Although the jury is still out, we seem to be dealing with the most significant Presidential change agent since FDR, and perhaps in the history of the American Republic. After a rather uneventful first term in office, one that surprised even his critics by its conventionality, Trump came into office again in 2025 locked and loaded to effect dramatic change.
Others have studied his systematic remaking of the Republican Party. The Reagan-era coalition of Main Street and conservative Christians was getting long in the tooth and was no longer able to generate electoral majorities, and Trump’s genius was to expand that coalition to include lower-class whites, Hispanics, and African-American men.
What I’m really interested in here, however, are the implications of Trump’s election and presidency for the Democratic Party.
We tend to forget just how significant the presidency of Barack Obama was. Under Obama, the Democratic Party abandoned its working-class roots and oriented its policies increasingly toward what sociologist Peter Berger called the “New Class”—the manipulators of symbolic knowledge (e.g., the media, the information economy, and academia) who tend to be “statist” because they are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the government.
And this “New Class” had bought rather thoroughly into a globalist perspective, identified back in 1967 by sociologist Robert Bellah in an elegant article entitled “Civil Religion in America,” that views America as legitimized only to the extent that it contributed to the liberation of the oppressed throughout the world. At the end of this article, which explores how Americans have viewed the mission and transcendent purpose of the nation throughout its history, Bellah wrote concerning an emerging, post-Vietnam “civil religion”: “There seems little doubt that a successful negotiation of this third time of trial—the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order—would precipitate a major new set of symbolic forms. . . . It would necessitate the incorporation of vital international symbolism into our civil religion, or, perhaps a better way of putting it, it would result in American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the world” (Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96 (Winter, 1967), 18).
Another result of the two-term Obama administration was the efflorescence of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) thinking and policy initiatives. To be sure, the Obama administration encouraged this, but it really gathered steam after Obama left office. Obama’s election had been hailed in messianic terms, but the failure of a two-term African-American president to lead America to the promised land of racial equality and harmony was seemingly confirmed by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 (which galvanized the Left), and the death of George Floyd in 2020. The answer, it seemed to many on the Left, was coercive policies that would provide a preferential option for the marginalized, and such policy priorities then became a hallmark of the Biden administration.
But DEI thinking contained the seeds of its own demise. With its roots in the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism, “critical theory” in its various branches was both bleak (in its reduction of nearly everything to power relationships) and abstract (in its focus on identity markers such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). Why, people increasingly asked, should an Ivy-league educated African-American be viewed as “oppressed” while the poor white coal miners in Fentanyl-ravaged Appalachia are told to “check their privilege”? And why should biological males be allowed to compete in female sports or invade women’s restrooms? The contention by DEI champions that such positions were a matter of “justice” seemed increasingly dubious.
The upshot of all this was that distinctively American interests were downplayed and the American working class got left out in the cold, just waiting for someone like Trump to address their concerns. As one trained in political science and religious studies, I find all this fascinating.
The Democratic Party took a drubbing in 2024, not so much because Joe Biden was senile and Kamala Harris was ditsy, but because their policies and priorities were viewed as crazy, sterile, and disconnected from reality by a significant portion of the electorate. Crazy is not a good place to be if you want to win elections (and yes, I don’t deny that the Republicans have their fair share of nut cases).
To summarize, in contrast to the Democratic Party of Tip O’Neill and Bill Clinton, during the Obama and Biden years Democrats became the party of power analysis, feverishly looking for “oppressed” people to be given preferences, and globalism. In the short term, it appears that the Democrats are doubling down on all that. They seem intent on being the party of Greta Thunberg and David Hogg, the activist who was recently named Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. I’m guessing that’s not going to sell.
But, and this is crucial, many of Trump’s executive orders are designed to remove the economic incentives, in academia and in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, for such progressive thinking. In other words, Trump is slowly but surely freeing Democrats to look at these issues in new ways.
Yes, there will be a struggle. Entrenched leadership is not easily dislodged. AOC and her ilk are not going to go quietly. But the path forward for Democrats is manifestly not a continuation of the current trajectory.
Painfully evident in the current American political context is the lack of a shared moral vision and vocabulary. In his landmark 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, sociologist James Davison Hunter spoke of “competing moral visions” that characterized the discourse and politics of cultural conservatives and cultural liberals or progressives—one rooted in a sense of timeless or transcendent moral standards to which people should conform, and the other in the needs and desires of the autonomous self. Not much has changed since then; if anything, the division is even deeper.
That division was on full display Tuesday in a prayer service for politicians at the National Cathedral in which the Episcopal Bishop of Washington scolded the incoming President, claiming that a variety of groups she deems oppressed (immigrants, LGBTQ people, transgender children, etc.) are “scared” of him. This contrasted sharply with some of the invocations and benedictions pronounced at the Inauguration the previous day, lauding the new President as one who would restore the moral fabric of the nation. Both exercises provoked eye rolls and face palms, which, of course, suggests that we really don’t have a shared moral vocabulary and conceptuality that even a bare majority, let alone a decisive majority, will affirm and find persuasive! In fact, there is no longer any agreement on what constitutes the true, the good, and the beautiful. All that’s left, it would seem, is power that seeks to impose a particular vision rather than to persuade, and the bleakness of this Nietzschean moment is not lost on many.
Of course, it was not always so. I would argue that up until the 1960s there was a shared moral vision. A key point here is that, while the doctrinal differences between more liberal mainline Protestants and conservative Protestants were substantial, there was pretty general agreement on basic matters of personal morality and even corporate morality. Conservative Protestants appealed to the divine commands enshrined in Scripture (hence the continuing affection among cultural conservatives for the Ten Words), while mainline Protestants framed morality in terms of Kantian duty and the teachings and commands of Jesus. By and large, however, they arrived at much the same place.
In the 1960s all that changed, as much of the Protestant mainline underwent a decisive shift in moral calculus from an ethic of personal duty to an emancipatory ethic of individual and corporate freedom. Reasons for this shift are complex. The impact of the Civil Rights Movement cannot be overestimated; the Protestant mainline sensed a need for a moral and theological framework that would support that important endeavor. The Vietnam War raised questions about national righteousness as many were convinced that America was an oppressive rather than liberating force in the world. The sexual revolution was another key factor, and increasingly the mainline Protestant ethic was one of personal and corporate emancipation.
There were philosophical influences at work as well. In the early nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher disagreed over whether the human being, religiously speaking, should be seen in terms of radical freedom (Hegel) or radical dependence (Schleiermacher). In his The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher has a subtle explanation as to how one can have absolute dependence and relative freedom, but not absolute freedom. On the other hand, Hegel’s focus on freedom was picked up by Marx and expanded well beyond the socio-economic by the Frankfurt School and others. One might say that, in the current context, Hegel won!
I would also argue that this shift in moral calculus has put the Protestant mainline in a pickle. One of the key functions of religion since time immemorial has been to restrain human behavior, to put limits on human passions. But this ethic of freedom has left the Protestant mainline with little to say on such matters. It’s no great surprise to me, then, to find churches that affirm the guardrails of human existence filled with young families who are trying to navigate a permissive culture, while mainline churches are increasingly empty.
A related dimension of this pickle has to do with the way an emancipatory ethic tends to take on a life of its own with relentless expansion of the autonomy principle. Particularly in the wake of the sexual revolution, many noted that nature itself (i.e., our bodies) can put significant constraints on the fulfillment of desires and thus seem to limit freedom. And so, consistent with a theological vision mainline theologian Peter Hodgson has called “the freedom project,” there has been strong support in many mainline circles for the T in LGBTQ+, with transgender concerns being particularly emblematic of the quest for self-creative autonomy, or freedom from nature itself. Thus, there has been a preoccupation with what many see as exotic sexualities (e.g., “drag-queen Sunday School”), but this has been both a tough sell in the religious marketplace and divisive in the mainline churches themselves.
To be sure, there are moral-calculus problems on the right as well. The focus on the timeless and transcendent has had difficulty processing the dynamic and evolving aspect of corporate morality in particular, and this accounts in part for a mixed record on slavery and race issues. Painting with a broad brush, we might even say that traditional morality tends to struggle with corporate ethics while the current emancipatory ethic of freedom struggles with individual ethics.
While there are ways of thinking about morality that I’ve found fruitful and suggestive in recent years (e.g., the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and the Moral Foundations Theory of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues), it’s not yet clear to me that there is a path to transcend this impasse in public discourse. We still seem to be stuck trying to answer the question famously posed in the title of one of MacIntyre’s later books: Whose Justice, Which Rationality?
This blog is entitled “The Ecclesial Calvinist.” Readers will rightly surmise that I am self-consciously located in the Reformed tradition of theology and that I care deeply about the church (ecclesia is the NT Greek term for “church”). This post is longer than usual and is also the most autobiographical post I have ever written, so please bear with this apologia pro vita sua.
When I was younger I enjoyed reading the “How My Mind Has Changed” series of articles in the Christian Century magazine, as prominent theologians and church leaders explained significant changes in their own viewpoints. Well, this has been a time of change for me, both practically and intellectually. I have recently retired as the Younts Professor of Bible and Religion at Erskine College, in Due West, South Carolina. I am deeply grateful for the 31-year career at Erskine (from 1993 until 2024), and for the many students I’ve taught over those years. It was a good run, but all good things come to an end. Rest assured that I wish my former colleagues and students God’s best as we move forward in faith.
It is also a time of change in denominational affiliation. For the past 32 years I have been a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church—a Presbyterian denomination that traces its roots back to the 1782 union of Scottish Covenanter and Seceder elements in this country. I joined the ARPC in 1992 after I discerned that the Dutch-Reformed Christian Reformed Church was not going to be a permanent church home. I will, however, be forever grateful to the congregants of Faith CRC Church in Nashville, TN for allowing me to explore my ministry gifts and sense of calling there while I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt University. I am also grateful to the Prosperity ARP Church in Tennessee for receiving me as a member and to Tennessee-Alabama Presbytery of the ARPC for ordaining me to a call to Erskine College. Here I should note that I joined the ARP Church in 1992 because I sensed that it offered a meaningful third way between mainline liberalism and conservative Reformed sectarianism (both of which I knew well). In the early 1990s that was not an unreasonable take on the situation. Alas, it did not turn out that way.
By 2010 or so, however, I sensed that the ARP Church had lost its sense of identity and direction. When I served as Moderator of the ARP General Synod in 2005 I warned the body that a dire situation awaited if the church did not recover a coherent identity and sense of mission. Serving on the subsequent General Synod Vision and Strategic Planning Committees reinforced the sense that we were wandering in the weeds and on the edge of precipitous decline. As a church historian I knew the story well—that ARP identity had historically been predicated on certain praxis distinctives (exclusive psalmody, non-instrumental worship, strict Sabbatarianism, and closed communion), and that by the mid-20th century all of that had dissolved and the church was searching for a new identity. From 2004 until 2012 I had written/edited the ARP Adult Quarterly Sunday-school curriculum, but beginning in 2012 I began to pull back from my denominational involvements to concentrate on scholarly writing and research.
During this time, I also noticed that the ARPC was becoming more rigidly conservative (largely because of the decline of Erskine Theological Seminary and the rising influence of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC) even as I was growing older and a bit more flexible theologically. A clarifying moment occurred in the last few years when I chaired a Synod committee to study the issue of women serving in the diaconate in the ARPC. The Committee presented a sensible report noting that the current policy of allowing women in the ARPC to serve as deacons has worked well for decades, that Scripture can reasonably be read either way, and that no one’s conscience is bound by the current policy. The floor debate on the report was disheartening, and it was evident that a large minority of the court wanted to do away with women on the diaconate completely. Particularly clarifying for me was an obviously premeditated speech by a younger minister asserting that those in favor of women in the diaconate were capitulating to the feminist and transgender agenda! No one called him to task, and I realized at that point that the Overton window had shifted to such a point that I was in the wrong church!
Most recently, ARP Church experienced a collective paroxysm of conflict that resulted in the dissolving of my own Presbytery. Suffice it to say that I was horrified by what I saw unfolding at the 2024 General Synod Meeting and at a subsequent called meeting of Second Presbytery, which can only be described as almost five hours of unremitting warfare. Given my contacts in the broader conservative Reformed world, I was also aware of other unseemly episodes and conflicts, and I concluded that something has gone seriously wrong in the world of conservative Presbyterianism.
The key question was why things have gone so wrong! In addition to the problems of what might be termed “small-pond leadership dynamics,” I also sensed that there were theological reasons for what I was seeing. The conservative Reformed version of Christianity in which I had lived and worked increasingly seemed to me truncated, as if a part had been substituted for the whole. At least two factors helped to account for this. First, conservative Reformed Presbyterian theology is obsessed with the forensic aspects of sin and salvation. Sin is seen largely as violations of divine commands which incur a legal debt, and salvation is likewise viewed in largely forensic terms as the payment by Christ of that debt of sin. There is, of course, truth in those forensic images, but other aspects of salvation (freedom from the power of sin and brokenness, defeat of the powers of darkness and injustice, the life of Christ implanted in the Christian) are often ignored, and this forensic preoccupation often leads to legalism and self-righteousness.
Second, in my conservative Reformed circles, Christianity was viewed primarily as a matter of right doctrine or orthodoxy rather than the life of Christ implanted and growing in the Christian individually and in the church corporately. Reference is often made to fundamentalist stalwart J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, where he stoutly insisted that Christianity is a “doctrine” rather than a “life.” In context, Machen had a point—when the neo-Kantian liberals of his day spoke of Christianity as a “life,” they had in mind a vague sort of ethical community! But these matters had been discussed extensively and more fruitfully some seventy years earlier when Charles Hodge and John W. Nevin debated a similar set of issues. Hodge, not surprisingly, argued for the priority of doctrine. By contrast, John Nevin rightly maintained that if Christian identity is, as the Reformed tradition has historically insisted, a matter of union with Christ, or being “in Christ,” then Christianity must be a “life,” and doctrine is a secondary, albeit vitally important, matter. I’ve sadly come to realize that an excessive focus on doctrine as opposed to life leads all too often to a preoccupation with the rational, to the intellectual arrogance that often goes with it, and to innumerable sectarian splits over fine points of doctrine as nearly any difference can become a “go to the mat issue.” Furthermore, the focus on the forensic has meant that the conservative Reformed tradition has further tended to split over praxis issues. In other words, a sectarian spirit seems to be hardwired into the conservative Reformed tradition! Seeing this, I came to understand better John W. Nevin’s nineteenth-century frustration at the Presbyterian situation of his own day, about which he vented in his 1849 Mercersburg Review article “The Sect System”:
Take one wing only of the [sectarian] system, the Scotch Secession, which has been accustomed from the first to make the greatest account of its own theological significance, in this way; and what after all, we ask soberly, is the value of all its witnessings put together, in this country, for the cause of universal Christianity, whether in theory or practice? Is there any inward reason in its divisions and subdivisions, its abortive unions and consequent new sections, till the whole has become a tangled web in the end which it is a perfect weariness of the flesh to pretend to unravel? Altogether we have some ten or twelve bodies in this country, (possibly more,) conscience split for the glory of God, who stand unitedly, while severally excluding one another, not only on the Bible, the sure foundation of all sects, but on the Presbyterian sense of the Bible also as embodied in the Westminster Confession. Can there be any meaning or reason in such a phenomenon? Has historical theology any real interest whatever in the questions that lie between Old Covenanters, New Covenanters, Associate Seceders, Associate Reformed Seceders, and Reformed Associate Reformed Seceders, clear out to the tip end of orthodoxy in the last wee Associate Presbytery of Pennsylvania? To ask the question, is to provoke a smile. Who understands this field of church history? Who cares to thrust himself into its briery waste? Do these sects understand themselves? Is there, in truth, anything in them to be understood; or that is likely to weigh a feather hereafter, under any separate view, in the mind of God’s Universal Church?
I will admit that my take on all of this has been informed by my family history. My paternal grandfather was a prominent PC(USA) minister whose lengthy career spanned time at Princeton Seminary as a classmate of J. Gresham Machen and Clarence McCartney, involvement in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy struggles of the 1920s, pastoring a variety of tall-steeple Presbyterian churches, serving as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1946, and work at the Presbyterian Board of Pensions in Philadelphia. My father followed him to Princeton Seminary and served large churches in New York City and the Philadelphia area before exiting the Presbyterian Church in the early 1950s and finishing his career serving non-denominational evangelical churches. Thus, I grew up familiar with both the Protestant mainline and evangelicalism, and valuing both traditions for reasons I did not yet fully understand.
In recently years I’ve been convinced by two Roman Catholic writers—Ross Douthat in his book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and Jody Bottum in his An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America—that the decline of the Protestant Mainline has left a hole in the fabric of American culture and public life that can be filled neither by Roman Catholicism (because it is too ethnic) nor by evangelicalism (because it is institutionally and intellectually weak). I have also concluded that the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in its various iterations (the Northern Presbyterian Church experiencing its controversy during the 1920s and 1930s resulting in the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Bible Presbyterian Church, and the Southern Presbyterian Church experiencing its iteration in the 1950s-1970s resulting in the formation of the Presbyterian Church in America) was fundamentally a mistake resulting in part from the sectarian impulses mentioned above. Truth be told, there was still plenty of room for those principled conservatives in the mainline Presbyterian context when they left.
The reality is that liberal and conservative Christians need each other, and the sad polarization we see in American Christianity today began in earnest when liberals and conservatives largely stopped talking to each other and ceased to learn from one another. Apart from those needful conversations, Protestant liberals often lose touch with the tradition and tend to wander off the reservation; apart from those conversations, conservatives become weird and turned in on themselves. Perhaps the greatest need today is for those meaningful conversations to take place once again. I have also concluded that those needful conversation are more likely to take place in a big-tent mainline denomination like the Presbyterian Church (USA), and that, as a convinced Presbyterian, if I am to be a part of those conversations I need to be part of the PC(USA).
And so, having decided that a change was in order and faced with the impending dissolution of my own ARP Presbytery, I applied for reception as a retired minister by Foothills Presbytery of the PC(USA). I was examined and received by a Commission of the Presbytery in August of this year, and that decision was approved by the Presbytery on November 12, 2024. I want to express my deep appreciation to the able leadership of Foothills, especially the Rev. Debbie Foster, Stated Clerk and Presbytery Leader. I also want to thank three friends who graciously served as references—the Rev. Dr. Carol Lytch, President Emerita of Lancaster Theological Seminary, the Rev. Dr. Tim Cargal, of the Office of the General Assembly in Louisville, and the Rev. Dr. Quinn Fox of National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC.
I was baptized, so I am told, in the Bala Cynwyd Presbyterian Church by my grandfather in 1957. It’s good to be back.
Well, Election ’24 is finally over, and it was a doozy! Let’s start with five reasons why Trump won:
1. Donald Trump is not a conventional politician (which led many on the left to underestimate him), but he’s a GREAT retail politician. When Joe Biden foolishly called Trump supporters “garbage,” Trump rode around in a garbage truck . . . with a big Trump logo and a smile on his face. When Kamala Harris disingenuously claimed a “middle-class background” (she is the daughter of well-heeled academics) and said she had worked at McDonalds, Trump responded by handing out fries and happy meals at a real McDonalds, all the while poking fun at Harris as a fraud. It worked!
2. Kamala Harris is NOT a good retail politician. When Trump went off-script, the results were unpredictable but often entertaining. When Harris went off-script, she was a deer in the headlights; without a teleprompter she was lost. Trump connected, and (for the most part) stayed on-message. Kamala never gave the electorate a good positive reason to vote for her, and she never differentiated herself from Biden’s unpopular policies. As some have noted, she was an empty pantsuit!
3. The American public suffers from “justice fatigue.” The Democratic Party has thoroughly bought into a view of “social justice” that is informed by an esoteric and highly psychologized form of Frankfurt-school power analysis that simply doesn’t make sense to most Americans. Why is it a matter of “justice” that confused children be subjected to medical gender transitions that will rob them of their ability to procreate? Why is it a matter of “justice” that biological males should be allowed into girl’s bathrooms? Why is it a matter of “justice” that biological males be allowed to compete in sports against females? I could go on, but you get the point. Trump’s ads hammered this point, and it worked!
4. Trump was talking about the issues that matter to most Americans–inflation, illegal immigration, energy, and social policies that promote human flourishing. Kamala Harris wasn’t. The Democrats have bought into the theoretical abstraction of identity politics (see #3 above) that has little to do with how most people actually live. In retrospect, the Harris ads were abstract and woefully lacking in specific details, while the Trump ads were gleefully concrete. Not surprisingly, Trump’s connected while the Harris ads fell flat. Toward the end, Trump’s campaign was hitting on all cylinders while the Harris campaign sputtered; the problem, as Britt Hume noted on election night, was the candidate.
5. While the Democrats reflexively played the politics of division (e.g., dismissing Trump voters as “garbage” and “fascists”), Trump was building a coalition of lower and middle-class whites, Hispanics, African-American males, and traditional Republicans that resulted in what appears to be a popular-vote majority. That’s quite an achievement!
While I’m personally no longer really a part of the evangelical subculture, I’m familiar with it and I’m particularly interested in the implications of Trump’s victory for evangelicals. It’s no secret that an awful lot of rank-and-file evangelicals have voted for Trump in the last three election cycles. It’s also no secret that quite a few prominent evangelical thought leaders have been vocal “Never Trumpers” (e.g., David French, current Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, former Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, former Westminster Seminary president Sam Logan, former Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw, journalist Tim Alberta, the late Tim Keller, a host of faculty members at Christian colleges, and so on). Their objections have been primarily moral—Trump’s history of philandering and lack of truthfulness are usually cited. But they failed to note that the alternative many of these Never Trumpers proposed—voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—stood in tension with those moral criteria in that neither Biden nor Harris are paragons of virtue either. And so, these evangelical Never Trumpers often came across as Pecksniffian, conveniently selective, and sex-obsessed. Furthermore, they seemed to have forgotten that Jesus came to save sinners, and that Jesus was a lot harder on the self-righteous religious elites of his day than on the publicans and prostitutes. All this moral posturing naturally led to the suspicion that other, more sociological factors were at work in motivating the anti-Trump evangelicals, such as a desire to differentiate themselves from declasse evangelicals, to maintain elite-adjacent status in the academy or media, and so forth. In short, opposition to Trump has functioned as what sociologists call a “boundary posturing mechanism” that sends a clear message: “Hey, I’m not like those people”!
All this raises some interesting questions about the unity and coherence of the evangelical movement itself. Of course, the question of evangelical identity has been controverted and precise definition has been elusive for some time. British historian David Bebbington famously proposed an “evangelical quadrilateral” of biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism, while American religious historian Darryl Hart puckishly described evangelicals as “conservative Protestants who like Billy Graham.” Evangelical cultural critic Ken Myers contended that evangelicalism as a movement is fundamentally experiential, and is characterized by a concern for “right feeling” or “orthopathy” rather than doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, one can argue that evangelicalism as a movement has long been pretty diffuse and that it’s been held together by entrepreneurial personalities. But the Trump era has revealed the sociological fissures, particularly involving social class, within the movement, and it’s pretty clear at this point that whatever theological common ground there may still be is unable to provide a sense of cohesion. Particularly revealing is how Never Trumpers have been more than willing to throw their evangelical coreligionists under the bus.
The Trump era also raises questions about who is in a position to speak for the evangelical movement itself. The fact that a majority of self-identifying evangelical Christians apparently happily voted for Trump with varying degrees of enthusiasm suggests that they are now paying little to no attention to the self-appointed evangelical elites in Wheaton, Illinois and Grand Rapids, Michigan. That may, in fact, be a good thing, but it also suggests that this is evangelicalism’s Humpty-Dumpty moment, and that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men probably can’t put it back together again.
Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins, 2023), 493 pp.
I finally got around to reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory this week, thanks to the generosity of a former academic colleague who graciously loaned me his copy. The title, as many will realize, is taken from the last portion of the Paternoster or “Lord’s Prayer,” as Christians recite “for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” the ascription being to God rather than to Christians themselves. Alberta’s sustained argument is that many evangelical Christians have arrogated that kingdom, power, and authority to themselves, with tragic implications for the evangelical churches and subculture.
Alberta begins with a vignette of the church in suburban Detroit where he grew up, a congregation of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church denomination pastored by his father. This personal background is important; Alberta, an accomplished political journalist who has written for The Atlantic, Politico, The Wall Street Journal and other prominent publications, self-identifies as an evangelical Christian. This is both a positive and a negative—Alberta knows the nuances and details of the evangelical terrain rather well, but he also seems to lack critical distance at some crucial points.
Occasionally, however, Alberta does get the details wrong. For example, he mentions the “Presbyterian Church of America (PCA),” and he speaks of his own denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church as “further to the right, theologically and otherwise, than the PCA” (p. 439). While there was a “Presbyterian Church of America” briefly in the 1930s, the denomination of which Alberta speaks is the Presbyterian Church in America, and most observers would regard the PCA (which does not ordain women to any church offices) as to the right of the EPC (which does ordain women to all offices).
Some evangelical Christians will dismiss this volume as yet another progressive evangelical anti-Trump screed (along the lines of, say, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation). This is unfortunate; while both books evince a similar underlying declension narrative, Alberta’s less ideologically driven book provides a wealth of anecdotal detail that needs to be read and digested.
Much of the book has the air of a travelogue, as Alberta travels around to various churches, schools, and events. The sustained impression we get is that evangelical churches and institutions are in crisis, as pastors seek to navigate, often unsuccessfully, the political and cultural divisions that afflict the broader nation, and as some churches and evangelical institutions have sought to capitalize on these divisions by aligning themselves with the populist religious Right. A persistent theme in the book is the fearmongering message promoted by such church leaders and institutions that evangelical Christians are “under siege” in America by progressive, secular interests, and that the traditional American way of life hangs in the balance. Thus an “apocalyptic” sensibility pervades in many of these circles, and this explains to a considerable extent the embracing of Donald Trump.
There is, to be sure, a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be picked to support Alberta’s argument. The populist religious Right, to a discouraging degree, has more than its share of entrepreneurs and ambitious intellectual lightweights (e.g., Charlie Kirk, Erik Metaxas, David Barton, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., etc.) often flogging strange stuff and capitalizing on the fears of unsophisticated evangelicals. Particular attention is given to Falwell’s Liberty University, which appears to be Exhibit A of the pattern of sacrificing Christian piety and academic substance for money and political access. We are also given, through the eyes of investigative protagonists such as Julie Roys and Rachel Denhollander, an insightful window into the abuse scandals that touched the Southern Baptist Church, Southern Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and prominent pastors such as James MacDonald and Ravi Zacharias, all further evidence of the temptation to sacrifice Christian principles on the altar of institutional interest.
All this is worthwhile, indeed important reading. Nevertheless, there are some problems and blind spots in the book. Alberta clearly writes as a participant in the struggle, with his heroes and villains. Persistently emerging as heroes are Alberta’s friends and prominent evangelical never-Trumpers Russell Moore and David French, while the villains are, predictably, all to their right. We are told many details, for example, of Russell Moore’s journey from Southern Baptist insider to Editor of Christianity Today magazine, but nothing is said of the circumstances that preceded Moore’s rise to the helm of CT—the sexual harassment scandal involving Moore’s predecessor and prominent never-Trumper evangelical Mark Galli. History is generally messier than we prefer it to be, but evenhandedness is important.
Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the book details the efforts of David French, Russell Moore, and Curtis Chang to mount an effort in churches (a politically oriented Bible study program called “The After Party”) to counter the Religious Right/pro-Trump agenda. When donors did not emerge from traditional evangelical funding sources, they found an activist progressive secular foundation quite happy to support their efforts. Alberta is reticent about the details of the funding source but investigative work by journalist Megan Basham found that the effort was funded by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors as part of their “New Pluralists” project, with the effort being rolled out in the electoral “battleground” state of Ohio. In short, French, Moore, and Chang, while gaining access to evangelical churches on the basis of their religious credentials, were party to a well-funded effort to elect Democrats. All this seems at best only slightly less tawdry than the shenanigans Alberta details on the right throughout much of the book.
Alberta is a good storyteller, and the book juxtaposes competing narratives, both of which have their limitations. On one hand, there is the apocalyptic narrative on the religious Right of a nation beset by the forces of darkness in which Christians are threatened with marginalization and persecution, the implication being that desperate times call for desperate measures. On the other hand, there is Alberta’s declension narrative of an evangelical subculture that has projected a threat to its existence and has sold its soul for power and wealth. It is clear, I think, that American populist evangelicals have overestimated the existential threat to themselves and to America, and their apocalyptic rhetoric is often disconnected from reality. But that is not to say that American populist evangelicals are completely wrong in their sense of marginalization and exclusion, and a weak point of the book is how Alberta persistently goes out of his way to pooh pooh that sense of marginalization (see, e.g., pp. 122-23). In short, Alberta writes as an “elite adjacent” evangelical who is apparently pretty satisfied with the current cultural situation.
If Alberta were more familiar with the literature treating recent American cultural warfare (e.g., sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America) he might have produced a more nuanced book that could begin to bridge the divide and facilitate dialogue between the polarized groups. As it is, the book is well worth reading as long as the author’s Tendenz and commitments are recognized.
Here are ten books (actually more than ten are mentioned) that I regard as theologically formative. By “theologically formative” I don’t mean the most important or the most influential. Rather, I’m speaking of books that have been particularly significant, for a variety of reasons, for me personally. In some cases, they are widely regarded as theological classics; others are more niche, but all have stood the test of time.
St. Irenaeus, Against All Heresies—This early patristic work is much more than a catalog of Christian Gnostic heresies; it articulates a redemptive-historical view of salvation as participation in Christ, the Second Adam, who fixes what the first Adam did wrong and so “recapitulates,” or sums up under a new head, human history. I have found that the later theologians with whom I particularly resonate tend to have Irenaean overtones (e.g., Calvin, Nevin, Torrance). Here I think, for example, of Julie Canlis’s wonderful Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Eerdmans, 2010), with its unpacking of the Irenaean, participatory dimension in John Calvin’ theology.
St. Augustine, Confessions—This classic of Christian religious autobiography serves as a fitting introduction to the greatest of the Western church fathers. Augustine’s Christian Platonism, with its themes of “faith seeking understanding” and participation in God, was dominant in the West until the high Middle Ages, and it continues to be retrieved in the Nouvelle Theologie and Radical Orthodoxy even today. Here I had to choose between Augustine and Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Athanasius is attractive in that he reminds us that the purpose of Christ’s saving work was much more than an abstract forensic exercise; it is to reconnect us with God, who is the source of light and life. Alas, the nod went to Augustine because I am, after all, a Western Christian.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion—Reading though the Institutes carefully reminds us that the Reformed tradition is broader and deeper than the later federal theology codified in Hodge and Berkhof. Calvin’s theocentric piety and focus on union with Christ continue to be as relevant today as they were in the sixteenth century. And that opening paragraph of Book III of the Institutes is pure gold: “How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only begotten Son—not for Christ’s own private use, but that he might enrich poor and needy men? First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” I can think of more than a few theologians today who should strive to emulate Calvin’s “lucid brevity.”
Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith—Although 20th-century scholarship dubbed him the “father of modern liberal theology,” in the 19th century Schleiermacher was often viewed as a bridge back to orthodoxy (both interpretations have value). He had the good sense to realize that, over against Kant’s view of Jesus as helpful but ultimately dispensable, if one wishes to be a Christian then Christ must be central. Thus, “Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion, and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” Schleiermacher also emphasized the Pauline and Irenaean theme of Christ as the “second Adam,” and this then became common in European theology through the Mediating Theologians, and was eventually foregrounded in conservative Reformed biblical theology by Geerhardus Vos. One 19th-century American theologian aptly described Schleiermacher as “the Origen of his age,” and Charles Hodge, who sat under Schleiermacher’s preaching in Berlin, wrote that he expected to see the great German in heaven! Of course, Schleiermacher was Karl Barth’s bête noire, but I’m convinced that Barth’s response to Schleiermacher was ultimately less than adequate. Fortunately, we now have a new English translation/critical edition of The Christian Faith, and Schleiermacher scholarship is on an upswing.
John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence—Published in 1846, this volume provides both a defense of Calvin’s eucharistic doctrine and a wonderful introduction to the soteriology of the Mercersburg Theology movement we associate with John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff. In it, Nevin called out much of the American Reformed community for its rationalistic Zwinglianism and lack of sacramental sensibility. It also provoked a heated debate between Nevin and Charles Hodge over the nature of the Reformed tradition. In the opinion of most historians who have studied the matter, Nevin won the debate on points! More accessible is Nevin’s The Anxious Bench, a surgical dissection—both theological and psychological—of Charles Finney’s revivalism.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century—Having grown up in a religious context where the Puritans were lauded for their “warmth of piety” (remember all those Banner of Truth Trust reprints?), and having grown really tired of the religious subjectivity on steroids of evangelicalism, I was pretty much done with the Puritans. But reading the Harvard atheist English professor Perry Miller on the New England Puritans finally helped me to make sense of them as people. It’s now fashionable in historical circles to sneer at Miller, but a good deal of what he wrote has stood the test of time and he’s fun to read.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture—This volume has helped generations of Christians begin to navigate the conflicting claims of Christ and culture. While the work is somewhat dated in that the question is now also Christ and cultures (plural), I (and my students) continue to find Niebuhr’s five-fold typology—Christ against culture (Anabaptism), Christ and culture in paradox (Lutheranism), Christ transforming culture (Calvinism), Christ above culture (Thomism), and the Christ of culture (liberalism)—illuminating.
Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ—Anyone interested in Torrance should start with this beautiful, elegant little book. It provides a wonderful primer in Torrance’s notion of the “vicarious humanity of Christ.”
Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption—This book rocked my world when I was a seminary student. Gaffin’s development of Geerhardus Vos’s second-Adam Christology, with particular focus on the resurrection as the climax of Christ’s redemptive work, helped me to move beyond the conventional evangelical transactional view of salvation to a more participatory understanding of salvation as union with Christ.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue—This volume almost singlehandedly stimulated a popular revival of interest in virtue ethics. MacIntyre’s argument—that, having lost sight of the teleology of human existence, people today have also lost any sense of the virtues that contribute to human flourishing, and ethical reflection has been largely reduced to “emotivism” (how we feel about it)—remains a compelling description of our situation. Also important is the sequel volume, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? Reading these volumes helped me to deepen my understanding of ethical reflection.
[Editor’s Note: This is the first EcclesialCalvinist post in quite some time. I’m hopeful that this will mark a return to more regular posting.]
My friend Peter Schmiechen, prominent United Church of Christ theologian and former President of Lancaster Theological Seminary, has written a stimulating book on the decline of the Protestant Mainline (or what Martin Marty of the University of Chicago called the “Sideline” and Edward Farley of Vanderbilt termed the “Oldline,” both terms, of course, signaling an eclipse). As the subtitle indicates, Schmiechen’s Tradition in Crisis: The Case for Centric Protestants (Wipf and Stock, 2022) does not just diagnose problems but offers suggestions for a way forward. I’ll add that Peter and I have discussed some of these issues at length. Those conversations have been frank and spirited, and I appreciate his willingness to dialogue.
NB: The volume reviewed here will be the focus of the 2023 Mercersburg Convocation, held at Lancaster Theological Seminary on May 22-23, 2023. I will be attending and look forward to the discussion.
The subject matter of this volume is serious and pressing. At this point, there can be little doubt that the Protestant mainline is in dire straits numerically. The Presbyterian Church (USA), the mainline denomination with which I am most familiar by virtue of family history and personal involvement, recently recorded an annual membership loss of 53,105 (a decline from 1,193,770 in 2021 to 1,140,665 in 2022). Moreover, the denomination is predominantly older (58.2% are age 56 and older), female (61.48%), and white (89.08%). Schmiechen’s own United Church of Christ has experienced similar decline. The takeaway from these patterns is that the Protestant mainline has failed to hold on to the younger generations and to males, and that, demographically speaking, the future is bleak—there is not much of a younger generation coming up to replace the losses. Of course, as Schmiechen rightly notes, things are not exactly rosy on the right either. More conservative denominations, which grew during the latter part of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion [1972]), have now started to plateau or decline in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Schmiechen’s discussion is textured and complex. He argues that while mainline Protestants read the Bible differently from conservative Protestants, they did not do a good job of justifying their hermeneutical approach. In addition, the impulse for evangelism collapsed (not terribly surprising, I would add, given the loss of the notion of eternal punishment), and, finally, mainline worship practices have sent mixed signals in that they have largely borrowed from other traditions rather than giving expression to their own (pp. 12-14). I think this analysis is basically correct.
Central to Schmiechen’s proposal is the notion of “centric Protestants,” which he defines, first of all, over against “liberals” with their anthropological optimism. By “liberal” he seems to have in mind the position H. Richard Niebuhr famously pilloried in the following terms: “A God without wrath brought men without sin in to a kingdom without judgment by the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” (Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, p. 193). But he also defines these “centric Protestants” over against Christians on the right—Confessional Protestants of the Lutheran or Reformed sort with their focus on “absolute” doctrine and Scripture, Anabaptists, Pentecostals and Charismatics, and Fundamentalists with their inerrant Bibles (p. 17).
Here, of course, an obvious question presents itself: Does Schmiechen’s notion of “centric Protestants” represent a coherent and sustainable theological position with a significant constituency, or is it an exercise in nostalgia, shaped by Schmiechen’s own formation in a mid-twentieth-century context dominated by Barth, Brunner, and the Niebuhrs, for a time that is long past and gone? Or, to phrase it differently, if conservative historian D. G. Hart can define “evangelicals” as “conservative Protestants who like Billy Graham,” could not Schmiechen’s centric Protestants perhaps be defined as “a few mainline Protestants who still like the Niebuhr brothers”? That the answer to this question is not immediately obvious is a potential problem for Schmiechen’s proposal.
So who are these “centric Protestants”? According to Schmiechen, they are shaped by three historical moments. First, they “celebrate the essential message of the sixteenth-century Reformation, namely the word of promise in Jesus Christ, understood as grace.” Second, they “are open to the issues raised by the enlightenment,” and they reconstructed Protestant theology on a christological rather than bibliological foundation. And finally, they have responded to the twentieth-century struggles regarding warfare, genocide, and social justice, and the stark realism regarding human condition that entailed (pp. 15-16). That historical schema strikes me as useful and illuminating.
The remaining chapters of the book focus on Schmiechen’s positive proposal for reenergizing centric Protestantism. Chapter 2 is on restoring “community.” Schmiechen rightly notes that the turn to Augustine and the Reformers that characterized the twentieth-century revitalization of Protestant theology involved the recognition that union with Christ (a theme crucial to both Luther and Calvin) involves a horizontal dimension—union together in the church as community (p. 44). Furthermore, this emphasis on community was powerfully shaped by twentieth-century debates about the relationship between “sacrificial love” and “coercive power,” debates that issued in the praxis focus of the Civil Rights Movement and Liberation Theology (pp. 46-47). The upshot of all this has been a decentering of church, doctrine, and theology by a notion of christological presence in community. As Schmiechen puts it, centric Protestants “are unable to endorse the absolute claims of churches regarding Bible doctrine or episcopal authority, or the attempts to preserve and protect the social status quo which wishes to perpetuate divisions by race, class, and gender. At the same time, they reject the attempts to reduce Jesus to moral teachings or separate religion or Jesus from the community of faith. They are open to radical criticism of institutional life, but refuse to give up on the church as the community of Christ” (p. 48). Schmiechen then provides a useful typology of different conceptions of how Christ is present in community (pp. 50-51). But this understanding of community is threatened, Schmiechen contends, by a variety of factors, most of them related to individualism, in which the church is construed as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals, salvation is viewed in terms of individual needs and desires, and the Eucharist is viewed as an exercise in individual penance (pp. 54-60).
Chapter 3, entitled “Sin and Grace,” is basically a Niebuhr-approved rendition of Christian Realism. Here the claim is that Genesis 1—3, read as neither ancient myth to be dispensed with (per liberalism) or literal history (per fundamentalism), provides a [regulative?] foundation for affirming the goodness of creation, the reality and tragedy of sin, the appropriate limits of our natures, and the breakdown of relationships (pp. 65-66). Schmiechen clearly regards this recovery of the doctrine of sin, and its corollary the goodness of creation, to be vital and even essential to the centric Protestant position: “In an unexpected way, the doctrine of sin is the keystone holding its counterparts together. If you remove it, the others collapse. The reason for this is quite simple. Realism affirms the realty of sin and evil, but also that they constitute a fall from the original goodness of creation. . . . The doctrine of sin holds creation and redemption together: something has gone seriously wrong, corrupting the individual and society, but it arises within the world” (p. 69). It is precisely here that Schmiechen locates the discomfort that centric Protestants sense over against both liberals, who deny that sin is individual, and many conservatives, who deny that sin can be corporate (pp. 74-78).
Here I should note, however, that Schmiechen’s presentation of the “goodness of creation” seems underdeveloped. For example, does this “good” creation order include the gender binary, as Genesis 1:26-28 would seem to suggest? This strikes me as a significant point, in that the goodness of creation is now one of the most controverted points in theology, and pessimism on this point helps to account for the rise of Gnostic ways of thinking in contemporary culture.
The fourth chapter (“Authority”) addresses an issue raised earlier in the book—that centric Protestants have often failed to provide a coherent account of their interpretation of Scripture and their approach to religious authority. Here the point of departure is Mercersburg theologian Philip Schaff’s The Principle of Protestantism (1845), which speaks of a twofold principle—sola gratia (justification by grace through faith) and sola scriptura. Schmiechen argues that of these two, the material principle (grace) has priority over the formal (Scripture), and that Scripture is to be read in light of God’s grace in Jesus Christ (pp. 81-82). Schmiechen also recognizes, in Niebuhrian fashion (cf. H. R. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture), that Christians must acknowledge many authorities and that grace/Christ must function for centric Protestants as the center of a matrix of authorities. Thus, centric Protestants approach Scripture seriously, but also with considerably more flexibility than their more conservative counterparts.
The last chapter, “Worship and the Vital Center,” recognizes that the renewal of worship will be vital to the future of centric Protestantism. Here Schmiechen argues, first of all, that worship must be an “encounter with the God who has redeemed us in Christ” and that themes of grace and community must be central (pp. 107-110). Second, he contends that worship must invite people to inhabit the biblical story of grace and salvation in Christ: “Christian worship is the place where our self-stories are told, judged, revised, and rewritten in light of the story of Jesus Christ. . . . Put in another way, we are not talking about enhancing or completing our stories, but deconstructing our stories and being re-formed by the story of Jesus” (p. 114). And finally, in contrast to the somber tone of much worship today, worship must involve “the response of faith, joy, and gratitude” (p. 116).
There is much to commend in this volume; it presents a deeply informed take on the trials and tribulations of mainline Protestantism by a seasoned mainline-church veteran and theological educator. I sense that Schmiechen’s understanding of the historical elements that have shaped what he terms “centric Protestants” is pretty compelling on the descriptive level, and that his theological programme may well be attractive to those who find other alternatives lacking.
Moreover, I would not want to diminish the importance of what Schmiechen is seeking to achieve—nothing less than the theological renewal of the mainline. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the collapse of the Protestant mainline in this country has left a void that neither Roman Catholicism nor evangelicalism has been able to fill. This argument has been made in various ways by, for example, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in his book Bad Religion: How We Became and Nation of Heretics (2012), and by Jody Bottum in his An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014). Like it or not, the Protestant mainline once provided the nation with a vocabulary and conceptual apparatus for speaking and thinking about national character, duty, obligation, and civic virtue. Now that voice is largely gone, and the nation is not the better for it.
I realize that the audience for this blog consists largely of readers who are right-of-center theologically, and that such people will likely have significant differences with Schmiechen over issues pertaining to the authority of Scripture and the dogmatic tradition. While not minimizing the significance of those concerns, I want to focus on some other areas of friendly criticism.
First, I’m just not sure that there are many “centric Protestants” left in the world. The mainline churches of today are quite different from the mainline churches of, say, the 1950s. Something significant happened in the 1960s (and Schmiechen at various points seems to concede that the 1960s were a watershed in this story). The Protestant mainline entered the 1960s at the height of prominence and cultural influence; it left the 1960s increasingly marginalized and frantically accommodating itself to a culture that had changed drastically. No longer influential, the mainline was increasingly influenced. The question is, what happened and why.
Second, a significant part of the answer to that question is that the Protestant mainline accommodated itself wholesale to what sociologists call “expressive individualism,” and, furthermore, that mainline-church theology was to a considerable degree reconfigured in an expressive-individualist idiom. Here the individual is defined in terms of self-expression and self-actualization over against the constraints of society and even nature itself. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues noted in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), the “expressive culture . . . reveals its difference from earlier patterns by its readiness to treat normative commitments as so many alternative strategies of self-fulfillment. What has dropped out are the old normative expectations of what makes life worth living. With the freedom to define oneself anew in a plethora of identities has also come an attenuation of those common understandings that enable us to recognize the virtue of the other” (p. 48). In other words, expressive individualism has robbed us of a common moral conceptuality beyond the formal concept of freedom without much in the way of limits, and this explains how the Protestant mainline went from being a key consensus voice for virtue, obligation, and duty to a divisive bully pulpit for what African-American theologian Carl Ellis has termed “do-your-own-thingism.” How many sermons on personal duty, fidelity, and obligation have you heard in mainline church circles recently?
While Schmiechen’s discussion of individualism is less than satisfying, he occasionally seems to sense a problem, but sees it as a “liberal” problem rather than a problem for the mainline more generally: “Much of this goes back to the tendency of liberals to define freedom in terms of self-actualization and self-expression . . . When dealing with oppressive practices on a social scale toward woman or minorities, liberals join in protesting for justice. But they also tend to carve our exemptions from critical analysis in the realm of personal relations such as love, marriage or family, even though such practices might be harmful to women and children” (p. 75).
From this embrace of expressive individualism by the Protestant mainline beginning in the 1960s, it is a relatively small step to the defense by many in the mainline of the contemporary sexual chaos with 57 genders and drag-queen Sunday School. This also helps to explain the demographic problem of the mainline, and why there are so few children and younger couples in many mainline churches. I sometimes attend PCUSA congregations, and the consistent pattern there is small and old. By contrast, the ACNA parishes that my two children attend in Chapel Hill, NC and Washington, DC are bursting with young couples and children. My clear sense is that Christian couples who are trying to carve out a stable home life and nurture children in the context of a culture seemingly gone crazy are highly unlikely to attend mainline churches where sexual chaos is not only tolerated but celebrated. It is also worth noting that this has created severe tension with the Christian tradition, which foregrounds self-denial and self-discipline and is manifestly NOT about sexual libertinism. From what I can see, most mainline theologians today either theoretically embrace this libertinism or they ignore it. In fact, the only mainline theologian I am aware of engaging these issues in a constructive way is the British feminist Sarah Coakley, who is seeking a middle path between libertinism and repression in books like The New Asceticism (2015).
But how was mainline theology accommodated to expressive individualism? This is a story I’ve only begun to ponder in recent months, but here’s a tentative outline. In addition to classical Protestant influences, there were significant Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment factors. Mainline Protestantism, particularly in its classical liberal and Social Gospel forms, was heavily influenced by Kant’s deontological approach to ethics with its emphasis on duty and obligation. Schleiermacher’s christocentrism and view of theology as funded by experience were also significant, and here it is particularly intriguing to note that Schleiermacher viewed the human being as characterized, religiously at least, by radical dependence (religion consists, according to Schleiermacher, in a “feeling of utter dependence” upon the Whence). Then there was Hegel’s dialectical approach to history and the historicism that it generated, but even more significant for subsequent history was Hegel’s framing of the human condition in terms of radical freedom. This was, in fact, a point where these two stars at the University of Berlin differed strenuously. As Hegel famously quipped, if Schleiermacher is right and the essence of religion is the feeling of utter dependence, then “a dog is the best Christian”! In the mid-nineteenth century Hegel’s stress on freedom was picked up by Karl Marx and applied to economics; then in the twentieth century Marx’s Hegelian view of freedom was expanded far beyond economics and social class by the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism to include nearly everything, and the theoretical basis for justifying expressive individualism in the broader culture was in place. With their culturalist orientation, many mainline Protestants simply went with the flow, and the results have been disastrous for the Protestant mainline.
Note, however, that one implication of the narrative in the paragraph above is that there are yet resources within the mainline Protestant tradition that can be drawn upon in order to address the problems of expressive individualism. For example, what if the human condition is better framed in terms of dependence (Schleiermacher) rather than autonomy and freedom (Hegel)? The argument can be made in a host of ways that as humans we are radically dependent beings. We start out completely dependent on our parents and we often end our lives in states of radical dependence upon others. And in between we are in fact dependent on others and upon God in a host of ways that we don’t fully understand. Moreover, we certainly don’t create ourselves! Once we recognize those realities we are freed up to recognize the costs of the current ways of thinking—for example, the ways that expressive individualism is corrosive of genuine community, from the family on up, that is necessary for human flourishing. Moreover, drawing on these other resources could well enable the mainline to recover a language of personal virtue, obligation, and duty that is so needful today.
All in all, this book is a significant contribution, though not the last word on what has happened to the Protestant mainline.
It’s with considerable interest that I’ve been watching some people I know in the conservative Reformed community getting in line to endorse Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign for the Presidency. Evangelical Old Testament scholar Tremper “you need to read my book” Longman told us on Facebook that he was voting for Biden some weeks back, and more recently Sam Logan, the Associate International Director at the World Reformed Fellowship, posted this on Facebook: “Three of the MANY reasons why I, as an evangelical Christian who opposes abortion, will vote for Mr. Biden are: 1) the implicit warnings about our current POTUS presented in Eric Alterman’s book, WHEN PRESIDENTS LIE: A HISTORY OF OFFICIAL DECEPTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, 2) the INCREDIBLE list of life-long Republicans, many of whom worked closely with Mr. Trump, who publicly oppose his re-election, and 3) the public statements about Mr. Trump by close members of his own family.”
I’m a bit mystified by Logan’s logic. Perhaps he can name one or two politicians who do not lie, but I’m not going to hold my breath. And while there’s no doubt that a raft of establishment Republicans hate Trump’s guts, I’m guessing that may actually reflect favorably on Trump. Finally, while I’ve gathered that the Trump family has been somewhat dysfunctional, the fact that some members of the larger Trump clan don’t like its best-known member just may be neither here nor there. Perhaps Logan has the inside scoop on the Trump family dynamics, but I doubt it. Color me unconvinced.
What is clear is that a fair number of evangelical elite types are registering their support for Biden, the candidate of the Democratic Party. Now such people won’t come right out and say that they support the policies of the Democratic Party platform—pretty much unrestricted access to abortion, the transgender agenda, and so forth—but a Biden victory in November will clearly advance those causes. We can speculate as to whether such people have “softened” on some of these moral issues (I suspect that the answer to that question will vary from person to person), but what is clear is that THE ISSUE is antipathy to Trump and what he represents.
I’ll grant that, on the personal level, the choice between Trump and Biden is unhappy. Neither man is a paragon of virtue. But despite recent polls suggesting that voters view Joe Biden as more honest than Trump, in fact Biden has a well-earned reputation for telling whoppers. More pressing seems to be the conviction by these evangelical types that Trump is just too randy to occupy the White House. Once again, the argument runs into problems, not least the fact that we’ve had quite a run of legendary libidos in the Oval Office (JFK, LBJ, and WJC come to mind and all of them were Democrats, so I guess the Republicans were due). Then there’s the fact that Joe Biden apparently has quite a history of inappropriate behavior toward women. In any event, the argument that Trump is manifestly morally unfit to occupy the White House while Joe Biden is the picture of rectitude doesn’t wash.
It’s also worth noting that the evangelical Never Trumpers are in the awkward position of making a dubious moral fitness argument to counter concerns about what will almost certainly be the profoundly negative cultural impact of a Biden presidency. If he is reelected, Trump will still be gone in four years, and at least we know that he is not hostile to people of faith. The fallout of a Biden presidency will likely be with us for generations. If Joe Biden wins, the Little Sisters of Charity and anybody else who affirms traditional morality had better lawyer up.
So, if these evangelical acolytes for Biden are not keen on the details of the Democratic Party platform, and their moral fitness argument is weak, what is going on? The short version is that this is class warfare. Almost without exception, as far as I can tell, the evangelical Never Trumpers come from the ranks of the elites, and the simple fact is that such progressive evangelicals have a really big problem with classism. They don’t like “the deplorables” any more than Hillary and Barack and Joe do, and they will go way out of their way to differentiate themselves from the hoi polloi they view as their intellectual and cultural inferiors. To use the language of sociology, the “boundary posturing mechanism” du jour is opposition to Trump.
Moreover, they care more about being acceptable to the movers and shakers of elite culture than they do about working for justice and mercy on the biggest issue facing our day. To be sure, they may sometimes endorse the abstractions of identity politics and critical theory, but the greatest single moral issue today is the way that entrenched elites have been screwing the lower classes—the elites stick it to the black underclass through the politics of dependency and they stick it to the white underclass through the politics of contempt and marginalization.
In a previous blog post, I noted that the gulf between traditional white evangelicals and woke/SJW white evangelicals is now unbridgeable, and that that fact bodes ill for the future of the evangelical movement. The movement of evangelical elites into the Biden camp further underscores the unbearable lightness of the evangelical movement as it now exists. We are now at a point where professed evangelicals are questioning not just the political judgment but the very Christianity of other professed evangelicals. I just can’t see people on both sides of these divides continuing to worship together—the disagreements are now so elemental—and that is probably the end of the road for evangelicalism as we know it.
Well, let’s put a fork in it . . . it’s done! Evangelicalism, that is. The social pressures of the current situation have revealed a truth many have suspected for quite a while. The simple truth, with apologies in advance for using Gertrude Stein’s overworked phrase, is that “there is no there there.” At least not anymore.
Two weeks ago on Facebook I commented, “One of the results of the recent waves of violence is that the gap between progressive/woke white people who view absolutely everything through the lens of (perfectly abstract) critical race theory and other white people (who recognize the cultural complexity and ambiguity of social relationships) is now unbridgeable. The implications of this split for the evangelical church are not good at all.” Unfortunately, I was right.
I’ve watched the representatives of “Big Eva” (i.e., the evangelical institutional establishment) falling over themselves to endorse the now conventional systemic-racism/white-privilege/white-guilt/white-fragility narrative. Christianity Today has called for white churches to pay reparation to blacks (and let’s not forget the former editor of that magazine, Mark Galli, excoriating evangelical Trump voters as something less than Christian). I’ve read posts by evangelical scholars calling for reparation and endorsing the erasing of history on university campuses by renaming buildings named for nineteenth-century southern white figures. Apparently, much of the evangelical elite is now embracing Kulturprotestantismus with great enthusiasm.
Parenthetically, I find all this both amusing and sad. It’s been said that wokeness is the single best indicator of white privilege, and close examination suggests that the recent flurries of virtue signaling probably have more to do with not-so-subtle class warfare against “deplorable” WPWDPLs (“white people we don’t particularly like”) and efforts to join with the secular elites than a genuine desire to help black people (for an insightful and rhetorically powerful treatment of the class issues in play right now, see this piece by Victor Davis Hanson).
Then there’s the awkward biblicism in service to whatever the current cultural fad is. As David Bebbington famously observed, evangelicals are “biblicists”–they love the Bible. But evangelical use of the Bible is often pretty wooden. I’ve studied this stuff for years and for the life of me I can’t find a biblical case for what passes for “antiracism” in the current, trendy, cultural-Marxist sense of the term. The biblical writers were certainly aware of racial differences (on balance, “ethnic differences” is probably a more precise term here; see Rodney Sadler, Can a Cushite Change His Skin?: An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible [2009]). For the OT writers, not only could the Cushite not change his dark skin, but no “Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, not even in the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). And the fact that Ruth the Moabite made it in the back door doesn’t change the text of Deuteronomy! By cultural-Marxist standards the Bible doesn’t come off too well.
And with regard to slavery, I’ve finally (and reluctantly) come to the conclusion that Harvard Professor Jon Levenson was correct when he wrote that “neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is opposed to slavery” (Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil [1994], 142). Furthermore, to the extent that the current structural-racism/white-guilt/white-privilege narrative depends on conceptions of corporate, multi-generational moral responsibility and complicity, it probably runs afoul of Ezekiel’s individualism. Recall that the exilic Jews realized that earlier notions of corporate guilt were no longer particularly helpful and so Ezekiel repudiates them with a vigor that caused some rabbis to think he was overturning the teaching of the Pentateuch (see Ezekiel 18:1-20; see also Jeremiah 31:29-30; cf. Exodus 20:5).
In short, the biblical ethical/legal materials, particularly in the OT, are highly contextual and dynamic, and a coherent proof-text argument for wokeness in my judgment can’t be made. Of course, that’s not to say that there is not a Christian case to be made against racism, slavery, and the profoundly invidious hierarchies that are sometimes manifested in human societies. But such arguments must, in my judgment, be made Christologically rather than on the basis of wooden proof texts. The outlines of such an argument were, in fact, suggested by the great Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America: “All the great writers of antiquity were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy as established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America [Mansfield trans.], 413).
But things are not much better on the other side of the argument. While sensing that things are going off the rails and fast, many more conservative evangelicals have difficulty articulating a coherent case to the contrary. Some try to counter the racialism (really a form of “soft racism”) of the Left only to fall off the other side of the horse into racism themselves. It’s also telling that those who want to make substantive arguments against the progressive liberal race narrative must almost of necessity draw on the work of seminal African-American scholars such as Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWorter, or on secular white thinkers such as Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.
The sad fact is that evangelicalism, with its historic and reflexively individualistic focus on saving souls, simply doesn’t have much of anything distinctive to offer in response to the pressing social questions of the day, and to the race question in particular. And seventy or so years of evangelical preoccupation with “Christian worldview” apparently hasn’t gotten us very far either.
For decades now evangelicalism has been suffering from a howling identity crisis, and my sense is that soon the anathemas will start to fly and the movement will further disintegrate. What will happen is that both sides will increasingly view their position on the race issue as a matter of status confessionis (a technical theological term meaning “state of confession,” in which a truth not directly addressed by formal confessions is effectively elevated to confessional status because of its saliency in a particular historical context). On the evangelical left, in the patois of pietism (to which evangelicals seemingly are addicted) the wokeness/identity-politics package is now being increasingly touted as a “gospel issue.” On the evangelical right, there is an increasing suspicion that the structural-racism/white-privilege/white-guilt narrative is not only unhelpful but also corrosive of a genuinely Christian ecclesiology and Christology, and that what is really going on is a redefinition of the church along lines suggested by liberation-theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez—the church as the oppressed and those in solidarity with them. In other words, a head-on collision is coming.
So, let’s put a fork in it. It’s done. I frankly don’t see how a religious movement with such scant theological resources and depth can survive.
Scientists tell us that the sun’s magnetic poles flip their orientation about every eleven years or so. North becomes south and south becomes north, and then it flips back, completing the 22-year Solar Cycle. Analogous flips occur in American politics, though not nearly as often and they take a lot longer to play out. We seem to be in the midst of such a shift today—in important ways, the Democrats have become the Republicans and the Republicans have become the Democrats.
Take the Democrats. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt (really from the “Prairie Populist” William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the twentieth century) until Bill Clinton they were the party of the working class, as a potent alliance of urban workers and rural agriculture was able to dominate American politics for many decades in the wake of the Great Depression. The impoverished and socially stratified South was solidly Democrat (there was, of course, a racial component to this in that the Republicans were still seen as the “party of Lincoln”). Reflecting this base, the Democratic party tended by and large to be economically liberal and socially conservative. Many were overt populists.
The Republicans, on the other hand, were the party of business and the upper-middle and upper-class establishment. As such, it tended to be economically conservative and socially progressive. For many, fiscal conservatism and social progressivism went hand in hand. It’s no accident, for example, that a key impulse toward socially progressive Supreme Court decisions has tended to come from Republican appointees (e.g., Earl Warren, Harry Blackmun, and more recently Anthony Kennedy).
Now, however, the Democrats have repudiated the working class (especially those “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion”) and have hitched their wagon to globalized big business and to the woke New Class of university-educated and ideologically driven manipulators of symbolic knowledge. They are socially progressive and they cater to the interests of really big money (that’s not exactly economic conservatism in the traditional sense, but it will do for the purposes of this comparison). Some of the older rhetoric about “care for the poor” continues, but it is vestigial and rings increasingly hollow.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have in recent decades become the vehicle for a visceral populist reaction against globalism and social progressivism and, of course, against the corrosion of local community and religious values that inevitably accompanies such globalist progressivism. The spendthrift economic policies of recent Republican administrations suggest that fiscal conservatism has been left far behind, even as many in the party have embraced social conservatism. This shift in focus from economic conservation to values conservation suggests that a decisive change is taking place in what it means to be a “conservative.”
This shift in Republican sensibilities began under the former Democrat Ronald Reagan, stalled to some degree during the “Olde-Republican” Bush One and Bush Two administrations, and has achieved hurricane-force intensity with Trump. It’s also worth noting that the “flip” among the Democrats is more complete than the shift in the Republican context, and at this point the Democrats may well be more ideologically coherent than the Republicans (which certainly didn’t use to be the case). Where all this will go is hard to predict, though the patterns we are seeing with Trump are also playing out elsewhere in the world as the economic limitations and cultural barrenness of liberal progressivism become increasingly obvious.
Also worth noting is how these shifts have been facilitated by the enormous economic expansion of the post-World War II era and the technological sophistication that has accompanied it. For example, it takes a lot of money and technology to facilitate the Democrats’ embrace of expressive individualism with its quest for sexual autonomy and freedom from the onerous constraints of nature itself. And while many Republicans rightly sense that expressive individualism is culturally rotten and distorts the fundamental contours of human existence, they seem to think that the checkbook for government spending, particularly on middle-class entitlement programs, is bottomless. All this suggests that neither party’s path is ultimately sustainable.
