The Changing Shape of American Protestantism
As the twentieth century dawned, it seemed to many American Protestants that something troubling was happening to their nation. Its Protestant foundations seemed threatened by erosion in some quarters; in others they were regarded as insignificant. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the exchange by the American academy and body politic of one orthodoxy for another was well under way. This process would culminate by the late twentieth century in the predominance of a strictly secular understanding of human existence, a commanding status that earlier had been granted to forms of mainline Protestant orthodoxy. The situation was made worse by German biblical criticism, whose growing impact on Protestant seminaries seemed to be eroding traditional attitudes toward the authority of sacred text. Things seemed to be going wrong for Protestantism. So what would happen next?
FUNDAMENTALISM: WITHDRAWAL FROM THE MAINSTREAM
What should be done? One answer was given in a series of pamphlets published during the years 1910 to 1915 entitled “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.” These essays, drawn from a range of conservative Protestant writers, set out a classic statement of Protestant teachings from a generally Reformed perspective. By an accident of history, they gave birth to the term “fundamentalism,” which was first used in 1920 by the journalist Curtis Lee Laws to designate those who were ready “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals.”
Since then, fundamentalism has regularly been presented as an unthinking, uncritical, highly dogmatic form of Protestantism. While there is some truth in this generalization, it fails to penetrate to the heart of the matter. The essence of all forms of religious fundamentalism is an oppositionalist mentality arising in response to a major threat.1 To treat fundamentalism simply as conservative religion confuses the characteristic and the distinctive. As Martin Marty has written, “Fundamentalism in any context takes form when members of already conservative or traditional movements experience threat.” In this case, the threat did not come from Catholicism, as in the past, but from secularizing forces within American society at large.
Protestant fundamentalism is thus best seen as a specific reaction to developments in the world of early twentieth-century America and is thus, in one sense of the word, thoroughly “modern.” It was from its outset, and has remained, a countercultural movement that uses central doctrinal affirmations as a means of defining cultural boundaries. Whereas most nineteenth-century forms of American evangelicalism were culturally centralist, committed to engaging with culture in order to transform it through the gospel, the fundamentalist reaction against modern secularism has entailed a separatist attitude toward culture. Certain central doctrines—most notably, the absolutely literal authority of scripture and the idea of the premillennial return of Christ—have been treated as barriers; they are intended as much to alienate secular culture as to give fundamentalists a sense of identity and purpose.
Controversies broke out within many American denominations over the issues raised by fundamentalism. The debate within Presbyterianism was particularly painful and divisive, and it seriously wounded the denomination.2
In 1922 a sermon by the Baptist preacher Henry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) originally entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was distributed throughout the United States under the new title “The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith.” Then serving at First Presbyterian Church in New York, Fosdick noted the emergence of conservative and liberal positions within the churches and pleaded for inclusiveness and mutual respect for each position. A fundamentalist riposte soon followed from across the Hudson River—Clarence Edward Macartney’s tract “Shall Unbelief Win?” The situation rapidly polarized, and oppositionalist mentalities on both sides of the debate framed the issue in black-and-white terms: Presbyterians were forced to decide whether they were “unbelieving liberals” or “reactionary fundamentalists.”
Yet the situation was far more complex than these simple characterizations suggest. It is often forgotten, for example, that in 1935 Fosdick himself shocked his progressive colleagues with a sermon entitled “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism.” Drawing on the emerging neo-orthodox theologies of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, he criticized liberalism’s habit of changing beliefs to accommodate culture, softening the reality of God, and downplaying the themes of personal and social sin. Although Fosdick disliked fundamentalism’s rigidity, dogmatism, and aggressiveness, he did not consider all of its ideas mistaken. Fosdick was a voice in the wilderness at this point, however, drowned out by the clamor of battle.
Positions were clarified, crystallized, and then petrified. Fundamentalists came to believe that the best way of fighting the “culture wars” that emerged in many denominations in the 1920s and 1930s was to disengage, leave their—as they saw it—liberalized and secularized denominations behind, and found new, pure denominations. By the 1930s, when it became painfully clear that reform from within could not prevent the spread of modernism in the major northern denominations, more and more fundamentalists began to declare that separation from America’s major denominations was an article of faith.3 It was a strategy that failed. Why?
Two main problems emerged. First, an oppositionalist mentality, once acquired, proves to be extremely difficult to shake off. Having broken away from traditional denominations over points of doctrine, fundamentalists now continued those debates with equally great ferocity in the supposedly pure denominations that had just been formed by their secession. Having got so used to fighting their opponents, they now started fighting each other. This pervasive infighting simply weakened the movement and prevented it from even beginning to achieve its goals.
One example concerns the great critic of Presbyterian liberalism of this era, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937).4 Convinced that the official Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions failed to do justice to the uniqueness of Christianity, Machen formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933. Those who joined him in this venture shared his opinion. As time went on, however, it became painfully clear that they had little else in common. Divisions over other issues, such as a simmering controversy between strict Calvinists and dispensationalists, soon emerged. Machen was ousted as the president of the board in 1936; worn out by the arguments and dissent within a supposedly “doctrinally pure” body, he died a few months later, in January 1937. By that time, the board had virtually ceased to exist in anything but name. It had simply imploded as a result of controversy and tensions.
The second problem was that fundamentalism’s decision to break away from mainline denominations and isolate itself from a tainted, fallen culture simply put it in the position of having no influence over either church or society. It was powerless to oppose the changes it so detested in both the churches and society at large. As time passed, it became clear that fundamentalism had committed a fundamental strategic error by disconnecting itself from any positions of power or influence. Conservative Protestantism seemed to have painted itself into a corner by accomplishing what its opponents had expected to happen only after major battles—its own total marginalization. The enormity of the error soon became apparent. It was only a matter of time before another strategy would emerge.
NEO? EVANGELICALISM: REENGAGEMENT WITH THE MAINSTREAM
The battles of the Second World War diverted American Protestantism from its internal feuds and set them in a not altogether unhelpful context. Once the war was over, new voices began to emerge within conservative Protestantism, urging fundamental changes of direction. The emergence of evangelicalism as a distinctive Protestant position dates to 1942 and the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals, with its principled attempt to distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism.5 In contrast to the dogmatic fundamentalist insistence on separation from modern culture, the “new evangelicals”—led by E. J. Carnell, Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Billy Graham—were committed to a positive engagement with culture in an attempt to transform it through the gospel.
Billy Graham is probably the best-known representative of this new movement on account of his worldwide evangelistic ministry, which began in the late 1940s. Graham came to regard traditional fundamentalist “oppositionalism” as a barrier to the preaching of the gospel. In 1956 the popular fundamentalist magazine Christian Life published an article entitled “Is Evangelical Theology Changing?” It argued that the fundamentalist old guard was committed to the slogan “earnestly contend for the faith,” whereas the new generation preferred “you must be born again.” A heated controversy resulted.
Three months later, the same journal published an interview with Billy Graham in which he declared that he was “sick and fed up” with such controversies and just wanted to get on with preaching the gospel. For Graham, fundamentalism led to interminable, sterile theological conflicts at a time when there was important evangelistic work to be done. The growing alienation of Graham from fundamentalism was publicly demonstrated when he accepted an invitation in 1955 to hold a crusade in New York City. The invitation came from a coalition of Christian churches, many of which were not in any way fundamentalist. By the time the crusade opened to massive publicity in the spring of 1957, fundamentalism seemed to be consigned to the past.6 Although Graham was unquestionably a conservative Protestant, that did not make him a fundamentalist.
Carl Henry (1913–2003) illustrates the character of the new movement particularly well, especially its attitude toward culture at large. In his Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947)—the “manifesto of neo-evangelicalism” (Dirk Jellema)—Henry argued that fundamentalism presented and proclaimed an impoverished and reduced gospel that was radically defective in its social vision. Fundamentalism, he suggested, was too otherworldly and anti-intellectual to gain a hearing with the educated public. It showed no interest in exploring the relationship between Christianity and culture and social life.
Yet Jean Monnet’s admonition now came into play: without institutions, nothing survives. The new movement required institutions—in this case, both a seminary and a journal—to consolidate its influence. The founding in 1947 of Fuller Theological Seminary, which quickly (and controversially) aligned itself with the “new” evangelicalism rather than fundamentalism, ensured its institutional survival.7 Henry’s experience as a journalist led to an invitation from Billy Graham and L. Nelson Bell to edit a new journal then being launched. As editor-in-chief of Christianity Today from 1956 until 1968, Henry did much to establish the profile, concerns, and credibility of the “new evangelicalism.”
The success and possible downside of the forms of cultural engagement advocated by evangelicalism can be seen in the ministry of Billy Graham.8 Although Graham’s relationship with President Harry Truman was tentative and uncertain, he succeeded in building a good working relationship with President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower. His relationship with John F. Kennedy was ambivalent, but he consolidated his emerging role as unofficial pastor and spiritual adviser to the White House with Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, and he would retain that role until the end of the Clinton administration. Graham thus enjoyed a privileged relationship with nine presidents over a period of nearly fifty years, virtually becoming a chaplain to the presidency.
Yet this high degree of political acceptance was not without its costs. Graham felt that he could not openly criticize those whom he served in this way, and as a result he failed to carry out the prophetic ministry many believed he was uniquely placed to exercise. He offered support for the Vietnam War effort under Johnson and was surprisingly un-forthcoming over the moral failures of several presidencies—most notably the Watergate scandal that engulfed Nixon and the sexual intrigues of the Clinton presidency. To its critics, the increasing social acceptability of evangelicalism was the reverse side of evangelicalism’s increasing acceptance of wider cultural norms: through such acceptance, it had lost its moral cutting edge.9
One clear area of divergence between fundamentalism and evangelicalism concerned social action. The impact of earlier revivals had led to new interest in engaging with society. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become assumed that those who had experienced some spiritual renewal should straightway take part in the various efforts to help the less fortunate in the community. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalism turned its back on any attempt at social outreach. For reasons that are not entirely persuasive and rest more on imagined associations than on demonstrable convergences, many influential fundamentalists saw efforts to help the poor as betraying a commitment to liberal theology. After all, were not the proponents of the “social gospel” during the modernist controversy of the 1920s theological liberals?10 Until recently, fundamentalists tended to see Christian social action as limited purely to struggles for religious freedom and against abortion. For evangelicals, in contrast, the gospel clearly calls Christians to fight racism, sexism, and poverty as well.
Other changes and realignments taking place around this time were further altering the nature of Protestantism. Once more, those changes centered on Protestantism’s relationship to culture.
A NEW REFORMATION? REVISIONIST PROTESTANTISM, 1960? 1990
During the 1960s, Western society underwent a series of convulsions that called the settled assumptions of the past into question with unprecedented vigor. It was as if there was an unrelenting impatience with the ways of the past, a sense of dissatisfaction with existing ideas and values, and a strong belief that a new beginning lay just around the corner. The cultural mood of the period is caught well by Tom Wolfe in his essay “The Great Relearning.”11 It was all about sweeping everything aside and starting all over again, “following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero.” Perhaps a clean sweep appealed more to the imagination than to the reason—but it certainly captured the mood of the moment.
Protestantism could not help but be caught up in this “great relearning.” Its fundamental mandate was, after all, to reexamine itself constantly, asking whether its present institutional forms and distinctive beliefs represented the most authentic and reliable interpretations of the Bible. Yet during this period a growing number of Protestant intellectuals began to ask even more radical and dangerous questions—such as whether the Bible could be taken seriously in modern culture.
Demands for a “new Reformation” gathered momentum. The “old Reformation,” it was argued, was based on the Bible; what was now needed was something more radical than had ever been proposed before. Writers such as John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal bishop of Newark, declared that this new Reformation would abandon obsolete ideas—such as a transcendent God, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and a reliable revelation of God in the Bible. Although these revisionist ideas had been around since the early Enlightenment, they had tended to exercise influence primarily within radical groupings outside the church. In the late twentieth century, however, they became an integral part of the agenda of revisionist Protestantism.
So if the Bible was not to be trusted, what was? By the late 1960s, the Enlightenment suggestion that reason could be trusted where the Bible could not was being abandoned as unworkable. Other alternatives were therefore proposed. Those who were perhaps the most influential argued that Protestantism should take its leads from the ideas and values of Western culture. The intellectual origins of this trend could be traced back to the great liberal Protestant writers of the nineteenth century, such as A. B. Ritschl (1822–89). Yet it was a risky strategy. As William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) once quipped, whoever married the spirit of the age today would be widowed tomorrow. Cultural change erodes culturally based theologies. And in the 1960s, Western culture went into convulsion.
The outcome was a series of suggestions that now seem a little extravagant, perhaps even mildly hysterical. The best known of these was the “death of God” movement, which made the front cover of Time magazine on April 8, 1966. The funereal black cover was emblazoned with three words: “Is God dead?” Books with titles such as Paul van Buren’s Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963) and Thomas J. J. Altizer’s Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) cornered headlines in a puzzled yet fascinated secular press. Altizer’s legendary inability to express himself clearly just puzzled them more.
A much more coherent statement of this agenda was set out when Harvey Cox—newly arrived at Harvard Divinity School—published his book The Secular City (1965). The book, which became a best-seller, took its stand on a series of incontrovertible core beliefs. “Secularization rolls on, and if we are to understand and communicate with our present age we must learn to love it in its unremitting secularity. We must learn, as Bonhoeffer said, to speak of God in a secular fashion and find a non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts.” Secularism was here to stay; God was dead; Christianity would have to accommodate itself to modern thought and values; religion was about humanity, not God. “As Bonhoeffer says, in Jesus God is teaching man to get along without Him, to become mature, free from infantile dependencies, fully human.” The book proved to be a landmark in the “secular Christianity” movement.
Similar ideas were expressed by the English bishop John Robinson in Honest to God (1963), which questioned whether the notion of a transcendent God could be taken seriously by “modern man.” John Shelby Spong developed these ideas in the 1990s, extending Robinson’s critique to many additional elements of Protestant beliefs.12 Catholicism, which was undergoing its own internal convulsions at that time as a result of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), was not affected by these social trends to anything like the same extent.
Many of the more radical religious writings of the 1960s proposed agendas based on the assumption that the prevailing cultural trends represented permanent changes in Western culture. That was a hasty and incorrect judgment. With the benefit of hindsight, this fascinating, turbulent period witnessed what was no more than a temporary change of cultural mood, but some were unwise enough to treat it as a fixed and lasting change in the condition of humanity. John Robinson’s Honest to God ultimately represents a modernist take on traditional Christianity.13 So what happens when modernism gives way to postmodernism, which rejects or inverts most of modernism’s fundamental ideas? A generation later, Robinson’s work feels like an exhibit in a museum of historical theology—a fascinating account of the cultural mood of a bygone era and the failed strategy to respond to it.
Others, taking their lead from postmodernity, argue that Protestantism must revise its ideas to accommodate the cultural insight that nothing can be known for certain and no reliable closure can ever be secured. The English theologian Don Cupitt illustrates this trend well, particularly in his assertion, “We alone improvise our knowledge about everything—including even ourselves.” In The Time Being (1992), Cupitt insists that the “world of signs” is endlessly transient, making it impossible to reach firm and permanent conclusions.14
These strongly revisionist approaches are part of the inevitable free market of ideas that shape Protestant identity. Protestantism is not a static entity, but a living entity whose identity mutates over time. Yet that mutation leads to a variety of outcomes—among which some flourish and others wither. While such revisionist approaches have found some support within sections of Protestantism in the West—especially the left wing of American culture—they have not attained the wide acceptance found by other new developments, such as Pentecostalism, which addresses the postmodern context on a very different intellectual basis and using a hermeneutical method.
Most commentators on recent American cultural history take the view that God, declared somewhat prematurely dead in 1966, underwent an intellectual and political resurrection in the following decades.15 As the president of America’s Skeptics’ Society, Michael Shermer, commented recently, never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the American population, believed in God.16 Not only is God not “dead,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prematurely proclaimed, but he never seems to have been more alive.
There is perhaps no more telling witness to this than the same Harvey Cox who published The Secular City in 1965. Some twenty years later, he followed this with Religion in the Secular City.17 Far from endorsing the views he expressed earlier, Cox argued that religion is—and would continue to be—a significant force in society. “With the passing of the modern age, the epoch of ‘modern theology’ which tried to interpret Christianity in the face of secularization is also over.” Cox pointed to the current vitality of Catholicism in Latin America and Protestant fundamentalism in the United States as signs that the long-predicted triumph of secularism was simply not going to happen.
Cox moved the goalposts still further in 1995 when he published Fire from Heaven.18 The central argument of this book represents a near-total inversion of Cox’s judgments of 1965. The twenty-first century, he asserts, will belong to Pentecostalism, not secularism. Pentecostalism is “a spiritual hurricane that has already touched nearly half a billion people, and an alternative vision of the human future whose impact may only be in its earliest stages today.” And what is the secret of its success? Cox is clear: it lies in its fundamental conviction “that the Spirit of God needs no mediators but is available to anyone in an intense, immediate, indeed interior way.” The evidence suggests that Cox may well be right in this judgment, at least in the short term. We return to consider this new movement in the following chapter.
THE FUTURE OF THE PROTESTANT DENOMINATION
As we noted earlier, the Protestant denomination is essentially a European phenomenon that reflects the shifting patterns of church life and controversy in western Europe from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. Patterns of religious affiliation and belonging that derived from the general situation of western Europe—and often the very specific conditions of religious life in England—were thus exported to the United States as self-evidently correct forms of Christian association. As a result, the emerging church life of North America was significantly shaped by the historical contingencies of western Europe.
This transplantation of European religious ideas to America must not, however, be seen as an unthinking and wooden undertaking with no attempt at modification or indigenization. We have already noted that seventeenth-century Puritanism in the Massachusetts Bay area shifted from the predominantly presbyterian model of church polity that was the norm in many parts of England to a congregationalist model. The simplest explanation for this development is that this model was better adapted to the American context. Again, the emergence of the Southern Baptist Convention can be seen as reflecting the local credibility of the voluntary association or voluntary society and the realization of its ecclesiological potential. The fact remains, however, that in many if not all respects most American denominations retained a surprising degree of continuity with their European pasts.
In 1929 H. Richard Niebuhr published a study of the origin of modern American religious denominations.19 They were, he argued, a distinguishing mark of American religious life, and they were here to stay, in that they were rooted in historical differences of social class, wealth, national origin, and race. Denominational diversity was thus the by-product of wider social divisions. This approach has been criticized for placing too much causal weight on existing social differences in shaping denominational identity when it is known that other factors are significant in shaping both denominational rupture or schism, on the one hand, and merger, on the other.20 Nevertheless, the merits of Niebuhr’s argument were widely conceded.
Niebuhr’s analysis pointed to the continuing importance of denominationalism in the United States in that it was sustained by deeper social causes. To belong to a specific denomination was often to make a statement about one’s historical origins or social status rather than one’s theological beliefs. The predominance of Christianity in the United States seemed to ensure that Protestant denominations, while separate from the state, would form what was almost a cultural establishment in their own right. The future of the denominations seemed secure.
Even in the 1950s, the position of the Protestant denominations seemed secure. The membership figures of the five major Protestant denominations—Baptists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists—increased each year. Social surveys made it clear that each denominational family saw itself as self-contained and sovereign. A 1955 Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of the adult population attended a church of the same denomination their parents attended. In another poll the following year, 80 percent of Episcopalians seemed to believe that it was wrong to worship with other Christian groups. The old demarcations were still firmly embedded in the fabric of Protestantism. As Will Herberg pointed out in his classic study of the American religious establishment at that time, the denominational system had become part of the basic assumptions of Protestants about America, as it had become part of the basic assumptions of all Americans about themselves.21
Yet by the year 2000 it was clear that things had changed. In 2004 researchers Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago released a report, The Vanishing Protestant Majority, which showed that the number of Americans identifying themselves as “Protestant” fell from 63 percent in 1992 to 52 percent in 2002.22 The report pointed to a fundamental failure on the part of most Protestant denominations to evangelize and assimilate their own youth and young adults. It also observed that in recent years immigrant groups have not followed the older pattern of eventual identification with the nation’s Protestant majority.
The mainline Protestant denominations are still there, but now they coexist uneasily with a growing group of churches that are clearly Protestant in their outlook but are also of very recent origin and see no reason to regard themselves as defined by the past. The entrepreneurial spirit that is so characteristic of Protestantism seems to have been redirected to activities outside, rather than within, the traditional denominational structures.
A group of factors seems to be implicated in this erosion of specifically denominational understandings of Protestantism, although it is not always clear which is cause and which effect. Here we briefly consider four of those factors before moving on to consider two that have had a particularly significant impact on the shaping of American Protestantism since about 1970.
In the first place, most Americans no longer regard a denominational marque, or “badge,” as something that makes a significant statement about their historical origins or social identity. With the emergence of a consumerist mentality in American Protestant culture since about 1980, the driving issue is where to find the best preaching, the best Christian education, or even the best parking facilities. This mentality may lead a Protestant family to attend, say, a Baptist church in Florida, a Methodist church upon moving to California, and a Presbyterian church after finally settling in Chicago. The issue is not denominational identity but local pastoral excellence. In marked contrast, their grandparents would have sought out the local church of their own denomination wherever they went.
The second point follows on immediately from this. The emphasis upon the local facilities offered by individual churches leads Protestants to be more than willing to contribute financially and personally to church outreach and social welfare programs. Yet this often strong sense of belonging and commitment to the local congregation is rarely extended to the denomination as a whole, which is likely to be viewed as an inefficient and redundant bureaucracy that makes serious financial demands of local congregations while giving little in return. This perception is exacerbated where local congregations are in dispute with the mainline denomination over issues such as sexuality in ministry, and these conflicts often lead to local withholding of funds from the central structures. More seriously, even as the general decline in membership of many mainline denominations inevitably leads to reductions in financial support, the costs of maintaining denominational structures are rising. Many denominations are facing up to the fact that centralized downsizing and rationalization may be the only way ahead.
A third factor has to do with the rise of evangelicalism and the charismatic movement, which are both transdenominational in character.23
Both movements tend to prioritize fellowship and collaboration with other evangelicals and charismatics, irrespective of their denominational allegiance. Anglican evangelicals often feel more at home with Baptist evangelicals, despite the substantial differences between their denominations over matters of church structure and polity. This is seen in the rise of “para-church” organizations—such as Youth with a Mission or the InterVarsity Fellowship—which transcend denominational structures and divisions in order to pursue a cross-denominational agenda. This development has led to a slight blurring of denominational boundaries. Yet much more importantly, it has also led to the relativization of the denomination, which is often seen as a barrier to inter-Protestant or inter-Christian collaboration that must be transcended in the service of the gospel.
A fourth factor that has been identified as of significance by sociologists with a particular interest in Protestant denominations is the rise of “lay liberalism,” which erases the clear boundaries separating believers from unbelievers.24 Where evangelicalism emphasizes the distinctiveness of Christianity, this pragmatic, laid-back lay liberalism feels able to renegotiate Christian moral and theological principles in the light of prevailing social norms. This has led to an erosion of the boundary between “church” and “world”—but also between Protestant denominations. Without clear “faith boundaries,” identification with any particular form of Protestantism—indeed, even with Christianity itself—becomes socially meaningless.
These four significant factors suggest that traditional Protestant denominations may come under still further pressure in the future. It is far too early to speak responsibly of a “crisis” in mainline Protestantism. However, it is clear that forces are at work that will force redefinition and reconception of the traditional denomination. In addition to the four points just noted, we must examine two other, arguably more significant, factors that are essential to an understanding of the recent fortunes of American Protestantism—the rise of new ways of “being church” and the redefinition of “the other.” In view of their importance, we consider these in some detail.
NEW MODELS OF THE CHURCH
The limitations of the traditional denomination were being felt by some by the late 1950s.25 Some strongly entrepreneurial Protestants found themselves increasingly frustrated by the institutional inertia of denominational structures, which increasingly appeared to them to be unresponsive bureaucracies that were uninterested in local initiatives or innovations.
Such frustration, of course, is not new. The great Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, who played such an important role in the great fundamentalist controversies of the 1920s, once made the astonishing revelation that he had once considered leaving “the historic Christian organizations” in order to start his own “independent movement.”26
Fosdick was dismissive of those who demanded ecclesiastical loyalty, holding that his only loyalty was to Christ. Yet despite his frustrations, he never set up his own church, even though his personal reputation was such that its future would have been secure. After all, he was widely regarded as the greatest preacher of his age and was regularly introduced to clergy conferences as “Dr. Fosdick, whose sermons you will have read and preached.”
Yet deep in the heart of the Protestant understanding of God’s dealings with humanity lay precisely the idea that would give a new sense of direction to those who shared Fosdick’s frustrations but not his patience. Protestant understandings of the nature of the church locate its identity as a Christian body, not in its institutional history or connections, but in its fidelity in preaching and ministering the sacraments. So why not break free of such denominational control and establish congregations that were open to new ways of embodying Protestantism? They could preach and administer the sacraments just as well as before, but they would be free to develop new pastoral and evangelistic ministries.
These were dangerous thoughts as far as the mainline denominations were concerned. Yet the entrepreneurial individuals asking these questions could not be held back forever. Their sense of theological vision, coupled with a can-do mentality that was nourished and inspired by the Protestant work ethic, eventually drove them to achieve their goals outside the traditional denominations. Like Luther, they did not want to work outside their mother churches, but the needs and realities of the situation seemed to provide them with no alternatives. The outcome was a surge of new initiatives that met needs largely ignored by mainline denominations and set new patterns for how churches work, develop, and organize themselves.
The first wave of new developments took place in the 1960s. It was a time of ferment and demands for change. The strongly countercultural “Jesus movement” was widely seen as a protest against the social conservatism and institutional preoccupations of traditional Protestant worship that had led many to conclude that change was needed. Several major new Protestant movements trace their roots back to this time, including Calvary Chapel.
Calvary Chapel began in 1965 when Chuck Smith began to pastor a church of that name in Costa Mesa, California. The congregation grew quickly, reaching two thousand by 1967. The church reflected the informal, anti-establishment views of the Jesus movement. Guitars displaced pipe organs; robed choirs disappeared; instructions about when to stand, sit, recite, or read were dropped; and clergy dispensed with robes and dressed informally. Although traditional theologically, the mode of expression of that theology was quite different. The new emphasis of worship, especially of its music, was on deepening the individual’s personal relationship to God.27
Yet the most interesting aspect of Calvary Chapel was its growth and its implications for denominational structure. At present, more than five hundred churches are affiliated with Calvary Chapel, mostly in California. Calvary Chapel insists that it is not a “denomination,” but a “fellowship of churches.” Where traditional denominations establish churches using a corporatist model of “branches” or “offices” of the central organization, Calvary Chapel’s approach is more that of a franchise, an organizational form that avoids the financial and administrative overheads of traditional denominations. Any congregation prepared to accept the “Calvary Chapel Distinctives” can become a member of this fellowship and identify itself as such.
A similar model is used by the Vineyard Churches, which originated in Anaheim, California, and are particularly associated with John Wimber (1934–97). The Vineyard movement grew out of the Calvary Chapel network: Wimber led a breakaway group that was concerned in part that Calvary did not give sufficient attention to the role of spiritual gifts. The charismatic movement was becoming a significant presence in California in the 1970s, and Wimber had been involved in its development, teaching a controversial course on “signs and wonders” at Fuller Theological Seminary. Like Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard movement does not regard itself as a denomination, but as an association or fellowship. It has no centralized structures or authority figures.
The impact of such movements goes beyond the reshaping of denominational options and structures and the provision of new and less centralized models of the church. Developments such as these within Protestantism have led to new and informal worship styles, an explosion in “worship songs,” a new concern about the dynamics of worship, and an increasing dislike of the traditionalism of formal liturgical worship, especially the cumbersome use of hymn books and service books, which many see as culturally alienating to “seekers” from within secular American culture.
This is perhaps seen most clearly in the emergence of the Willow Creek network, which traces its origins back to 1981. Founded in South Barrington, Illinois, just outside Chicago, Willow Creek Community Church aimed to present the Christian faith without the baggage of Protestant ecclesiastical tradition—such as clerical robes, hard pews, collection plates, and old-fashioned hymns. “Seeker-sensitive” worship would take place in an environment in which “unchurched” individuals could feel at home while learning about the Christian faith. Founding pastor Bill Hybels wanted Willow Creek to be “a safe place where seekers can hear the very dangerous, life-changing message of Jesus Christ.”
Its success encouraged many other churches to use its methods. Once more, any suggestion that Willow Creek represented a new denomination was avoided. Individual congregations could associate themselves with Willow Creek; there would, however, be no centralized structures. Willow Creek—like Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard—has spawned a global network of churches that look to it for guidance.
The phenomenon of the “community church” allows entrepreneurs to develop their gifts in ways that would be impossible within the confining and restricting structures of most traditional denominations. These churches are strongly sensitive to the needs of their local communities, and their local grounding and knowledge inform their strategies and agendas. Most community churches are nondenominational and eschew the byzantine labyrinth of ecclesiastical politics. They see themselves as existing primarily for their members, and they have no great interest in supporting or sustaining the unwieldy and increasingly self-serving denominational hierarchies.
Perhaps the most celebrated recent example of a community church was established at Saddleback Valley in Orange County, California, in 1980 by Rick and Kay Warren, who had just graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas. It aimed to reach out to those who did not traditionally attend church, in a way that was seeker-sensitive, on the one hand, and theologically conservative, on the other. The vision was to establish “a place where the hurting, the depressed, the frustrated, and the confused can find love, acceptance, help, hope, forgiveness, guidance, and encouragement.” Warren’s best-sellers The Purpose-Driven Church (1995) and The Purpose-Driven Life (2002) have had a significant impact on the reshaping of Protestant attitudes toward creating community, evangelism, pastoral care, and outreach—all unimpeded by any denominational apparatus.
So is this the future? There will be other big community churches that develop distinctive ministries that work well and draw the attention of would-be imitators. A major transformation of the religious life of the United States is under way: the mega-churches are, in effect, becoming the new dioceses, with large numbers of orbiting planets. They are more responsive to social changes, easier to manage, and cheaper to run than traditional denominations. Just as the great medieval monasteries planted smaller monasteries (“daughter houses”) in outlying regions, resourced by the mother house until they were deemed strong enough to be self-sufficient, so the mega-churches are spreading. The future of Protestant denominations in America will be deeply shaped by this major new trend.
The longer-term outcome, however, remains uncertain. Historians of American religion, such as Philip Jenkins, point out that certain cyclical trends can be seen at work over generations in the past, and these may well be repeated in the future with these new styles of Protestantism. As such groups become more established, they become more respectable. Their emerging leaders attend seminaries that become more liberal, with the result that the denominations themselves become more liberal in the next generation. This then leads to division within the denomination and the breaking away of groups to form more conservative or fundamentalist denominations, often with their own accredited seminaries. The future is far from clear.
REDEFINING “THE OTHER”: CHANGING ATTITUDES TOWARD CATHOLICISM
As we have stressed throughout this work, Protestantism gains its sense of identity through both internal and external factors. Internally, this sense of common identity arises from a shared commitment to certain beliefs and norms—such as the centrality of the Bible. Yet Protestantism has also been shaped by the perception of a common threat from a significant enemy—Catholicism. From its beginnings until very recently, this has been an integral aspect of Protestant identity.
The importance of “binary opposition” in shaping perceptions of identity has been highlighted in recent years, not least on account of the major debate between different schools of critical thought over whether such “oppositions” determine and shape human thought or are the outcome of human thought.28 A series of significant binary oppositions are held to have shaped Western thought—such as “male-female” and “white-black.” Binary oppositions lead to the construction of the category of “the other”—the devalued half of a binary opposition when applied to groups of people. Group identity is often fostered by defining “the other”—as, for example, in Nazi Germany, with its opposition “Aryan-Jew.”
In the case of Protestantism, the main binary opposition has been Catholic-Protestant. Its plausibility has been enormously enhanced by the fact that Catholicism adopted precisely the same opposition. Protestantism was not a significant presence in regions of the world where Orthodoxy was dominant, but this binary opposition came to be perceived as normative elsewhere. Each side saw its opponent as “the other,” a perception that was relentlessly advanced by novelists and other shapers of public opinion.29 Media reporting of the social unrest in Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1995 reinforced this opposition.
It is a simple fact of history that Protestantism has defined itself against this significant “other.” While European Protestantism was haunted by this specter for many years, the lack of a significant Catholic presence in many parts of North America during the colonial era led many Protestants to search, not entirely successfully, for alternative “others.” Then waves of Catholic immigration from Europe in the nineteenth century revitalized the traditional perception that the enemy was Catholicism. “The other” had reemerged and proved of decisive importance in shaping American Protestantism’s sense of identity.30
The identification of Catholicism with “the other” was pervasive in American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century and can be summed up in the famous comments of a delegate to the Evangelical Alliance meeting in New York in 1873: “The most formidable foe of living Christianity among us is not Deism or Atheism, or any form of infidelity, but the nominally Christian Church of Rome.” As the twentieth century opened, this perception seemed permanent and normative. At one level, Protestantism was defined by anti-Catholicism.
Yet the twentieth century has seen this perception change, to the point that it now lingers on only in some parts of American Protestantism, and then more as a historical memory than a current reality. Anti-Catholicism is arguably now more characteristic of political pressure groups and media gurus who resent the continuing moral and political influence of Catholicism in America.31 “The other” is being redefined. No longer is Catholicism the enemy for conservative Protestants; it is the perceived secularism and incipient atheism of America’s cultural opinion makers. Socially conservative Protestants and Catholics thus see each other as natural allies in a struggle against a secularizing government, despite the obvious tensions within that working agreement.
This is not to say that Protestants no longer regard Catholicism with suspicion, or even hostility. For many Protestants, the agenda of the European Reformation remains a live issue and has not been resolved to this day.32 The point here, however, is more subtle: it is that secularism has surfaced as the major concern of many Protestants. This does not mean that other concerns or threats have been eliminated, or are even seen to have been eliminated. It represents a communal shift in many Protestant circles concerning the identity of the most pressing challenge of the moment.
What of liberal Protestants, still a very significant constituency within the American religious scene? On the whole, these Protestants do not regard secularizing forces in America as an enemy, being broadly sympathetic to their goals, if occasionally uneasy over their fine detail. Protestants in this constituency tend to regard conservative Christians, irrespective of denominational allegiance, as “the other” and occasionally use the term “fundamentalist” in a purely derogatory sense to stigmatize them.33 This points to the fragmentation of “the other” within Protestantism as a whole.
Yet while many Protestants no longer regard Catholicism as an enemy, it is still widely seen as a rival. This perception has been catalyzed by a significant development since about 1990—prominent Protestants, including evangelicals, have been converting, either by “crossing the Tiber” to Catholicism or “crossing the Bosphorus” to Orthodoxy. In 1990 the leading Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus converted to Catholicism, setting a trend that has escalated since then. Recent defections from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) illustrate this trend well. Robert Wilken, a leading Lutheran patristics scholar teaching at the University of Virginia, became a Roman Catholic. The preeminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University, became a member of the Orthodox Church. Leonard Klein, pastor of Christ Church, a large Lutheran parish in York, Pennsylvania, and sometime editor of Lutheran Forum, converted to Catholicism with his family and is studying for the priesthood. Bruce Marshall, one of American’s most significant younger Lutheran theologians, recently converted to Catholicism. The list goes on.
What is causing these conversions? It is clear that a variety of factors are involved. One of the reasons so many evangelicals are “crossing the Bosphorus” is that they are alarmed at evangelicalism’s lack of historical roots and institutional continuity with the New Testament and they see Orthodoxy as having particularly strong credentials in this area. Other Protestants are uneasy about the biblical foundations of one of the core ideas of the first phase of the Reformation—the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Catholic critics regularly argue that this is unbiblical: not only, they insist, is there no New Testament passage that affirms this idea, but one passage explicitly condemns the idea.34 A third group is concerned about developments within their denominations that they regard as departing from historic Christianity; therefore, they have transferred to churches with a strong record of defending the tradition.
The long-term implications of this trend, if continued, remain uncertain. Yet all the indications are that it has not led to increased hostility between Catholicism and Protestantism but is actually the outcome of increased understanding, which makes such ecclesiastical transitions easier. While the evidence is that some Catholics do convert to forms of Protestantism, the traffic appears to be primarily in the other direction.
Finally, we must note that this shift in the perception of Catholicism came about through changes in American culture at large, not in response to Protestantism’s understanding of its internal marks of identity. “The other” is determined culturally. When there were hardly any Catholics in America, “the other” was often identified as Protestants with differing views on church polity. The massive immigration of Catholics—a social development—altered that perception. The rise of secularism changed it still further. But what lies in the future? Will “the other” be redefined still further? To Protestants in many parts of Africa and Asia, “the other” is radical Islam, which is widely regarded as an intellectual and physical threat to Protestantism. It must be noted that America is not typical of global Protestantism and that its culturally determined perceptions of “the other” do not resonate with the experience of coreligionists in other parts of the world.
With that point in mind, we shall presently turn to consider the remarkable transformation in Protestant identity that took place in the twentieth century as Protestantism became a significant living presence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, we must now address a new form of Protestantism that emerged in the twentieth century and has now become the largest single constituency of the movement—Pentecostalism.