Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.
I should say at the outset that this isn’t a book review in any proper sense. But for those interested in the question of church life in our era of polarization, Ryan Burge’s The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us makes a provocative claim: since the culture war of the 1960s, American Christianity has become polarized with its liberal and conservative elements increasingly identifying with the causes of the political left and right. Burge thinks this is a bad thing, and that the American church has been harmed by an overidentification of faith with politics.
Now, Burge takes the position of an equal-opportunity offender, offering a critique of both the Christian left and the evangelical right. However, as some reviewers have pointed out, he ends up aligning himself with the murky, middle of the road cultural Christianity of the Protestant mainline that dominated American religious culture at midcentury. Mainline Protestantism – generally defined as the historic denominations that maintained cultural prominence along the eastern seaboard of the US – was, in the twentieth-century, simultaneously integral to cultural and social cohesion while at the same time being doctrinally indifferent.
Mainline churches at the time differed less theologically than culturally or along class lines – with Episcopalians serving wealthier elites, Presbyterians the middle class, and Methodists and Baptists popular among the middle and working classes. On the eve of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, there was far more shared culture and ethos across the class continuum in the US, as scholars like Charles Murray have argued. Nevertheless, cultural Christianity also benefitted from the shared values of the American political spectrum as well. Midcentury America was divided politically over questions that seem trivial today, like which strategy will best contain communism or how much of the New Deal should be reformed or dismantled. Hot-button social issues didn’t divide Americans like today, so there was less for people to clash over – at church and in other venues of social connection.
It’s for this kind of shared cultural Christianity that Burge seems nostalgic. Though he falls on the left side of the spectrum, he is not alone in this nostalgia. Indeed, many conservative Christians today share this longing for cultural Christianity as they look on with dismay at the erosion of traditional social norms in twenty-first century western society. Cultural Christianity might be dead in Europe and North America, but it’s not without its admirers – interestingly, both on the right and the left.
One problem many seem not to notice is that cultural Christianity in America was less conscious of important issues of doctrinal divergence than Christians are today. Polarization has exacerbated the divide between mainline Protestants on the left and evangelical Christians on the right; but it doesn’t provide a complete picture of the kind of fracture that has become visible over the last several decades in American Christianity. Evangelical Christians might align with the political right on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, gender ideology, or similar topics.
Yet, as evangelicals have become more acquainted with their own confessional traditions, they have also become more aware of the doctrines which divide. Reformed Baptists cling to Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election but are committed to a doctrine of baptism which requires a confession of faith before the congregation that rules out infant baptism. Presbyterians and the Reformed, in contrast, maintain a strong view of God’s grace in salvation, but also baptize the infant children of Christians – a practice consistent with their understanding of covenant theology. Lutherans mark the divide between themselves and Reformed by a divergence over the nature of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. Much as evangelicals have united on debated political issues today, the recovery of their varied doctrinal traditions has also served to clarify their very real divisions.
The fall of cultural Christianity – and the rise of conservative evangelicalism – hasn’t united evangelicals as much as it might appear. Political polarization hasn’t caused conservative Christians to abandon their historic disagreements and divergences. In contrast, cultural Christianity at midcentury was associated with mainline Protestantism and its permissiveness about doctrine. The emergence of evangelicalism as a significant movement since the 1960s has brought with it a much greater concern for historic Christian teaching.
Moreover, American cultural Christianity also brings with it a hazardous history. During the progressive era early in the previous century, elite Christian culture was at the forefront of the social gospel movement which sidelined historic Christian teaching about salvation in favor of economic reforms aimed at the problem of poverty. Modernist views of human nature prevailed among mainline Protestants who enthusiastically supported the eugenics movement and the expansion of abortion rights and access to birth control.
Many conservative evangelicals in America today who long for the return of cultural Christianity should consider this problematic legacy. In contrast to traditionalist European movements which sought to restore the supremacy of Christian culture – Carlist monarchism in Spain, the French reactionary movement, or English Jacobitism – American cultural Christianity accommodated liberal, post-Enlightenment ideas about human nature and society. American Protestant elites in the twentieth-century had much in common with the German Christian movement (Deutsche Christen) of the Third Reich, which leveraged historical criticism against the authenticity of the Old Testament and Darwinian biology in favor of eugenic modification of human nature.
Changing concerns after the war shifted focus to the rules-based international order led by the United States, with the idealistic notion that democracy and the free-market economy are universally suited to human society. Leading Protestant intellectuals defended liberal democracy on Christian grounds. Reinhold Neibuhr, for example, argued that the reality of human sin means that tyranny is an unfortunate but universal proclivity best curbed by the decentralization of power and free exchange in an open market.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be. As Luther once observed, the law of God is the most salutary doctrine of life, but it cannot help us on the way to righteousness. Cultural Christianity, with its mixture of blessings and liabilities, likewise cannot bestow righteousness. Only the gospel of Christ proclaimed anew in every generation can make us righteous in the eyes of God.
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