9
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
—WALLACE STEVENS, 1915
THE UNITED STATES confronts a remarkable paradox: an increasingly secular society is saddled with an increasingly religious politics. In 2021, 29 percent of the national population identified as having no religious affiliation, but only 0.2 percent of members of Congress did.1 Federal courts, dominated by Republican-appointed judges, have expanded the meaning of the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment while limiting the scope of that amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of religion. The courts have granted exemptions based on “sincerely held” claims of conscience that allow individuals and groups to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans or deny women access to reproductive health services.
The democratic process was not compromised when the “conscience exemption” was developed in 1940 to enable individual members of tiny pacifist sects to avoid military conscription.2 But that process is threatened when “religious liberty” becomes a means for large populations to escape the reach of federal and state laws. The conscience exception has been expanded drastically to confer privilege on ideas professed by millions of citizens, and even by multimillion-dollar corporations.3 In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the US Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that the mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requiring companies to pay for contraceptive services for their employees violated a privately held, for-profit corporation’s right to religious freedom.4 In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) the court ruled that Philadelphia violated the free exercise clause by failing to give Catholic Social Services an exemption from the nondiscrimination provisions in the city’s public service contracts that would require CSS to screen prospective foster parents without regard to their sexual orientation or marital status.5
Dealing with the paradox of an increasingly religious politics in an increasingly secular society is made more difficult by the practice of protecting religious ideas from critical scrutiny. This informal ban on “the questioning of someone about their religion,” laments Linda Greenhouse, is the “last taboo in American society.” This ban “has been a gift to the religious right: the secular middle does not know how to talk back or even how to frame the questions.”6 The fear that one will be accused of being “biased against religion” has enabled conservative Christianity to exercise disproportionate influence over the public affairs of the United States, pushing aside liberal versions of Christianity and other perspectives, including secularism.7
The notion that one shows respect by refraining from criticizing another person’s expressed religious ideas, no matter how out of touch with reality, has a noble history. It is a legacy from the days when religion was understood as a private concern, like the details of one’s marriage. During that era, many Americans learned to give all religious ideas “a pass.” In keeping with this tradition, we commonly subject to critical scrutiny ideas about almost everything except religion. If we hear someone say that women cannot do first-rate science, or that African Americans are just not as smart as Korean Americans, or that taxation is essentially a form of theft, or that the Americans won World War II with minimal help from the Soviets, or that global warming is a hoax, it is okay to challenge the speaker with evidence and reasoning. Not so with any idea presented as an aspect of someone’s religious faith.
One might suppose that we live in a world of either/or: either religious ideas are relevant to public policy and thus subject to critical discussion, or they are not relevant and thus not a topic for debate. But instead, we live in a world of both/and: religious ideas are both relevant to public policy and excluded from critical evaluation.8
It is easy to disparage the hope for honest conversation about religious ideas. To doubt the power of argumentation about virtually any contested topic is often invoked as a mark of sophistication. But forthright debate has been basic to American democracy since Jefferson invoked “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Democracies give up on argumentation at their peril.
To be sure, truths about the world are more easily accepted when advanced by members of one’s own tribe. Intellect works best when accompanied by fellow feeling. But tribal boundaries sometimes change, and tribal epistemologies are not beyond challenge. In the history of the United States, demographic diversification and epistemic demystification have together enabled many people to change their minds.9 Religion is not impervious to argumentation, especially as informed by education.
Education is no guarantee against authoritarianism, as the history of right-wing regimes in modern Europe proves. But the more knowledge people gain about history, society, and nature—as distinguished from technical and vocational training, which has less decisive consequences for citizenship—the greater their capacity to evaluate the claims and counterclaims that always confront voters in a democracy. “Democracy must be born anew every generation,” said John Dewey, “and education is its midwife.”10 When schooling is hard to come by, generous personal instincts and mutually supportive local communities can promote sound civic policies. But today, when highly capitalized programs of disinformation threaten to twist the common sense of the most honest and virtuous of souls, the need for education is especially great. “People here in the heartland,” remarked the white Appalachian bard Joe Bageant on behalf of his ancestral tribe, “will keep electing dangerous dimwits in cowboy boots, until it is possible to get an education without going into crushing debt.” Bageant added that “Malcolm X had it straight when he said that the first step in revolution is massive education of the people.”11
Historical sociologists Claude Fischer and Michael Hout find that education more than any other measurable factor has separated Americans from one another in virtually all domains of human striving during the past one hundred years.12 This applies with special significance to religion. Education makes people less inclined to ascribe to supernatural authority whatever value they find in the teachings and social function of Protestant and Catholic churches and less prone to invoke supernatural authority as a warrant for policing the worldly conduct of their fellow citizens. Worldliness is available to all, of course, no matter how much or how little time a person may have spent in school or how much experience a person may have had outside their tribe. Not everyone with a limited education is attracted to supernatural authority. In order to be an atheist or an agnostic, or to become indifferent to religion, you don’t have to go to college or to be a world traveler.
What matters about religion for the health of democracy is not belief in God but what believers say God authorizes them to do. Millions of Americans profess faith in God but organize their public and private lives around worldly authorities informed by modern learning and refrain from accusing their political opponents of failing to obey authority located beyond human argumentation.13 In a society where churches have long been vital centers of community, sustainers of cultural tradition, and settings in which to contemplate some of life’s terrors and enigmas, it is not surprising that many individuals remain connected to churches even when any link to the supernatural is remote, or even nonexistent. The belief/nonbelief, religion/secular distinction can conceal the messiness of many people’s spiritual strivings.
Before white evangelicals succeeded in getting so much of the country to treat them as the chief owners of Christianity, institutionally empowered ecumenical Protestants showed that divinity could be understood in keeping with what human beings have come to know about the world through schooling and through the expanded sense of humanity that comes from direct education in its varieties. These “other Protestants” sought to develop versions of Christianity that could work within a political system willingly shared with Jews, with other kinds of non-Christians, and with nonbelievers.
These campaigners for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism are the central actors in Christianity’s relation to public affairs in the United States during the past one hundred years. They defined the terms of the ecumenical-evangelical divide. Did these people do as much as they might have to diminish racism, sexism, imperialism, Orientalism, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism? Certainly not. But this book has not put a fine point on this obvious truth because so little reflection is required to discover that a given cast of historical actors fails to measure up to today’s sense of how people should behave. The ease with which we can answer this morally structural question—is someone within our ethical community, or not?—accounts for the question’s copious and confident responses.
Morally developmental questions are more challenging. What conditions have facilitated the expansion of our ethical community? What has enabled equality, inclusion, and democracy to make what gains they have made? This book has attended to differences in education, theology, class position, and cross-cultural contact as major factors explaining why ecumenical Protestant leaders did more than most of their white Christian contemporaries to advance goals more easily affirmed today than when most of this book’s subjects were active. The mainline leaders managed to do what they did not because of purity of heart, although some did have great generosity of spirit. They lived in a force field where descent and doctrine, wealth and war, trade and travel, science and sentiment, and a host of other elements in motion made them into the relatively well educated, relatively global individuals they became. The ecumenical Protestants emerge from this book less as heroic agents than as historic witnesses to the power of the forces that shaped and directed them.
American Protestants have always been subject to conflicting appeals, voiced by two of Christianity’s greatest figures, the Apostle Paul and Immanuel Kant. Hold fast to the revealed truth, trusting that it can handle all earthly storms? Or conclude that those storms can overtake you unless you acquire worldly knowledge of them? Maintain the clearly bounded, rule-following Christian community Paul founded, risking that it will prove less viable than other, more capacious communities? Or try to build the universal moral and epistemic solidarity envisioned by Kant, risking loss of identity in a seemingly boundless expanse?
Most groups of American Protestants split the difference between Paul and Kant, somehow balancing their variously measured suspicions of a provincialism too confining and a cosmopolitanism too uncertain of its own destination. But eventually the two appeals became more sharply differentiated and drew constituencies increasingly separate from one another. The more control white evangelicals achieved over the Christian franchise and the more they allowed it to weaken democracy and to discredit science, the more comfortable other Americans came to feel in one another’s spiritually and ethnoracially diverse company. The lines distinguishing liberal adherents of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism from post-Protestants, post-Catholics, post-Judaic Jews, and other secularists became fuzzier. The secular emerged as less a threat than the sectarian to an inclusive national community committed to democracy. Paul’s legacy was far from dead in the national arena, but Kant’s was stronger there than ever, making white evangelical Protestantism’s demographically disproportionate power in public affairs all the more paradoxical, and all the more demanding of critical engagement.