Can Mainline Protestantism Be Rebuilt?
Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The negative world is almost defined by institutional incompatibility or hostility to historical Protestantism. This necessitates a countercultural approach and bars the door to a mainline relationship of the church to culture.
Jake Meador wrote a recent interesting piece on a topic of great interest to me, namely about a call to attempt to create a new Protestant mainline. He says:
So to bring the discussion to reformed catholicity and what reformed catholic churches can do in our current context, here it is: The old Mainline is dead. American Catholicism is likely terminal as well, even prior to the plausible turmoil to come under Pope Francis’s successor. American Evangelicalism is now encountering its own dechurching crisis and loss of influence. The Christian movement in America is thus at a crossroads. Something new will need to be built. But I do not think we should build a new evangelicalism; I think we should build a new mainline.
That mainline should be centered around the EPC, PCA, and ACNA with room for the possible addition of Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist denominations, should denominations interested in this project emerge from those streams. The old mainline encompassed Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists. We currently have Presbyterian and Anglican communions that might plausibly grow into the “continuing church” vision once articulated at the PCA’s founding. It remains to be seen if the Global Methodists can join this movement, let alone if the LCMS can stave off its own demographic collapse or if a strengthened Baptist commujnion can emerge from the chaos and corruption currently vexing the SBC. These are the institutional pieces to watch, then: the PCA, EPC, ACNA, Global Methodists, LCMS, maybe WELS, and SBC.
I agree that America lost a lot with the decline of the mainline denominations. Attempts to at least salvage or reclaim some of that is of great interest to me, and also others as well. I think you can see Tim Keller’s plan for the renewal of the American church through this lens, and I might be collaborating on an article about that in the future.
Lind’s Four American Republics
Before digging in, however, I thought it was interesting to see Meador lay out a “four Americas” framework from Michael Lind that was very similar to my own version. I did not draw from Lind, though had heard he had something like this. But I think this sort of division of American history is one very obvious way to do it, so I’m sure it has recurred many times.
Where I differ from the framework Meador gives is that I see the “fourth republic” or “America 4.0” as less emerged than he does (or at least that’s my impression). I see us as in a liminal period where we can’t yet see the contours of what the future system will look like, just as those in the Depression didn’t know what postwar America would be like. The old is passing away but the new has not yet been born. Hence we should be cautious about over fitting solutions to the present movement.
Through Catholic Eyes
Meador is also influenced by Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, which I actually read after I saw him make a previous reference to it. It’s an interesting book in which Bottum makes the common argument that contemporary elite morality and culture is a form of secularized mainline Protestantism (a view with some degree of truth). In his telling, Catholics (with evangelicals in a supporting role as public mouthpiece for Catholic natural law arguments) were the would be replacement for the mainline role in society, but that project failed because America ended up being too Protestant to submit to a Catholicism that was weakened at the time by internal issues.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Bottum himself is a staunch Catholic. That is, like 90% of the people I read who center America’s problems in mainline Protestantism, he himself is not a Protestant. Invariably in these readings, any role Ellis Islanders (like my family) might have played in contemporary America’s failings is minimized or avoided altogether. Just once I’d like to see a Catholic writer say something like, “The WASPs handed over the keys, but we ran the car into a ditch.”
This is one reason I have been arguing that Protestants must stop outsourcing their thinking to Catholic intellectuals. Invariably this leads to us repeating essentially Catholic serving talking points, as Bottum himself basically says in his book (e.g., of George W. Bush).
Meador’s Mainline Restoration Project
With those preliminaries, what does Meador’s mainline restoration project look like?
Institutionally, he sees it centered in the conservative “shadow denominations” of the mainline, mostly splinter groups (EPC, PCA) but some which are not (LCMS). He goes on to say:
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Presbyterian Church in America, 50th Anniversary, 2023
If ministerial candidates were being taught by some educators that Jesus’ words in John 17:17 were in fact not true, then the future of the denomination as a confessional church faithful to Scripture and the great commission was in question. The concerned Presbyterians made their case through preaching, special informational meetings, and publications increasing their number sufficiently to take action because the divergent views could not continue to coexist in one body. Leaders of the concerned Presbyterians organized the Advisory Convention of the Continuing Presbyterian Church to meet in Asheville, North Carolina, August 7-9, 1973. An important action by the Advisory Convention was calling the first general assembly for the Continuing Presbyterian Church.
This year is the semi-centennial of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Fifty years is a long time with many members having entered the denomination over the years while others alive in 1973 have passed on. To remember the founding, some of the early history of the PCA is provided below. Pictured in the header is a broadside composed in 1973 by Ruling Elder J. Ligon Duncan, Jr. It appears to be a document that was laid out on a table at a gathering so individuals could sign it, but this was not the case. However, before continuing with the story of the broadside, the question of the relationship of the National Presbyterian Church to the PCA must be answered. For several years there were members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) that were increasingly dissatisfied with the position of their denomination regarding the doctrines of Scripture and issues associated with its interpretation and application. Along with this was minimalization or neglect of the teachings of the Westminster Standards subscribed to by all church officers. With reference to Scripture, one signer of the broadside told me that when he confronted one of his professors in a denominational seminary asking him while pointing to a Bible, “Is this the Word of God?,” that after circling around an answer finally said “No.” This was one professor; not all the professors in the seminaries took his position. If ministerial candidates were being taught by some educators that Jesus’ words in John 17:17 were in fact not true, then the future of the denomination as a confessional church faithful to Scripture and the great commission was in question. The concerned Presbyterians made their case through preaching, special informational meetings, and publications increasing their number sufficiently to take action because the divergent views could not continue to coexist in one body. Leaders of the concerned Presbyterians organized the Advisory Convention of the Continuing Presbyterian Church to meet in Asheville, North Carolina, August 7-9, 1973. An important action by the Advisory Convention was calling the first general assembly for the Continuing Presbyterian Church.
It was a cloudy but dry nearly seventy-degree evening when commissioners gathered December 4, 1973 in an earlier sanctuary of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The Advisory Convention had selected Ruling Elder Jack Williamson of First Church, Greenville, Alabama, convener for the meeting. He was an accomplished Christian jurist who ruled well in his church and was an important contributor to the connectional judicatories as well as the continuing church movement. Respect for him yielded election by acclamation to moderate the first assembly. Also elected by acclamation to continue their temporary positions were Teaching Elder Morton H. Smith as stated clerk and Ruling Elder John Spencer as recording clerk. Notice that the assembly elected a ruling elder for moderator with two of the three assembly offices held by ruling elders. It is an acknowledgement of the two office view of church leadership—the elders function in a ruling or teaching capacity and they work together with the diaconate in its mercy ministry. For the most part, at least through the nineteenth century, the history of American Presbyterianism shows that moderators were ministers, as were clerks. For example, minister-educator-founding father John Witherspoon was moderator of the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) in 1789, but due to ill health he quickly passed the gavel to John Rodgers; when the Presbyterians in the southern states in 1861 formed the church that would become the PCUS, the minister-educator Benjamin M. Palmer was the moderator. Thus, the new church showed its commitment to rule by elders as Moderator Williamson called the commissioners to order at 7:30. One particularly important item of business was selection of a better name for the church than Continuing Presbyterian Church. Three names proposed were—Presbyterian Church of America (previously used briefly by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church), Presbyterian Church in America, and the name that went on to be selected, National Presbyterian Church. In addition to name selection were decisions concerning the governance and direction of the new church such as presbytery boundaries, general assembly committees, inter-church relations, the adoption of doctrinal standards, the examination of ministers, and supplying insurance for ministers. Also, the broadside was included in the Inter-Church Relations committee report given by its chairman, Teaching Elder G. Aiken Taylor. The draft broadside was adopted with the title “A Message to All the Churches of Jesus Christ.”
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The Christian’s Hard Affluence and Easy Hardship
With all our affluence today, rather than worrying over waning faith and despairing over our salvation, we ought to see the tremendous opportunity that affluence affords us to love our neighbors on a scale premodern people could never imagine. Such different outlook could make all the difference in the world—and beyond.From sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s worries over “moral therapeutic deism” in their 2005 book, to the Pew Research Center’s documentation of the growing trend of religious “nones” (people who claim no religious affiliation), to common claims that we now live in a “post-Christian” culture, the idea that religion and modern affluence cannot coexist has deep roots. Indeed, one might go back further and cite sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Peter Berger wrote an excellent rejoinder to the secularization thesis 12 years ago, noting that on the whole the phenomenon has not panned out as many feared. And yet … one cannot deny that, even in the United States, affluence and faith stand in inverse relationship. In 2014, Pew recorded that 14% of people who make over $100,000 per year identify as atheists compared to half that, 7%, among those who make $30,000 or less.
So it makes some sense to expect that increased affluence means decreased faith and religiosity, but why? And is this something modern and new? Or is it timeless?
While orders of magnitude more people, due to modern market economies, enjoy the blessings of affluence today than in the preindustrial world, human nature stays the same. Jesus warned, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:24). When a rich young man came to him and asked, “What must I do that I may have eternal life?” (Matt 19:16), Jesus told him to follow the commandments, which the man claimed to do. Yet apparently he still felt unfulfilled, further asking Jesus, “What do I still lack?” (Matt 19:20). To which Jesus replied, “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matt 19:21). Instead, the young man goes away sorrowful, and Jesus laments, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23).
The data above seem to indicate that Jesus’ lament holds for our modern affluence.
But wait a minute. Isn’t salvation a “free gift” (see Rom 5:15–16)? Don’t Christians believe “by grace you have been saved” and “not of works” (Eph 2:8–9)? How then can it also be “hard”?
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CRT vs. Classical Liberalism vs. Christianity
The Bible presents a complex view of reality and how modern political ideologies dismember parts of this complex reality, isolate them, and treat them as the whole. And it helps Christians to engage with liberalism, CRT, and other political ideologies in a way that doesn’t invest them with ultimate, messianic hope or allow them to become the uncontested and sovereign ideology of our souls.
Perhaps you saw the video. A woman stares down the lens of the camera, straight into our eyes. Her expression is weary, her tone angry. “How can you win?” she cries, with the air of a question she’s asked a thousand times. “You can’t. The game is fixed,” she answers. “So when they say, ‘Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’—it’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything.’”
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Kimberly Jones’s viral video gave voice to the anger and anguish felt by many black men and women in the United States and beyond. She spoke of a society rigged so that most black people cannot succeed—however hard they work and whatever the content of their character.
Though the assumptions and commitments informing this view of a systemically racist society go by multiple names, here I’ll use “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as a general term to capture the set of concerns. (To be clear, lamenting the presence of systemic racism does not necessarily make one a CRT proponent.)
When discussed in Christian circles, CRT is often explicitly or implicitly contrasted to a version of classical liberalism: not the liberalism of the liberal/conservative divide, but the liberalism of individual freedom, universal rights, and the importance of property propounded by thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. Some Christians, rightly sensitive to the problems of CRT, end up espousing a secular liberalism because it provides an off-the-shelf alternative. Others, whose education or life experience have primed them to see liberalism’s dangers, give a free pass to CRT as the go-to tool for addressing them.
But both reactions sell the Bible short, not by opposing it at every point but by isolating an aspect of its interconnected truth, distorting it, and making it into the whole truth. Many of today’s social and political pitched battles are staged between complementary biblical truths that have been dismembered, isolated, and opposed. This tragic and unnecessary spectacle characterizes much of the struggle between CRT and liberalism.
To be clear, my aim in this article isn’t to keep score between these secular ideologies and pronounce which error is worse or which is more compatible with biblical Christianity. I simply aim to show how both reduce the complexity of biblical truth, often in symmetrical and opposite ways.
The Bible is not, of course, a book of secular political philosophy: it addresses ultimate realities and calls people to find eternal life in knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent (John 17:3). Nevertheless, the Bible does describe the world, human beings, and the flow of history in particular ways (in a forthcoming book I call them “figures”), and these ways have implications for how we think about political and social issues. So let’s consider the key biblical turning points of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation as a grid through which to compare CRT and liberalism to the biblical truth they both simplify and distort.
