Protestantism and the Shaping of Western Culture

Protestantism and the Shaping of Western Culture

Christianity has always had an ambivalent relationship with its cultural context. As Christianity became a growing presence within the Roman Empire during the first three centuries of its existence, it was regularly regarded with hostility and suspicion and occasionally even persecuted by the authorities.¹ So how were Christians, who often held high public office, to understand their relationship with the culture at large?

The rise of monasticism was a particularly significant development in shaping Christian attitudes toward culture. Antony of Egypt and others believed that life in the world distracts people from the love and praise of God and leads to their corruption rather than salvation. Withdrawal from the world was the only solution. These attitudes are expressed in the title and contents of Thomas à Kempis’s spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ and of Contempt of the World and All Its Vanities.

As Protestantism gained prominence in western Europe and beyond, it was forced to address the question of how it interacted with its cultural environment. The question had, of course, never been entirely absent from Protestant reflection. Martin Luther’s theology of “the two kingdoms” can be seen as an attempt to give intellectual justification to his own somewhat complex relationship with Frederick the Wise, just as John Calvin was obliged to develop a theology that was consistent with the social realities of Geneva. Neither Luther nor Calvin, of course, could control his cultural context; each was obliged to work within that context, while aspiring to its transformation. Anabaptism found itself in conflict with sixteenth-century culture at large and believed that its own identity and agendas were best served through withdrawal and disengagement with the world.

British Library, London; Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY

The burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1563. From “Actes and monuments” by John Foxe (1516–87).

Those tensions remain today. In twenty-first-century America, many Protestants are involved in cultural activities and debates, while others withdraw from these entirely, seeing them as “worldly” or leading to compromise. Today Protestantism displays perhaps the greatest range of attitudes to culture of any religious group, Christian or otherwise. To understand the variety of Protestant attitudes to culture at large, we shall explore a number of “models” of how Christianity relates to culture that have been adopted by Protestants. Each is based on a particular reading of the Bible, and each leads to quite a different attitude toward culture at large.

So what is “culture”? The word is often used in a neutral sense to mean something like the integrated system of learned behavior patterns that are characteristic of the members of a society, or the total way of life of a people.² The word can also be used in a more nuanced sense, as in T. S. Eliot’s famous remark, “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”³ For our purposes in this discussion, we take the word in its neutral sense to refer to the intellectual and social environment within which humanity exists. In a later chapter, we consider Protestantism’s relationship with culture in Eliot’s sense of the term.

RELIGION AND CULTURE: PROTESTANT MODELS OF INTERACTION

The classic analysis of the types of relationships to emerge between Christianity and its cultural context was the work of the American Protestant theologian Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962). In 1951 Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, which sets out five models that historic Christianity developed in reflecting on its relationship to its environment.⁴ Although Niebuhr clearly had a preference for the fifth of these models (to be described later), his work gave an empathetic account of all the existing possibilities, identifying both their biblical foundations and the nature of their application.

Niebuhr was concerned with Christianity as a whole, not specifically with Protestantism. Yet a close reading of the book reveals an important point that has been confirmed by all subsequent scholarship. Protestantism did not introduce any new models for understanding its interaction with culture. It worked within existing Christian paradigms, adapting and developing them to meet its concerns—but not developing new models of its own. Protestantism may prefer certain models over others, allowing differences of emphasis to be identified. Yet there is no sign of radical innovation in this area.

In what follows, we consider each of the five models identified by Niebuhr, noting the Protestant writers and movements that embraced them and attempting to describe their implications for Protestantism’s broader relationships with society at large.

Christ Against Culture

This model asserts that there is a fundamental opposition between Christianity and culture. The relationship is one of antagonism, whether arising from culture’s hostility toward the church or the inverse. Such attitudes were found in some early church writers, such as Tertullian, and in monasticism. In the Protestant tradition, this attitude was initially associated with the Radical Reformation and writers such as Menno Simons and Jakob Hutter. The instinct to separate from a fallen culture is particularly well exemplified in some contemporary American Protestant movements that trace their origins back to the Radical Reformation.

The best known of these is the Amish, a diverse group of communities originating from the teaching of Menno Simons but given a new sense of direction under Jakob Amman in the seventeenth century.⁵

Their rejection of contemporary American culture led them to retain many aspects of late seventeenth-century rural European communities. This ethos is not primarily based on nostalgia or on a particular affection for an identity-giving past. It is best seen as a way of developing practices and behaviors that isolate the Amish from modern American culture and hence make a pointed statement about their identity and values. The best-known Amish communities are located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; other Amish groups exist elsewhere.

This attitude toward culture is also found within modern American Protestant fundamentalism. The roots of this attitude can be traced back to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who founded the Plymouth Brethren and exercised a significant influence within conservative Protestant circles in the United Kingdom and North America. The rise of fundamentalism is best seen as due to social and political circumstances peculiar to the United States in the 1920s (we consider this movement in more detail later). For our purposes in this section, the important point is that this group is perhaps the best example of a community whose attitudes and values are shaped by the “Christ against culture” model.

The Christ of Culture

This model argues that the Christian faith represents what “the world values most dearly,” and its aim is to adjust and accommodate Christianity to be in tune with cultural norms. “Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy.” As such judgments are inevitably historically contingent and subject to cultural geography, this approach is probably best regarded as leading to temporary adjustments that are modified still further over time.

The best example of this assimilationist approach is the movement generally referred to as “liberal Protestantism,” which began to emerge in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Initially associated with the great Berlin theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher, the movement achieved its most significant successes under A. B. Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Classic liberal Protestantism arose in response to a growing perception that Christian faith and theology alike required reconstruction in the light of modern knowledge, attitudes, and values. To use Niebuhr’s language, the “finest ideals” of the nineteenth century seemed very different from those of the sixteenth century. Protestantism needed to adapt if it was to survive. The increasingly positive reception given to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (popularly known as the “Darwinian theory of evolution”) in the 1870s created a climate in which some elements of traditional Christian theology (such as the doctrine of the seven days of creation) seemed to be increasingly untenable.

Leading liberal Protestant writers argued that a reconstruction of belief “in the light of modern knowledge” was essential if Christianity was to remain a serious intellectual and cultural option in the modern world. For this reason, they demanded a degree of freedom in relation to the doctrinal inheritance of Christianity, on the one hand, and traditional methods of biblical interpretation, on the other. Where traditional ways of interpreting scripture, or traditional beliefs, seemed to be compromised by developments in human knowledge, it was imperative that those interpretations be discarded or adapted to bring them into line with what was now known about the world.

The theological implications of this shift in direction were considerable. A number of Christian beliefs came to be regarded as seriously out of line with modern cultural norms; these beliefs were either abandoned, as resting upon outdated or mistaken presuppositions, or reinterpreted in a manner more conducive to the spirit of the age. For example, the traditional Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ was reinterpreted as an affirmation of Jesus exemplifying qualities that humanity as a whole could hope to emulate. Jesus thus differed from humanity in degree, not in kind.

These ideas proved to be very influential in Germany, England, and the United States.⁶ Their critics regarded them, however, as a dilution of the essence of Protestantism that reduced it to a mere endorsement of prevailing cultural norms. All that remained of classic Protestantism, they suggested, was “an aroma from an empty bottle” (Erik Peterson). Liberal Protestants retorted by arguing that they had rescued the church from cultural and intellectual irrelevance.

Christ Above Culture

The third approach identified by Niebuhr tries to synthesize the Protestant faith with contemporary culture norms. Whereas liberal Protestantism tends to accommodate its ideas and values to those of secular culture, the “Christ above culture” approach aims to subordinate those ideas to Christian concerns. This view holds that the relation between Christ and culture takes the form of a convergence of nature and grace, without significant cultural Christian accommodation and reduction of the nature of Christ or the gospel to contemporary norms. Niebuhr argues that this approach, which he finds particularly in the writings of the great scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, synthesizes elements from the gospel and the culture into a single structure of thought and conduct.

One exponent of this approach identified by Niebuhr is the American Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who set out to correlate the fundamental questions asked by contemporary culture with the answer provided by the Christian revelation.⁷ Tillich’s synthesis is set out with particular clarity in an essay of 1956 in which he explored the relation of the church and culture: “The Church judges culture, including its own forms of life. For its forms are created by culture, as its substance makes culture possible. The Church and culture are within, not alongside each other. And the Kingdom of God includes both while transcending both.”⁸ The basic features of the “Christ above culture” approach can be seen clearly in this extract. Niebuhr himself expressed concerns about this approach, noting in particular its tendency toward cultural conservatism and the risk of institutionalizing Christ and the gospel.

Christ and Culture in Paradox

The fourth approach identified by Niebuhr holds that individual Christians and the church exist in a tension with the world, as a result of its fallenness. The Christian must be thought of as belonging to two, quite distinct realms, usually designated as “the temporal” and “the spiritual.” Christians cannot evade the resulting tension between these two authorities. Niebuhr sees this approach exemplified in Luther, particularly his doctrine of “the two kingdoms.”⁹

As noted earlier, Luther rejected the medieval distinction between the “temporal” and “spiritual” estates. In its place, Luther developed an alternative theory of spheres of authority, based upon a distinction between the “two kingdoms,” or the “two governments,” which refer to the “spiritual” and the “worldly” government of society. God’s spiritual government is effected through the word of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. God’s worldly government is effected through kings, princes, and magistrates and through the use of the sword and the civil law. Whether these princes or magistrates are true believers or not, they still perform a divine role (Romans 13:1–7; 1 Peter 2:13–14).

Luther insists that God has ordained that order shall be imposed upon creation, for the maintenance of peace and the repression of sin. There are three hierarchies, or “orders,” within a Christian society: the household or family, with the father as the head (reflecting the paternalism of Luther’s age); the princes and magistrates, who exercise secular authority; and the clergy, who exercise spiritual authority. All these are founded on the word of God and reflect the divine will for the structuring and preservation of the worldly realm.

In the end, Luther’s social ethic seems to suggest that two totally different moralities exist side by side: a private Christian ethic, reflecting the rule of love embodied in the Sermon on the Mount; and a public morality, based upon force. The tensions are manifest, and the result is a permanent tension.¹⁰ For Luther, that is the inevitable outcome of the nature of reality. This approach does, however, raise some difficult questions, as we shall see when we consider the German church crisis of the 1930s, which many commentators argue arose directly from Luther’s inadequate social ethic.

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Niebuhr’s fifth and final category is clearly the one that he himself preferred. Here the theme is conversion. Although Niebuhr includes Augustine in this category, most of those he cites are Protestants—John Calvin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan tradition, and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. All of these “try to convert the values and goals of secular culture into the service of the kingdom of God.” Here Christ is seen as converting people within their cultures and societies, not apart from them. This approach rejects isolating the church from the world without accommodating central Christian truths to the values of contemporary culture. While taking a more positive attitude toward culture than the paradoxical dualists, it holds that culture stands under God’s judgment.

This fifth category can be seen in the works of one of the twentieth century’s most significant Protestant missionary theologians—Lesslie Newbigin.¹¹ In his 1952 Kerr Lectures, Newbigin commented on the significance of the breakdown of Christendom for Christian life and witness.¹² For Newbigin, the notion of “Christendom” meant “the synthesis between the Gospel and the culture of the western part of the European peninsula of Asia” that had developed during the Middle Ages and remained in place, though in a weakened form—in other words, Niebuhr’s “Christ above culture” model. Newbigin argued that Christianity had become so domesticated within European culture that it had become little more than a form of folk religion. To remedy the situation, Newbigin called for the rediscovery of a missionary perspective aimed at the conversion of culture.

Given this diversity of attitudes toward culture on the part of Protestants, both historical and contemporary, it is to be expected that a similar range of attitudes should be expected in relation to the question of social engagement. To what extent should Protestants become engaged with social issues? And which side should they take? We consider some instructive examples in what follows.

PROTESTANTISM AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Recent studies have noted that most of the intellectual and spiritual leaders of medieval Christianity were monastic, isolated from many of the harsher realities of everyday life by the walls of their monasteries and convents. Protestantism chose to inhabit the more dangerous world of the city and marketplace, exposing its thinkers to pressures and problems that their Catholic forebears had not been required to consider. It is of the utmost importance to appreciate that the intellectual lights of the first phase of Protestantism—Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, and John Calvin—lived, thought, and wrote in the midst of urban society, producing theology that possesses a refreshingly earthly quality.

Yet the transition from the monastery to the marketplace was dangerous. Protestantism was exposed to precisely the dangers, threats, and problems that had led to the emergence of the monastic movement in the first place. How could Christianity maintain its integrity when it was now immersed in, and confronted with, the challenges of the world? As Roland Bainton, one of the most distinguished analysts of the early sixteenth century, remarked, when Christianity takes itself seriously, it must either renounce or master the world.¹³ Given the political realities of the age, Protestantism could only aspire to mastery; unlike Islam, it never achieved religious mastery of the secular but was obliged to work with more or less sympathetic secular rulers.

At first sight, this last statement may seem puzzling to those familiar with some popular accounts of Calvin’s Geneva. Surely this was a theocracy in which Calvin ruled the city with a rod of iron? This outdated stereotype is in need of radical revision. Those who speak loosely about Calvin’s “theocracy” in Geneva need to be reminded that all secular power, and not a little religious power, remained firmly in the hands of the city council throughout his lifetime. Calvin’s successes and failures at Geneva can be accounted for largely through his shifting relationships with the real source of authority within the city. Calvin’s idea of “theocracy” was intellectual, not practical or institutional; it related to the idea that all power and authority are derived from God. But God, as Calvin knew perfectly well from his New Testament, was prepared to work through secular rulers, then as now.

The real problem for Protestantism can be explored using a biblical analogy that featured prominently in the movement’s reflections on the issues. Jesus of Nazareth declared that his followers were the “salt of the earth.” But what, he asked, if that salt were to lose its saltiness (Matthew 5:13)? It was no longer of any use. Perhaps Jesus was referring to rock salt, whose saltiness can be leeched out by dampness. But whatever the real-life model for the image, its power is undeniable. What if a movement whose identity depends upon its distinctiveness loses precisely that distinguishing mark of identification? What if engagement with the world led Protestantism to become indistinguishable from the world, with only traces of its saline origins remaining? How could Protestantism remain in the world without becoming of the world—adopting the world’s standards, norms, language, and values and losing its own, whether accidentally or deliberately?

Two Protestant strategies for coping with the problematic of the ordinary emerged in its first formative period and have remained characteristic of the movement ever since. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. In what follows, we consider each of these strategies before going on to consider some illuminating case studies of Protestant engagement with society and the issues that these raised.

The first strategy, initially associated primarily with the Anabaptists, can be seen as a continuation of the monastic model, though with subtle modifications. As Anabaptism became the object of increasing suspicion on the part of monarchs, city councils, and mainline Protestant leaders in the late 1520s, its instinct was to form a counterculture. Anabaptists rejected the coercive structures of contemporary society, refusing to swear oaths, hold any magisterial office, serve in any military capacity, or bear arms.

Such a radically apolitical and world-renouncing attitude inevitably entailed separation from the world. Perhaps using as a model the pre-Constantinian church—which existed within, but not as part of, the Roman Empire—the radicals often conceived of their communities as an “alternative godly society” within, but not part of, the greater society surrounding them. Like Israel before them, they insisted on separating from the nations, for fear of becoming like them.¹⁴ Purity and integrity were best—indeed only—maintained by withdrawal from a fallen world, which would otherwise absorb them utterly, leeching out their saltiness.

Similar approaches can be found in certain—but certainly not all—forms of Pietism. It must be stressed that many Pietists were social activists, as the history of early Methodism makes abundantly clear.¹⁵ Yet one of the traits that came to be associated with many Pietists was what might be termed the “privatization of religion”—that is, the restriction of religious involvement to matters of spirituality. This approach holds that involvement in social or political issues is “worldly” or “corrupting.” Discipleship entails disengagement from the world. The approach is particularly associated with Protestant fundamentalism in the early twentieth century, which emphasized the need for a dividing wall between church and society in the face of the increased secularization of the United States.

The strengths of this approach must be acknowledged immediately. It unquestionably serves to maintain Christian distinctiveness and integrity by relieving Christian communities of any sense of obligation to mimic the language, values, or customs of the world. As the recent works of Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder have demonstrated, such approaches have enormous potential for the life and thought of the church.¹⁶ One particular strength of this approach lies in the possibilities it offers for exploring nonviolent approaches to social existence—or, indeed, aspects of Christian theology that have often rested on an analysis of violence, such as theories of the atonement.¹⁷

Yet there are weaknesses and risks to this approach. These are best illustrated by the concerns that led to the emergence of “neoevangelicalism” in the United States during the late 1940s, in response to the perceived failures of fundamentalism. As we shall see later, fundamentalism arose in reaction to secularism within American culture in the 1920s and led many conservative Protestants to withdraw from any form of social or cultural engagement. In his Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), Carl F. H. Henry argues that fundamentalism was too otherworldly and anti-intellectual to gain a hearing among the educated public and that it was also unwilling to concern itself with exploring how Christianity related to culture and social life.¹⁸ The latter failing had simply led to the exclusion of any Christian presence in culture and society. This essay in fundamentalist self-criticism saw Henry—writing as a fundamentalist—expressing considerable misgivings about the directions the movement had taken and about its obvious failure to achieve its goals. As Millard J. Erickson points out, it had become increasingly clear that fundamentalism totally failed to turn back the rising tide of modernism, that it had not achieved any significant impact upon the thought-world of its day, and that it had spurned the social problems of its time.¹⁹ The watchword of the “new evangelicalism” would be engagement—cultural, social, and intellectual.

With the benefit of hindsight, this can be seen as having done much to shape the contemporary political landscape of the United States. The emergence of the “Religious Right” is one of many important results of this new attitude, which led politically conservative Protestants of the 1980s to emulate the political engagement of left-leaning activists of the 1960s.²⁰ The election of George W. Bush as the forty-third president of the United States was widely interpreted by political commentators as the outcome of a new commitment to political activism on the part of Protestants who had hitherto regarded it as pointless or a distraction from the real business of life.

The program advocated by the new evangelicalism in 1947 was, in many ways, a return to the approach advocated by the mainline Protestant constituency throughout the 1540s and 1550s. Here we find an emphasis on engagement subtly balanced by an insistence on maintenance of identity. Protestants can be active in the world, while being safeguarded in their identity and calling through the preaching and support of the church. If the world is a wasteland, the church is the oasis. If the world is desalinated and desalinating, the church is the saltcellar.

The theological foundations of this delicate balancing act were developed by Calvin, who constructed a sophisticated dialectic between faith and the world that allowed scope for positive action in the world while identifying and averting the risks such action entailed.²¹ In Calvin’s thought, Christians should be encouraged to invest in and commit themselves to the world. There was no place in his thinking for the medieval monastic attitude toward society, which led to individuals renouncing the world while the institutions they served affirmed it. Yet Christians, he warned, while immersing themselves in the affairs and anxieties of the world, must learn to keep it at a critical distance. Outward investment in and commitment to the world must be accompanied by inward detachment and the fostering of a critical attitude toward the secular. Believers must immerse themselves in the secular sphere, but not allow themselves to be submerged by it. “We are to learn to pass through this world as though it were a foreign country, treating lightly all earthly things and declining to set our hearts upon them.”²²

Yet the weakness of this strategy is clear and cannot be evaded. Those who seem to master the world are often those who have actually been mastered by it. Those who are counted successes by the world are often those who have capitulated to its norms. Latent within Calvinism is a purely profane approach to life, in that the failure to maintain a proper dialectic between God and the world leads to the collapse of the divine into the secular. Calvinist moral, economic, social, and political structures and values, although firmly grounded in theology, could all too easily become detached and independent from those theological foundations. The emancipation of such structures and values from faith itself through cultural erosion is one of the most significant aspects of the Western reception and assimilation of Calvinism, especially in North America. We shall have occasion to return to this point when considering a possible link between Protestantism and secularization.

We have considered the two families of attitudes that emerged within Protestantism as it sought to maintain its identity and fulfill its calling in the modern world, and the analysis thus far calls out for some examples to illustrate the points being made. In what follows, we offer a brief consideration of some illuminating episodes from Protestant history. We begin by considering Protestant attitudes to slavery.

The issue of slavery was at the heart of one the most important and difficult debates within American Protestantism in the nineteenth century. It proved immensely divisive, causing political tensions and bringing some denominations to the point of near-schism. At the heart of the debate lay a fundamental issue of biblical interpretation. Did the Bible legitimize slavery? Most Protestants in antebellum America assumed it did. Did not Noah’s curse on Ham (Genesis 9:25) justify the practice?²³

The Bible did not condemn slavery; it merely regulated it. Little wonder that Jefferson Davis (1808–89), president of the Confederate States of America, could declare that slavery was “sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.”

Abolitionism had gained ground in England in the late eighteenth century, aided to no small extent by growing Protestant opposition to the practice. William Wilberforce was a particularly significant and influential voice in the debate.²⁴ Were not all peoples created in the image of God? The idea of a person being treated as “chattel” seemed increasingly unacceptable in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

In the United States, a significant polarization emerged. The northern states moved to abolish slavery in the years following the American Revolution as increasing numbers of former slave owners, such as Benjamin Franklin, changed their views on the matter. The Second Great Awakening, which rekindled religious fervor in much of the nation, saw new religious pressure for abolition. Oberlin College in Ohio was founded as an abolitionist institution. In the South, abolitionists broke away from mainline Methodism to form the Free Methodist Church. African American Christians were a particularly significant voice urging the churches to read the Old Testament in the light of the New and abolish slavery.

Yet the dominant position in the South was strongly pro-slavery, and the Bible was used to defend this entrenched position. Theologically, the arguments used by the pro-slavery lobby represent a fascinating illustration and condemnation of how the Bible may be used to support a notion by reading the text within a rigid interpretative framework that forces predetermined conclusions on the text.²⁵

The defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War inevitably led to the final abolition of slavery throughout the Union. Yet a lingering question remains, which hangs awkwardly over Protestantism. Many respected Protestant intellectuals and statesmen of the nineteenth century—including Princeton’s venerable theologian Charles B. Hodge—supported slavery on biblical grounds, often dismissing abolitionists as liberal progressives who did not take the Bible seriously. Might not the same mistakes be made all over again, this time over other issues?²⁶

A second example illuminates the tensions resulting from tendencies within Protestantism that pull in opposite directions. As we shall see presently, the emergence of a strong “work ethic” during the formative phase of Protestantism led to an emphasis on moral activism that approved the generation of wealth but not its expenditure. One outcome was the rise of a “spirit of capitalism”; another, although in this case less direct, was the notion of a “gospel of wealth.” This latter belief held that prosperity was a sign of divine favor. Although this often represented little more than a loose assumption on the part of some Protestants, it was actively developed by some into what is widely known as the “health and wealth” movement.²⁷ The Bible is interpreted to mean that financial success and personal well-being are the direct results of God’s approval of an individual.

So what of the poor? Is their plight the result of God’s disfavor? What about the many biblical texts that emphasize God’s special care and love for the widowed, orphaned, impoverished, and dispossessed? Is the alleviation of poverty tantamount to the subversion of God’s will? For some (wealthy and healthy) Protestants in the 1890s and beyond, this was indeed the case. Leave things alone, they argued.

Others disagreed, seeing themselves as driven and compelled by the biblical testimony to work for the relief of the poor. The origins of the Salvation Army lie in such concerns for the poor, whose situation its founders believed could be alleviated by combining evangelism and social action. William Booth’s remarkable book In Darkest England drew attention to the social deprivation experienced by millions in England in the 1890s.²⁸ After the movement became established in the United States in 1880, it pursued its twin tacks of revivalist evangelism and social action. Salvation Army bands marched through the main thoroughfares of Chicago and New York, its preachers proclaimed the good news of redemption, and its social workers cared for unwed mothers and women who had been deserted by their husbands.²⁹

The “Social Gospel” movement in the United States also attempted to address these issues.³⁰ Many Protestant clergy were concerned at their churches’ failure to care for the urban poor. Washington Gladden (1836–1918) and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) both took the view that unrestricted capitalism was the cause of urban poverty, which in turn caused other social problems. Rauschenbusch published what is now widely seen as the manifesto of this movement—The Social Gospel (1908).³¹ Although political socialism never gained a significant following in the United States, the attitudes of the Social Gospel movement paralleled those of the movements generally known as “Christian socialism” elsewhere.

Social concern within Protestantism has been forged and developed in other contexts as well. The most important of these in recent years has been the emergence of Pentecostalism, which is often characterized by a strong sense of social concern for the marginalized and the poor.³² Although this is especially evident in Pentecostal ministries in the developing world, it has also become characteristic of such ministries in urban America. The 23,000-member West Angeles Church of God in Christ is heavily involved in social outreach programs focusing on low-income housing, the care of seniors, and recovery ministry. Such social engagement is not seen as peripheral or supplementary to gospel concerns, but as integral to the Christian vision of healing and renewal—a characteristic emphasis of Pentecostal spirituality.

These examples illustrate both the possibilities and the tensions that accompany Protestant attempts to engage society—above all, the difficulties that arise from interpreting and applying the biblical material to social issues. The nature of Protestantism is such that these difficulties can be expected to continue, precisely because of the lack of any widespread agreement over the principles that should govern its engagement with society. Similar problems also arise in relation to an issue of ongoing significance for Protestantism, to which we now turn—the question of the relationship of church and state.

PROTESTANTISM ON CHURCH AND STATE

The birth of Protestantism coincided with the beginning of the end of Christendom—the great medieval vision of the essential unity of church and state, with individual monarchs ruling their territories, all presided over by the pope. From the outset, Protestantism was bound to cause political ripples. Perhaps it should be no cause for surprise that the first mainline Protestant reformers adopted models for understanding the relation of church and state that were adapted to the political realities of their regions.

Luther’s doctrine of the “two kingdoms” gave the state (especially “the godly prince”) a major say in the running of the church. Zwingli adopted an approach to authority and government within the church that bore a remarkable resemblance to the civic authority structures at Zurich in the 1520s. Calvin’s strong republican convictions may have been connected to the fact that the city of Geneva, where he ministered from 1536, had declared itself a republic in 1535. English Protestantism gladly recognized the monarch as the “head of the church,” until a theologically prudent Elizabeth I changed the terminology as a matter of theological diplomacy. She and her successors would be the “supreme governors” of the national church.

We see here the political realism of early Protestantism. The price paid in order to secure its reforming measures was to give religious legitimacy to existing authorities. They, in their turn, averted the risk of revolution—always seen as a possibility after the seizure of the German city of Münster by radicals in 1534—but at the price of giving protection to the new religious authorities and enforcing their wishes when this was deemed necessary or expedient. The political conservatism of sixteenth-century Protestantism has often been noted; it is not difficult to understand it. Only the Anabaptists chose to stand apart from this cozy relationship of church and state, believing that something vital had been compromised. The church, they believed, had lost its way after Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. A fundamentally corrupting alliance had been forged then between the church and political power.

This point is of major importance in relation to the rise of atheism in western Europe, which was often a consequence of the perception that the Protestant churches enjoyed a disproportionate status and influence.³³ Karl Marx’s criticism of German Lutheranism during the 1840s is a particularly significant example. Protestantism was seen to be privileged and powerful; what better way was there to undermine its conservative political influence than to destroy the ideas upon which it ultimately rested?

The situation in the United States, following the Revolution of 1776, was quite different. The constitutional separation of church and state prevented any Protestant denomination from gaining “established” status and created a level playing field for Christian groups. Alexis de Tocqueville noted the implications of this fact and suggested that the American separation of church and state was directly related to the American interest in religion—in stark contrast with the situation he knew back in Europe.

The serious consequences of Protestantism’s ambivalent relationship with power are best seen in the German church crisis of the 1930s. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and promptly set about the “Nazification” of German culture. This was relatively easily presented in terms of the renewal of German culture, an effort welcomed by some within liberal Protestantism, which assumed a close link between religion and culture. Nazi rule was at first welcomed by many German churchmen, partly because it offered a bulwark against the ominous state atheism sponsored by the Soviet Union, and partly because it seemed to offer a new cultural role for religion. Indeed, many churchmen—such as Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel—supported Hitler.³⁴

A furious debate broke out between the “Confessing Church,” led by figures such as Martin Niemöller, who were not willing to cooperate with Hitler in church matters, and the “German Christians,” who saw Hitler as the savior of the German nation and church. There were unquestionably many Protestants who took a courageous stance against the Nazi regime, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in the final phase of the Second World War. Yet the Protestant churches as institutions are widely criticized for having failed to provide a credible and cogent alternative to Nazism.

The Nazification of German culture showed up the fatal vulnerability of any form of Christianity that took its lead from contemporary cultural norms. Since liberal Protestantism mirrored the norms of contemporary culture, it had no adequate basis for critiquing that culture. Protestant writers such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer vigorously opposed this trend, arguing that Christianity and the churches should seek their norms and legitimation in Jesus Christ and the Bible, not in cultural norms. But they were a decided minority.

It is therefore not surprising that many Protestant thinkers found both Bonhoeffer and Barth immensely congenial resources as they struggled with similar issues. For example, John de Gruchy, Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Cape Town, pointed out the important of Bonhoeffer for Christians in South Africa at the time of apartheid. Bonhoeffer, he argued, provided a model for challenging prevailing cultural norms and taking a stand against a state that enjoyed a substantial degree of support from the established church of the region—in this case, the Dutch Reformed Church.

Barth and Bonhoeffer vigorously contested any Faustian pact between the church and state, between Christianity and culture. Although both writers had clear political commitments of their own, they regarded these as subservient to the overriding task of remaining faithful to Jesus Christ. A church that smells the powerful fragrance of power and influence shows a worrying ability to become accommodating and flexible on matters some might regard as nonnegotiable. How serious a risk is this? For example, the Church of England is the established state church of England. Might it not run the risk of simply regurgitating the policies and values of successive British governments? That risk is certainly there; it must not, however, be overstated. Even in the depths of the Second World War, some bishops of the Church of England (particularly George Bell) spoke out against the inhumanity of massive Allied bombing raids against German cities, incurring the wrath of the British political establishment in doing so.

The growth of the Religious Right in the United States is often seen as representing a Faustian pact between faith and politics. The rise of this grouping, which is widely held to be linked with the Republican Party, was stimulated by a series of major Supreme Court decisions that the movement perceived as threats to traditional American patterns of social life, perhaps most notably Engej v. Vitale (1962), which banned prayer in public schools.³⁵ To its critics, this association represents precisely the kind of unholy alliance that Christians ought to avoid. In response, the Religious Right argues that many mainline denominations have already fallen into precisely the same kind of alliance with the Democratic Party, leading to an institutionalization of liberalism within these denominations—for example, the Episcopal Church in the northeastern states. Although the Constitution prohibits any alliance of church and state, this has clearly not prevented more informal alliances from taking place. To an outside observer, the United States seems to embrace a variety of “culture Protestantisms,” each comfortably attached to a political and social agenda.

PROTESTANTISM AND ECONOMICS

One of the most visible differences between Protestant and Catholic Europe in the early seventeenth century was the marked economic superiority of the former over the latter. For example, consider Flanders, which was torn apart in the second half of the sixteenth century by Protestant revolt and Catholic reconquest by the Spaniards. For the best part of two hundred years thereafter, the Protestant zone was bustling and prosperous, and the Catholic area depressed and unproductive. Even in robustly Catholic nations, such as France and Austria, economic entrepreneurialism was primarily due to Calvinists. Capitalism and Calvinism were virtually coextensive by the middle of the seventeenth century.

This observation is easily made; explaining it is somewhat more difficult. It is impossible to engage with this topic without mentioning, however briefly, the “Weber thesis,” developed by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920).³⁶ Weber set out a complex argument, not entirely justified by the evidence he assembled, to the effect that a new “spirit of capitalism” emerged in the early modern period and seemed to be associated with Protestantism—more specifically, with Calvinism.³⁷

Weber set out to identify the characteristics of “modern” capitalism by comparing it with what he termed the “adventurer” capitalism of the medieval period. This earlier form of capitalism, he argued, was opportunistic and unscrupulous; it tended to consume its capital gains in flamboyant and decadent lifestyles. The forms of capitalism that emerged in the early modern period, however, possessed a strong ethical basis, which was often linked to personal asceticism in respect to material goods.

Under Catholicism, the accumulation of capital was seen as intrinsically sinful; under Calvinism, it was seen as praiseworthy. In Weber’s view, this fundamental change in attitude was particularly well illustrated by a number of seventeenth-century Calvinist writers such as Benjamin Franklin, whose writings combined commendation of the accumulation of capital through engagement with the world with criticism of its consumption. Capital was seen as something to be increased, not something to be consumed. Calvinism, according to Weber, thus generated the psychological preconditions essential to the development of modern capitalism.

Weber’s argument linked the rise of the “spirit of capitalism” with Calvinism through the concept of predestination. Weber argued that Calvin’s predestinarianism created religious anxiety on the part of those wondering whether they were truly elect. In attempting to overcome this anxiety, Weber argued, Calvinists such as William Perkins developed a heightened sense of a moral obligation to work, the conviction that a person’s election by God was authenticated by his or her activism, and a pervasive ethos of living thriftily off the proceeds from such work, with the remainder being saved, invested, or simply given away.

The “spirit of capitalism” thus arose from the quest for the assurance of salvation—which Calvin’s theological system accentuated but did not itself resolve.³⁸ This has proved to be an influential, yet not an ultimately persuasive, argument.³⁹ What is clear, however, is that the emergence of modern Western capitalism has a connection with Calvinism—whether as cause or effect, or whether as shared elements of a cultural syndrome. Whereas Karl Marx had argued that the emergence of modern capitalism brought Protestantism into being, Weber argued precisely the reverse. Calvinism made commercial success respectable by declaring that the virtues that lay behind it—such as thrift, austerity, and discipline—were themselves acceptable in God’s sight.

Calvinism is clearly linked to the rise of modern capitalism in other respects. The most important of these is Calvin’s attitude toward usury—lending money at interest with a view to making a profit on the loan. Throughout the patristic era and the Middle Ages, the entire consensus of the church had been that usury was a mortal sin.⁴⁰ This was no peripheral matter, no matter of theological vagueness. The credit markets of western Europe, like those of Islamic nations today, were held back by a belief, reinforced by church legislation, that usury was contrary both to the gospel and to natural law.

The Old Testament explicitly prohibited this practice.⁴¹ Throughout the patristic and medieval periods, this prohibition was both reinforced and clarified. In a series of sermons, Ambrose denounced the taking of interest on a loan, arguing that such usury was a violation of the law of God and was prohibited by both “the Old and Divine law.”⁴² Jerome defined usury as “collecting more than one has given,” something that is explicitly prohibited by the law and prophets. Did not Luke 6:35 explicitly state that Christians should “lend, expecting nothing in return”?

Three medieval councils—the Second and Third Lateran Councils (1139 and 1179) and the Council of Vienna (1314)—reinforced the Old Testament ban, even stipulating that usurers were to be denied a Christian burial.⁴³ In 1140 the great medieval authority on canon law, Gratian of Bologna, declared that:

To demand or receive or even to lend expecting to receive something above the capital is to be guilty of usury; usury may exist on money or something else; one who receives usury is guilty of rapine and is just as culpable as a thief; the prohibition against usury holds for laymen as well as clerics but, when guilty, the latter will be more severely punished.

Yet while Christians were prohibited from lending money at interest, Jews were explicitly exempted from this ban. This exemption led to the emergence of the stereotype of the Jew as an avaricious moneylender, famously exemplified in Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

These views were not challenged in the first phase of Protestantism. Martin Luther regarded the biblical prohibition of usury as permanently binding. In his 1524 sermon on trade and usury, Luther lashed out at any attempt to charge interest. In his view, Christians “should willingly and gladly lend money without any charge.” The Elizabethan Protestant bishop John Jewel reflected the views of his age when he raged from his pulpit against the iniquities of usury. “It is theft, it is the murdering of our brethren, it is the curse of God and the curse of the people.”⁴⁴ This uncompromising opposition to usury was embodied in a statute passed by the English Parliament in 1571, which had the unforeseen and unintended effect of legitimating usury at a fixed rate of 10 percent.

Yet the lending of money at interest was essential to the emergence of modern capitalism. A steadily increasing hunger for capital led many in both church and state to turn a blind eye to moneylending and to reconsider the entire theological basis of the prohibition of usury. Calvin could not have been unaware of these problems. The survival of the city of Geneva depended on being able to sustain and develop its urban economy and remain independent of potentially dangerous neighbors.

In 1545 Calvin wrote to his friend Claude de Sachin, setting out his views on usury. The letter was not published until after Calvin’s death (1564), when Theodore Beza decided to make its contents generally known in 1575. At one level, this letter can be read as a total inversion of the teaching of the Old Testament; a more attentive reading confirms this suspicion but discloses the sophisticated lines of argument that led Calvin to his surprising conclusion. So how could Calvin reinterpret the Old Testament’s explicit statements that usury is prohibited to mean that it is actually permitted?⁴⁵

Calvin’s letter of 1545 reinforces the importance of biblical interpretation to Protestantism. In one respect, Calvin reaffirmed the general Protestant idea that not all the rules set out for Jews in the Old Testament were binding upon Christians; in these instances, the Old Testament offered moral guidance only, not positive prescriptions for conduct. Yet this way of interpreting the Old Testament had been applied to cultic issues—such as the Old Testament’s demand for animal sacrifices. Calvin’s extension of the principle to usury broke new ground.

A fundamental theme recurring throughout the letter was that things had moved on. The situation in sixteenth-century Europe was not the same as that in ancient Israel. As Biéler points out in his magisterial study of Calvin’s economic thought, the new realities of financial life in the early modern period made the uncritical application of such Old Testament texts highly problematic.⁴⁶ The new economic realities of the sixteenth century made it possible to view interest as simply rent paid on capital. Calvin therefore argued for the need to probe deeper and ascertain the general principles that seemed to underlie the Old Testament ban on usury in its original context. It was the purpose of the prohibition, not the prohibition itself, that had to govern Protestant thinking on this matter. “We ought not to judge usury according to a few passages of Scripture, but in accordance with the principle of equity.” For Calvin, the real concern was the exploitation of the poor through high interest rates. This, he argued, could be dealt with in other ways—such as the fixing of interest rates at communally acceptable levels. Calvin’s willingness to allow a variable rate of interest showed an awareness of the pressures upon capital in the more or less free market of the age.⁴⁷

Calvin’s views, which were seen by many as running counter to the clear meaning of the Bible, took some time to become accepted. By the middle of the seventeenth century—more than one hundred years after Calvin’s groundbreaking analysis—usury was finally regarded as acceptable. Protestant jurists such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf supplemented Calvin’s theological analysis with clarifications of economic concepts, especially in relation to price and value, that finally removed any remaining scruples about lending money at interest. The Catholic church did not legitimate usury, however, until 1830, apparently in response to the widespread acceptance of the practice within predominantly Protestant western Europe.

Yet Protestantism did more than bring about the theological adjustment that opened the way to a modern capitalist economy; its early development in the cities of Europe, especially in Switzerland, created the economic conditions that made such a change inevitable and essential. During the period 1535 to 1540, an economic recession descended on the area around Geneva. Despite this downturn, Geneva was able to survive and to go on to benefit from the subsequent recovery throughout the region, which lasted from 1540 to 1555. It is now thought that one of the prime reasons for Geneva’s resilience during this period was the emergence of the Swiss banking system, which allowed Basel and other major Swiss Protestant cities sympathetic to Calvin’s religious agenda to bail him out through large loans.⁴⁸ The Swiss banking system emerged as a direct response to a shared sense of identity throughout the Protestant cantons of Switzerland and neighboring cities—including Geneva.

By the early 1540s, Geneva was a city without an economic hinter-land, and it faced considerable pressure from the growing number of religious refugees, often fleeing from persecution in France. Its survival increasingly came to depend on the generation of new markets and industries. As many refugees brought manufacturing and marketing skills with them, the scene was set for economic expansion.⁴⁹ Geneva’s fabled connection with the watchmaking industry began with the arrival of French refugees who specialized in this area. A significant publishing industry developed, along with ancillary industries, such as papermaking and the production of printing type. The immigration of French families associated with the cloth and drapery trades—such as the Bordiers and Mallets—led to the expansion of these industries at Geneva. With the abolition of the old seigneurial ecclesiastical and guild system—the final obstacle to “modern capitalism”—these newcomers could set up business and begin manufacturing and trading without serious restrictions.

The raising of capital for economic expansion thus became imperative for Geneva around this time. Calvin’s removal of the remaining theological impediments to the practice of usury was not merely religiously progressive; it was essential if his version of Protestantism was to survive. So intimate was the connection between the religious system of Calvinism and the city of Geneva that the collapse of the latter would have had disastrous implications for the former.

Economic activism subsequently came to be associated with Puritanism in England, Scotland, and the United States in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵⁰ Welsh Calvinists who settled in Ohio in the nineteenth century brought their faith and their capitalism with them to the region.⁵¹ Although there is some evidence that an ethos of hard work and the prudent use of resources may have become a culturally embedded tradition rather than an instinct that arose naturally from personal religious convictions, there is clear evidence that Calvinism’s later representatives saw an obvious link between their faith and capitalism.

There is another component of Weber’s argument that we must consider here—the notion of “calling.” Max Weber suggested that the idea of the call played a critical role in shaping Protestantism, and above all in shaping its characteristically entrepreneurial attitudes.⁵² In view of the importance of this notion to the Protestant work ethic, we consider it separately in some detail, without any commitment to the specifics of Weber’s occasionally problematic analysis.

THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC

The phrase “the Protestant work ethic” is widely used in contemporary Western culture to designate the belief that work has intrinsic value in its own right and for its own sake.⁵³ This, it must be noted, represents a secularized version of this work ethic; it might more accurately be described as “the post-Protestant work ethic.” Protestantism’s own rigorously theological reevaluation of the place of work in human life and culture, however, would continue to influence Western culture—albeit in a largely secularized form.

To appreciate the significance of the emergence of the Protestant work ethic, it is necessary to understand the intense distaste with which classical culture regarded work.⁵⁴ The social patricians of ancient Rome regarded work as something incompatible with their social status. This negative attitude toward work was reflected in early Christianity, especially in the emerging monastic movement. For Eusebius of Caesarea, the perfect Christian life was one devoted to serving God, untainted by physical labor. Those who chose to work for a living were second-rate Christians. To live and work in the world was to forfeit a first-rate Christian calling, with all that this implied. Work was often seen as a debasing and demeaning activity. Such attitudes probably reached the height of their influence during the Middle Ages.

The monastic spirituality of the medieval period generally regarded work as degrading. This widespread stigma against manual labor was pervasive, but not universal. Benedictine spirituality, for instance, created a genuine spiritual place for work within the monastic life.⁵⁵ Yet the more widespread medieval attitude was that found in Chaucer’s Pardoner, who boasts that he will not stoop so low as to weave baskets with his own hands. As the Italian historian of culture Adriano Tilgher concluded in his definitive study of work in the Western world, monastic spirituality never regarded everyday work in the world as anything of value.⁵⁶ Those who chose to live and work in the world were, at best, “regarded with indulgent charity.” Those who committed themselves—either by choice or through lack of serious alternatives—to living and working in the everyday world were regarded as inferior, devoid of any “calling.” The Latin term vocation was understood to mean a call to the monastic life that involved leaving the world behind.

From the outset, Protestantism rejected the critical medieval distinction between the “sacred” and “secular” orders. While this position can easily be interpreted as a claim for the desacralization of the sacred, it can equally well be understood as a claim for the sacralization of the secular. As early as 1520, Luther had laid the fundamental conceptual foundations for created sacred space within the secular. His doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” asserted that there is no genuine difference of status between the “spiritual” and the “temporal” order. All Christians are called to be priests—and can exercise that calling within the everyday world. The idea of “calling” was fundamentally redefined: no longer was it about being called to serve God by leaving the world; it was now about serving God in the world.⁵⁷

God calls his people, not just to faith, but to express that faith in quite definite areas of life. This idea of a “double calling” played a particularly important role in the thought of William Perkins, who insisted that one is called, in the first place, to be a Christian, and in the second, to live out that faith in a certain sphere of activity in the world.⁵⁸ Luther stated this point succinctly when commenting on Genesis 3:19: “What seem to be secular works are actually the praise of God and represent an obedience which is well pleasing to him.” There were no limits to this notion of calling. Luther even extolled the religious value of housework, declaring that although “it had no obvious appearance of holiness, yet these very household chores are more to be valued than all the works of monks and nuns.” Luther’s English follower William Tyndale commented that while the “washing of dishes and preaching the word of God” clearly represented different human activities, he insisted that, “as touching to please God,” there was no essential difference.

The historical transformation of the status of work through this ethic is quite remarkable. In his magisterial study of the status of work from Aristotle to Calvin, Vittorio Tranquilli showed how Calvin’s theology led directly from a view of work as a socially demeaning, if pragmatically necessary, activity, best left to one’s social inferiors, to a dignified and glorious means of praising and affirming God in and through his creation while adding further to its well-being.⁵⁹ It is no accident that those regions of Europe that adopted Protestantism soon found themselves prospering economically—a spin-off rather than an intended and premeditated consequence of the new religious importance attached to work.

The Protestant work ethic is nowadays often described in terms of an “ethic of self-reliance”; in this view, work is a thing that is good in itself. The concept of “vocation” or “calling” has been desacralized and now refers to whatever it is that an individual wants to do with his or her life. Yet the post-Protestant secular variant of the work ethic is open to criticism, not least because it has been held to lead to the addictive patterns of behavior often referred to as “workaholism.” If work is seen as an end in itself, a distorted set of priorities ensues, with inevitable negative outcomes for social, family, and personal relationships.⁶⁰ It can be argued that this problem arose from later Puritanism, which often identified people’s God-given vocation with work, at the expense of their other involvements and responsibilities in society, family, and church.

Nevertheless, the original Protestant work ethic is itself in need of revision in the light of changing social structures and work patterns. In recent years, it has become clear that the notion of “a job for life” is no longer the only, or even the best, option. Both Luther and Calvin, it can be argued, linked people’s work to their existing station in life rather than to the particular gifts God gave them to use. They defined work, in other words, in terms of social function, not personal gifts.

This socially static concept of work or vocation was relatively unproblematic for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it has now become significantly deficient. One response has been a reworking of the Protestant work ethic to emphasize the importance of individual gifts and their potential actualization in many spheres of life.⁶¹ Individuals may thus engage in a variety of “works” throughout their lifetimes, seeing their God-given calling as capable of transfer to different contexts.

The Protestant work ethic finds its application in many contexts in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the most obvious is the phenomenon of “faith-based activism”: religious groups using their faith both as a platform and a guiding principle for social engagement and voluntary work.⁶² Although this is no longer a distinctively Protestant phenomenon, the history of its development makes clear its strong, intentional connections with mainline Protestantism, especially in the United States. Protestant activism, expressed in the Protestant work ethic, is clearly a resource that is likely to play a more significant role in the future if government funding for social welfare programs is reduced.

PROTESTANTISM AND EDUCATION

As it began to gain influence in western Europe, Protestantism discovered the importance of education. Populations had to be persuaded of the folly of their older religious ways and beliefs and assisted in gaining a firm grasp of the principles of the new form of Christianity that was gaining influence and momentum. The development of the educational form of the “catechism” was an important response to this need: congregations could be encouraged to learn these by heart. Luther’s Catechisms of 1529 proved particularly effective and established the question-and-answer format as normative. Yet more was clearly required. Luther recognized the potential importance of the public school system for educating children in the ways and ideas of Protestantism, yet lacked the professional expertise necessary to exploit this resource.⁶³

As time passed and Protestantism became more securely established, the home began to emerge as the primary focus of intergenerational transmission of faith.⁶⁴ Family Bible reading and prayer became an important daily routine, cementing the family’s unity as much as its religious devotion.⁶⁵ The late eighteenth century saw the emergence of the family Bible with notes, which was an important source of religious education within the family, not to mention a significant influence on the shaping of social attitudes in relation to issues of gender.⁶⁶

The rise of the Sunday school in the late eighteenth century proved to be a significant means of consolidating Protestant influence. This was initially seen as a means of providing suitable occupation for the urban poor, who would otherwise merely cause trouble. However, Sunday schools quickly developed into an important agency of Protestant education in the cities of the United States. There students were encouraged to memorize verses of the Bible, an exercise seen as fundamental to a religious upbringing.⁶⁷ By 1820 there are known to have been several hundred Sunday schools in the United States. All gave priority to religious instruction over reading and writing, although most taught the latter subjects as a means of inculcating the former. Many schools used a “ticket reward” system: students were given a blue ticket for every ten verses they memorized, traded six blue tickets for one red, and eventually cashed in the red tickets at a value of one-half cent each toward purchasing Sunday school books or tracts. Some expressed anxieties over this mercenary aspect of the educational process; others relished the fact that it seemed to work so well.

Yet the most significant way in which Protestantism shaped education was through the founding of colleges, seminaries, and universities. Recognizing the importance of well-educated pastors and other church leaders, Protestantism saw investment in education as essential to its survival. Calvin realized the need for such facilities in 1541; owing to political disagreements in Geneva, however, it was not until 1559 that the Geneva Academy was inaugurated, with Theodore Beza as its first rector.⁶⁸

Yet the new academy was soon upstaged. As Calvinism became an international movement, an increasing number of universities became favorably disposed toward the new religion. Leiden and Heidelberg rapidly gained an international reputation, eclipsing Calvin’s personal foundation. These new seats of learning were supplemented by the new Calvinist academies located strategically at German cities such as Her-born in Hanau, and especially those founded in France after the Edict of Nantes—Montauban, Saumur, and Sedan.

The founding of what became known as Harvard College in 1636 established the intellectual hegemony of Calvinism in New England. Following the founding of Harvard would be the establishment of a series of colleges and seminaries dedicated to the propagation of the Protestant faith in church and society. From its outset, Harvard saw itself as dedicated to the goal of a Protestant education. As the Statutes of 1646 put it, the chief object of its education would be “to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.” This goal was admirably summarized in the college’s motto of 1692: Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae (“Truth for Christ and the Church”). Other schools followed this trend, usually emphasizing denominational distinctions alongside a general desire to deepen personal faith and piety.

It was a powerful, yet ultimately vulnerable, vision. The American Revolution caused significant modifications to the founding ideals of many such institutions on account of the constitutional separation of church and state.⁶⁹ Yet the real issues began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, and especially in the twentieth, when colleges with Protestant religious foundations began to wonder whether they were prisoners of their past. Was their Protestant commitment deterring potential applicants? Might these be barriers to funding? A slow, complex, and seemingly irreversible process of secularization began as colleges across the United States chose to marginalize their religious heritages.⁷⁰ In a deeply symbolic move, Harvard changed its motto to the single word Veritas. Most colleges and universities that began with specific Protestant faith commitments have now given up on these.⁷¹

This phenomenon of institutional drift in American Protestant educational institutions has taken place at three different, though clearly interconnected, levels.

While all institutions of education founded on a specifically religious basis face similar challenges, it seems that Protestantism has been particularly vulnerable to an erosion of vision and loss of focus. One possible explanation lies in the influence of Pietism within Protestant institutions. The traditional Pietist emphasis on a “religion of the heart” easily leads to a neglect of theology and a disregard for the church. This expresses itself in religious anti-intellectualism, which has little time for the intellectual content of faith and makes little attempt to correlate it with other academic disciplines. The outcome has been a religious disengagement with learning. Faith was a matter of the heart, not the mind. The outcome was predictable: apart from an emphasis on nourishing personal devotion to Christ, educational programs at such institutions became indistinguishable from those offered at secular institutions. The Pietist element came to be regarded as academically risible by academics in such institutions and often fell into disrepute.

Faced with this phenomenon of institutional drift, Protestants have sought to find ways of either enforcing the religious identity of their institutions or making this a selling point. The former approach generally involves a “statement of faith,” which all trustees and faculty members are required to sign as a condition of service. These statements are seen as safeguarding the institution’s core identity from erosion or redirection. Although these are generally quite broad—often affirming little more than what C. S. Lewis would term “mere Christianity,” though sometimes with specific denominational emphases or issues—they have occasionally been the source of tension within institutions, particularly if long-standing faculty members change their religious views—for example, through converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

With the resurgence of interest in religion in North America since about 1980, this latter option has become entirely realistic. The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) was founded in 1976 with the objective of advancing “the cause of Christ-centered higher education” and “faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical truth.” The Council offers support to the presidents and faculties of its member institutions in order that they might retain their distinct identities and agendas and engage positively with the increasingly competitive higher education market.⁷³

Yet Protestantism has continued to expand its educational vision, especially in North America. Fuller Theological Seminary, now one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of theological education, was founded in Pasadena, California, in 1947 by evangelicals who were anxious to establish evangelicalism’s intellectual credentials in the wake of the damaging fundamentalist controversies of the previous decades.⁷⁴ Regent College in Vancouver opened its doors in 1970 and is now Canada’s largest institute of theological education, with a significant global reach. Both schools are interdenominational and evangelical. The age of Protestant commitment to education is far from over; indeed, it seems to be entering a new phase.

The rapid expansion of Protestantism in Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the twentieth century has led to some remarkable new educational developments. Korea now has some of the largest Protestant seminaries and universities in the world, reflecting both that nation’s valuing of learning and the remarkable advances of Protestantism there since 1900.

PROTESTANTISM AND WOMEN

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to rediscover the role played by women in the religious and social life of the later Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.⁷⁵ There is a clear consensus that the agendas and interests of earlier (largely, it must be admitted, male) historians of these movements may have minimized the significance of these writers, whether unconsciously or deliberately. The retrieval of such forgotten or repressed histories has renewed interest in the new possibilities created for women by the new religious movements of the age.

The emergence of Protestantism was of considerable significance for women, even if the actualization of the promise of the movement proved rather more problematic than some had hoped. Above all, Luther’s doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” affirmed that all Christians—whether male or female—possessed the status of priests within the corporate priesthood of the people of God. If pursued consistently, this line of thought led inexorably to women being able to exercise the same ministerial functions as men.

Yet Luther was conservative in both his theology and his practice and appears to have been reluctant to follow through his radical affirmation to its ecclesiological conclusions. Indeed, Protestantism did not even allow women the subsidiary clerical roles that nuns had earlier performed. While Calvin held that the Pauline admonition that women should be silent in church is a matter of time-bound apostolic advice rather than divine law for all time, there is little evidence that he believed the time was right to make changes there and then. Nevertheless, it is clear that he was open to such major changes in the future.⁷⁶

Others were more radical—or, as they would see it, more consistent. On February 1, 1532, the Parisian faculty of theology issued its condemnation of a series of subversive doctrines propounded by the Protestant Étienne Le Court, including his radical suggestion that, “now that God has willed that the Bible should be in French, women will take over the office of bishops, and bishops the office of women. Women will preach the gospel, while bishops will gossip with young girls.”⁷⁷

The problem of this failure was accentuated by Protestantism’s removal of one (and occasionally both) of the two realms in which women were able to exercise genuine leadership and authority during the medieval period—the monarchy and the convent.⁷⁸ The early Protestant critique of the monastic life, though not always totally negative, regarded it as isolating Christians from the world. The closure of the convents denied to women the leadership roles evident in Catholic women writers such as Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena, both of whom were declared to be “doctors of the church” in 1970.

Early Protestantism downplayed the spiritual roles of women in other, more subtle ways. The Protestant rejection of the “cult of the saints” eliminated a series of role models known to have been important to women during the Middle Ages—such as Saint Anne, mother of Mary and the patron saint of pregnant women. Religious processions and other rituals that gave women clear functions of their own were now discontinued, as were female religious confraternities.⁷⁹

In part, such losses were remedied through the early Protestant relocation of the concept of calling for women within the family. One of the most significant consequences of the Protestant rejection of the idea of clerical celibacy—which was in any case widely flouted—was a new emphasis on the importance of marriage as a covenant relationship. The deliberate decisions of Martin Luther and Martin Bucer to marry former nuns was a clear statement of the transference of vocation from the convent to the home. The family was to be the new unit of religious calling and nurture.⁸⁰

Protestantism is often held to be responsible for the emergence of the characteristic Western notion of the “nuclear family.” In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, individuals belonged to multiple families, including confraternities, guilds, corporations, and religious orders. The “family” was a diffuse and extended notion involving multiple loyalties and associations, and it included the dead as well as the living. Although there was no Protestant “theology of the family,” a number of theological and social factors that were clearly of Protestant provenance—such as a disinclination to pray for the dead and the abolition of confraternities—led to the family becoming an increasingly important social unit. The family was now understood to be defined by biological and physical proximity—that is, a group of people closely related by blood and living in the same place.⁸¹

This new respect for the family and motherhood marked a significant break with the existing consensus. Medieval Catholicism tended to laud the virtues of celibacy and virginity and regarded the decision of those who chose to marry and bear children as an unfortunate consequence of original sin. The need to procreate and have legitimate heirs was, of course, entirely understandable, not least for monarchs. Yet it was seen as an unfortunate necessity, a means of taming physical lust rather than the fruit of Christian piety. While this public praise of celibacy was often accompanied by clandestine affairs, little attention was paid to those who chose to marry and bear children. By doing so, they had lost their spiritual credibility and degenerated to the spiritually debased category of the ordinary.

It is easy to point to Protestant works emphasizing the importance of women in the family and arguing for an enhanced valuation of their role. Johann Steinbach, in his Household of Women (1561), argued that women should play a much greater role in the running of households. Johann Freder’s Dialogue in Honor of Marriage (1543) advocated greater parity between the genders on the grounds that women had the same noble and rational souls as men.⁸² Yet other forces were at work that would ultimately subvert these developments.⁸³ In the end, sixteenth-century Protestantism altered the perception of women without necessarily effecting the transvaluation and transformation of social roles that this would have seemed to entail.

Individual Protestant women achieved significant prominence in the following centuries. Anne Bradstreet (1612–72) played an important role in the spiritual affairs of Puritan New England, not least through her religious poetry. Phoebe Palmer (1807–74) was at the center of Methodist holiness revivalism in the United States, especially during the 1850s. The Anglican Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–95) penned some of the classic hymns of the English language, including There Is a Green Hill, Once in Royal David’s City, and All Things Bright and Beautiful. Her American counterpart Fanny J. Cosby (1820–1915) wrote Blessed Assurance and To God Be the Glory.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others produced The Women’s Bible (1895), which set out to use the Bible itself to liberate women from the straitjacket that had been placed around them by institutionalized Protestantism. “Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’…[With] this declaration of the equality of the sexes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman occupies in the Christian Church of today.” Cady’s well-turned phrases and careful arguments did much to raise concern about Protestantism’s traditional attitudes toward women.

In the end, the radical changes in Protestant attitudes toward women in the twentieth century must be judged to be primarily the result of the greater acceptance of women’s roles in society as a whole, rather than the outcomes of a theologically driven agenda. In this case, theology showed an intriguing tendency to follow public opinion, not to shape it. Women received the right to vote in many Western nations—including Great Britain and the United States—after the end of the First World War in 1918. Yet it was not until the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, that Protestantism as a whole began to explore the place of women in ordained ministry with any great seriousness.

Since then, those denominations ordaining women to full leadership positions have seen their numbers mushroom. In the United States between 1977 and 1997, the number of ordained women in the Baptist churches increased from 157 to 712; in the Episcopal church from 94 to 1,394; and in the United Methodist church from 319 to 3,003. In June 2006, the General Convention of the American Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada as its new presiding bishop. By 2005 more than 50 percent of the students in American Protestant seminaries were women. In the Church of England, which voted to ordain women as priests in 1992, the number of women being ordained is now equal to that of men and is expected to surpass that number in the future. This has alarmed traditionalists, who see this change as the “feminization” of the priesthood. Others suggest that it is the inevitable and welcome outcome of the fundamental doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers.”

From the material presented in this chapter thus far, it will be clear that the relationship between Protestantism and its social context cannot be defined in terms of some “universal Protestantism” shaping its social context in an ideologically controlled or predetermined manner. The relationship was mutual, in that social factors shaped Protestantism as much as Protestantism molded its context. The significant differences in styles of Protestantism, when linked with the substantial cultural and political variations between nations and regions, led to a multiplicity of interactions.

Yet in the twentieth century, Protestantism expanded far beyond its original homelands in the West, taking root in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This has generated new concerns and debates, as will become clear from what follows.

BEYOND THE WEST: NEW CULTURAL CONCERNS

In the past, discussions about Protestantism and culture have been shaped by Western concerns—precisely because of the widely held assumption that Protestantism is a Western religion, located in Western culture. The twentieth century has challenged both assumptions, not only through the emergence of Protestantism outside the West but also—and perhaps more significantly—through the transformation of Protestantism in those other regions as its foundational legacy of theological and cultural recalibration is carried out there. To put it bluntly, Protestantism is no longer a “Western” religion.

In the twentieth century, Protestantism found itself caught up in the “clash of civilizations.”⁸⁴ Thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that there was a moral and intellectual system common to all peoples and that its universal extension to all was simply a matter of time. Its ideas and values were already embodied in the West; globalization—which was simply the extension of Western values to the world at large—would lead to the universal triumph of those ideas and values in due course.

This is no longer believed to be the case. Political and cultural resistance to the West has grown significantly in recent years, and Islamic and Asian nations have reasserted their value systems. Thus, Western human rights policies have been seen as “power politics in disguise”—an instrument for the covert advancement of Western political and economic interests.⁸⁵ The impact of the reassertion of traditional Asian, African, and Islamic values in the many regions of the world where Protestantism is a growing presence is significant.

Demonstrating this impact is the issue of the ordination of homosexuals, which has been the subject of debate within many Protestant denominations since 1990. The issue has proved especially divisive within Anglicanism. In the United States, the Episcopal church has seen itself as spearheading a progressive agenda that embodies the best of American liberal values. The ordination of homosexuals has been seen there as tantamount to a human rights issue. Although the debate has proved divisive within the Episcopal church, it is strongly in line with the American liberal ethos that the Episcopal church has come to represent since the 1960s.

Yet Anglicanism is now a form of Protestantism that is predominantly located in the developing world. There are more Anglicans in the west African state of Nigeria than in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand put together. Nigerian Anglicans see no need whatsoever to endorse what they see as the intrusion of liberal American cultural values into the church. Within the Nigerian cultural context, in which Islam is a major presence, homosexuality is regarded as a cultural abomination.

Paradoxically, an approach that affirms that Protestantism should reflect the cultural norms of its environment thus leads to totally different outcomes in New England and in Nigeria. The tensions over this issue are now so great that it is difficult to see how these two churches can remain in the same denomination. The only realistic outcome is for Anglicanism to follow the trend already established by Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists and recognize a “denominational family,” with tensions and fissures over significant issues.

The ordination of homosexuals, however, is only one issue among many to confront Protestantism in its new phase of development. Demands for the “de-Westernization” of Protestantism are growing, both as the strength of the movement in the developing world increases and as the spiritual and theological robustness of the Western churches seems to decline in comparison with the rest of the world. A new agenda is developing, and it can only lead to the transformation of Protestantism. Global Protestantism is leaving the traditional agenda of the West behind as it reflects on its engagement with Islam, its relationship to traditional Chinese religion and customs (such as “grave-sweeping”), its attitudes toward indigenous tribal practices in the Amazonian rain forests, and the use of Taoist or Hindu ideas as points of contact for the proclamation of the gospel.

What the discerning observer notices is the emergence of local Protestantisms that seek to interpret and apply the Bible within their own cultural contexts, without feeling any pressing need to introduce Western assumptions, ideas, or values into their reflections.⁸⁶ In many ways, this represents a return to the first days of Protestantism, when Luther and Zwingli faced the challenge of trying to apply their vision of the gospel to the very different situations in Wittenberg and Zurich. Their twenty-first-century descendants are trying to do exactly the same thing, yet in contexts that Luther and Zwingli could not have imagined.

Protestantism, as we have stressed throughout this book, is above all a method rather than a fixed set of outcomes, and it is capable of rapid and extensive adaptation to new situations without loss of its original core vision. Its detachment from Western culture appears to have led to its growth and the development of new forms that often bear a remarkable resemblance to what we know of the church in the first three centuries of its existence. Might the development of Protestantism in these new contexts, set free from its cultural imprisonment in the West, let us see it as if for the very first time?

Thus far, we have considered how Protestantism relates to culture in the most general sense of that word. But what of its relationship to culture in T. S. Eliot’s subtly developed sense of the word? Or in Matthew Arnold’s sense of the term, summed up in his famous definition of culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world”? What of more recent extensions of this theme that hold that culture is defined and manifested, more broadly, in terms of the embodiment of its values in sport? In the following chapter, we consider the ambivalence of Protestantism’s involvement in the development of the arts, sports, and natural sciences.

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