allow the church to disappear as the inherited faith flourished in full commerce with the world. “Only when we in the church are willing to lose our institutional life in love for and service to the world,” one Bonhoeffer-inspired ecumenical youth proclaimed, “will we deliver the nature of our true life, our mission, and our Lord.”22
While many young people were leaving the ecumenical churches, those who remained were having fewer babies. During the baby boom that affected most of American society, Northern Presbyterian women gave birth to only an average of 1.6 children, while the overwhelmingly stay-at-home evangelical women gave birth to an average of 2.4 children—more babies than even Catholic women delivered during the same years. Ecumenical families that favored family planning soon had fewer children, and as those children grew up, quite a few departed. Those who remained had fewer children than their parents. As a consequence, the proportion of church members over the age of fifty grew rapidly. The graying of ecumenical churches is easily measured. In 1957, only 36 percent of Lutherans were over fifty, yet by 1983, 45 percent were. During that same quarter century, the percentage of Methodists over fifty increased from 40 to 49 percent, and the percentage of Episcopalians over fifty increased from 36 to 46 percent.23 The churches contained fewer and fewer women of childbearing age.24
Birth rates do not exist in cultural vacuums. Ecumenicals encouraged contraception and were more comfortable with women joining the workforce than were evangelicals. Even before World War II ecumenical churches not only supported sex education in the public schools but were largely responsible for developing it as part of standard curricula. Evangelicals generally disapproved. According to sex education’s leading historian, the topic was essentially a subset of “the story of liberal Protestants in the United States.”25 In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey found theologically liberal clergy to be among the most committed defenders of his research on sexual behavior. Support for the legalization of abortion was widespread among ecumenical leaders well before the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Liberal ideas about sex were central to the ecumenical-evangelical divide as it deepened in the late 1940s and 1950s.26 Evangelical families not only managed to keep more of their children close to home than did ecumenical parents; they had more children to begin with.
No less important as a cause of the decline in ecumenical church membership was the growing reluctance of upwardly mobile evangelicals to join. The postwar increase in ecumenical churchgoers in the suburbs had been based largely on upward class mobility: Nazarenes, Adventists, and members of other evangelical confessions “moved up” to the Presbyterians and Methodists as they prospered and gained more education. But by the end of the 1960s, oil money, media expansion, and enterprise had made evangelical Protestantism sufficiently respectable that one did not have to leave it in order to be recognized as an established part of American society. No longer did one have to be mainline to be mainstream. Joining the ecumenical churches, moreover, obliged one to face intensifying pressure to take a stand against white supremacy and to abandon the notion of a “Christian America,” and to put aside inherited ideas about the Bible.
Evangelical churches made it easy to resist such pressures. An evangelical could be counted as fully Christian without taking on potentially unwelcome social obligations. What did Billy Graham mean by “accepting Christ”? It could mean remaining within the confines of the inherited culture depicted in Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers while simply promising to be better at it. To be better, that is, at living up to that culture’s self-image. Practicing the Golden Rule, being faithful to one’s spouse, eschewing pornography and same-sex intimacy, avoiding the abuse of alcohol and drugs, extending a helping hand to less well-off neighbors, praying on a daily basis, and supporting the essentials of the American economic and political order until its injustices were corrected by changes in the human heart were not necessarily signs of God’s grace. But these behaviors were expected of those who came to Graham’s altar. That was enough.
It was far from enough for the ecumenical leaders, especially in the wake of the withering self-scrutiny the polemicists of the early 1960s had forced upon them. Ecumenical officialdom demanded more from the faithful. This demand rendered the historical situation of ecumenical Protestantism comparable to that of the Democratic Party when it endorsed the cause of civil rights for African Americans in 1964. “We have lost the South for a generation,” President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as remarking at that pivotal moment. At stake was not only the standing of African Americans—the crucial issue for the Democrats—but also the entire campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism, including perspectives on empire, sex, gender, and the critical approach to scripture and the supernatural popularized by writers like Cox and Robinson.
Ecumenical leaders were less attuned than Johnson to the risks they were taking, but they, too, believed that the time had come to redirect the institutions and constituencies they led. Hence they abandoned to opportunistic evangelicals the classic missionary goal of conversion, the powerful claim of a proprietary relationship to the American nation, and a host of other aspirations to which many white Americans remained attached. In pursuit of causes they believed were inspired by God, ecumenical leaders encouraged secular alliances that blurred the boundaries of their faith community and risked the gradual loss of their children to secular communities. They accommodated perspectives on women and the family that reduced their capacity to reproduce themselves exactly at the same critical moment in history that they espoused positions on race, empire, and divinity that diminished their ability to recruit new members from the ranks of evangelicals. Just as the Democrats lost most of the South to the Republicans—and for a much longer time than Johnson himself expected—the ecumenicals lost to evangelicals more and more of the authority to speak for Protestantism.
The campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism lacked a single, dramatic moment like the one Johnson memorialized in his famous remark about the South. But the dynamic was the same. The people in charge of an enterprise decided it was time to do things very differently and risked losing a major segment of the enterprise’s traditional constituency. The similarity between the two cases is visible even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, when Democrats still struggle to win the support of white voters, especially in the South, and ecumenical Protestants still struggle to retain a substantial amount of the symbolic capital of Christianity.
The Republican Party’s subsequent embrace of the “Southern Strategy” makes the analogy of ecumenical Protestantism to the Democratic Party all the more instructive. Historians do not agree on just how central this strategy was in the thinking of President Richard Nixon and his advisors in the early 1970s, but there is no doubt that it was part of the mix.27 By mobilizing the voters least comfortable with the ending of the old racial order, Republicans understood the potential consequences for the Electoral College: if they could lock in the South and tighten their control of the rural midwestern and Mountain states, where they already had a strong hand, little else was needed to win the presidency. One or two of the more urban midwestern states—perhaps Ohio—would clinch it. The same idea applied to the US Senate. The Republicans did continue through the end of the twentieth century to appeal to suburban whites in the urban Northeast and in California, but the gravitational pull of the reliable white voters of the South gradually defined the Republican Party and made the Southern Strategy a central feature of American politics.
What made the Southern Strategy possible is what we continue to call “race” (the visible marks of physical descent, popularly understood), not religion. But that strategy was an event in American religious as well as racial history. Evangelicals dominated the church-intensive states of the old Confederacy, where ecumenicals were the weakest. This had been true for generations and was resoundingly confirmed in 2014 when the Public Religion Research Institute found that white evangelicals composed more than a quarter of the population in fifteen states, eight of which had belonged to the Confederacy (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas). The most extreme case was Tennessee, where 43 percent of residents were white evangelicals. Two of the other fifteen had been slave states without joining the Confederacy (Kentucky and Missouri), and two others (Oklahoma and West Virginia) were adjacent to Confederate states. The other five were scattered in the prairies and the mountains (Indiana, Kansas, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming).28
An additional fact contributed to the religious character of the Southern Strategy. The ecumenical churches that did exist in the South were decidedly more conservative than those in the North, the Midwest, and the West. Denominational officers and leaders of transdenominational organizations were continually frustrated by the reluctance of their southern affiliates to accept policies and programs that the national bodies had agreed upon. The white Methodists, Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ in the southern states were closer to their evangelical neighbors than their counterparts in other sections of the country were to theirs. The southern ecumenicals voted more like the evangelicals than not. For example, the southern Presbyterians, although affiliated with the National Council of Churches, rejected pressures to merge their own pre–Civil War denomination until 1983, when the United Presbyterian Church, at the urging of former missionaries, brought into one organization the sectional bodies created in 1861.
The Republican Party’s pursuit of the Southern Strategy resulted in the gradual but ever tightening connection between Republicans and white evangelicals. The two-party system of the Protestants became more entwined than ever before with the two-party system of American politics. As white evangelicals became more Republican, African American Protestants and white ecumenicals became more identified with the Democratic Party. So, too, did the rapidly increasing numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans. This sharpened ethnoreligious polarization became an enduring feature of American public life.