Tag: civil religion

Church and State no. 1: A tricky question in a muddled world

Church and State no. 1: A tricky question in a muddled world

This essay (see the series) aims to help ordinary Christians rightly consider the relationship between the church and the state. This is important because Christians receive many contradictory messages about this issue. Some Christian influencers call for believers to “take America back for God.” Others just want good, old-fashioned Christian values to influence society, and they feel marginalized because Mayberry is gone and isn’t coming back. Still others just want the church to have nothing to do with politics—perhaps to the extent that their churches neglect to speak truth to a decadent culture.

So, there’s good reason to consider the “church v. state” issue with some fresh eyes—to go back to basics. I won’t address everything about this large topic, but I hope to establish a foundation for thinking about this issue the right way. This essay consists of six articles, of which this is the first.

In this introductory article I’ll sketch two paradigm shifts which impact any discussion along this line from an American context, introduce three common operating environments in which churches often operate, and provide a preview of this essay’s conclusions. Then, I’ll spend the bulk of the essay discussing five foundational principles that will help us work through the “church v. state” issue. I labored to ground these principles firmly in the biblical storyline, rather than in creeds, confessions, or political theology. This doesn’t mean I don’t value tradition; it just means first principles on important issues ought to be explicitly or implicitly scriptural.

Paradigm shift no. 1—the death of “Christendom” and the like

In the 20 centuries (and counting) since Jesus’ first advent, Christians in the West have often operated in an environment that assumed a church and state nexus. Since the time of Constantine, the church had presumed it would have the support of the state and of the culture around it. The tremors of the Enlightenment cracked this wide open.

But, even after this earthquake, the church still occupied a position of unquestioned influence and status in many nations—a defacto Christian-ish ethos pervaded. For example, as late as 1952 the National Council of Churches launched a $500,000 advertising blitz to promote the Revised Standard Version translation of the bible and publicly presented President Harry Truman with his own copy[1]—this is unthinkable in 2023.

Figure 1. Excerpt from Peter Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures (New York: OUP, 1999), p. 70.

This situation began to change rapidly in the mid-20th century, when for perhaps the first time in its history the church in the Western world began to grapple with how to understand its role vis-à-vis the state as a minority community in a self-consciously secular world.[2] Some flavors of the American church have long responded to this with a defensive impulse which stems from its memory of a different time, when “while the state was not officially Christian, society seemed to promote values that were deemed essentially Christian.”[3] Whether this idyllic reality existed at meaningful scale outside of 1950s television sets is open to question.[4] However, that era is gone, secularism is here, the church has a minority status, and one theologian aptly likened this new world to an airplane flying blind without instruments, not knowing where it is or where it’s going.[5]

Certain American believers sometimes react by trying to re-Christianize society on a superficial level—to recapture a largely imaginary lost glory. One Christian historian described Victorian-era America as having “a veneer of evangelical Sunday-school piety” that amounted to “a dime-store millennium.”[6] It’s still common to hear older believers complain about the demise of compulsory prayer and bible reading in public schools. This ghost of a so-called “Christian nation” is a monkey some flavors of the American church have trouble shaking off its back—it often lurks in the background in the guise of a Christian-ish American exceptionalism or super-patriotism. 

Paradigm shift no. 2—Christianity shifts to the global south

The second paradigm shift for the church v. state issue is that many, many Christians now live in an environment that never knew Christianity as a civil religion[7] and are not handicapped by that cultural memory. Over the past 120 years, Christianity has at last become a truly global phenomenon. For many centuries, since the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean basin in the early 7th century, Christianity had been largely a Western religion.[8] But, as one church historian has noted, the period between 1815 to 1914 (the great age of missions) “constituted the greatest century which Christianity had thus far known.”[9] This missions movement produced a church that is now global and no longer beholden to the patronage of Western benefactors. These so-called “younger churches” are hungry, energetic, and often far outpace the enthusiasm and vitality of their Western “parents.”

There were now new centers in every continent, resulting in a map of Christianity that, rather than seeing it as having its base in the West, and from there expanding outward, sees Christianity as a polycentric reality, where many areas that had earlier been peripheral have become new centers … the new map of Christianity does not have one center, but many. Financial resources are still concentrated in the North Atlantic, as are educational and other institutions. But, theological creativity is no longer limited to that area.[10]

Indeed, most Christians now live nowhere near Europe or North America.

In 1900, 82% of Christians lived in the North. By 2020 this figure had dropped dramatically to just 33% … The future of World Christianity is largely in the hands of Christians in the global South, where most Christians practice very different kinds of the faith compared to those in the North. Christianity has shifted from a tradition that was once majority global North to one that is majority global South.[11]

Many of these Christians did not grow up in a “Christianized” culture, and so their thinking of the church and the state isn’t colored by sepia-toned memories of a bygone age. We can learn from these brothers and sisters and better appreciate the limitations of our own situation. So, for example, when an Argentine theologian critiques the culture Christianity of the “American Way of Life,” the American church ought to listen to its brother:

Christian salvation is, among other things, liberation from the world as a closed system, from the world that has room only for a God bound by sociology, from the “consistent” world that rules out God’s free, unpredictable action … The gospel, then, is a call not only to faith but also to repentance, to a break with the world. And it is only in the extent to which we are free from this world that we are able to serve our fellow men.[12]

This is a call to, among other things, divorce oneself from secular values and allegiances—including political ones. Perhaps because the author doesn’t come from a context where Christianity has been a civil religion, he can read the New Testament without explicitly or unwittingly conflating church and state—and that makes him (and others) worth listening to.

Three common operating environments for the church

Broadly speaking, churches operate in one of these three operating environments:

  1. Church in alliance with the state. In this arrangement the church and the state are generally bound together. Legislation and public policy will allegedly be informed by purportedly Christian values. This can take various forms. Theonomy envisions the church as the state (basically a theocracy);[13] the populist rhetoric from what is sometimes misleadingly labeled as “Christian nationalism” is downstream from some aspects of this theory. Constantinianism refers to the state controlling the church—when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to faith he made Christianity the state religion and presided over councils about Christian doctrine as both the head of state and as the alleged head of the church. In Western Europe, many nations still retain the emaciated shell of a state church—even though that influence is now largely symbolic. Or, in a softer version of the same, varieties of American exceptionalism[14] advocate for America’s special role in God’s providence and its resulting obligation to honor God in all it does, or at least America’s role as “a communal paragon of justice, freedom, and equality.”
  2. Pluralism. This is also known as a “free church in a free state.” The idea is that government’s role is to preserve law and order and provide freedom for citizens to pursue their own religious path or none at all. The state is more of a neutral arbiter or policeman who keeps order.[15] The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution embodies this ethos in its “free exercise” and “establishment” clauses—the government cannot establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise.[16] The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights also reflects this perspective.[17] Baptist churches which understand their heritage (and not all do) have always been champions of this ethos.
  3. Isolation. In its milder forms, this means Christians create their own alternative subcultures for reality (think about the movie The Village). Or, it can mean a church deliberately never speaks of “political issues” and chooses to not teach believers how to engage these topics as responsible citizens. Or, in perhaps its most extreme form, it can take the form of monasticism.[18] 

Many Americans Christians of a certain age and subculture are probably most comfortable with some version of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, some Christians are sick of it all and don’t want any hint of “politics” in the church. Other Christians believe church and state ought to stay separate, each minding their own business—their interests may overlap but their roles and functions are different.[19] Still others are theonomists who want a Christian America. Even more aren’t quite sure what they want and are falling prey to populist, bastardized variations of theonomy-ish talk from right-wing politicians who may or may not actually believe what they say.

What do the scriptures say? Do they provide a way out of this confusing maze?

Five principles—a preview of coming attractions

Here are a preview of the five foundational principles that I believe provide a solid, biblical basis for considering the “church v. state” question. These come from an unapologetically Baptist milieu, and some readers will spot this fairly quickly. Here they are, with a brief description.

  1. There are two kingdoms, Babylon and Jerusalem. Babylon will lose. This is the most fundamental truth about human history, the biblical story, and reality.
  2. God’s kingdom is distinct from every nation state. If we conflate America (or any nation) with the kingdom, we’re making a terrible mistake. “The church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology.”[20]
  3. A Christian’s core identity is as a child of God and a kingdom citizen, and so her principal allegiance must be to God’s kingdom (“Jerusalem”) and not to a nation state. If you’re a Christian, then God doesn’t much care that you’re an American. You now have a kingdom passport, kingdom citizenship, and a kingdom mandate. To the extent our most basic identity is rooted in America rather than God’s kingdom, then we are traitors.
  4. The church’s job is to be a kingdom embassy; a subversive and countercultural society calling outsiders to defect from Babylon and pledge allegiance to Jerusalem. “We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world … The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief.”[21]
  5. Set apart, yet not isolated. The analogy of “church v. state” compared to “home v. work” is helpful. Christians must approach political and social issues as self-conscious outsiders with a kingdom agenda—to tell God’s truth to Babylon. A pluralist operating environment is the best operating environment for a local church.

I hope this brief sketch of the church v. state issue is helpful for you and provides a sure foundation for considering a question that will only get trickier in the coming years. Future articles in this series will discuss each of these five principles in detail.

[1] Peter Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures (New York: OUP, 1999), pp. 4, 90. 

[2] This is an important caveat, because the long Baptist struggle for religious liberty took place within a Christian-ish milieu. What I’m referring to is the church as a minority community in an overtly secular world.  

[3] Justo Gonzalez, Christian Thought Revisited: Three Types of Theology, rev ed. (New York: Orbis, 1999), p. 128.

[4] See especially David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), ch. 34. 

[5] See Carl F.H. Henry, Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief (Wheaton: Crossway, 1990), ch. 1. 

[6] George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) p. 10.

[7] A civil religion is “a religion, or a secular tradition likened to a religion, which serves (officially or unofficially) as a basis for national identity and civic life,” (s.v. “civil,” see s.v. under “compounds,” OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/33575?redirectedFrom=civil+religion (accessed May 08, 2023)). I’m distinguishing this from “Christendom” in which an alleged Christianity has an external and superficial role as a traditional religion (s.v. “christendom,” noun, no. 3c, OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/32437?redirectedFrom=christendom (accessed May 09, 2023). For example, many Latin American countries have a “Christendom” background because of their Roman Catholic heritage, but it’s not necessarily a basis for national identity or civic life—read the Latin American liberation theologians.

[8] Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), pp. 288-294. See also Kenneth S. Latourette, A History of Christianity, vol. 1, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 286-291. 

[9] Kenneth S. Latourette, A History of Christianity, vol. 2, revised ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 1063.

[10] Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol. 2, revised ed. (San Francisco: Harper One, 2010), pp. 525, 526.

[11] Gina Zurlo, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2022), pp. 3-4.

[12] Rene Padilla, Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom, revised ed. (Carlisle: Langham, 2010), p. 42; emphasis in original. This essay is the presentation Padilla gave at the 1974 Lausanne Conference.

[13] On “theocracy,” I mean “[d]omination of the civil power by the ecclesiastical,” (John MacQuarrie, s.v. “theocracy,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed(s). James Childress and John MacQuarrie (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), p. 622).

On theonomy, see Rousas Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito: Chalcedon, 1986). “A Christian theology of the state must challenge the state’s claims of sovereignty or lordship. Only Jesus Christ is lord or sovereign, and the state makes a Molech of itself when it claims sovereignty (Lev. 20:1-5). The church of the twentieth century must be roused out of its polytheism and surrender. The crown rights of Christ the King must be proclaimed,” (p. 10). Emphasis added. Theonomists often insist they do not endorse sacralism and want God-ordained institutions to remain in their own spheres of authority. Yet, one of the church’s jobs is to insist that “every sphere of life [including the government] must be under the rule of God’s word and under the authority of Christ the King,” (Christianity and the State, p. 9). Thus, they would argue this is not a church and state alliance at all. I believe this is a distinction without a meaningful difference.

[14] I’m drawing from John Wilsey’s discussions of “closed” and “open” American exceptionalism, respectively (American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), pp. 18-19).

[15] See especially Raymond Plant, s.v. “pluralism,” in Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, pp. 480-481.

[16] For a trustworthy, plain language discussion of the historical context and legal interpretation of the religion clauses, see Congressional Research Service, “First Amendment Fundamental Freedoms,” in Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-1/ (accessed 08 May 2023).

[17] Article 18: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.

[18] On monasticism, see Kenneth S. Latourette, A History of Christianity, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 221-235.

[19] “Church and State might in a perfect society coalesce into one; but meantime their functions must be kept separate,” (Edgar Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908), p. 195).

[20] Lausanne Covenant, Article 6. 

[21] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, expanded ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), pp. 39, 48.

On Christian Civil Religion

On Christian Civil Religion

Christian Nationalism, the tendency to conflate American patriotism with the Christian faith and message, came into its modern form in the Eisenhower years. It did so largely as a civil religious bulwark in the context of the escalating Cold War and domestic “Red Scare.” It was deliberately fostered by President Eisenhower. It morphed into the political arena in a meaningful way from the 1980s to roughly 2004; the glory years of Moral Majority and, later, the Religious Right.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote about this in her book The Evangelicals (which I previously reviewed):

Eisenhower and Graham did not agree on theology or foreign policy, but they agreed on the place of religion in what both considered perilous times. They agreed that America was fighting atheistic Communism and that national survival rested on the belief of Americans in God.

“A spiritual awakening,” Graham said, “will restore our spiritual heritage, create moral stamina and consciousness, bring back the sanctity of the home . . . strengthen the bulwarks of freedom and bring integrity back to the people of the world.”

They agreed that patriotism and religious belief were synonymous and that America had a moral and spiritual mission to redeem the world. “If you would be a loyal American, then become a loyal Christian,” Graham said in one sermon, and in another, “We are created for a spiritual mission among the nations.”

Graham, of course, did not believe that just any religion would do. In a sermon titled “Satan’s Religion” he offered five ways Americans could “most effectively combat Communism.” The first was “by old-fashioned Americanism”; the second “by conservative and Evangelical Christianity”; the third by prayer; the fourth by spiritual revival; and the fifth “by personal Christian experience.” “The greatest and most effective weapon against Communism today is to be a born-again Christian,” he said.

Despite his sectarian perspective, Graham’s position was closer to Eisenhower’s than to that of liberal Protestant leaders, all of whom objected to the conflation of Christianity with Americanism, and some of whom had a disconcerting tendency to call for nuclear disarmament and talks with the Communist Chinese.

It was also closer to the majority position of the day. In 1949 Graham had styled himself as Amos, the prophet crying in the wilderness, but in four years he had become a pastor of the national civil religion.

The Evangelicals, pgs. 185-186.

This is why this article by Michael Svigel is so helpful. He offers up a third way for Christians to engage the world. A way that isn’t isolationism or a bad marriage to politicians and their all too often crocodile promises. It’s a way Svigel calls the “Conscience of the Kingdom” approach:

In this approach, Christians uncompromisingly commit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ with regard to their priorities and values, morals and message. They surrender none of these to any other lord or any other leader. The Church is the community of their primary allegiance, which they will share with no other party or political organization.

However, Conscience Christians view their relationship to the world as analogous to the conscience of an individual. On the basis of God’s Word and in allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians speak and act on behalf of righteousness.

Christians address political corruption, weigh in on social ills, take righteous action on behalf of truth, justice, and mercy, and do so in ways that refuse either to empower a “strongman” or take shelter in a bunker.

Svigel’s article provides a helpful corrective for Christians who may tend to conflate American nationalism with the Christian faith. They are very different. They should REMAIN very different. The hopes and dreams that fire a Christian’s heart and mind MUST come from Christ’s kingdom, not from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Read the whole article. Then, read Svigel’s wonderful book RetroChristianity.

Against Christian nationalism

In the latest issue of Christianity Today, one article deals with Christian nationalism by surveying three books on the phenomenon. The article offers up about as good a summary of the plague of Christian nationalism in America that I’ve yet seen:

… a movement committed to preserving its own privilege and power, favoring the interests of native-born white people over immigrants and ethnic minorities, and using legal authority to impose a Christianized moral order.

The article explains:

In the mid-2000s, it was fashionable among journalists and academics to worry that America was on the verge of becoming a theocracy. Conservative white evangelicals had fueled the election of George W. Bush and helped turn Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ into a box-office smash. They seemed poised for renewed political and cultural dominance. And so books and articles poured forth warnings about the peculiar dangers of “Dominionism,” “Christian Reconstructionism,” and various other movements conspiring to impose Christian beliefs on an unsuspecting populace.

This narrative came crashing down with the election of Barack Obama. Almost overnight, fears of America descending into a theocracy evaporated. Pundits began forecasting the death of the Religious Right, and the same evangelicals who had helped propel Bush to power spent the next eight years playing defense. More and more, they saw themselves not as ascendant governing partners but as targets of a crusading secularism.

And then Donald Trump broke everything. His surprising election, enabled in part by white evangelical support, reawakened fears that religious conservatives would mobilize underneath a theocratic banner. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a fundamentalist dystopia where women are forced to breed, enjoyed a second life repurposed as a Trump-era cautionary tale (and a hit Netflix series).

Yet the idea of America descending into a genuine theocracy lacked the same surface plausibility it had during the Bush years. Though white evangelicals enthusiastically carried Trump into the White House, his lack of personal piety made him an unlikely candidate to preside over a thoroughly Christianized commonwealth. Nor, by and large, did his evangelical supporters mistake him for a godly statesman. Rather than King David, Trump was Cyrus, the pagan Persian emperor who, after conquering Babylon, allowed the Israelite captives to resettle in their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

Still, with Trump in office, the political fortunes of religious conservatives appeared to improve. This set the stage for a new journalistic and academic preoccupation: uncovering why white evangelicals flocked so fervently to Trump. The books and articles that typify this genre still feature concerns about conservative Christians manipulating the levers of power. But with the specter of full-dress theocracy having dimmed—and with Trump styling himself more as a champion of American greatness than a vindicator of the faith—attention has shifted to a distinct but overlapping phenomenon: Christian nationalism.

There is a generational shift in conservative Christianity. Older Christians, who lived through the heyday of the Religious Right, Jerry Falwell, Sr., James Dobson and the Moral Majority, are often confused about why younger Christians (including younger pastors) don’t echo the Christian nationalism that arguably had its last meaningful victory in the second election of George W. Bush. Some argue that Christian nationalism had its most grotesque perversion of principle in the election of Donald J. Trump.

Russel Moore explained some of this generational shift in his 2015 book Onward:

The typical younger pastor is less partisan than his predecessor, less likely to speak from the pulpit about “mobilizing” voters and “reclaiming Judeo-Christian values” through political action and economic boycotts. This is not because he is evolving leftward. It is because he wants to keep Christianity Christian. As a matter of fact, the center of evangelical Christianity today is, theologically speaking, well to the right of the old Religious Right.

It’s true that the typical younger pastor of a growing urban or suburban church doesn’t look like his cuff-linked or golf-shirted forefather. But that doesn’t mean he’s a liberal. He might have tattoos, yes, but they aren’t of Che Guevara. They’re of Hebrew passages from Deuteronomy.

His congregation’s statement of faith isn’t the generic sloganeering of the last generations’ doctrinally oozy consumerist evangelical movements, but is likely a lengthy manifesto with points and subpoints and footnotes rooted in one of the great theological traditions of the historic church …

He is pro-life and pro-marriage, although he is likely to speak of issues like homosexuality in theological and pastoral terms rather than in rhetoric warning of “the gay agenda.” Unlike the typical Bible Belt congregation of the twentieth century, the new kind of evangelical church has strict membership requirements, both in terms of what it takes to enter the believing community and what it takes to say there. There aren’t likely to be four-year-olds baptized after repeating sinner’s prayers in a backyard Bible club, and the unrepentant often face what their parents never seemed to notice in their red-and-black-lettered Bibles: excommunication. If this is liberalism, let’s have more of it.”

Onward by Russell Moore; Kindle Location 363-377.

Amen to all that.

Book Review: “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald

Frances Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a B.A. in Middle Eastern history. She has written numerous books. In 2018, she published The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (730 pgs). This book is particularly interesting for several reasons. First, Fitzgerald is a responsible journalist and historian. Second, she does not appear to be an evangelical insider, which means she may have a more objective viewpoint. Third, the issue of the “Christian right” has become very, very relevant since Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States in 2016.

So, I picked the book up at my local library. Fitzgerald explains:1

this book is not a taxonomy or attempt to describe the entirety of evangelical life, but rather a history of the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents that have emerged in recent years.

Fitzgerald begins with the first Great Awakening and moves rapidly through the American religious scene until arriving at Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by page 291. The remainder of the book (340 pages of text) chronicles the Christian Right over the past 40 years.

Rather than offering a blow by blow account of the work, I’ll confine myself to some brief remarks.

Comments on the book

Fitzgerald’s survey from the Great Awakening to the mid-20th century is outstanding. Very helpful, relatively brief, but comprehensive.

It appears Fitzgerald relied heavily on secondary sources. Time and time again, I turned to the endnotes to trace a particular quote or fact, and saw a secondary source cited. For example, Fitzgerald even cited a secondary source when describing Calvinism (pg. 15)! Likewise, when I looked for primary sources for quotations from Billy Graham’s publications I found in her text, I also saw secondary sources. This is very disappointing. Fitzgerald knows better.

I found a few misspellings in the earlier part of the book. Fitzgerald also, for some bizarre reason, consistently misnamed the Southern Baptist Convention’s publisher as “Boardman & Holman” (it’s actually “Broadman and Holman”).

The chronicle of the modern Christian Right is encyclopedic. In fact, it’s rather overwhelming. Some readers might be fascinated with moment by moment accounts of James Dobson’s advocacy efforts in the 2004 election. I am not! Fitzgerald would likely have done better to survey the era with a lighter touch and save room for analysis. Robert Jones, in his The End of White Christian America, covered the same ground in a little over 30 pages.

Indeed, the book is very light on analysis. Fitzgerald has a meager 11-page epilogue where she tries to pull some threads together. Some of this analysis is very insightful. For example:2

The Christian right was an equally forceful reaction, not against liberal theology, but rather against the social revolution of the 1960s. Its dominant theme was nostalgia for some previous time in history – some quasi-mythological past – in which America was a (white) Christian nation. But which time exactly? Would its leaders have been content with reversing the Supreme Court decisions made since the 1960s? Or would they have insisted that America must be by law a Christian nation? Naturally there were differences among them, but by failing to specify how far they would go to reverse the process of separating church from state, men like Pat Robertson and James Dobson allowed their opponents to charge that they wanted a theocracy.

And this:3

In the 1990s the Christian right was a powerful movement, but mainly because of those who had lived through the Long Sixties. Later generations had absorbed some of the shocks of the women’s movement and the gay rights movement, and were less fearful and angry about them. After the turn of the century, the Christian right maintained its power largely because of the further shock of same-sex marriage. In other words, the decline of the Christian right began earlier than assumed. Then, by allying themselves with the unfortunate George W. Bush, they created a backlash among evangelicals as well as among others. Emboldened, the ‘new’ evangelicals broadened the agenda, and in a sense came full circle with a return to the reformist imperatives of the antebellum evangelicals, such as Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney. The Christian right tried to resist, but the younger generation was not with them except on abortion. the death or retirement of the older leaders was a sign of the changing regime

And this:4

Presidential election votes might seem to belie it, but evangelicals were splintering. For more than thirty years Christian right leaders had held evangelicals together in the dream of restoration and in voting for the Republican establishment and policies that favored the rich in exchange for opposition to abortion and gay rights. No more. Evangelicals no longer followed their leaders.

Fitzgerald would have immeasurably strengthened her book if she had gone lighter on the encyclopedic history, and heavier on the analysis. In that respect, she made the same error Larry Oats made in his otherwise outstanding The Church of the Fundamentalists. Lots of details, facts, names and dates. Little analysis to pull things together. The book just … ends.

The most enlightening chapter, for me, was entitled “Billy Graham and Modern Evangelicalism,” particularly Fitzgerald’s discussion of President Eisenhower’s attempts to use civil religion as a unifying force in the face of the Communist threat. I’d never heard this before. I wonder how much of the simplistic ‘Merica! rhetoric you see so much of in some evangelical circles stems from Eisenhower’s efforts?

Fitzgerald succeeded in deepening my disgust with the Christian Right as a political movement. I do not believe America is or was a “Christian nation,” though it was undoubtedly influenced by Christian thought (see Christian historian John Fea’s excellent Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?). I vehemently disagree with all flavors of American nationalism mixed with the church. I think Falwell, Dobson (et al) are kind, decent men who wasted their talents in the political realm.

The more I read about the history of Christian Right’s engagement in the public square, the better context I have to frame my heretofore unfocused distaste for political action in the name of Christ. Here, two mainline scholars have something to teach us:5

Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity—lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent.

Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to be present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.

Hauerwas and Willimon wrote their book nearly 30 years ago and explained it “could be read as an extended reflection on politics in the name of Jesus.”6 Falwell looms large in their discussion, and the book seems (in part) to be a reaction against the political activism of the Reagan years. Writing only three years ago, Robert Jones interpreted Resident Aliens (and Russell Moore’s own work Onward) as a recognition by Christians that they’d lost the culture and must re-frame expectations from “this is our world” to “we’re a people in exile.” Indeed, Jones likened Hauerwas to a “hospice chaplain, dispensing a critical palliative care theology for a mainline Protestant family struggling toward acceptance as WCA [white Christian America] faded from the scene.”7 My own thoughts are that Hauerwas and Willimon can teach evangelicals a thing or two about cultural engagement. Their vision of the church is deeper than a good deal of what I’ve read from the evangelical-fundamentalist tradition. It’s certainly a healthier alternative than the Falwell-Dobson-Robertson model.  

Fitzgerald views the “Conservative Resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention as a “fundamentalist uprising” (see ch. 9). This will irritate my fundamentalist brothers and sisters who still insist on applying the old, tired appellation of “neo-evangelical” to the conservative evangelicals. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald is correct. John MacArthur, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, James White, Ligonier Ministries (et al) are fundamentalists. They might not identify themselves as such, but they are. Baptist fundamentalism, in contrast, is a small and struggling movement that hasn’t deserved the title of “fundamentalist” for a long while. The conservative evangelicals are the ones who engage the culture and confront apostasy, and Fitzgerald rightly recognizes them as “fundamentalists.”

Final thoughts

Fitzgerald wrote an outstanding book. I give it 4/5 stars. Essential reading for any evangelical pastors who want to understand where their movement came from and where it’s going. We need to know history. It helps us not make the same mistakes every generation. Read it!

Notes

1 Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 3.

2 Ibid, 626.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid, 635.

5 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, revised ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), 80-81.

6 Ibid, 7.

7 Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 214.