8
Back out of all this now too much for us …
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.…
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.…
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
—ROBERT FROST, 1947
IN 2012 THE BRITISH historian-philosopher Theo Hobson chided American ecumenicals for not taking every opportunity “to tell a strong story about the compatibility of Christianity and secular liberalism.” This was “an immense failure,” Hobson argued. “America can only be ideologically unified by this story.”1
Whatever might or might not overcome the divisions among Americans, Hobson was certainly correct about the ideological disarray of American ecumenical intellectuals. Amid political polarization and secularization, ecumenical leaders struggled to maintain and clarify their Christian identity. If they were to serve as a “prophetic minority,” as many suggested in the wake of their diminished size and standing, what were they to be prophetic about? Where in their program was the Bible, which the evangelicals claimed as theirs? How were they to make sense theologically, rather than just politically, of race, gender, and sexual orientation? Where were they allied with secularists, and where distant from them?
While attempting to engage these questions ecumenical leaders were obliged to deal with two unexpected and portentous developments. The first was the failure of the postwar merger movement. Plans for a unified, national Protestant church, so long in the making, came to nothing as early as the 1970s. Second was the growth of theologically and politically conservative churches in the Global South during the final decades of the twentieth century, changing the shape of what was recognized as Christianity. This transformation of the global Christian profile greatly strengthened the claims of American evangelicals that they—not the mainliners—were the true exemplars of the ancient faith. Ecumenicals had spent many decades urging American Christians to show more respect for the religious ideas and practices of peoples abroad, only to find those ideas and practices, as they matured, similar to those of their evangelical rivals at home.
Neither of these two developments has registered in popular and academic treatments of recent religious history.
The failure to fashion a single, national Protestant church was emotionally traumatic and theologically threatening. This crushing defeat came exactly at the historical moment when the ecumenical intelligentsia was taking the greatest risks in opposing imperialism abroad and racism at home and was beginning to notice a membership hemorrhage. By the early 1970s the governing bodies of nearly all denominations in the Consultation on Church Union had pulled out.2 Most of the people who cared enough about churches to pay for their maintenance, often joined by their local pastors, sent a clear answer to the leadership. No!
Campaigners for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism were thus struck with the second installment of a historicist double whammy, the first of which had hit them in the mission field. Immersion in religious life abroad made it impossible to ignore the historical particularity of American denominations. Now, the anti-sectarian follow-up at home, designed to act on the lessons learned abroad, revealed that traditional rituals, doctrines, and tribal identities really mattered. Historical particularity was not a pathology, to be overcome therapeutically, but was essential to what churches actually were. That individuals would “lose an essential locus of identity in already depersonalized society” was the most common concern of critics of the merger movement.3
Was the notion of a transhistorical gospel a fantasy? This fear had hovered like a ghost above ecumenical apologetics, decade after decade. H. Richard Niebuhr himself fled from it early on, shortly after he had documented the depth and power of particularism in his Social Sources of Denominationalism. Eight years later, in 1937, he answered himself with The Kingdom of God in America, arguing that American Protestantism had been united by an expectation that God’s kingdom would actually come about on earth, eventually. There was some basis for this claim about what American Protestants thought, but it was a thin foundation for any hope that denominational divisions could ever be overcome. Earnestly, Niebuhr called on the faithful to renew their “reliance on the divine initiative,” thereby to “infuse new life” into American Protestantism.4 But Niebuhr’s empirical findings about the dynamics of disunity endured, while his call for renewed commitment faded into the generalized hope of his generation’s seminarians.
The globally engaged leadership, having ventured far ahead of its constituency in dismissing particularistic identities as retrograde, was embarrassed. If its churches were to be salvaged, the cosmopolitan campaigners were obliged to chart earthly paths that the faithful and their local ministers might actually walk. Outlining that future was made more difficult by an ironic fact: the role of denominations in the Christian project did decline, but not as expected. Megachurches took up more and more organizational space in American Protestantism after the 1970s. These huge enterprises, often near Walmart or Target box stores in the bourgeoning suburban and exurban shopping malls, bore almost no resemblance to what denominationalism’s ecumenical critics hoped to see. Entrepreneurially skilled, charismatic preachers, proclaiming a simple, evangelical gospel, built followings in the thousands and even tens of thousands, eventually growing to millions through television and social media. Most had little or no connection to any larger ecclesiastical body, although some of the leading televangelists of the late twentieth century, including Pat Robertson, were affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Robertson’s 700 Club, begun in 1966, eventually broadcast in dozens of languages and claimed an annual audience of 360 million people throughout the globe.
Hence the ecumenical leadership, having experienced the failure of its own plans for a large, integrated American church working in tandem with the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical institutions throughout the world, found itself watching evangelicals succeed in building national and global followings of prodigious size and wealth. Meanwhile, their own local congregations in small towns and urban neighborhoods were struggling. Proud of their large, imposing edifices with tall steeples, typically built between 1890 and 1940, the Presbyterians were on one downtown corner, the Methodists on another, and the Episcopalians just a block or two away. But the members of these congregations were graying and the churches were losing many of their children. By the end of the twentieth century many merged with neighboring churches of kindred denominations to avoid becoming too small to afford a full-time minister. For pastoral leadership, the smallest congregations came to rely on part-timers with only the brief apprentice-like training offered by “academies” that functioned as alternatives to seminaries. From a theological point of view, it was rather like substituting a bar review course for three years of law school, but it kept the churches alive. In many American downtowns, the capacious church buildings of the old “Protestant establishment” were sold to flourishing Pentecostal congregations.
Amid these unwelcome circumstances, seminaries and divinity schools understood it was part of their responsibility to figure out what should be done.5 Where was the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism to go? In the halls of these institutions the notion of ecumenical Protestantism as a “prophetic minority” took its most vibrant shape, deeply responsive to the progressive movements in the surrounding society.
Just which issues mattered most? Concerns about economic inequality lost much of their earlier hold on ecumenical attention. The Social Gospel as developed by Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Jane Addams had prioritized economic justice. This tradition was renewed in the 1940s heyday of ecumenical Protestantism. Then, after being soft pedaled in the face of McCarthy Era red-baiting, calls to end economic inequality returned with a vengeance in the early 1960s in the manifestos of the Stringfellow-Cox generation. But this priority did not last. Amid the multicultural enthusiasm of the later twentieth century, the identity politics prominent in the nation’s liberal left played out noisily in the ecumenical churches, just as it did in higher education and in the Democratic Party. The universalist ideology that had been a defining feature of ecumenical Protestantism, and that served as a justification for its progressive engagements of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, fell under deep suspicion, often accused—with some justice—of serving as a cover for white male privilege. Programs that were not significantly defined by ethnoracial or sex- and gender-related identity groups lost purchase. What did survive, and became one of the chief triumphs of the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism, was the antiracist legacy of the Stringfellow-Cox generation.
Liberation Theology changed the terms of academic debates about Christianity. This international movement had strong proponents in Catholic Spain and Latin America but in American Protestantism was led by James Cone. His early books, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Theology of Black Liberation (1970), vilified white theologians for not addressing anti-Black racism and established Cone as an intellectual and political powerhouse at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In this early phase of his career, Cone argued that Christ was himself virtually Black, and an agent of Black liberation, worldwide. Eschewing theology’s traditional claims to universality, Cone insisted on radical particularism. “As a Black theologian, I want to know what God’s revelation means right now as the Black community participates in the struggle for liberation. Revelation is a Black event—it is what Blacks are doing about their liberation.” In later years, Cone became more welcoming of the markedly different understanding of Christianity advanced by Martin Luther King Jr., and indeed by most African American religious and political leaders. In Martin & Malcolm & America, a book published in 1991, Cone held that the reconciliation perspective of King and the militantly separatist perspective of Malcolm X corrected and complemented each other.6
Theological leadership in the ecumenical seminaries and divinity schools increasingly passed into the hands of African Americans like Cone and white feminists like Catherine Keller.7 African American transgender feminist Pauli Murray, who had been a cofounder of the National Organization of Women in 1966, became an Episcopal priest in 1977.8 But the gains of feminism and Black liberation were mitigated by the fact that theology itself was no longer as important in national conversations as it once had been. In a great historical irony, just when ecumenical theology became a setting for exceptional creativity by African Americans and women, theology itself was rapidly losing standing in the public culture of the nation.
While Cone underestimated the antiracist politics of his predecessors, his representation of theology as practiced in American seminaries during the previous several decades was not inaccurate. With the exception of Princeton Theological Seminary’s Richard Shaull, the leading white professors of theology even in the 1960s did not address race theologically with the directness that Cone did. For all their progressive politics, their theology remained dominated by themes developed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.9 The theology taught in the ecumenical seminaries, observed Gary Dorrien, had become “too secular for religious believers, too religious for secularists, and too academic for non-theologians.”10
In 2003 Keller offered an unusually candid summary of how theology had tumbled “off the line of progress”: “[Theology] partakes little of the optimistic gleam of scientific progress, the insouciant originality of the arts. When for the sake of that sparkling novelty or that cultured public, religious thinkers dwell on the ‘cutting edge,’ they lose their traditional constituencies—and ipso facto, ironically, the activist potential that distinguishes progressive theology. Inasmuch, however, as we honor the constitutive accountability of, say, Christian theology to the church, we cannot escape the dogmatic drag, the vortex of swirling symbols and insecure institutions.”11 Here, Keller alludes to the tension between the impulse to innovate in response to new conditions and the need to honor the sentiments of the members of the community of faith. The entire history of the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism was a struggle to resolve this tension. Keller’s own response to this “double bind,” Dorrien explained, was to pitch theology “to environmentalists, radical feminists, liberation movements, and antiglobalization activists.”12
But did people involved in those movements need theology? The secular movements Dorrien named were among those that had attracted young people, especially into the ranks of post-Protestants and post-Catholics. Cone’s theology drew heavily from the secular Black Power movement, many of whose leaders displayed little interest in churches. The most visible of the feminist theologians of that generation, the Catholic Mary Daly, eventually abandoned the church altogether.13 Theology had always drawn some of its content from the surrounding culture, and theology’s mission was often understood to include dialogue with the world in which churches found themselves. But just what was Christianity contributing to that dialogue? Dorrien noted that academic theology “became more liberationist, feminist, environmentalist, multiculturalist, and postmodernist” while “the churches to which the liberal theologians belonged” accepted only mild forms of feminism and environmentalism while “battling annually over gay rights” and swinging toward “great homogeneity and confessional identity.”14
“Battling over gay rights” was indeed a major locus of the clash between American ecumenical and evangelical Protestants, and among ecumenicals themselves, during the last decades of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first. For evangelicals, the battle was mostly against outsiders, but ecumenicals at every institutional level, from local congregations through regional assemblies to denominational governance, divided passionately over the status of LGBTQ parishioners, sanctioning same-sex marriages, and the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy. This was true across the color line: Blacks, whose influence within the ecumenical leadership increased during these same years, joined many white Protestants in resisting liberal social and legal perspectives on LGBTQ issues. Heather R. White and other scholars have shown that the opposition to same-sex intimacy was in fact a minor theme in the Christian tradition across the centuries. But evangelicals brought it into greater prominence. Ecumenicals found the debate impossible to avoid.15
It was exactly while debating LGBTQ issues that ecumenical churches were obliged to deal with the second of the unexpected, portentous developments that complicated the challenges of ecumenical leadership following the “decline of the mainline.”
Christians in the Global South, soon constituting a majority of the world’s professing Christians, had strong opinions about same-sex relationships. The faith that caught on and flourished in most of Africa and much of Asia and Latin America took directions the ecumenical missionaries had discouraged as anachronistic and lacking in spiritual maturity. The evangelical missionaries who dominated the mission fields after the departure of their ecumenical counterparts often encouraged Global South Christianity’s vigorous opposition to same-sex intimacy by supporting indigenous leaders who were responsive to that message. Paul’s apparent approval of the death sentence for homosexual intercourse in Romans 1:27–32 had more credibility in Uganda than it did in all but the most extreme of American congregations.16
Some American denominations were able to treat Global South Christianity as a thing apart, but governance arrangements made this impossible for Methodists, Episcopalians, and several other groups. Delegates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America were empowered to participate in policy making. Repeatedly, these representatives joined with US-based conservatives in voting down anti-homophobic resolutions when brought to denominational assemblies.
The theological imperative to welcome all believers into the Body of Christ meant that Global South Christianity was another example of demographic diversification by long distance, but with new and ironic consequences. Earlier episodes had challenged conservatives and inspired liberals, but the egalitarian imperative to welcome Global South Christians into full fellowship now had exactly the opposite result. It provided new allies to American evangelicals. Ecumenicals had spent decades demanding more deference to “indigenous” Christians, as the convert communities in missionary-targeted societies were called. “We” need to listen to “them” and should not tell them exactly how to be a Christian. Okay, here “they” were.
A Kenyan bishop blessed Sarah Palin in her own Assembly of God church in 2008, praying that the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate would be safe from witches. Was it racist to find this objectionable? Was it patronizing to let it pass and to refrain from criticizing it? How much of American Protestant progressivism was actually a form of colonialism, a continuation of Western arrogance? A Nigerian bishop tried to perform a rite of exorcism on a gay British priest at a meeting of the global Anglican Communion. An American bishop criticized this act and was forced to apologize.17
Global South Christianity became problematic for the Americans and Europeans not only as extensively homophobic but as lacking in support for the ideal of gender equality—a value that since the 1960s had become an important part of ecumenical Protestantism in the United States. Even evangelical confessions that had embraced some forms of gender equality experienced adamant opposition from coreligionists in the Global South. The Seventh-day Adventists, an evangelical denomination that originated in the United States in the 1860s, were unable to ordain women year after year because delegates from Africa, Latin America, and Asia (almost 90 percent of Adventists lived outside North America by 2010) kept voting down measures calling for women’s ordination. Paul the Apostle explicitly prohibited it in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35: “The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission.… If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.”18 Selected scriptures were interpreted more literally than most American Christians, including many evangelicals, could easily welcome. Rwandan bishops justified genocide by citing Samson’s slaughter of Philistines.19
Not all varieties of religion practiced in the Global South under the sign of Christianity were in significant tension with practices in the ecumenical churches of North America and Western Europe. Denominational and transdenominational organizations maintained cordial, collegial relationships with some of the “new” churches. Institutes and programs devoted to “Global Christianity” have replaced “foreign missions,” an encouraged, sustained, reciprocal contact.20
Yet more than enough of Global South Christianity differed from American ecumenical norms to make the question of the borders of the faith inescapable. Did Christianity have no boundaries, other than the self-professions of individuals? The history of the faith was filled with quarrels about its boundaries, with parties accusing one another of not being “real” Christians. The spectacular rise of Global South churches brought this old question to the fore, yet again, and with unprecedented force. Who is to say that the growing churches of Tanzania and Brazil are not as Christian as the Southern Baptists of Texas, or the Episcopalians of San Francisco, or the Catholics of Boston?
Some observers toyed with the theologically dangerous question, as expressed by Brian Stanley, “whether Christianity has converted indigenous religions or whether indigenous religions and cultural perspectives … have succeeded in converting Christianity.” Stanley raised this question about some “white North American” as well as “African, Asian, [and] Latin American” practices claiming to be Christian, but the Global South presented a more formidable challenge than the American “prosperity gospel” to the notion that Christianity had a clear and singular essence.21
A popular means of recognizing the Christianity of the Global South while establishing some critical distance from it was the representation of Global South Christianity as a “third church,” like Catholicism and Protestantism, comparable but different. Historian Philip Jenkins is an influential defender of this approach. Perhaps, Jenkins observes, “only in the newer churches” can the Bible “be read with any authenticity and immediacy.” Perhaps “the Old Christendom should listen attentively to Southern voices.” In the eyes of “the poor and persecuted” in many areas of the globe, Jenkins suggested to his Western readers, “the book of Revelation looks like true prophecy on an epic scale,” and the notion of “the government as Antichrist is not a bizarre religious fantasy but a convincing piece of political analysis.”22 Indeed, it served the interests of the most conservative of American Protestants to downplay the differences.
This reluctance to emphasize differences is true of many evangelical visitors to Africa. Melani McAlister shows that American evangelicals who return home from mission-driven visits to Africa often rhapsodize about the apparent authenticity of the faith they witnessed. They are “enchanted” with what they take to be the simple purity of mind and spirit they find in African worship services, reminiscent, they think, of the raw passion of the earliest churches as described in the New Testament. These visitors usually screen out the economic, social, and political complexities of the lives of the local Christians. The American tourists McAlister studied were quick, however, to recognize Muslim persecution of African Christians, which they connected to what they alleged was secular persecution of Christians in the United States. McAlister finds that American evangelical engagement with the Global South intensified an evangelical self-conception as “victims.”23 Evangelicals tell pollsters that they, much more than Muslims, are the real victims of prejudice in the United States.
Thus the “global perspective” championed by the cosmopolitan elites of American Protestantism came to imply an obligation to respect, rather than challenge, the most conservative of American theological and cultural attitudes. Solidarity with the Christians of the Global South ended up enhancing evangelical claims to speak for Christianity. The larger the presence of Christianity in the world, the more weight was carried by anyone holding the franchise in any particular, national setting. By the early years of the twenty-first century, most of the world’s Christians lived outside the United States and Europe, and a majority were Pentecostals. Membership numbers were wielded like clubs against anyone suggesting that the world was experiencing secularization. Christianity was stronger than ever, and it was increasingly evangelical. Even more of Christianity’s symbolic capital fell into the hands of evangelicals.24
As evangelical voices became louder in the United States, bolstered by the size of theologically congenial Global South Christianity, it became increasingly difficult for ecumenicals to be heard in national arenas. While stories about religion in the popular press were occasionally about Catholics and religiously observant Jews, and sometimes about Muslims, more often than not they were about white evangelicals. Journalists seemed never to tire of interviewing Oklahoma preachers, Southern Baptist seminary presidents, and random habitués of small-town diners in “middle America.” Ralph Sockman was the last ecumenical preacher to command a national audience, yet by the end of the 1950s even he had been eclipsed by Billy Graham. The great North Carolina evangelist enjoyed the attention of the media and the ear of many presidents, especially Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes. Even William Barber II, among the most famous of today’s African American ecumenical leaders, has never approached the media prominence of his white evangelical counterparts, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.25 Early in 2022, New York Times columnist David Brooks made no reference to ecumenical Protestants in an ambitious account of the progressive elements of American evangelicalism and their potential to lead a “renewal” of Christianity, despite the decades-long espousal by ecumenicals of the more enlightened faith Brooks admired.26
Only with the election of Raphael Warnock to the US Senate in 2020 did an ecumenical preacher or theologian again become a household word in the United States. Warnock was the pastor of what had been the congregation of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, but, beyond that, was a student of theologian James Cone and himself a contributor to Liberation Theology. Like King, Warnock was resolutely in the ecumenical tradition. He acknowledged the educational and theological divide within African American churches. His religious outlook was transformed by Morehouse College. “My parents were very, very conservative evangelicals,” Warnock told the New York Times in 2021. But at Morehouse he “moved from a tradition that emphasized prayer and personal salvation to one that took a more activist approach.”27 He then studied at the liberal Protestant intellectual bastion Union Theological Seminary. Warnock’s chief public identity is now as an elected politician, but he is also an emblem for the increased role of Blacks in leading the ecumenical Protestantism that was, itself, becoming a smaller part of American public life.
Were there other Warnocks in the religious pipeline? Not many. The drift to post-Protestantism during the half century between 1970 and 2020 decimated the potential leadership of ecumenical Protestantism. The seminaries had trouble recruiting ministerial students. Able men and women, Black and white, who might have entered the ministry as late as the 1960s were not interested. Those who wanted to engage contemporary intellectual movements, including those responsive to the traditions of Christianity, could easily find secular academic programs for which the seminaries were usually poor substitutes, often playing catch-up or taking this or that methodological or ideological movement to a curious extreme. University professors of philosophy, history, literature, sociology, and anthropology were inclined to dismiss seminaries as academia’s hospices, where ideas went to die.
The seminaries themselves were literally dying. Many closed or moved in with still-healthy relatives. In the early twenty-first century, Andover-Newton, Bangor, Crozier, Episcopal Divinity, Pacific Lutheran, San Francisco, Southern California, and Trinity Lutheran closed or merged with other seminaries or were folded into universities. The institutions best able to survive were divinity schools affiliated from the start with major universities, including Harvard, Boston, Yale, Chicago, Emory, Duke, Southern Methodist, and Vanderbilt. A connection to functioning, all-purpose universities made a difference both intellectually and institutionally. A seminary was obliged to make it alone, but a divinity school could strengthen its ties to academic departments in relevant fields and draw support from a campus administration. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ecumenical-evangelical divide, free-standing seminaries continued to flourish, including Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Southern Baptist.
Academic departments of religion and religious studies were once thought to provide alternatives to seminaries and divinity schools as settings for scholarship and teaching unbound from the confessional commitments appropriate for a church-related institution. These programs proliferated in the 1960s especially in private, but also in public universities, usually trying to do justice to the full panorama of classical world religions, in addition to Christianity. Often, they developed highly sophisticated programs in subfields like Buddhist Studies, Judaic Studies, and Islamic Studies. Invariably interdisciplinary, units of religious studies included anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars. Religious Studies programs became caught up in theoretical debates about the applicability of the very concept of “religion”: does it really refer to something distinctive and universal in culture and history or to just a collection of quite disparate phenomena so embedded in their contexts as to make comparison and generalization impossible? Did all of the “world’s great religions”—not to mention the many so-called new religions—share enough elements to justify their study under that rubric? Moreover, if the very concept of “religion” as applied beyond the historically Christian North Atlantic West was a “colonialist move,” as was often alleged, weren’t scholars of Religious Studies complicit in furthering cultural hegemony?
Religious Studies departments and programs did advance cosmopolitan outlooks. They were largely founded by ecumenical Protestant scholars but were increasingly dominated by post-Protestants, some of whom bore an animus toward Christianity and the West. These programs often occupied a limbo between faith-affirming communities and institutions on one hand and the established disciplines that continued to study, within their own evolving portfolios, the phenomena conventionally classified as “religious” but without the institutional imperative to declare what that meant on the other. After all, anyone could study Confucianism or Daoism without worrying whether or not it was a religion. Only Religious Studies specialists were obliged to ponder that.
As theology declined except as a theoretical foundation for social activism, the chief topics of public debate across the ecumenical-evangelical divide became racism, sexism, and homophobia, and it was a debate characterized by the striking absence of what once been a core feature of traditional Protestantism: biblical hermeneutics. This meant that ecumenical voices in the public arena were mostly silent about the one cluster of fundamental issues on which they might have spoken with unique authority and sophistication: what the Bible actually was, how it should be read, and how it could guide conduct in today’s society. Anyone can debate sexism and racism and homophobia. But the seminary elite was trained in the study of the Bible. And Protestantism was, after all, preeminently a textual religion. Sola scriptura, the Reformation fathers had proclaimed. Although these ecumenical intellectuals did cite scriptural passages in support of progressive causes and disputed evangelical interpretations of Romans 1:27–32 on same-sex intimacy, they rarely went beyond this piecemeal criticism to explain why their own perspective on the Bible was superior to that of their evangelical counterparts.
Might ecumenical intellectuals have more openly and clearly proclaimed that the Bible is a literary document containing profound and instructive passages that, when integrated with modern social and intellectual experience, can serve as a cultural anchor, a foundation for community, and a source of ethical inspiration? This conception of the Bible had long been readily available in the writings of liberal theologians. Even the doctrine of atonement—that “Christ died for our sins,” as Paul phrased it in 1 Corinthians 15:3—is best read, argued Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor, L. Harold DeWolf, as a holdover from the ancient practice of blood sacrifice. “The description of Christ as a substitute for the bloody sacrificial offerings of old,” DeWolf explained in 1953, “now seems at best a quaint and alien figure of speech having no real interpretive value, while at worst it seems to imply acceptance of superstitious and unworthy notions.”28
The Bible was easily appreciated as a moving record of the formation of the Christian project in the context of the traditions of the ancient Hebrews. Recognition of its historicity united secular admirers of the Bible with liberal Christians. Accurate history had not disqualified the Bible for use in many Christian communities. Indeed, ecumenical pastors routinely encouraged their congregations to appreciate the Bible for its stories, rather than for its doctrines. Harvey Cox was at his least controversial when he observed that “a historical-critical view of the Bible has deepened, not destroyed, our respect for its truth.”29
“The function of the New Testament stories,” Van A. Harvey argued in 1996, tracking Rudolf Bultmann, is not to “assent to supernatural claims.” Rather, the point is “to provide a rich series of narratives that the members of the Christian community can use to reflect on their lives.” There is no need to regard the gospels or the letters of Paul as recording actual historical events, Harvey continued; rather, the scriptures “provide pictures and imagery on which the imagination, so to speak, can dwell and that can be the basis for a call to a renewal of one’s life.”30
Yet in the public sphere increasingly dominated by evangelical voices, the ecumenical intelligentsia made little effort to plant their own flag in the Bible. This decision to hold back is one of the most remarkable choices made in the entire history of the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. Langdon Gilkey took his ecumenical colleagues to task in the mid-1990s for this “conspiracy of silence.”31 This reluctance to engage in Bible talk had its advantages. One could thereby avoid overt clashes within the community of faith. More important, perhaps, one could avoid the risk that some parishioners, upon learning what the preachers really thought about the Bible, might be more inclined to depart. But political peace and intellectual passivity had real costs. Ecumenical reluctance to publicly proclaim their view of the Bible facilitated the transferal of Christianity’s symbolic capital into the hands of evangelicals, who were glad to claim it. The Bible belonged to them, more than ever.
Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong was an exception to the avoidance of sustained, public argumentation about biblical hermeneutics. But Spong was regularly patronized by academic theologians as a pretentious iconoclast. Spong suggested that the Apostle Paul was a repressed homosexual and that Jesus of Nazareth had been married to Mary Magdalene. Spong scorned evangelicals for taking seriously the idea of the virgin birth of Jesus. Ministers and church officials often warned the faithful that Spong was too far out to be part of the ecumenical mainstream.32 For evangelicals, he was simply wild and not a real interlocutor. A more recent—and much more cautious—exception to the avoidance of detailed argumentation about the Bible is Tony Keddie’s Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels, which documents the link between evangelical hermeneutics and the policies of the Republican Party.33
Ecumenical intellectuals proved to be more comfortable attacking the “New Atheists” than taking evangelicals to task for a flawed interpretation of the Bible. Sam Harris, the most popular of the freethinking writers of the early twenty-first century to whom journalists applied that label, complained in 2005 that “moderates,” as he called them, “did not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.” Harris and the other New Atheists made little effort to understand nonfundamentalist Christianity and rarely acknowledged the function of churches in building and maintaining communities. They focused almost entirely on the content of belief. But Harris and his cobelligerents were correct to ascribe to ecumenical Protestants a high degree of tolerance for biblical interpretations they knew to be intellectually indefensible. Harris was also correct to insist that “moderate” versions of Christianity were the result of “two thousand years of human thought” and a process of education by which knowledge of nature, society, and history was disseminated.34
Christian apologists of many orientations criticized Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other New Atheists for their ostensibly unsophisticated criticisms of religion. Yet this ritualized dismissal of the New Atheists almost always elided a very important fact. Vast numbers of the faithful espoused the crude ideas the New Atheists attacked. “To dismiss atheist critiques as substituting caricatures for finely shaded portraits,” complained philosopher Philip Kitcher, “overlooks the obvious fact that, however subtle the religious conceptions of those who inhabit divinity schools or faculties of religion … many believers would acquiesce in the interpretive approaches assumed by the critics, reading religious doctrines exactly as they do.”35 The New Atheists may have been wrong about religion in general, but they were more right than wrong about specific religious ideas that were widely accepted in the United States. Rather than welcoming the New Atheists as imperfect allies, most ecumenical intellectuals dismissed them, circling the wagons of the community of faith.
At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, the nation’s most widely respected defender of the spiritual traditions of ecumenical Protestantism is arguably not a theologian or a preacher or a biblical scholar but the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Her four “Gilead novels,” centering on the small-town Iowa lives of Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the 1950s, constitute a singular event in American religious history. The chief characters in Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack display plenty of frailty as well as wisdom and courage. Robinson’s portrait of the Congregationalist pastor John Ames is one of the most sensitive explorations of ministerial subjectivity ever written. But her picture of what is perhaps the finest in American Protestantism is locked in the past. Robinson’s nonfiction essays tried to perform contemporary philosophy and theology yet do not earn their conclusions because she begs countless questions that theorists are expected to answer. These essays, moreover, are persistently limited in their intellectual inventory. One of her sketches of American history identifying thinkers who might serve as resources for charting the nation’s future mentions only Congregationalists.36 Robinson’s readership is wide, and her skills as a novelist are extraordinary. But the ecumenical Protestantism she champions is most powerful when out of apparent reach. The religious witness she performs can be universally welcomed because it serves primarily as a museum.
By the time Robinson gained popularity as a spokesperson for ecumenical Protestantism, the Christian project’s relation to the nation was quite different from what it had been for nearly all of American history. As the secularization process reduced the size of Christianity in the United States, white evangelicals who believed they had a proprietary claim on the nation dominated Christianity’s hollowed-out remnant.
Had Christianity become a refuge for white Protestants and Catholics on the conservative side of the salient political, cultural, and theological spectra? Yes, more than ever. But not exclusively. Renegade white evangelicals like Jim Wallis, Beth Moore, and David Gushee insisted that an evangelical orientation need not mean conservative politics. The diminished ecumenical Protestant and liberal Catholic populations still existed, often invoking scriptural inspiration for left-liberal public policy. The National Council of Churches continued its traditional role as a progressive lobby.
But the most striking challenge to conservative control of the franchise was the vitality of African American Protestantism. Black churchgoers, heirs to a distinctive tradition in which churches were the only institutions Black people were able to operate on their own, did not depart Christianity nearly as rapidly as whites.37 Christianity remained a substantial locus of community and a foundation for social action. In 2021, 66 percent of African Americans identified themselves as Protestant and 6 percent as Catholic, and another 3 percent were Jehovah’s Witnesses and other smaller confessions. In that year, slightly less than half of the American population as a whole belonged to any Christian church at all. The majority of African American Protestants were affiliated with either one of the historically Black denominations associated with the National Council of Churches or with one or another of the “mainline” denominations.
Even those African Americans whose theological opinions could be credibly classified as evangelical according to the “quadrilateral” are not typically allied with white evangelicals in public affairs. The common observation that American evangelicalism includes Blacks may be doctrinally true, but otherwise trivial and misleading. African Americans, even with relatively low levels of formal education, have had a worldly education in American social practices that inoculated them against many of the ideas white evangelicals found compatible with evangelically flavored theologies. “On nearly every social and political issue,” Du Mez correctly summarizes the relevant studies, “black Protestants apply their faith in ways that run counter to white evangelicalism.”38
Yet the total numbers of politically nonconservative Christians of any and all ethnoracial groups continue to dwindle. Even if nearly three-quarters of American Blacks identify as Christians, African Americans constitute only about 12 percent of the national population. Relative Black loyalty to the faith is not enough to alter the trend. Secularization, so long denied, is accelerating.39 Secularization “may not be inevitable,” the dean of the Harvard Divinity School concluded in 2020, but is “likely to be irreversible … except in relatively minor and temporary ways.”40
If nonconservatives want to advance their own versions of Christianity within the American national frame, instead of being content to nourish the spiritual health of a particular silo of believers, they increasingly depend on allies outside the community of faith, especially the post-Protestants and post-Catholics who constitute most of the nonreligious population.
Brian Stanley has correctly described the decisions of the ecumenical leadership as decisive in yielding to evangelicals the upper hand in representing what was recognized in the United States as Christianity: “The mainline denominations estimated the prevailing sentiment to be one of radical humanism and commitment to human rights, whereas the conservatives judged the public preference to be for free market forms of highly individualized programs for self-betterment.… The liberals got it wrong and the conservatives got it right.”41
The conservatives got it “right” in the competition for control of the Christian franchise in the United States. Doubling down on a business-friendly individualism and turning away from human rights was a highly effective means of achieving that goal. But what if the goal was larger? What if the choices the two groups made were to be assessed in a world-historical context, understanding Christianity not as an end in itself but as a historically particular vehicle for values that transcend it? Might wisdom then belong to those who looked beyond the immediate control of the Christian project? Might that project be an “earthen vessel,” a worldly instrument?42
If we take this instrumental view of Christianity, there is no cause to lament its American fate as in part to serve as a way station to something beyond Christianity. But the remainder of that fate depends heavily on who controls what is left of it.