All Down Hill After John Witherspoon?

Published on by D. G. Hart

Anthony Bradley wonders (again) what has happened to Presbyterians and why they lost their momentum. First it was as popular voices among evangelicals, now it’s as dispensers of wisdom about the world:

I am wondering, then, for those who are raising their children in the Presbyterian tradition what resources exists for forming Presbyterian identity in terms of an understanding marriage & family (i.e., the relationship between covenant marriage & covenant baptism in America’s marriage debate), issues related to social & political power & federal political theory (which is derivative of federal theology), divorce and remarriage, war and social conflict, apologetics, and so on? How does a covenantal world-and-life view, and Presbyterian understandings of power structures, unlock the implications for a theology of work & economics when applied to international third world development, and so on?

By extension, I am also wondering what happened to Presbyterians as known and normative leaders of culturally leveraged institutions in American society and culture? Mark Twain and William Faulkner were Presbyterian. More Vice-Presidents of the United States have been Presbyterian more than any other denomination (Presbyterians rank 2nd for the US Presidency). Presbyterians rank 2nd in terms of placement on the Supreme Court in US History. I could go on. . . .

An initial thought is to wonder why Presbyterians need to go to another Presbyterian for instruction on the federal government. Isn’t reading the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (Presbyterian or not?) good enough?

Another wonder is whether Presbyterians have ever been all that influential as Bradley’s post assumes. To meet his criteria — “what Presbyterians are speaking to these issues or leading institutions that are (like think tanks or colleges and universities” — at least three sets of circumstances need to be in play. First, a person needs to be Presbyterian (what kind — Old Side, New Life, Neo-Calvinist — is another question)? Second, such a person needs to be writing on a vast number of public policy type subjects. So far Tim and David Bayly suffice. But then, third, and this is the kicker, the person needs to be sufficiently well known for folks in the pew to consult him or her (sorry, Tim and David). As it stands, lots of Presbyterians have lots of thoughts on all sorts of subjects and publish them (on the interweb). But no one of them stands out with Francis Schaeffer notoriety.

The problem, then, may have less to do with Presbyterian decline than with the diversification of communication technology and the formation of diverse pockets of affinity.

At the same time, Presbyterians need not feel so bad, at least if misery loves company. Bradley’s question applies just as much to Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and — boy does it ever — to Congregationalists (nee Puritans). Among Western Christians, Rome stands out as distinctly different in this regard since Roman Catholics have an endless supply of public intellectuals who are doing their best imitations of popes, who speak constantly to a host of issues below their pay grade. This may explain much of Rome’s contemporary appeal to converts. If you want a church with all the answers to life’s pressing questions — don’t go to Guy Noir but to the Vatican. But if you believe in the spirituality of the church and the sufficiency of Scripture, you don’t need a Presbyterian pontiff to tell you how to live. You go to church, say your prayers, work dutifully at your callings, and take your lumps.

One last thought about Anthony’s question comes from a period I know relatively well. During the first half of the twentieth century we did have Presbyterians who spoke on any number of issues, were well known and so had pretty large followings. These were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, J. Gresham Machen, and Carl McIntire. Maybe 1 in 4 isn’t bad. But if that’s going to be the percentage of Presbyterians we should heed when they start to pontificate about all of life, I’ll take my chances with guys who write for American Conservative.

22 thoughts on “All Down Hill After John Witherspoon?”

  1. So PCA big George Robertson has a “dream that [the PCA] would be a leader denomination in evangelicalism, and in so doing, a real influencer of our culture, so that people of North America would look to the PCA for resourcing or guidance.” I’d be happy if George (and many others) just figured out the second commandment (stick with it for 17 seconds):

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  3. Resourcing, is that a word? As denominations grow, the qualifications for officers become unrecognizable from those for middle management.

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  4. No doubt they’re efforting and dialoguing on appropriate and relevant engagement in their sphere of influence and local environment. Community impact and interfacing with thought leaders and opinion makers is also a priority. What Paul said.

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  5. So what’s the difference between a ‘worldview’ and a ‘world-and-life view’? Are these people living their lives somewhere else than in the ‘world’?

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  6. Rube, worldview is critical of world-and-life view but advocates for Christians schools. I don’t get it, but I think it’s similar to the difference between revival and revivalism. Which I also don’t get.

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  7. He is bewailing that Twain and Faulkner aren’t around today to lead Presbyterians on the cultural front?

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  9. Erik, while I can understand wanting to claim Twain, I will never understand why Faulkner gets the plaudits.

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  10. I haven’t read much Faulkner, but what I’ve read was pretty slow going. Sherwood Anderson was a mentor to him and you can see similarities between Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” has a similar feel to both of them (albeit in the form of poetry). All three were doing new things and need to be reckoned with.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoknapatawpha_County

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  11. The question to ask when someone bemoans the fact that P&R leaders are not engaging the culture as they once were is whether or not those leaders were engaging the culture with the gospel or something else. Freeing slaves or banning strong drink is not the gospel. The gospel is the gospel.

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  12. Pingback: Presbyterians, John Witherspoon, and Decline @logos | Unsettled Christianity

  13. D, how to explain your sudden interest in history? Props, bro. John Witherspoon, American Founding Father, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, and one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in ~1788. To business, then:

    These were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, J. Gresham Machen, and Carl McIntire. Maybe 1 in 4 isn’t bad.

    This conservative has become an admirer of that great liberal William Jennings Bryan. And far less of an admirer of the clever but heinous HL Mencken who slandered him so. “Inherit the Wind” is not the truth of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” and neither was Mencken’s “reporting.”

    http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/mencken2.html

    Mencken’s Mendacity at the Scopes Trial: How he maligned William Jennings Bryan and the people of Dayton, Tennessee

    In my previous post, entitled, H. L. Mencken: “Is this your hero, New Atheists?,” I accused H. L. Mencken of lying and character assassination, in his reporting on the 1925 Scopes trial. Specifically, I charged that Mencken(pictured left) knowingly and deliberately made false statements about William Jennings Bryan (pictured right), a three-time Democratic Presidential candidate and eloquent orator, whose passionate opposition to Darwinism led him to volunteer his services an assistant prosecutor during the Scopes trial. To accuse a highly respected author such as Mencken of slander is a very serious matter, and in today’s post, I’m going to substantiate this charge. Mencken not only slandered Bryan; he also slandered the people of Dayton, Tennessee.

    What motivated me to write this post was my discovery that a quote attributed to William Jennings Bryan at Positive Atheism’s Big List of Scary Quotations, that “Man is not a mammal,” was a complete fake. Bryan, as it turns out, never said any such thing. The man who attributed such a statement to Bryan was H. L. Mencken. Mencken lied. That discovery made me wonder what else in Mencken’s reports was a lie. The short answer is: quite a lot.

    For the record, I’m fine with evolution, but there is much more to the story of the Monkey Trial. Eugenics was the enemy–the “science” of mankind as an animal, no better than breeding us like horses or dogs.

    As for the gentlemen at Pat Buchanan’s paleo-American Conservative, Darryl, meh. I cannot think of a more irrelevant bunch in all of the American polity who have so much to say about politics and so little effect.

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  14. Part Deux, crossposted @ http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2013/07/all-down-hill-after-john-witherspoon.html

    The John Witherspoon part was interesting. How an essay entitled with the name of American Founding Father Rev. John Witherspoon ends up in the same essay as Carl McIntire

    a firebrand fundamentalist radio evangelist who railed against communism, liberalism, racial integration, sex education, evolution and water fluoridation from his broadcast pulpit

    Witherspoon-to-McIntire is an intriguing thesis, Darryl, and I actually understand how your Calvinist theology links a Presbyterian Founding Father to a Presbyterian racist anti-fluoridation creationist via “Two Kingdoms” theology.

    I’m afraid for us both.

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  15. Chortles,

    Where did you get this quote from George Robertson?

    “dream that [the PCA] would be a leader denomination in evangelicalism, and in so doing, a real influencer of our culture, so that people of North America would look to the PCA for resourcing or guidance.”

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  17. Careful Tom, McIntyre and Sarah Palin would be very comfortable together. In fact, most Christian Conservatives would have very little difficulty embracing McIntyre’s Bible Presbyterianism, sans infant baptism.

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  20. “I would say additionally that it is my dream that we would be a leader denomination in evangelicalism, and in so doing, a real influencer of our culture, so that people of North America would look to the PCA for resourcing or guidance. . . .”

    Has the desire for great influence ever resulted in any lasting good?

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  21. Erik Charter
    Posted July 16, 2013 at 10:56 am | Permalink
    Careful Tom, McIntyre and Sarah Palin would be very comfortable together. In fact, most Christian Conservatives would have very little difficulty embracing McIntyre’s Bible Presbyterianism, sans infant baptism.

    The internet tells me that Carl McIntyre was a big supporter of J. Gresham Machen. Do you think it’s fair to tar Machen with the McIntyre brush? I don’t, and so neither is it right to tar Sarah Palin with him.

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  22. Tom,

    McIntyre supported Machen initially but broke off after a year in the OPC to form the Bible Presbyterian Church. Bible Presbyterians were tea-totallers and fundamentalists first, Presbyterians second. Think the Baylys vs. D.G. Hart.

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