7
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense.… Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
—AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, 410
SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY gained attention for his fist-raised support of the pro-Trump mob’s attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Missouri Republican left no doubt about the character of his religious faith and its relation to American politics. He insisted in a speech of 2017 that Christians must take the authority of Christ “into the public realm,” “to seek the obedience” of all the nations, including “our nation.” He continued, “There is not one square inch of all creation of which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” The destiny of the American nation, Hawley explained, was Christian, or must be made so: the “ultimate authority” of Jesus Christ must be taken “into every sphere of life.”1 How different from the ecumenical theorist Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s insistence in 1960 that Christians were just one group among many and that they must accept their diminished role in a multicultural future.2
The Republican Party, in Hawley’s construction, is an instrument to advance the dominion of Christianity, not a partner of the country’s other major party in the practice of democracy. Religious authority “takes captive” the political.3
The support for Trump by white evangelicals like Hawley is the culmination of decades of Republican Party cultivation of this particular ethnoreligious group. Well before January 6, 2021, the Republican Party had written off the sections of the country with the highest education levels and the greatest demographic diversity and had come to rest its fortunes on white voters who were slower to welcome nonwhites into equal citizenship. These targeted voters were also more religious and less educated. Josh Hawley went to Stanford and Yale, but most of the evangelicals who agreed with Hawley did not have the educational advantages he had.
The Democratic Party, in the meantime, became more than ever a home for voters of a very different kind. African Americans, especially, were overwhelmingly Democrats. The Democrats could count on highly educated Americans of all ethnicities. People without any religious affiliation were also much more often Democrats than not. Not all Democrats fit these categories, just as not all Republicans were white evangelicals. But these were the most reliable constituencies of each political party, and each was reminded regularly by the press of their own identities and of the expected political coordinates.
Race was at the center of this dialectical polarization. Since the 1960s, the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party has played successfully to the sentiments of white voters who were uncomfortable with the Civil Rights Movement and with its ecumenical supporters.
Ronald Reagan resoundingly vindicated the Southern Strategy and its heavily evangelical foundation. He opened his successful 1980 presidential campaign by defending “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi, standing virtually on the graves of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three voting rights organizers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Reagan then won thunderous applause a few weeks later at a convention of fifteen thousand evangelicals when he declared, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.” As president, Reagan did not always throw his weight behind specific evangelical policy proposals. But he presented himself as their champion and was largely accepted as such. His mantra that “government is the problem” resonated with white southerners who were prepared to set aside their antipathy to federal power—inherited from the defense of slavery and of Jim Crow—only when it was clear, as it had been during the New Deal, that Black people would be largely excluded from the federally funded economic and social benefits at issue.
Ironically, the former California governor’s victory was achieved at the expense of an actual white southerner who was, theologically, a bona fide, born-again evangelical: Jimmy Carter. During Carter’s presidency the federal government had begun to challenge the tax-exempt status of the racially segregated private schools that proliferated in southern states in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Brown v. Board of Education I and II (1954, 1955) that deemed racial segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional and ordered such segregation ended “with all deliberate speed.” What kind of southerner was the peanut-farming Sunday school teacher from Georgia? Less trustworthy, it turned out, than the slick Hollywood actor. Defenders of the schools in question argued that the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws was actually an attack on the constitutional right to free exercise of religion.
It was a great opportunity, as historian Randall Balmer summarizes, “to shift the terms of the debate from a defense of racial discrimination in evangelical institutions to a supposed defense of religious liberty, all the while conveniently ignoring the fact that tax exemption is a form of public subsidy.” Suddenly, evangelicalism, “arguably the most influential social and religious movement in American history, adopted the posture of a persecuted minority” under assault from a “secular majority.”4
Although the free exercise claim did not succeed with specific regard to racial segregation, it gained more traction in subsequent decades when evangelical institutions and businesses joined Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals to seek exemptions from the requirement that they provide full reproductive health care and serve gays and lesbians.
Casting about for other issues with which to attract white evangelicals, especially in states where the defense of racial segregation was not a priority, Republican politicians settled on abortion. Until the 1970s abortion had been largely a Catholic issue, and even five years after Roe v. Wade (1973), “pro-life” advocacy remained tepid. A majority of Protestants, ecumenical and evangelical, generally accepted Roe while supporting some restrictions on access to abortion for adolescents. Yet as Paul Weyrich and other Reagan advisors sensed, the issue had potential appeal to evangelicals who were protective of traditional gender roles. They mobilized luminaries Francis Schaeffer and Phyllis Schlafly (who was Catholic, but proved to be an effective ally) to promote antiabortion efforts.
The initiative worked, despite its dubious scriptural warrant. The Hebrew Bible includes dozens of explicit rules for personal conduct, none of which address abortion. The Reagan campaign did not see fit to call into political service any of the other items in this formidable inventory of Old Testament rules. The New Testament is entirely silent on abortion.5 Yet a religious community committed to literal readings of the Bible, once it became persuaded that traditional family roles and hierarchies were threatened by the legalization of abortion, was suddenly comfortable with bold, new extrapolations from scripture. It was routinely claimed, for example, that a fetus’s status as a human being was established by Luke 1:15: “He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” Another popular “proof text” was Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Republican politicians took advantage of this novel opportunity and became “pro-life.” Reagan himself had supported women’s reproductive rights in California but joined other Republicans with no previous record of opposition to abortion in changing sides. Southern Baptist leaders who had never before identified abortion as an issue now pivoted against it. Hence the antiabortion movement, as Reva Siegel, Linda Greenhouse, and others have documented, appeared late in the day.6 The evangelical-centered opposition to abortion by the Republican Party was not focused on the South, but the preponderance there of evangelicals made antiabortion a structural supplement to the Southern Strategy, rendering that strategy more religious in character than it otherwise would have been.
When Republican presidential candidates risked losing white evangelical voters, they took decisive, public steps to neutralize the threat. In 1988, George H. W. Bush faced a primary challenge from the evangelical preacher Pat Robertson. The Bush campaign’s notorious “Willie Horton” ad, accusing Democrat Michael Dukakis of being “soft on crime,” was designed to appeal to evangelical voters in southern states. It was an unabashedly “race-baiting TV production,” notes historian Anthea Butler, featuring “a prisoner who had raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend while on furlough during Dukakis’s term as governor of Massachusetts.”7 It greatly strengthened Bush’s candidacy. A dozen years later, when George W. Bush faced probable defeat in another Republican primary by John McCain, the younger Bush made a highly publicized visit to fundamentalist Bob Jones University and promoted the rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black daughter.
When McCain himself wanted to shore up evangelical support in his 2008 campaign against Democrat Barack Obama, he chose the extreme evangelical Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin caused McCain some trouble with nonevangelical voters, but she cemented McCain’s evangelical support. McCain’s choice of Palin also advanced the Republican Party’s increasing dependence on the kind of voter who could appreciate a genuine premillennial dispensationalist. Palin was the most theologically radical individual ever to run for president or vice president on a major party’s ticket.
Thus evangelical support for Republicans was far from new in the era of Donald Trump. Nearly the same percentage of evangelicals that voted for Trump had voted for McCain in 2008 and for Mitt Romney in 2012. But some things were different. In 2016 and 2020 evangelicals embraced a man whose personal character was obviously at variance with evangelical teachings. This was not something Romney, McCain, or George W. Bush demanded of evangelicals. Novel, too, was the extent of Trump’s disdain for highly educated voters on the two coasts. In neither of his presidential campaigns did Trump make a serious effort to win votes in the entire Eastern Corridor, from Maine to Virginia, with the exception of Pennsylvania. He also ignored the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Already by 2016, to be sure, the pre-Trump Republican Party’s gradual abandonment of those fifteen coastal states was so far advanced that Susan Collins of Maine and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania were the only Republicans among the thirty senators representing those fifteen states.
Some evangelical intellectuals insisted that Trump’s clerical apologists are not true evangelicals at all. “It should be easy to see that is a mistake,” declared George M. Marsden in 2019, “to generalize about evangelicals on the basis of the behavior of white American Trump voters.”8 Evangelicalism is best seen, argued David W. Bebbington, as a coherent system of four interlocking doctrinal commitments: “Biblicism” (reliance on the Bible itself), “conversionism” (the need to covert others to the faith), “crucicentrism” (a focus on the “atonement,” the idea that Christ’s death on the cross atoned for the sins of humankind), and “activism” (the idea that action in the world must reflect the gospel).
This “quadrilateral,” as Bebbington and his scholarly allies call this set of beliefs, has some value for understanding the doctrinal history of at least part of evangelicalism across the centuries. But this sense of “true” evangelicalism elides the entire history of fundamentalist and evangelical connections with business-friendly individualism. Missing, too, from the quadrilateral is the vibrant tradition of premillennial dispensationalism, according to which evangelicals were encouraged to accept wildly implausible ideas, making QAnon’s theories seem less strange than they otherwise would be.9 And even when we take seriously these “four tenets of evangelical orthodoxy,” observes historian Amanda Porterfield, “they operate together as a defense against skeptical inquiry” and thus fit in perfectly with the Republican Party of Donald Trump.10
Kristin Kobes Du Mez shows how little the quadrilateral did to protect American democracy from Trump and just how far that quadrilateral has been from the minds of most evangelical churchgoers. Those minds have been filled, instead, with a deeply anti-intellectual, Manichean, and persistently misogynist “evangelical culture of consumption.” Setting aside theological complexities, this culture embraces, as Du Mez puts it, “militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates ‘the least of these’ for one that derides gentleness as the provinces of wusses.… In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.”11
Hence, while it is a mistake to assume that evangelical culture itself lacks any resources for honest engagement with the truth about American politics, it is a yet more egregious error to downplay the strain of tribal authoritarianism in evangelical culture, and it is an equally egregious error to ignore how much that strain owes to ideas about epistemic authority preached decade after decade by evangelical preachers and writers.
In 2010, two leading social scientists concluded on the basis of extensive research that about three-quarters of the Americans whom scholars count as the most religious “reject evolution altogether, and believe instead that God created human beings fewer than ten thousand years ago.”12 There is no mystery about where the faithful got these ideas, and no uncertainty as to what groups of clergy were in a position to disabuse churchgoers of their illusions. If “distrust of scientists has become part of cultural identity, of what it means to be white and evangelical in America,” as the New York Times commented in 2021, this outcome owes much to purveyors of “the Christian worldview,” a phase uncommon among ecumenical Protestants but ubiquitous among evangelicals.13
Evangelical intellectuals developed the concept of “the Christian worldview,” historian Molly Worthen explains, as “a powerful rhetorical strategy” that “curtails debate, justifies hardline politics, and discourages sympathetic voters from entertaining moderation or compromise.”14 Evangelicals committed to the notion of an “inerrant” Bible struggled with uncertainties about just what inerrant biblical authority could mean. Disagreement within orthodoxy was a problem for a tradition of biblical hermeneutics according to which achieving an accurate understanding of the Word was simply, as Marsden explains, a matter of “taking the hard facts of Scripture, carefully arranging and classifying them, and thus discovering the clear patterns which Scripture revealed.”15 Countless preachers assured the faithful that the Bible “means what it says and says what it means.” It was dangerous to identify ambiguities and to confront the fact that the earliest known texts that make up New Testament are thousands of manuscripts, with multiple differences between them. The Bible contains, after all, more than thirty thousand verses composed by a great many authors over the course of many centuries. Only an extravagantly mystical conception of the Bible can endow it with a clear and unchanging message.
The “Christian worldview” was a way to circumvent this epistemic morass and to avoid sectarian conflicts within the community of faith. The concept was amorphous enough to resist detailed critical interrogation, yet could be invoked with sufficient conviction to keep evangelicals on the same page and to serve them in disputes with nonevangelicals. All secular knowledge lacked genuine authority; rather, each claim had to be assessed within “Christian” or “biblical” presuppositions. The concept of the “Christian worldview” denied authority to any truth claim that had not been assessed in an ostensibly Christian perspective. The Manichean tendencies of the Fundamentalist movement were thus perpetuated and renewed. You were in the know, or you were not. Worthen locates the development of the “Christian worldview” in the context of evangelicalism’s long established “pattern of hostility and ambivalence toward the standards of tolerance, logic, and evidence by which most secular thinkers in the West have agreed to abide.” Universities were a special challenge, but for evangelicals “academic freedom as understood in the modern secular university,” Worthen adds, “was not freedom at all, but slavery to human pride that would lead young Christians from the narrow path.”16
No wonder millions of evangelicals were an easy mark for Donald Trump, willing to believe his Twitter stream of falsehoods. Political scientists found that at the time of the 2020 election, “white evangelicals” believed “more often than not” that “the Democrats are part of a vast criminal conspiracy not just working against Trump but against the interest and rights of Christians,” that Trump “has been anointed by God to serve them,” and that “the United States is a Christian nation whose success is part of God’s plan.”17 The 35 percent of Americans who as late as April 2021 believed “that Biden’s victory was illegitimate” were disproportionately not only white, older, less educated, and Republican, but, according to credible surveys, “more religious (particularly Protestant and more likely to describe themselves as born again).”18 These evangelicals got the message early and loud and clear from Pat Robertson. Two weeks after the election, Robertson told viewers of his 700 Club, “I think Trump’s ultimately going to win.” He added that “Satan” wanted Biden in office in order to “turn this nation over to socialism.”19
To be sure, there are white evangelicals who ignore and even resist thinking of this kind. Often, these people connect their religion primarily to local communities and pay little attention to national politics. They would not see Josh Hawley as a mirror of themselves. Moreover, the ranks of white evangelicals have long included a vocal minority of economic and ethnoracial progressives. Since 1971, the magazine Sojourners has been a prominent forum for socially engaged evangelicals who reject Manichean assumptions and who try to engage their opponents in honest debate. There has long been a genuine “evangelical left.”20 But its marginality is illustrated by the career of Richard Cizik, who was removed in 2008 from his position as the Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals because of his deviation from orthodox views on same-sex relationships and his heterodox prioritizing of environmental protection and economic equality.21
Cizik, like most of the people who tried to move evangelicalism in progressive directions, essentially copied elements of the ecumenical campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism but did not admit it, certainly not in public. Each spiritual journey no doubt has its own integrity, but the development of progressive evangelicalism has been in large part a project in appropriation and effacement: the perspectives and programs of ecumenicals were appropriated for an “enriched” evangelicalism or a “post-evangelicalism,” while the ecumenical sources of inspiration, so long scorned, were effectively effaced. A recent example of this syndrome is David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity, which vigorously endorses one traditional ecumenical idea after another while rarely identifying them as such.22 Whatever value anyone might find in Gushee’s “New Christianity,” it is not new.
Far to Cizik’s right, a good many evangelicals, Worthen observes, wanted heroes “who would stand up for their instincts about human nature, social order, and biblical law.”23 What millions of them turned out to really desire was what they got from adamantly Manichean Christian nationalists like Gary North: “We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which flatly denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”24
The power of the Christian worldview was visible in the widely publicized 2021 letter from eleven members of Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger’s family disowning him for voting to impeach Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. The letter reveals how the evangelical faithful had been trained to think. Kinzinger’s cousins treated his anti-Trump vote as tantamount to joining “the Devil’s Army.” The errant congressman had given up Christianity and gone against Trump, who really “is a Christian,” supported by “Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffries,” and other pastors who warrant that Trump is “a believer.” Kinzinger should forsake the “false news” of the media and attend to Trump’s “Christmas message,” which “gave the plan of salvation, instructing people how to repent and ask the Savior into their heart to be ‘Born Again!’ ” The family’s letter voiced sadness that Kinzinger had “lost the respect of Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham,” and other Fox News personalities.25 The operative standard for what it meant to be a good Christian was the approval of Fox’s commentators.
Evangelical support for the unabashedly “immoral” Trump should not be treated as a mystery. That triumph fits with the culture of American evangelical Protestantism, the long-term history of which has been cogently summarized by historian John Fea:
Evangelical fears that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and that as president he would violate the Second Amendment and take away their guns echo—and are about as well founded as—early American evangelicals’ fear that Thomas Jefferson was going to seize believers’ Bibles. The Christian Right’s worries in the 1960s and 1970s that they might lose their segregated academies should take us back to the worries of white evangelicals who lived in the antebellum South. Contemporary efforts to declare America a Christian nation should remind us of similar attempts by fundamentalists a century ago. Efforts to portray immigrants—documented and undocumented—as threats to white Christian culture take us back to the days of evangelical support for the Know-Nothing Party.26
While the Republican Party’s dependence on white voters who inherit this tradition was gradually becoming more pronounced, the Democratic Party was able to count on African Americans, college graduates of all ethnicities, and voters who professed no religious affiliation.
Black voters, whose numbers increased exponentially after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, decisively abandoned the Party of Lincoln. From the mid-1960s onward, more than 80 percent of African American voters identified themselves with the Democratic Party and yet more voted for Democratic presidential candidates. As more African Americans were elected to state and federal offices, culminating after many decades in Barack Obama’s presidential victories of 2008 and 2012, the relative importance of Blacks in the Democratic Party increased. The success of the Republicans in siphoning off white voters through the Southern Strategy created more space for African Americans. By 2016, nearly one-quarter of voters in Democratic Party primaries were Black. After Lyndon Johnson in 1964, no Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of white voters.
In 2020 the centrality of African Americans to the Democratic Party became obvious. By endorsing Joe Biden at a strategic time, Black congressional leader James Clyburn of South Carolina did more than any single individual to secure his party’s presidential nomination for Biden. Without the benefit of African American politician Stacey Abrams’s extraordinary grassroots mobilization programs, it is doubtful that Biden would have won Georgia’s electoral votes or that Democrats would have won Georgia’s two Senate seats. Moreover, without the overwhelming support of Black voters Biden would not have prevailed in the swing stages of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Kamala Harris’s selection as Biden’s vice presidential running mate surely owed something to her potential ability to appeal to African American voters. Not all African Americans are actively involved in Protestant churches, but the overwhelming majority share a church-intensive background. Hence the ethnoracial event of greater African American participation in public affairs is also an ethnoreligious event.
Catholics, too, became a more formidable political presence, marked initially by John F. Kennedy’s election as president in 1960. Kennedy’s election was part of a larger transformation then encouraged two years later by Vatican II, which freed American Catholics to accept religious pluralism and church-state separation. John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit thinker who advised Kennedy on his epochal speech vowing not to govern according to the dictates of Rome, facilitated this transformation of the Catholic outlook. Murray had struggled since the mid-1940s to persuade his superiors that Catholics would never exercise substantial influence in the United States unless they were willing to work within a constitutional system that did not confer special recognition to the Roman Catholic Church. After Vatican II, Catholics had an easier time getting elected or appointed to public office beyond the ethnic enclaves that had been their gateways into legislative and judicial power. By the early twenty-first century, Catholics constituted 20 percent of the national population, yet six of the nine US Supreme Court justices were Catholics, as were 30 percent of the members of the House of Representatives.27
Catholics helped Christianity retain its prominence in American society, but they did not become a dependable constituency for either political party. To be sure, from the 1930s through the 1960s the great majority of Catholic voters, especially working-class whites, were part of the Democratic Party’s coalition. But as Catholics achieved upward social and economic mobility, they divided their votes between the two parties. In 1965, only 14 percent of the Catholic members of the House of Representatives were Republicans, but by 1997, 40 percent were. In 1965, all but two of the fourteen Catholic senators were Democrats, but in 2020 there were twenty-two Catholic senators, only twelve of whom were Democrats.
The Republican position on abortion influenced this drift to the right. Catholics who attended mass regularly were more likely to leave the Democrats when the Reagan-era Republicans identified abortion as a major issue. Yet more switched later, when the Republican efforts to expand “religious liberty” brought about an alliance with Catholic hospitals and social agencies that wanted to retain access to federal funding while refusing to provide reproductive health services as required by federal law. White Catholics were divided in their political affiliations. John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden were Catholics, but so, too, were some of the most conservative of Republican politicians, including Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. Since 2000, a majority of white Catholics have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election. The growing population of Hispanic Catholics has usually voted for Democrats, but not always.
In the early twenty-first century, it was clear that the conservative political coalition around issues of gender, sexuality, and religious liberty reflected traditional Catholic teachings and depended on a substantial segment of Catholic voters as well as white evangelical Protestants. At the same time, the power of political views to overcome religious affiliations was shown by how little discussion there was regarding the election of a liberal Catholic as president in 2020. Sixty years before, when Kennedy was elected, the pope’s proximity to Washington was seen as a real enough threat to be earnestly explained away. But the determination of the Republican Party to appoint Catholics to the US Supreme Court and elsewhere in the federal judiciary reflected a sound understanding of the Catholic political tradition. That tradition, diverse as it was, constituted a substantial resource to be drawn upon for conservative purposes.
The Democrats could rely on the rapidly growing population of religiously unaffiliated voters. These highly educated individuals are the least susceptible to QAnon fantasies. The numbers of self-identified nonreligious Americans began to increase in the 1980s, well after Catholic and ecumenical Protestant churches experienced sharp declines in membership. Until the early 1980s, only about 5 percent of Americans said “none” when asked to identify their religion, resulting in the popular practice of social scientists and journalists to speak of “nones” as a category. As late as 1990, well after the mainline denominations had lost large percentages of their members, only 8 percent gave that response, but a decade later the number had grown to 15 percent. By 2012, 20 percent of the population so described itself. In 2019, more than a quarter of the nation—26 percent—did so. The 2019 study, carried out by the Pew Research Center, found striking generational differences. Of persons born between 1981 and 1996, 40 percent reported no religion.28 Pew found that by 2021, 29 percent of Americans had become “nones.”29
Why did most of the people who, by leaving the churches, had created the statistical foundation for the “decline of the mainline” wait so long to tell pollsters what they had done? The answer is not clear, but going to church had long been socially approved behavior. Admitting that you were no longer doing it was more difficult for many Americans. By the early twenty-first century, however, post-Protestants and post-Catholics began to go on record about their lack of religious affiliation at accelerating speed. Once more than a handful were willing to say they had no religion—a tipping point?—it became easier for others. Even among African Americans, where church membership had always been high, nonaffiliation began to be reported much more often in the early twenty-first century.30
Former ecumenicals constituted the vast majority of the “nones.” Recent membership figures posted by ecumenical denominations themselves leave no doubt about this. Between 2010 and 2018, the Disciples of Christ declined by 40 percent. The United Presbyterians lost 40 percent between 2009 and 2020. The Lutherans lost 22 percent between 2010 and 2019. The Dutch Reformed (Reformed Church in America) lost 45 percent between 2000 and 2020. The Episcopalians lost 29 percent between 2002 and 2019.31 Post-Judaic Americans are certainly part of this group, but since less than 2 percent of the national population in the early twenty-first century is ethnically Jewish to begin with, post-Judaic Americans could constitute only a tiny fraction of the religiously unaffiliated. Some of nonaffiliates were ex-evangelicals. Progressive evangelical theologian David P. Gushee remarks that he knows of countless young people who got fed up with “inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, divine violence, Hallmark-Christmas-Movie Jesus, rejection of gay people, male dominance, racism, God = GOP, or whatever else.”32
A substantial number of these nonaffiliates, however, had left the Roman Catholic Church, which lost members at about the same rate as the ecumenical Protestant churches. In their comprehensive study of church attendance, two sociologists conclude “that the key trend in attendance over the last half-century or more has been the decline in Catholic attendance to the level of that of mainline Protestants.”33 By 2020, more than one-third of the cradle Catholics in the United States no longer identified themselves as Catholic. The most thorough study of Catholic disaffiliation finds that about 17 percent of the Americans who have left the Catholic Church profess no religious affiliation—these are the “post-Catholics”—while 15 percent joined other Christian churches and 2 percent affiliate with non-Christian faiths. These figures include Hispanics. The traditional white demographic foundation of American Catholicism declined by about 40 percent in the past fifty years.34
Some Catholics found Vatican II’s changes disappointing—too radical, or not radical enough. Others were uncomfortable remaining in an institution where the sexual abuse of children by priests seemed endemic and where women were excluded from the priesthood. The church’s persistent opposition to contraception greatly diminished its authority for many women.35 Other Catholics, like Protestants and religiously observant Jews, became indifferent to religion as they found other communities. Since churches and synagogues exist in part to serve needs for intimacy and belonging, their significance declined when people had easy access to alternative forms of community, including those made available by electronic communication networks. Moreover, as belief in hell and eternal punishment faded, churches lost some of the managerial authority they once exercised. Further, liberals had an additional incentive to declare their distance from any and all churches when the most widely quoted spokespersons for Christianity came to be those with a tolerance for white supremacy and expressed unabashedly reactionary views about sex and gender, including a hostility even to contraception.
Quite a few of the people who left the Protestant churches retained what historian Martin E. Marty calls a “Protestant deposit,” a cultural layer that continued to affect how they processed their ongoing experience.36 Some of the departing young people had been regular readers of the avant-garde youth magazine motive. William Stringfellow and Harvey Cox were contributors to this arts-and-culture periodical sponsored by the United Methodist Church. Conservative Methodists were outraged by its militant feminism, in defense of which church officials like Oxnam often faced down angry regional assemblies. But after many perceived provocations, the Methodists in 1969 ceased to finance the ecclesiastically troublesome operation. The editors responded by publishing, with their last remaining funds, what amounted to an institutional suicide bomb: two blockbuster issues celebrating same-sex relationships.
The career of one of motive’s editors, Charlotte Bunch, illustrates both the dynamics of exit from churches and the post-Protestant feeling of a connection to them. “When I came out as a lesbian in the context of the feminist movement,” Bunch later wrote, “I was simply not willing to be affiliated with an institution that labeled me a sinner or denied me the right to enter its highest callings.” Bunch was politicized by the multiracial youth conferences of her college years. She was elected president of the Methodists’ national youth organization and then became a co-editor of motive. She left the Methodists, “impatient” with “the phallocentricity of Christianity and with the slowness of the institution to see how it oppressed women.” Yet as a mature scholar and senior university professor, Bunch in 2003 testified to a feeling that her work “on feminism and human rights is still part of the struggle I began in the ’60s to find a values-based politics that can give hope and vision for a better life for all.”37
Just as the travels of the ecumenical elite enabled their churches to function for some as more capacious homes, for others these travels became stepping-stones to something different. Ecumenical Protestantism was often a way station on the road to post-Protestant secularism. Transitional spaces were vital for millions of American Protestants. The ecumenical churches created and sustained an environment in which it became more possible to engage sympathetically a vast panorama of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural varieties of humankind. These varieties threatened to destabilize inherited practices and beliefs, but the ecumenical churches provided a community and an orientation that facilitated these engagements for people who might have otherwise avoided them. That many millions continue to be at home in ecumenical churches does not render any less significant, historically, the transit-assisting function for other millions. Not everyone driven in the same direction by the same circumstances ends up in the same place.
Catholics dealt with the same needs somewhat differently. Because the Roman Catholic Church is institutionally monolithic, those who became post-Catholic experienced no strict equivalent to the ecumenical way station. These individuals found what transitional homes they could in liberal enclaves within Catholic churches, sometimes moving from one parish to another in search of more congenial company or transferring from a relatively conservative Catholic college to a more liberal one. But Catholic ecclesiastical structure encouraged an in-or-out framing for individual decisions. Liberal Catholics from Dorothy Day through Daniel Berrigan and Nancy Pelosi take positions at variance with papal decrees while strongly affirming Catholic identity. Those who identify themselves as “ex-Catholics,” like most “ex-evangelicals,” tend to be more critical of their natal communities than post-Protestants are of theirs.
Many ecumenical Protestants and many post-Protestants have much in common. This confluence is consistent with the easy back-and-forth between ecumenical Protestantism and secular liberalism going back several generations, well before church membership numbers diminished and post-Protestant numbers increased. Langdon Gilkey noted that ecumenical congregations even in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were filled with “moderate, democratic, rationalistic, autonomous, tolerant” souls “almost indistinguishable” (except for a theism that could not even be taken for granted, Gilkey observed pointedly) from “the responsible, moral, humanistic, ‘secular’ culture around them.” As other communities became available to these men and women, especially to their children, the move from churches “into a secular lifestyle represented a very small step, probably making a discernable difference only on Sunday mornings.”38
Without the support of most of the post-Protestants and post-Catholics, the diversity-preoccupied public life of the United States of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries could not have come into being and the presidential victories of Barack Obama and Joe Biden would have been impossible. Not all of the “nones” had the same attitudes and values, but there is no doubt that the ethical orientation of many did reflect the teachings of their Congregationalist and Methodist tutors. Ecumenical leaders campaigned for “individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry,” observes sociologist N. J. Demerath III, exactly the liberal values that gained ground in the last third of the twentieth century and were honored to some degree by most Americans outside of the Republican Party.39
These liberal values served as key justifications for many of the transformations of the 1960s and have been invoked since that time in countless specific contexts as the nation has confronted massive immigration from non-European lands and has sought to find ways to do justice to the descendants of its enslaved and conquered peoples. The liberal political theory of the former Episcopalian John Rawls is widely recognized as an example of post-Protestant thinking.40 The long, stutter-step campaign of ecumenical Protestant leaders to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism was not simply a product of internal self-reflection but also a product of engagement with the same modern social and cultural experiences that influenced secular contemporaries, including the demographic changes noted above. The campaign of the liberalizers did not follow from simply reading yet again the Sermon on the Mount, the book of James, and other scriptural foundations for liberalization. Science and worldly experience fueled the campaign, exactly as the modernists of the 1920s said they would.
Religious collectives, like other movements, are contingent entities, generated, sustained, transformed, diminished, and sometimes destroyed by the changing circumstances of history. But a survivalist bias has obscured recognition of the place of ecumenical Protestantism in these standard historical processes. A preference for if not a commitment to the survival of Christianity in general and of the institutions of Protestantism in particular can inhibit appreciation of the historic function of ecumenical Protestantism as a way station on the road to post-Protestant secularism. Most of the scholarly literature on ecumenical Protestantism has been written by survivalists disinclined to see departure from churches as anything other than declension. People with institutionalized responsibility for the flourishing of ecumenical churches are understandably slow to see post-Protestantism as anything other than a loss. Yet, only if one approaches history as a Christian survivalist is it invidious to recognize ecumenical Protestantism’s historic role as a way station to something else. Was that “something else” really so bad? The question invites more sustained inquiry than the ecumenical intelligentsia has given it. Might ecumenical Protestantism take some pride in facilitating post-Protestantism? The influence of ecumenical Protestantism on the public life of the United States will remain largely invisible if we look for it only in the churches.
But the churches did not disappear. Christianity was surviving. In what measure, in what form, and in service to what ends?