Protestantism
Protestantism
This study has woven together many histories to create a “grand narrative” of the origins and development of Protestantism. Like a plant, the movement has grown rapidly, and in unexpected ways. Perhaps the biological notion of mutation offers the best model for understanding the growth of Protestantism. In biological mutation, small changes in genetic codes lead to the emergence of new forms. Some of these prove poorly adapted to survival and die out; others prove highly adapted and flourish, transmitting their genes to future generations. While there is a very high degree of genetic continuity between these forms, they are not identical. Moreover, environmental factors have caused unpredictable changes in the genetic code.1
Although clearly continuous with and related to other versions of Christianity, Protestantism arose as a new way of reading the Bible. Yet Protestantism has mutated over time as new forms emerged that shared a high degree of continuity—but not absolute identity—with what went before them. The “genetic codes”—in the case of Protestantism, the set of instructions for interpreting the Bible—have changed over time, even though they are nearly identical with those of other versions of Protestantism. Yet these small changes have brought about significant differences, over long periods of time. Some of these turned out to be unsuccessful and gradually faded away. Yet others proved highly adapted and went on to experience growth, thus passing their distinctive understanding of the patterns of Christian truth on to future generations.
Pentecostalism represents the outcome of a seemingly small change in how Protestantism reads the Bible—recognizing, even expecting, that the Holy Spirit remains active today in much the same manner as in the apostolic era. Yet that seemingly small change in the genetic code has led to a dramatically altered understanding of the dynamics of the Christian life and reshaped the contours of the Christian faith.
Biological models have their limitations in explaining religious phenomena.2 Nevertheless, the concept of mutation is a useful model to account for the development of Protestantism because it highlights two points.
So what might the future of the movement look like? Three major trends can be identified, each of which emphasizes the movement’s capacity to adapt and change: changing understandings of Protestant identity; changing patterns of biblical interpretation; and a continuing shift away from a controlling institutional centralism. We consider each of these trends in what follows.
THE PROBLEM OF PROTESTANT IDENTITY
What is the essence of Protestantism? What gives it its inner identity? On a critical historical reading of the development of Protestantism, the movement has been characterized from its outset by divergence and difference. Protestantism came into being as a diverse entity shaped by a multiplicity of different driving agendas, cultural contexts, intellectual resources, and directing visions. There is no question of a “lost primal unity” of Protestantism, a golden age of unity that quickly shattered into fragments. Its multiple geographical, cultural, and historical origins made Protestantism diverse from the beginning.
The origins of Protestantism lie in what was ultimately an uncontrollable burst of creative energy directed toward the intellectual and spiritual renewal and institutional reform of the church. That creative burst gave birth to a solar system of planets of various sizes revolving around a biblical sun at different distances and in orbits of varying eccentricity; there was no single, unambiguous Protestant template, gene, or paradigm controlling their formation. A plurality of related though competing biblical interpretations jostled for space, attention, and influence in many parts of western Europe.
One pattern that emerges from the development of Protestantism is what seems to be an endless cycle of birth, maturing, aging, and death, leading to renewal and reformulation. The relentless energy and creativity of one generation gives rise to a new movement; a later generation, anxious because the original dynamism and energy of the movement appears to be dissipating, tries to preserve it by petrification—that is, by freezing the original vision in the hope that its energy will thus be preserved. Yet all too often, petrification leads to the conservation of only a structure, not the life-giving vision itself. However perfectly preserved in the entomologist’s specimen room, the butterfly is still dead.
Classically, this is held to have happened in the rise of orthodoxy within Protestantism after the deaths of Luther and Calvin. As the geopolitical aspects of the Reformation became increasingly important, the rise of confessionalism led to a politically enforced uniformity within the movement in many regions of Germany. The use of “confessions of faith” as a means of preserving the foundational insights of Lutheranism and Calvinism led, in the view of concerned Protestant activists, to the emergence of a conformist attitude toward religion expressed in formal acceptance of statements of faith rather than in a living and trusting faith in God. This concern inevitably led to growing demands for reform and renewal as faith became increasingly a matter of outward observance, without any inward spiritual reality. Pietism attempted to renew the relational aspects of faith by giving priority to an understanding of faith as personal trust in God, rather than as formal assent to doctrinal statements. The great revivals within American Protestantism showed very similar patterns.
For the historian, such cycles of review and renewal seem to be an integral aspect of Protestant identity. The development of Pietism, the emergence of the American holiness tradition, and the rise of global Pentecostalism can all be understood as the outcomes of this ongoing renewal of older traditions and development of new understandings of what it means to be a Protestant. A similar process can be seen at work within Anglicanism, a form of Protestantism that is capable of accommodating a significant number of traditional “Catholic” notions—such as the use of liturgy and architecture to communicate the truths of faith—without losing its Protestant identity. This process of review and development has not stopped, and all the indications are that further changes lie ahead in the future.
The pressure of these changes has created a furious debate within sections of Protestantism, leading to a confrontation between two very different visions—one static, the other dynamic—of Protestant identity. On the one hand are Protestant traditionalists who hold that the essence of Protestantism can only be preserved by “freezing” defining moments in the past—for example, the clerical dress, cultural attitudes, and worship styles of sixteenth-century Calvinism, seventeenth-century Puritanism, or eighteenth-century English evangelicalism. For such traditionalists, fidelity to the past is the touchstone of authenticity and integrity.
On the other hand are those who argue that Protestantism is not, and never has been, defined in this way, but locates its identity in its constant self-examination in the light of the Bible and in its willingness to correct itself when it takes wrong turns or situations change. This second approach—often summarized in the slogan semper reformandum (“always being reformed”)—defines the distinctive identity of Protestantism as a method, not as any one specific historical outcome of the application of that method.
Protestantism is thus seen as applying the Bible to new situations in which one may learn from past applications but is not obligated to repeat them. It is this vision of Protestantism that has gained the upper hand in the late twentieth century and captured the imaginations of strongly entrepreneurial individuals—precisely because it creates conceptual space for the innovation, development, and experimentation that are virtually precluded by the older, more static model. Pentecostalism is perhaps the supreme example of this second Protestant paradigm that is now clearly in the ascendancy in many parts of the world.
This second model of Protestant identity has major implications for the future of the movement. By refusing to regard any past expression of Protestantism as normative, this approach has liberated the movement from its captivity to the cultural habits of early modern western Europe. Why should twenty-first-century Presbyterian ministers in Kenya wear the black gowns favored by sixteenth-century Geneva? Why should Western cultural norms be preferred over their African equivalents? Why should Asians have to read the Bible through Western eyes? This assertion of the cultural independence of the global South has led to significant shifts in understanding and opened the way to rapid Protestant expansion outside its traditional homelands in the West. Each region now sees itself as free to find its own form of Protestant identity, grounded in a local interpretation and application of the Bible.
The twentieth century thus saw a rediscovery of the radical, dangerous Protestant principle of starting all over again, wherever necessary dismantling outmoded approaches and forging new ones, shaped by the biblical witness. It has become increasingly clear that some traditional Protestant ideas about church architecture, denominational structures, worship patterns, and even moral values were often little more than cultural constructs, reflecting a bygone era in western European culture. The capacity of the Protestant template to respond and adapt to new environments has given it a new lease of life as it expands into new regions of the world and faces new challenges and opportunities.
This naturally leads us to consider how the Bible continues to shape Protestant identity and development.
PROTESTANTISM’S CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS OF SCRIPTURE
In 1620 the great Puritan theologian John Robinson preached a sermon to those about to leave for the New World aboard the Mayflower. His powerful address portrayed the pilgrims as setting out on a voyage that would lead them not only to a new world but to a new grasp of truth. They would be spiritual and theological pioneers exploring not only the new world of the Americas but the new insights they would find in the Bible as they sought to plant the kingdom of God there. One phrase from that sermon has rebounded down the ages: “I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.”
Robinson’s words are a fitting epigram to the entire Protestant engagement with the Bible. Some have argued that this task is completed and that closure has been secured. Protestantism’s task is merely to repeat the ideas and values of its definitive shapers, such as Luther and Calvin. Most, however, hold that this argument is quite contrary to the ethos of Protestantism. To be a Protestant is to set out on an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage that is never completed. Every location, every generation, every challenge forces the community of faith to reread the Bible, asking what it might have to say in this situation that it did not say in other situations. For Robinson, no person, no age, could ever fully plumb the depths of scripture. Through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, new challenges would lead to new insights, above all in relation to church structures and policy. What might be right in one situation or for one era might not be so in another.
As we have seen, the capacity to adapt is the birthright of Protestantism. The contrast with both Catholicism and Orthodoxy could not be greater at this point. Although both consider the wooden repetition of yesterday’s certainties to be inadequate, preferring to work with the idea of a “living tradition” that is capable of at least a degree of development, both equally emphasize the fixity of their doctrinal and institutional forms. For the noted Catholic apologist Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), the Catholic deposit of faith is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Protestant innovations and heretical degradations—religious categories that tended to elide in Bossuet’s judgment—could be identified without undue difficulty precisely because they represented change.4 John Henry Newman had no doubt that each generation could wrest further insights from the Catholic tradition; its substance, however, would not change.
From its outset, Protestantism stated its identity in terms of a method rather than its outcome—a means by which ideas would be generated and governed, not a specific set of ideas resulting from its application. The Protestant principle of grounding matters of doctrine and ethics in the Bible and subjecting these to constant review immediately generated controversy. Luther and Calvin argued that this method led to the reestablishment of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith, on the one hand, and the reformation of areas in which the medieval church had gone astray through inadequate attention to scripture, on the other. These doctrinal outcomes were expressed as “confessions of faith,” which were understood as local, provisional, and revisable statements of faith, not to be confused with the universal and final statements of Christian faith contained in the creeds.
Their radical Protestant critics suggested that this represented an inconsistent reading of the Bible; a more radical—or, better, a more consistent—reading of the text led to skepticism concerning traditional doctrines such as the Trinity and more recent innovations such as Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, which they held to lack biblical warrant. Yet such debates were ultimately healthy in that they encouraged theological vigilance and avoided the premature foreclosure of important debates.
This had three significant results. First, a number of ways of interpreting the Bible emerged as characteristic of Protestant traditions, and those traditions then felt obliged to defend their way of interpreting scripture. One can easily speak of a Lutheran tradition of interpretation of Paul’s doctrine of justification, or a Reformed tradition of interpretation of the concept of the kingdom of God. Second, the debate led to changing patterns of biblical interpretation over time as constant review led to revision of the original judgments of the founders of Protestantism. Third, it resulted in a variety of approaches to biblical interpretation within specific Protestant groupings, thus forcing a difficult discussion of the acceptable limits of diversity. When did diversity degenerate into deviation, hence forcing the exclusion of those who would then go on to form new Protestant groupings, further contributing to the fragmentation of Protestantism?
In considering such difficult questions, it is important to note that biblical interpretation is partly a socially constructed enterprise that rests on inherited assumptions concerning what is “natural” or “obvious” within a community. Individuals experience part of the complex process of socialization by growing up within such an interpretative community, absorbing its values and approaches.5 Judgments as to what is the “natural” way of reading a biblical passage rest partly (but not exclusively) on the prevailing consensus within that community, which often assumes that the familiar and traditional are equivalent to the self-evidently correct. The theological notion of the “natural sense of scripture,” not unlike its cultural cousin “common sense,” is a communal notion that is shaped partly by the happenstances of history and is sustained and sanctified through constant repetition and application.6
As the history and experience of a community develop, traditional ways of reading scripture are reviewed and revised in the light of new challenges, experiences, and encounters—such as the rise of a capitalist economy, a growing awareness of the existence of vast geographical regions untouched by the Christian gospel, or spiritual experiences that appear to replicate those described in the New Testament. All of these can be shown to have been important factors in encouraging Protestant engagements with the Bible and shaping their outcome.
Even the briefest account of Protestant biblical interpretation during the first five hundred years of its existence shows shifting understandings of what the Bible says and how it is to be read, and these shifts are laden with significance for the identity of the movement. If Protestantism is held to be defined by a set of specific interpretations of the Bible, then, in addition to being pluriform from the outset, it has undergone significant changes since its emergence.
Four examples of shifting Protestant understandings of the meaning of the Bible may be noted, all of which have been discussed in this work. In each case, the settled interpretation of earlier generations underwent significant modification as opinion shifted decisively toward a rather different view.
Alongside these significant shifts in patterns of biblical interpretation over the last five hundred years, a number of debates have continued, repeating the debates of past years with occasional extensions. Of these, the most famous is the long-standing debate over how to interpret the words of Jesus of Nazareth at the Last Supper: “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Here the main positions taken in the first age of the Reformation remain contested to this day, and the debate still circles well-established landmarks and authorities. No Protestant now seriously expects these debates to be resolved; indeed, many now regard them as lying beyond resolution, having become so deeply ingrained within the traditions that make up contemporary Protestantism that they cannot be disentangled from those traditions’ sense of identity and historical rootedness.
Yet other debates have opened up, extending debates over biblical interpretation. Debates about the ministry of women and homosexuals have opened up new questions and given new urgency to old ones—such as the passionate and often vitriolic debate within American Protestantism during the first half of the nineteenth century over whether the Bible sanctioned slavery. These debates, which often involve complex and controversial judgments about the role of cultural norms in biblical interpretation, often point up significant divergences within global Protestantism, especially over issues of sexuality.
DECENTRALIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF DENOMINATIONS
The history of twentieth-century Protestantism confirms that the movement is in the middle of a clear and irreversible process of congregationalization, in which central authority is ebbing away from denominational bureaucracies and becoming concentrated in individual congregations. Since the 1980s, the growth of market-shaped or market-driven congregations in American Protestantism has forced denominational leaderships to determine whether they will be regulatory or consultative in nature. While this development can be seen as a pragmatic response by successful congregations to increasingly unwieldy central structures, it can equally well be seen as the late flowering of one of the most fundamental themes of early seventeenth-century American Protestant theology—“the principle that a corporate body is created by the consent of constituent members,” in the words of the historian Perry Miller.7
In noting the fundamental themes of Protestant models of the church, we have emphasized the absence of any necessary institutional component. Institutions might be useful; they are not, however, essential to the identity of a Protestant congregation. Many Protestant writers draw a pointed distinction between what is necessary for the esse, and what is appropriate for the bene esse, of a church.8 No specific institutional structure is required if a group is to be recognized as a church; certain structures might, however, be helpful in enabling congregations in their mission and ministry.
This theory of the church enables radical entrepreneurial activity. In the seventeenth century, it found expression in the idea of the local congregation as a covenanted community. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the model of the voluntary society gained wide acceptance and was found in various forms in the emergence of British Methodism and the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States. More recently, two other models have begun to emerge, both of which have their origins in the business world: the church as franchise and the church as a small business. Both models give considerable scope to entrepreneurial activity, personal initiative, and creativity on the part of leaders and allow them to circumvent the often cumbersome procedures and high overheads of traditional denominations.
The best-known example of the franchise model is Calvary Chapel, begun by Chuck Smith in the 1960s and now boasting five hundred affiliated congregations throughout the United States, especially in California. Congregations that wish to be known as “Calvary Chapel” may apply for a local franchise, which is granted subject to certain conditions, of which the most important is conformity to the distinctive ethos of the parent body. A slightly different model was developed by Willow Creek Community Church, which founded the Willow Creek Association in 1992. Once more, congregations opt in to what is essentially a franchising operation.
Yet the model that has proved most successful in driving Protestant expansion in recent years is based on the analogy of starting your own business—the dream of many would-be entrepreneurs who find themselves frustrated by the unimaginative and unresponsive attitudes of their companies. On this model, individuals set up their own churches and rely on growth in reputation and congregational numbers to secure their future. Though laden with risk, the model offers pastors with a strong sense of vision the opportunity to develop a ministry that meets a specific need they believe is not being adequately met elsewhere. Calvary Chapel, Willow Creek Community Church, and Saddleback Church are all examples of successful churches built on the visions of their founders. The same phenomenon can be seen in large Pentecostal churches in Asia and the more recent African Initiated Churches, which often trace their origins and driving visions to a founding pastor.
This phenomenon is set to increase, partly owing to the inexorable dispersion of power from the center to the periphery of traditional denominations, but more significantly on account of the responsiveness of such decentralized models to their environments. With no centralized Protestant validating agency equivalent to the Vatican, there is no enforceable means by which this phenomenon of innovation can be controlled. The downside is obvious: being accountable to no external authority, the pastor is often responsible only to congregation members for the theological direction of the church. Yet the upside can hardly be ignored, especially when the approach meets a real need on the part of enthusiastic pastors and receptive congregations.
The impact of this accelerating trend is perhaps most obvious in the case of Anglicanism, which has in the past defied the decentralizing trend seen within other Protestant denominations. A number of factors have accounted for this surprising cohesion within Anglicanism—the British colonial legacy, maintained more recently through the British Commonwealth of Nations; the British crown as a symbol of unity; the English language as the Anglican Communion’s lingua franca; the King James Bible of 1611 and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as unifying texts. Yet all of these have been subject to historical erosion; the growing cultural, linguistic, and political diversity within Anglicanism has gradually eaten away at any sense of a shared identity. Although recent debates over homosexuality have exacerbated this process, they have not been its cause.
It is to be expected that Anglicanism will go the way of other Protestant groups and transmute into a denominational family characterized by a federalist structure and perhaps presided over by a symbolic figure of unity, almost certain to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. The cultural differences between North American liberalism and West African traditionalism may well catalyze this process of fissure, and the absence of strong leadership makes the situation worse than it need be. Yet these tensions have simply highlighted the theological fissures and fatigues that have been part of Anglicanism from its origins.
Weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a tradition or institution often lie unnoticed until new stresses and pressures place them under such strain that they finally rupture. From the 1990s, Anglicanism has been confronted with the contradictions inherent in its own heritage, long shielded from view by a benign and static cultural environment. Happily, this confrontation does not mean the end of Anglicanism, nor even the beginning of a decline. It need do no more than usher in a period of alternative models of the church, each faithful to the Protestant tradition and adapted to its own specific environment. Paradoxically, the future of Anglicanism is thus likely to be characterized by overall growth rather than contraction.
THE CRITICAL ANALOGY BETWEEN PROTESTANTISM AND ISLAM
In recent years, reform movements have arisen within non-Christian religions, particularly Nichiren Buddhism, which bears clear resemblances to Protestantism.9 An excellent example of this trend is provided by the Soka Gakkai, a Japanese lay reformist Buddhist organization that emphasizes social engagement.10 Yet the most striking and interesting parallels exist between Protestantism and the world’s second-largest religious movement—Islam.
As is well known, the Muslim world is divided into a number of factions, the two largest of which are the Sunni and the Shia. It is often suggested that Protestantism has certain affinities with the Shia. However, the truth is more complex. Islam as a whole, precisely because it is a logocentric, text-based religion, bears many similarities to certain forms of Protestantism.
The parallel is not exact. Some forms of Protestantism—such as Lutheranism, or certain forms of Anglicanism—are focused primarily upon the person of Jesus Christ and give weight to the Bible insofar as it gives access to him. Although the Bible is regarded as fundamental, such Protestants place Christ where Islam places the Qu’ran. Yet other forms of Protestantism—particularly within fundamentalism and various forms of evangelicalism—see the Bible as standing at the center of all things. These groups share Islam’s suspicion of imagery of the divine, preferring to focus on the preaching and proclamation of the word. For such Protestants, the differences between Christianity and Islam lie in the question of which text they regard as authoritative: the Qu’ran or the Bible?
Like many forms of Protestantism, Islam focuses on a central text—the Qu’ran. And as with Protestantism, the question of who has the right to interpret the Qu’ran, and hence to define the nature of Islam, has become of critical importance.11 There has never been a “Muslim pope” or the Islamic equivalent of the Vatican. Authority has traditionally resided with certain clerical institutions.
Yet in the late twentieth century, something along the lines of an “Islamic Reformation” from below can be seen emerging. Highly charismatic individuals outside the clerical establishment—such as Osama bin Laden—have offered their own interpretations of Islam. The popular support they have garnered within the global Muslim constituency has undermined the authority of traditional Islamic institutions and laid the foundations for a radical, even dangerous, debate over the essence of Islam. Just as printing spread the ideas of the Protestant Reformation across Europe, so the Internet allows the ideas of the new Islamic radicals to spread globally, challenging traditional Islamic beliefs and values.
The four accepted Sunni schools of Qu’ranic interpretation—Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanbali—are facing a major challenge from a rising generation of Muslims who are impatient with the conservatism of these schools and prefer the radicalism of alternatives. Each of these schools can be likened to a branch of Protestantism: each is based on the same text, yet offers different interpretations and implementations. New schools are emerging, however, precisely because of a growing realization that the contingencies of history prevent their number from being fixed. More radical schools argue for the need to refer directly to the Qu’ran and Hadith to discover the doctrines and rites of religion rather than trust in the traditions of the past. New possibilities will emerge, along with new schools. Like Protestantism, Islam will face increasing fragmentation as it enters into new cultural contexts in which the restraints of past convention are no longer decisive. Islam’s growing presence in the West is opening the door to precisely these reinterpretations, catalyzed by new assumptions about texts, new challenges and pressures, and increasing historical and cultural distance from the Arabic homelands of Islam.
The same patterns can be seen within Protestantism. The settled consensus of an older generation is overthrown by a rising generation who bring new interpretations to the same texts. The emergence of Pentecostalism—easily the most significant development within Protestantism in the twentieth century—illustrates this perfectly. In the nineteenth century, Protestantism’s authority figures were more or less unanimous: charismatic phenomena belonged to the apostolic age and had now ceased. That judgment is now the minority report. Patterns of biblical interpretation have changed—and with those changes in biblical interpretation have emerged radical new forms of Protestantism.
The argument that “Islam traditionally teaches this” now carries little weight when authority structures are shifting and a new generation is developing new interpretations of the Qu’ran or reclaiming older interpretations that have been marginalized by the Islamic establishment. Within Islam, older Islamic scholars often cite interpretations of the Qu’ran that a more militant grassroots constituency rejects—most notably in relation to the idea of the jihad.
Might there be further changes? Islam’s well-known opposition to usury has spawned a minor sharia-compliant financial industry in some parts of the world. Yet Protestantism emerged with precisely the same hostility toward usury, based on its foundational religious text. As we have seen, that judgment was open to challenge, and ultimately total reversal. Might Islam do the same?
There is a deeper question here. Is Islam about to go through the convulsions that shook Western Christianity in the sixteenth century and led to social and political instability for more than a century? And what might be the implications of such a development for the West? Exploring the development of Protestantism may not entirely answer this question. But it certainly maps out some possibilities and raises questions that Western political and religious leaders cannot afford to overlook or ignore.
PROTESTANTISM, RELIGION, AND WORLD POWER
The world is changing rapidly, leaving many puzzled by its twists and turns. One of the settled assumptions of Western thought during the period 1960 to 1990 was that religion was of diminishing importance in world affairs. Paul Kennedy’s magisterial Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988) mentions Islam only incidentally, and then links it particularly with the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire.12 There is no hint, no anticipation, of the importance of Islam as a political force to be reckoned with in the “new world order” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As was pointed out some time ago by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the foreign policy of the United States has consistently underestimated the importance of religion as a political force.13 Democratic and Republican administrations alike have seriously misread the growing importance of religion as a global force.
The development is obvious to those who have eyes to see. Religion has the capacity to transcend national and cultural barriers, uniting Muslims in Britain in a powerful bond of sympathy with their coreligionists in Palestine, Jews in New York with those in Israel, and Catholics in Boston with those in Northern Ireland. As both Christianity and Islam continue their global expansion, the question of their frontiers and boundaries is becoming increasingly sensitive—witness the serious tensions in both Nigeria and the Sudan between the predominantly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. If Western statecraft is to deal with these developments, it needs to be realistic about the strategic importance of religion instead of relying on the wisdom of the late 1960s, which held that religion was dying out and would be replaced by a secular liberal world order in both the East and West.
But an objection might be raised at this point. Granted that religion is becoming more important as a global factor—surely this hardly applies, however, to Protestantism, which has shown relatively little inclination to political activism throughout the twentieth century?
The analysis of this book suggests that this is a dangerously simplistic judgment. It is of the essence of Protestantism to reexamine and renew itself, responding to its environment, on the one hand, and its own reading of the Bible, on the other. Protestantism has undergone massive change in the twentieth century—change that would have been unpredicted and unanticipated in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Protestantism is uncontrollable. As with Islam, there is no centralized power, no institutionalized authority to regulate or limit its development. Protestantism is increasingly open to political radicalization, with unforeseeable implications.
That process is already under way. There are telltale straws in the wind for those who are willing to look and listen. In 1960 it would have been unthinkable for conservative American Protestants to become actively involved in politics. Faith was a private matter, confined to the home and church. Politics was seen as “worldly,” something that corrupted faithful believers and led them away from the straight and narrow path. As late as 1965, Jerry Falwell distinguished between “Ministers and Marchers,” arguing that “the duty of the church is to preach the Word, not focus on externals.” Yet even then there was a growing realization of the need for political engagement and activism on the part of many around him. By the late 1990s, even the most conservative Protestants were politically engaged, determined to redirect their nation, religiously and politically. There are many who dislike their politics; their importance, however, can hardly be overlooked.
So what has changed? George Marsden and other historians are clear that a critical factor was the perceived drift of American political culture in a secular or antireligious direction. Reacting against such developments, conservative Protestants realized the importance of religiously motivated political engagement. The fundamental theme was that of “a proclamation of reclaimed authority over a sacred tradition which is to be reinstated as an antidote for a society that has strayed from its cultural moorings.”14 Just as Western secularism and political adventurism in the Middle East contributed to the rise of radical Islam, so its counterpart back home may well have begun an equivalent process within Protestantism. The political impact of this development, if it continues, will be incalculable. Protestantism has the innate capacity to reclaim its older self-understanding as a political as much as a religious entity. Whether that happens depends largely on whether Western culture creates the conditions that will bring it about—for it is primarily a reactive process.
So what of the future of Protestantism? Those who base their answer on its fortunes in western Europe, its original heartlands, may offer a somewhat negative answer. But for those who have reflected on its remarkable advances elsewhere, such an answer is inadequate. Yes, the sun may set on a movement—but it is too easily forgotten that the sun rises again the next day. Protestantism has had its moments in the past; it will have them again in the future.
Those who are anxious about the future of Protestantism often urge that radical change in its self-understanding is necessary if it is to survive, let alone prosper. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis (“Times are changing, and we change with them”—Ovid). The historical and theological analysis presented in this book offers a rather different answer. We have seen that Protestantism possesses a unique and innate capacity for innovation, renewal, and reform based on its own internal resources. The future of Protestantism lies precisely in Protestantism being what Protestantism actually is.