Author: D. G. Hart

Christian Nationalism for Philosophers

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What follows may sound anti-intellectual. Political theorists and political theologians are a different breed and as academics have every right to carry on their scholarly discussions in language that may be inaccessible to non-specialists. Yet because the Christian theologians and political theorists who diagnose modern politics, criticize liberalism, and propose theoretical alternatives to existing political structures – because those thinkers do not confine their views to scholarly journals but publish in semi-popular outlets and promote their views on social media, they may need to consider whether they are convincing anyone beyond their select academic peers.

These thoughts apply particularly to those who count themselves Christian postliberals. If that phrase seems unclear, imagine adding “ecclesiocentric” to “postliberal” the way Peter Leithart and James Wood do. The great thing about political liberalism is that it gives us a free country with liberties for philosophers and theologians to talk about politics any way they like. Still, identifying yourself as an ecclesiocetric postliberal [EP] does very little to give outsiders a sense of what you are proposing. It may even sound alarming, as in, times are so bad that we need an alternative that alerts the uninitiated to how perilous the situation is. The only way out is – wait for it – ecclesiocentric postliberalism.

Despite the linguistic changes, what stands out in reading and listening to EP’s is the priority they give to philosophy. They are not alone in this regard. Whether it stems from Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences or Abraham Kuyper’s appropriation of Hegel for an epistemological brew in which the regenerate inherently and automatically think differently (and better) than unbelievers, conservative Protestants on the Reformed side of the American church prioritize the philosophical foundation for almost everything, including politics and civil authority.

This intellectualist approach is distinct, mind you, from the logocentric understanding of Christianity of which conservative Presbyterians (especially the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) are supposed to be guilty. Doctrinalism is one thing. Philosophical foundationalism is another.

Although Wood and Leithart have been working out the ideas and implications of EP for several years (see a related book, Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays on Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism), last summer postliberalism drew attention during the run up to the PCA’s Study Committee’s report on Christian nationalism (of which Wood is a member). Wood is a theologian (and PCA teaching elder) at Redeemer University, and appeared on Mike Horton’s broadband show, “Postliberalism, America, and the Church,” to explain and answer questions about Christian postliberalism.

At the start of Horton’s show, Wood identified postliberalism with two basic ideas: one is that religion is a public good and should not be reduced to the private sphere of an individual’s personal belief; the other is that public institutions have an obligation to promote (not maintain) religion as part of the public good.

That second idea dovetails with the arguments that Stephen Wolfe and James Baird have been making and prompts this writer to wonder why Christian nationalism or Christian syllogismism have caught on so much more among church officers and members than EP. The reason could be that postliberals are caught up in academic discussions that have not trickled down to pulpits or pews. Another way of saying this is that Wolfe and Baird #dothereading and appeal to relatively well known voices if Reformed Protestantism between 1600 and 1800. EP’s take a different intellectual path. Their sources are generally outside the Reformed churches and date from the twentieth century.

In a piece for First Things on postliberalism, Wood revealed both the philosophers that EP’s take seriously but also the heavily philosophical character of the enterprise:

[Postliberals] do not reject the now-standard genealogies of modernity offered by figures such as Charles Taylor or Michael Allen Gillespie; they largely accept them. They grant that secularity has Christian origins, that late medieval nominalism marked a decisive shift, and that modernity emerged from within Christianity rather than in straightforward opposition to it. Where they differ is in what follows from this history. For Milbank, the Schindlers, and others working within a participatory metaphysics, the Christian genealogy of modernity is not a vindication of the liberal settlement but a diagnosis of its distortions—and therefore an invitation to correction. To say that modernity is inescapable does not settle the question of whether its dominant political form is necessary.

One of the ironies of these discussions is Wood’s acknowledgment of Radical Orthodoxy’s contribution. When postliberals are “radical,” that’s fine but what out for rrrrrrrrrr2k. Wood wrote:

For those formed by Radical Orthodoxy (à la John Milbank) and the Communio school (à la David L. and D. C. Schindler), the primary objection is not individual autonomy as such—it is the separations themselves. The severing of the political from the theological, of law from morality, of the economy from social life—these are the deeper disorders, of which autonomy-maximization is more symptom than root cause.

Readers should know that entering debates surrounding Radical Orthodoxy can take readers deep into the intellectual weeds. On Adriane Vermeule and Roman Catholic integralism, Wood wrote:

Vermeule’s vision is fundamentally modern in its understanding of the state and its reduction of politics to a contest of power and will: It merely deploys modern political categories for anti-modern ends. His Schmittian framework accepts the very ontology of violence that, on a Radical Orthodox reading, lies at the root of modernity’s pathologies.

What leads someone to use the phrase “ontology of violence” seemingly without a second thought in a magazine that is not produced for specialists? Whatever makes that possible, it is at least a sign that philosophical categories are doing work that will leave average readers behind.

At the risk of introducing Protestant sectarianism into this discussion, the habit of EP’s to rely on Roman Catholic ecclesiology is odd (and may also explain why Wolfe and Baird have more reach). In the following quotation, Wood not only invoked a smart French Roman Catholic philosopher, but also seems to accept the view of the church that comes with it:

As Pierre Manent has argued, Christianity presents a distinctive political problem because the Church is a “real universal community,” which claims all persons and thereby relativizes every political order. Early modern political theory can be read, in part, as a sustained effort to neutralize this rival. . . . By redefining the Church as a voluntary association concerned with inward belief and otherworldly ends, [John Locke] preserves its formal freedom while stripping it of public significance. As Peter Leithart has shown, this move is not incidental but constitutive, for redefining politics as concerned with outward behavior and civil order is inseparable from confining the Church to inward belief and private devotion. The Church, on these terms, is free—but free only insofar as politically irrelevant.

What does a “real universal community” mean for a Protestant? Part of what that involves is the unity of the church not through formal institutions that govern Christians around the globe but a fellowship of saints who through the Holy Spirit share one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. (Ephesians 4:5)

Just as important to notice is the apparent disregard Leithart and Wood seem to show for the freedom of the church. History teaches that in some settings Christians have not been free to worship (such as Protestants in Roman Catholic France). If freedom to worship makes churches irrelvant to politics, maybe it is a bargain worth taking (which is the deal American Presbyterians accepted with the 1787 revision of the Westminster Confession). Churches that have been politically relevant, like the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, have not worked out so well. Maybe EP’s can supply an ontology of relevance?

As bad as the church’s irrelevance may be, worse for EP’s is the “simplified political ontology” to which political liberalism subjects the church and its ministry. As Wood described it, liberal politics leave Christians with only two choices: “the autonomous individual and the sovereign state.”

Intermediate or rival forms of authority are either absorbed (most recently marriage) or marginalized (the long-term project with regard to religious authority). Allegiances once directed to the Church are gradually redirected to the state, which comes to function as the most comprehensive, and the only indispensable, form of common life.

A further consequence for EP’s who take their cues from Roman Catholics is “the proliferation of denominations and the language of ‘religious choice.’” Such conceptualizations of the church “are not merely sociological developments” but the “outworking of a deeper conceptual transformation in which the Church has been reconstituted as one voluntary association among many.” “A critique of liberalism that focuses narrowly on autonomy while leaving this ecclesiological settlement intact,” Wood added, “has not yet reached the root of the disorder it seeks to diagnose.”

Why can’t the problem with liberalism EP’s identify merely be that sociologists and political scientists do not talk about the church the way that faculty teaching ecclesiology at seminary do? Just because Peter Berger (a sociologist) describes Christian communions as voluntary associations does not mean Stuart Robinson (Presbyterian theologian) is wrong to talk about the church as “an essential element of the gospel.”

Descriptions of church membership and authority by critics of modern liberal politics need not be any more authoritative than advertising departments for Major League Baseball. Calling the fans of the American League Boston franchise “Red Sox Nation” is no more definitive for understanding modern society than referring to modern people as rational autonomous selves.

Scholars and pundits use words and categories, supplied by a body of reflection, to describe institutions and the persons who negotiate those organizations. Those descriptions may be useful for understanding the place of the church within the fabric of modern society. But simply concluding that the church is not relevant or lacks power thanks to the reach of modern nation-states is to concede that the reality said philosophers or theorists describe is the actual state of affairs. Sometimes those descriptions are, in the words of Jeff Lebowski, “like just you’re opinion, man,” no matter how erudite.

Not to be missed in the metaphysical discussions of state power and church authority is the leverage that philosophy obtains in postliberalism. It may be biblicist to ask for biblical exegesis or sectarian to bring up the Protestant confessions, but why should, to borrow a line from Larry Newman, philosophers have all the good ideas? If you peel back the layers of the onion of Radical Orthodoxy, what will you find? Everything wholesome and metaphysically unified? Will we have to conclude that the we need philosophical tests for holding office or will we simply cut to the chase of the philosopher king (instead of Wolfe’s Christian prince)?

No matter how bad the Roman Empire was, Paul did not need political theory or political theology to be able to say that the Roman emperor was legitimate and worthy of honor. Maybe government would be better with more philosophy. But governing people does not take a hiatus to attend a seminar in postliberalism. Governments are on a spectrum, from authoritarian to liberal. The benefits of those arrangements run from stifling uniformity to incoherent chaos.

The American founders were trying to do the best they could and some of us think they did fairly well. Using epistemology or ontology to pick apart their norms and procedures is fair game in the free society they set up. But it is also too serious to be taken seriously.

The History Evangelicals Prefer

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Mark Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) in the early 1990s but the recovery of a mind for evangelicals had been in the works for at least a couple decades. Prior to 1980, the study of American Protestantism followed the mainline denominations – from the colonists to the National Council of Churches. Of course, awakenings (18th century and 19th century) were part of the story but by 1950 Billy Graham’s revivals were clearly outside the Protestant mainstream.

That consolidation of the mainline Protestant narrative took a beating during the 1960s when so much of the United States’ institutions changed thanks to race (Civil Rights), sex (feminism), and war (Vietnam). From 1965 to 1980, in the history of American religion, mainline Protestants needed to make way for the Black church, Roman Catholics, Jews, and other non-Christian groups. Bringing up the rear were evangelical Protestants who, with a burst of energy supplied by Jimmy Carter’s admission that he was a “born-again” Christian, the founding of the Moral Majority and the funneling of evangelicals into the Religious Right, evangelical history took off like a rocket (that actually worked).

At the forefront of this history was George Marsden whose 1980 book on fundamentalism (Fundamentalism and American Culture) coincidentally came out just when journalist, think tank scholars, and even college professors were trying to figure out where the Religious Right came from. Soon, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch emerged as leading voices on American evangelicalism, though both worked more on the Founding and the early national period than the twentieth century. Noll’s Princeton and the Republic is still a model of historical scholarship. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history.

With those three scholars at the front of the parade, other evangelical historians began to weave evangelicalism into the history of the United States. Some historians thought the recovery of evangelicalism in the history of the United States went too far and tried to explain too much. Mainline Protestant historians began to push back and tried to recover the particular histories of the mainline denominations. But evangelicalism, which hardly anyone knew about in 1975 had by 1990 become one of the most widely researched topics in the study of American religious history.

Where did it lead? Did evangelicals themselves come to a clearer awareness of their American past? Did they come to appreciate the variety of figures that had the most influence in their day when almost no one was reading Jonathan Edwards – figures like Charles Finney, Hannah Whitehall Smith (The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life), Dwight L. Moody, Charles Parham (of speaking in tongues fame, Josiah Strong (whose social gospel had Christian Nationalist over and undertones), J. Gresham Machen, William Jennings Bryan, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, Carl Henry, or Kenneth Kantzer (who put Trinity Evangelical Divinity School on the map before it wasn’t anymore). Did they figure out the American story?

Recommendations for church libraries may not reveal everything, but they do suggest what parts of evangelical history interest today’s believers. Tim Challies compiled a 250-book list and in it were sections that dip into those figures and eras that indicate the eras, figures, and texts that deserve attention. Readers may not be surprised to learn that Puritans and other Protestants associated with awakenings are the most worthy of study.

In Challies’ “Classics” section – numbers 73 to 84 – were John Bunyan, Augustine (Confessions), C. S. Lewis twice (Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters), J. C. Ryle twice (Holiness and Thoughts for Young Men), Richard Sibbes (Bruised Reed), Thomas Brooks (Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices), Jeremiah Burroughs (Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment), John Owen (Overcoming Sin and Temptation), John Calvin (A Little Book on the Christian Life), and Charles Spurgeon (All of Grace). By my reckoning, that list is heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those who want to hear from more contemporary authors are thanking the Lord for the writers with two initials in their name.

The section on biography (numbers 200 to 222) again leans heavily toward the Puritans, awakenings, and foreign missions (this does not include everyone): John Bunyan, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s wife, Susie, George Whitefield, John Newton, William Tyndale, Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson, Amy Carmichael, Henry Martyn, John and Betty Stam, Corrie Ten Boom, Elisabeth Eliot, R. C. Sproul (the twentieth century seems to have cultivated the two-initial phenomenon), and Tim Keller.

The last section explicitly recommends texts on church history (numbers 224 to 230). Challies recommends four books that survey the past, two on the Reformation, one on the early church and the doctrine of Christ (Stephen Nichols, For Us and For Our Salvation), and one on the Puritans.

What these lists show is that the work of the evangelical historians, such as Noll, Marsden, and Hatch, did not make much of an impression on rank-and-file evangelicals, their pastors, or the seminaries that train those pastors. Evangelically motivated Protestants came into the POSTWAR!!! (World War II) period with regard for the Reformers, Puritans, and revivalists. The output of evangelical history by evangelical historians has not changed that historical proclivity.

George Marsden actually captured this tendency among evangelicals in his introduction to Evangelicalism and Modern America (1984)

For Marsden, evangelicalism broadly speaking meant that

many American evangelicals participate in a larger historical pattern, having substantial historical experiences in common. All reflect the sixteenth-century Reformation effort to get back to the pure Word of Scripture as the only ultimate authority and to confine salvation to a faith in Christ, unencumbered by presumptuous human authority. During the next centuries these emphases were renewed and modified in a variety of ways, often parallel or interconnected, by groups such as the Puritans, Pietists, Methodists, Baptists, nineteenth-century Restorationists, revivalists, black Christians, holiness groups, Pentecosals, and others.

In contrast, evangelicalism narrowly considered was

for many self-consciously, a community. In this respect evangelicalism is most like a denomination. It is a religious fellowship or coalition of which people feel a part. This sense of an informal evangelical community or coalition goes back to the international Pietism of the eighteenth century. . . . International revivalism, particularly that of Charles Finney in the first half of the century and Dwight L. Moody in the second, as well as efforts in world missions, especially helped foster a unity of purpose among evangelicals from a variety of denominations.

Of course, the history of evangelicals since 1800 has not been particularly inspirational or theologically stable. Even so, some might have expected the recovery of evangelical history by evangelical historians to have moved the favorite-period-of-church-history needle.

Christian Nationalism’s Churchless Christianity

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What most critics of Christian nationalism, do not understand is that ChristNats believe in the spirituality of the church. Listen to George Sayour’s interview with Timon Cline and hear the younger interlocutor say that no ChristNat wants the church to become involved in law or public policy. Cline says it as if it’s a no-brainer. The church should, according to this view, stay in its lane, conduct the work of gospel ministry, and leave politics to the politicians.

This aspect of Christian nationalism makes it exceptional in the history of American Protestantism. Prior to our contemporary period, if Christians wanted a righteous or holy society, they threw all the resources at their disposal at the problem. The Social Gospel, for instance, drew upon the Protestant denominations themselves, gained support from ecumenical bodies like the Evangelical Alliance and the Federal Council of Churches, and relied upon Christian government officials to do the i’s and cross the t’s of Progressive policy.

Social Gospelers had no trouble conceiving of the church the way Ryan Burge apparently does in his recent book, The Vanishing Church. In a review at First Things, Brad East sees in Burge a nostalgia for the mainline Protestantism that threw the spirituality of the church to the curb.

“According to Burge, “the American church can (and should) be one of the primary drivers of depolarization in the United States.” Indeed, “the fate and future of American democracy may be at stake.”

This is pure, uncut civil religion. In Burge’s hands, the Church is not a biblical or theological entity; it is a voluntary association that exists to improve society, care for the disadvantaged, and forge bonds across differences. It is a spiritual NGO. It leavens democratic life with prayer and song and moral uplift. It offers a place for people to seek edification, whatever doubts may fester in their hearts.

In the words of Freddie deBoer, this is not worship of God. It is “worship of the God-shaped hole.” It lauds faith because it is “prosocial” and “builds capital.” DeBoer, to his credit as an atheist, calls it what it is: “Idolatry.”

The Church does not exist to grease the wheels of democracy. Paul did not found churches in Corinth and Ephesus to build up the civic health of the Roman Empire. The faithfulness of the Coptic Church is not measured by Egypt’s ranking in the social progress index. The Church is the body of Christ, called forth by the gospel into fellowship with the living God and sent by his Spirit to witness in the world to the good news of salvation. If, in the fulfillment of this mission, the measurable effects are hailed by social and political scientists, that is a happy by-product. If they are not, believers shouldn’t lose any sleep. With apologies to E. M. Forster: If I had to choose between betraying my democracy and betraying my church, I hope I should have the guts to betray my democracy.

There is a name for Burge’s preferred cocktail of religion and civics, Church and state. It’s Christendom. Burge’s book is one long lament for the passing of mainline Christendom in America. You might even say it is both a paean and a dirge for a certain style of Christian nationalism—liberal Christian nationalism. Make the mainline great again!

East has a point. This is Christian nationalism 1.0, the form it took among mainline Protestants. But don’t let the occasional remark by ChristNats that the mainline is “based” fool you. They do not want churches to do what the mainline Protestants used to do.

What East criticizes is not Christian nationalism of the 2020s variety. The bulk of ChristNats do not want either the PCA or the OPC (or any NAPARC communion) to perform the sort of political advocacy that mainline Protestants did one hundred years ago. They simply want Christian government to promote and advance Christianity in American society (they don’t talk much about the rest of the world).

This is as remarkable as it is exception if only because it means you do not need the church to have a Christian nation. All you need is a Christian prince (Wolfe) or Christian laws (Baird). Government, not the church, will make a nation Christian.

Churchless Christianity used to be the product of the world of evangelical parachurch networks. Go to a local Bible study led by Christian neighbors, or go to summer Bible camp, or download the songs of your favorite Christian pop song performer, and be sure to have a quiet time, preferably early in the morning, and you have a full Christian diet for the energetic life of holiness. The church is simply background noise. It only meets on Sunday and only has a handful of people speak. The real work of the real church, the grassroots one, is the daily pursuit of piety that the ordinary faithful conduct 24/6.

But now comes another version of churchless Christianity – namely, Christian nationalism. The making of a Christian society is going to come, supposedly, without the work of the one institution that God ordained, in the words of the Confession of Faith, to minister the “oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world.”

Of course, ChristNats will likely deny that they do not need the church to construct a Christian nation. But so far, they have not explained what kind of authority the Christian prince’s church will have over his conduct and profession. Nor have they commented on the effects of an increasingly Christian nation upon that nation’s churches: will some communions be government approved as superior places for Christian citizens? Will churches that Christian citizens avoid be able to register complaints with the Christian government? Will Christian governments support the construction of new church buildings? Will that Christian government institute an open application process or will it “pick winner” denominations or congregations? Will the Christian government even produce a confession of faith that explains the terms of its Christian profession?

You get the point. A Christianity without institutions (don’t the ChristNats read Aaron Renn?) is almost impossible. Even the most popular Christian musical entertainers need recording studios and distributors (Youtube is an institution, you know). How a Christian nation exists and keeps the church merely a spiritual institution is anyone’s guess.

The Chapter Twenty-Three Paragraph Three Debate

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Resistance to the American revisions to the Westminster Standards takes different forms.  All objections to the American Presbyterian church’s changes proceed from discomfort with political liberalism of the John Locke variety, even if the focus of historical attention wanders (is it the postwar (WWII) consensus that is the problem or the protections of religious freedom that Jefferson and Madison introduced?).  For that reason, objections to the American revisions can take the following forms:

1) The 1787 changes were not substantial since the revisers did not revise the Larger Catechism where church teaching still gives magistrates grounds to suppress false religion (the common references here are WLC 108 which does not refer to the magistrate and WLC 191 which does);

2) The 1787 revisions, even if they did change the Confession, do not require church officer today to reject the original Westminster Confession;

3) The revision of chapter twenty-three shifts the grounds from protecting Presbyterian churches exclusively to the magistrate’s responsibility to protect all Protestant denominations.

This last objection is arguably the most common and it gives cover to the argument that the magistrate has a responsibility to promote (not maintain, the language of the confession) the true religion.  This is, by the way, an odd argument for confessional Presbyterians to make since it is basically a National Association of Evangelicals approach.  If Presbyterians were serious about being Presbyterian, why would they want the magistrate to protect churches that the Westminster Confession regards as “less pure” than the “more pure” churches of the Reformed confessions? 

Be that as it may, the revision of chapter twenty-three is still odd because it says more than what ChristNats (or ChristNat adjacent) want the confession to say.

The best reading of the chapter for Christian Nationalism purposes is in the confession’s own words:

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief.

If that were all the confessional revision said, ChristNats would win the debate.  Here you have the magistrate as a nursing father (not a tranny, of course) protecting the common faith of Christ.  That sounds like the revisers were making room for Baptists; Methodists were not yet a factor in United States Protestantism.  You also have an explicit reference to “denominations,” a word that became much more common among sociologists a century later for understanding the unity and diversity of Anglo-American Protestantism. 

This part of the chapter also explicitly refers to churchly activity such as “sacred functions,” “government and discipline” of the church, “profession” of faith, and church officers (“ecclesiastical persons”).

So far, the revision of chapter twenty-three, paragraph three, no matter what we do with the Larger Catechism, sounds fairly friendly to Protestantism as the preferred religion in the United States (now if only the ChristNats would avoid the old tactic of calling R2K “Lutheran,” as if – get this – Lutheranism were beyond the pale of Protestantism). 

But!

The revision of chapter twenty-three does not stop with the magistrate as a nursing father protecting generic Protestantism.  If that is what the revisers had intended, they should have stopped – in a Full Stop way – with this language (to repeat):

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief.

The American Presbyterian officers who revised the Confession of Faith did not stop there. Instead, they added the most troubling language and the highest hurdles for ChristNats who want to find a home in the American revisions.  This is what the American church added to chapter twenty-three:

It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.

Civil magistrates – who do not need to be Christian, by the way – have a DUTY to protect all their people.  “Duty” is the same word used to describe the responsibility of magistrates to protect “the church of our common Lord.”  This word choice would seem to indicate the same responsibility to non-Protestants as the one as “nursing father” (not a tranny, of course) to Protestants. 

Of course, the language of “all their people” indicates that magistrates have a duty to protect (not maintain) people who are not professing Protestants. 

The magistrate’s duty is precisely to protect such people, whether on the basis (“pretense”) of accusations of false religion or infidelity, from “any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury.”  In other words, the magistrate, acting as “nursing father” (not a tranny, of course), has a duty to protect non-Protestants from persecution.

That duty is at odds with suppressing false religion, such as passing and enforcing blasphemy or Sunday laws. 

But if the revised chapter twenty-three supports religious freedom in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution manner – which conflicts bigly with ChristNat arguments – notice also what the revision says not merely about personal or individual beliefs but also organized non-Protestant religion.  The magistrate has a duty to see that:

all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.

This would seem to apply to both non-Protestant Christians (ecclesiastical assemblies) and to Jewish believers (religious assemblies). “Assemblies” is a curious word since it is a word that characterized both the highest judicatory in the Church of Scotland as well as the legislatures of colonies and later states like Virginia and Pennsylvania. If the revisers of the Confession had wanted to indicate that they needed to live with Jews and Roman Catholics in the United States and that those Americans needed to be able legally to hold their own non-Protestant faiths, they did not need to add that assemblies of believers other than Protestants should be able to assemble (what assemblies do) beyond maintaining (not promoting) their own private convictions. But that was not what the revisions did. Instead, the revised chapter twenty-third chapter of the Confession of faith taught that the magistrate has a DUTY!! to protect the persons of non-Protestants and also to protect their assemblies.

The debate between ChristNats and regular Presbyterians over chapter twenty-three boils down to this: ChristNats prefer that the revision stopped with the phrase, “any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief.”  Regular Presbyterians instead MAINTAIN AND PROMOTE the entire revised chapter, all the way to the magistrate’s duty to protect “the religious and ecclesiastical assemblies” of non-Protestants. 

What Could ChristNats Learn from Ulster Unionists?

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The parallels between Ulster and American Protestants striving to protect their cultural and political heritage is striking. Some of the similarities may be lost because Ulster Protestants use the language of “unionism” instead of “nationalism.” For parts of their history, Ulster Protestants have linked their religious convictions, quite plausibly, to British Protestantism instead of Irish Catholicism. Still, both groups, Ulster Protestants before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and American Christian nationalists (ChristNats) since roughly 2022 profess to view their societies’ governments through the lens of Protestantism (for some, “aggressive” Protestantism). Both have also viewed themselves as part of a beleaguered minority that represents the historic faith of its society (as opposed to Roman Catholics in Ireland or secular liberals in the United States).

One important difference is that Ulster Protestants have used the levers of government far more effectively than ChristNats. What is also true is that ChristNats write more books than Ulster Protestants.

Neil Southern’s 2007 article on Protestant alienation in Northern Ireland could, with a few tweaks, describe ChristNats in America:

Concomitant with the changes which have occurred at the level of politics, Protestants have had to contend with changes at the level of their cultural identity. Cultural alienation is treated as a separate analytical construct to that of politics and focuses on the emotional properties of Protestantism, whether in the form of the British identity of the Protestant and its symbolic displays in Northern Ireland, or the more regionally specific expression of Protestant culture in the form of the Loyal Orders.

. . . Protestants trace the increased presence of Irishness in Northern Ireland back to the Good Friday Agreement (and beyond). The Agreement states that, where there is a desire for the teaching and learning of the Irish language, the British government will ‘take resolute action to promote the language’ and ‘encourage the use of the language’. Yet many Protestants are alienated by the Irish language because they feel that it is not so much a cultural expression as a political tool. Protestants consider the issue of the Irish language to be used by Sinn Fein to emphasise the separateness of Irish culture within Northern Ireland as part of an overall political justification for their quest for Irish unity.

A pertinent example of Protestant cultural alienation followed in the wake of the decision of Queen’s University Belfast to dispense with the national anthem at graduation ceremonies. Many Protestants were of the opinion that the university was willingly discarding symbols of its Britishness in order to placate students from a nationalist background.

Obviously, ChristNats don’t regard the British national anthem as a marker of Protestant identity. Nor do Ulster Protestants seem to care much about blasphemy laws. They did want to align with a Christian prince – well a princess (QEII) – the way ChristNats pine for a Christian government. But Charles III’s emergence as the defender of multiple faiths may render Ulster Protestants more willing to support a Christian government in the USA. Maybe Ulster could become the fifty-first state?

But when compared side by side, Ulster Protestantism and American Christian nationalism look remarkably national (and cultural) rather than Christian. Instead of producing a common set of policies for a Protestant society anywhere, Irish and American Protestants calculate their “Christian” government according to patterns of Irish and US history respectively.

Maybe the one man who could have bridged the differences between Ulster and American Protestants was Ian Paiseley, the former First Minister of Northern Ireland. After all, Paisley worked with both Carl McIntire and Bob Jones to form a kind of trans-Atlantic Religious Right.

But I dare say no ChristNat could affirm what Paisley did in 1985 when he spoke on behalf of a Protestant Ulster. The Free Presbyterian pastor did not have American Protestants in mind when defending the Christian nationalism of Northern Ireland. he opposed political reforms in Northern Ireland that resulted in a shared Protestant and Roman Catholic government:

God has a people in this province. There are more born-again people in Ulster to the square mile than in anywhere else in the world. This little province has had the peculiar preservation of divine Providence. You only have to read the history of Ulster to see that time after time when it seemed humanly impossible to extricate Ulster from seeming disaster, that God intervened. Why? God has a purpose for this province, and this plant of Protestantism sown here in the north-eastern part of this island. The enemy has tried to root it out, but it still grows today, and I believe, like a grain of a mustard seed, its future is going to be mightier yet. God Who made her mighty will make her mightier yet in His Divine will.

Roman Catholicism is the Biggest Christian Tent of All

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A seminar at the University of Notre Dame over the weekend reminded me of thoughts that went into Still Protesting and my objections to the conversion stories of evangelicals becoming Roman Catholic a decade or so ago. The seminar itself was about a new book about the Claretians (official name: Congregation of Missionaries Sons of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary), an order started in mid-19th-century Spain that evolved into an order that evangelized and ministered to Hispanics and Latinos in North America. The gathering of academics also occurred on a campus that Christian Smith, one of the greatest sociologists of religion in the United States, had left roughly nine months earlier.

The reason for connecting a seminar on one of the many religious orders that dot the Roman Catholic landscape and Christian Smith’s departure from Notre Dame is a suspicion that many Protestant converts to Rome do not know what they are getting into. Aside from the twists and turns of the development of doctrine and debates about continuity and discontinuity in the wake of Vatican II (not to mention whether the Eastern or Western churches have a better claim to antiquity), the Roman Catholic Church is a kaleidescope of institutions, many of which with a high degree of autonomy, with the papacy as the tube holding the mirrors, colored fillers, and eyepiece together. Of course, gaining recognition from the Vatican requires some conformity among religious and priests within a specific order. But in the case of the Claretians, they developed their own materials, their own forms of devotion, moved from place to place (sometimes to be banned by the local bishop), and developed a distinct set of allegiances among Spanish-speaking Roman Catholics in Mexico, Texas, and later Chicago that ran in grooves distinct from “the” teaching of the Vatican, or the national parishes (that ministered, for instance, to Poles, Italians, Germans), and other religious orders.

Aside from the institutional configuration of the Claretians’ work — how did the superior coordinate with local bishops or the various agencies of the Vatican? — I had questions about the degree to which the order cultivated a generic Roman Catholic piety or an alternative that nurtured a high degree of attachment to the Claretians specifically. In other words, if a Latino-American wound up moving from a Claretian parish to a place that only had diocesan clergy, would he or she find a home? Or would the Claretian-formed Roman Catholic feel at odds with other Roman Catholics?

These questions are ones that apply to Protestants perhaps as much as Roman Catholics. If someone grows up Baptist, will he make an easy transition to Lutheranism if he moves to a town where (as if) there are no Baptist congregations? And what about the Presbyterian church planter who tries to establish a congregation in a town that already has Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Anglican congregations? Who coordinates among the Protestant communions to decide whether the Presbyterian is allowed to start another Protestant congregation? American Protestants have no umbrella institutional authority to make such calls. Roman Catholics do. It is the papacy.

But here’s the kicker, without the Roman pontiff, Roman Catholicism is as diverse and as entrepreneurial as Protestantism. That may seem like a big difference, as if Rome has a kind of authority that Protestants lack. But often it seems that the pope acts more like a back stop than an actual potentate executing real power over Roman Catholic ministries. Roman Catholics can choose to operate a host of orders and ministries and they can develop all sorts of different kinds of piety and forms of devotion. The one thing that keeps them “united” are the international offices housed in Vatican City.

Maybe that makes Rome superior to Protestantism, but in the welter of modern society with its religious freedoms, the papacy hardly stacks up to be a weight against individualism, relativism, and creative destruction. Rome’s unity is on paper or fills aspirations. It hardly generates a disciplined, uniform, constraining church.

This is where Christian Smith’s departure from Notre Dame deserves mention. He has himself had a long track record of leaving parts of his background loudly. His break with his own academic discipline of sociology and its “sacred project” was as courageous as it was smart:

Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism. But, whether or not it helps achieve those in the outside world, within sociology itself, and in higher education broadly, in the end that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought. In short, it reproduces in its own image that which it opposes and seeks to transform in the world beyond.

This critique did not mean he stopped teaching sociology or writing. It did, though, signal his own repudiation of his guild’s orthodoxy.

What he did with sociology, he also applied to his own evangelical Protestant faith. In two books, Smith explained why he left Protestantism for Rome. One was The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (2011). In the other, How To Go From Being A Good Evangelical To A Committed Catholic In Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (2011), Smith walked through and deconstructed Protestant objections to Roman Catholicism, such as a wooden and literalistic hermeneutic:

For Protestants, the words are the truth. That is why one must get them exactly right. For Catholics, by contrast, words formulate expressions of truth. There is not in Catholicism, a literal, exact univocal correspondence or identity between words and truth. Much of truth, especially truth that directly concerns God, is in Catholicism a mystery. Ultimately the truth is God. And God is not words.

That objection, in some ways, makes his departure from Notre Dame surprising. Smith’s reason for leaving (and retiring with a bang!) has the earmarks of a Protestant expecting a Roman Catholic institution to adhere to the words it professes. Instead of words, Smith faulted Notre Dame for neglecting books (which is adjacent to Protestant logocentrism):

A Catholic university is Catholic only insofar as its scholars, however diverse their frameworks and methods, maintain a serious engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition. The central and animating question should be: What do the Catholic tradition and the many scholarly disciplines have to say to one another?

Smith judged that Notre Dame talked a good game but did not carry out its academic mission in light of Rome’s intellectual tradition (which would likely be a set of authors, texts, and theological themes).

It’s not just that the university hasn’t reached its potential, it’s that it hasn’t seriously tried. Sustained engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition happens in pockets, but leaders avoid the institutional efforts that would make this engagement consistent and integrated.

What might such efforts look like? . . . Notre Dame should advance its Catholic mission by means of standards and programs that involve truth-in-advertising, judicious hiring, incentives for faculty to learn about the Catholic intellectual tradition, and accountability for the expectation that faculty contribute to the Catholic mission. 

Smith was clearly not expecting a university to have the same kind of uniformity as the church. He was not advocating for hiring only Roman Catholics (otherwise Notre Dame would not have hired him before his conversion). He had hoped that Notre Dame’s faculty would teach or conduct their scholarship in light of the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition even if they did not themselves belong to the church. But if Smith had this kind of standard for a university, imagine what he must have found when he encountered the variety of Roman Catholic options within the church itself, from its clergy to the laity, from the German bishops to the folk piety of the faithful in Central America.

An irony of Smith’s departure from Notre Dame is that his reason for leaving has on it the fingerprints of his education as an undergraduate at Gordon College. When he graduated from the evangelical college on Boston’s North Shore, Gordon had almost three decades of practice with integrating faith and learning. Whether it came from the inspiration of Neo-Calvinists at Calvin College or emerged more organically among evangelical faculty in philosophy who tried to implement a curriculum in which students thought about the arts and sciences from a Christian perspective, Smith’s undergraduate education undoubtedly planted the seeds of conducting the work of a Christian college or university in ways that reinforced Christian conviction among professors, students, and maybe even student-athletes (at least before Name, Image, and Likeness).

As it turns out, the integration of faith and learning is a lot harder to do than either Gordon faculty or Notre Dame administrators imagined. Academic subjects may line up with Christian truths only some of the time (the history of the Civil War does not automatically reinforce the Great Commission or Presbyterian polity). Christian faculty themselves may apply Christian teaching differently (the Good Samaritan supports open borders but Pauline teaching on the magistrate leads to defending ICE).

You might have thought a sociologist would have been alert to the diversity of the Roman Catholic Church and to differences among university faculty even at a confessional institution. A sociologist might have also detected that like the Claretians, Notre Dame has its own piety, one broad enough to include the reflections of Alisdair MacIntyre and the strategy of Knute Rockne.

Presbyterians Going to Rome as Presbyterians

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About a decade ago, while in Rome for a seminar and some sight-seeing on the side, I worshiped at St. Andrew’s Church, Rome (a reminder of which came from discovering a short pamphlet on the congregation’s history). What follows are a couple paragraphs from the congregation’s booklet on the early history of Presbyterianism in Rome. Not only is the illegality of Presbyterian worship striking, but so to is the kind of cooperation that ministry overseas encourages among Protestants from different communions. (For another example, consider the example of Seceders, Church of Scotlanders, and Free Church Presbyterians at odds and then cooperating to for the Presbyterian Church of Canada.)

The Church in a House

The experiment began in the Apostolic manner in “a hired house” and in a room holding thirty-five people. Being within the walls of Rome, meeting for Protestant worship within a house constituted an illegal act. In March 1862 Mr. Laughton reported to Edinburgh that “as he” he had not “been interfered with by the police.” This small, valiant group of Presbyterians, drawn mainly from Scotland and America, continued in their clandestine worship under the shadow of the Inquisition until 1864. By drawing their visiting chaplains from the three Presbyterian churches then prevailing in Scotland, they gave within the walls of Rome, historic instance of non-Roman ecumenical cooperation.

In 1864 Dr. James Lewis of Leith was appointed the first permanent minster. By then the activities of the Scots Kirk had attracted the attention of the police, and those who came to worship were warned to carry no Bibles openly, and to leave the house in twos and threes. Despite the fact that no advertising was allowed, the congregation grew, and had to move to a larger room in Via del Babuino.

The Church in the Garden

The story of that achievement is full of adventure. As Dr. Lewis used to say while the church was being built “It is more in danger from the bombs of Italian troops than from the Bulls of the Pope.” When the building was opened on the second Sunday of 1871, Rome had been freed from Vatican control four months earlier, on 20th September, 1870. As the worshipers entered their new sanctuary on Italian territory, they could enjoy the scent of violets from the surrounding fields and a clear view of St. Peter’s across the Tiber, looking lovely but lonely, its Pontiff a prisoner within his own Vatican walls.

The ministry of that church was limited by a twenty year lease, by the growing congregation for which it was proving inadequate, and perhaps above all, by the death of Dr. Lewis a year after its completion. From 1872 until the appointment of Dr. J. Gordon Gray in 1881, the church was supplied by a succession of distinguished ministers from all three Scottish churches for about three months at a time. It was a spectacle of Presbyterian brethren dwelling and working together in unity; something which could not be said of all churches then in Rome.

9/11 Revealed Christian Nationalism before Stephen Wolfe’s “Case”

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Reactions to the terrorist attack then and now (25 years later) have been hard to miss or experience. One conferee this past weekend in Baltimore who gathered to honor H. L. Mencken’s cynical wit (and more), could hardly bottle up tears after stopping at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the way to Charm City.

Tallying Christian responses has also put the recent discussions of Christian nationalism in perspective. As it turns out, Protestants who have a high view of politics and nations (who are also invariabley pietist) rushed to find Christian meaning in 9/11. Confessionalists, in contrast, were reluctant to use Christian doctrine to make sense of the United States’ loss and suffering.

(Sure, this could come across as a case of confessionalists taking a victory lap at the expense of pietists. It might also be instructive about the way a high view of the church deescalates the importance of nations.)

John Fea surveyed evangelical responses to 9/11 from twenty-five years ago in a piece for Christianity Today. The opposition of Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to immorality and secularism was clearly a forerunner to recent calls from ChristNats for laws against blashpemy and Sabbath breaking.

It took only two days for Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University’s chancellor, to publicize his interpretation of the attacks. On Thursday morning, he appeared on televangelist Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and blamed the attacks on all his culture war enemies.

“I really believe,” he said, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

. . . A few days later, as the nation watched George Bush’s National Day of Prayer and Remembrance at the National Cathedral, Falwell spoke to cable news trying to walk back his comments. He told CNN, in the outlet’s paraphrase, that “only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the deadly attacks”—but even then he could not stop talking about his enemies.

Falwell again accused the ACLU of having “secularize[d] America” and “removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded,” thereby causing God to “lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812.” (The editors of Christianity Today later quipped that Falwell spoke “as if America enjoyed a spotless record of righteousness until the 1960s.”)

. . . Many evangelicals, whatever they thought of Falwell’s specific targets, seemed to share his underlying assumption: God was sending the United States a message through September 11. This was the old rhetoric of the Puritan jeremiad, sermons that called Massachusetts Bay to repentance in the wake of a society-wide tragedy. Puritans believed God used Indian raids, earthquakes, and losses of charters to punish the colonies’ inhabitants. Now, in these attacks, some evangelicals were sure God was again punishing his new chosen people.

Radio psychologist James Dobson pointed to America’s “pride and arrogance,” the “killing [of] 40 million unborn babies,” and the “mainstreaming of pornography.” He told his readers to “accept the truth that this nation will suffer in many ways for departing from the principles of righteousness.”

At the Nicotine Theological Journal, the editors adopted a different stance. One article, “God Damn Mr. Laden,” questioned the ubiquity of the phrase, “God bless America”:

The phrase, “God damn,” is one that devout Christians are not supposed to utter. Depending on how it’s said, it violates the Third Commandment which, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, forbids blaspheming and misusing the name of God “by cursing, perjury, or unnecessary oaths.” “God damn” would appear to fall into the category of cursing. That may explain why the only time I’ve heard a minister of the gospel say these words, and with noted effect, was when describing Jesus Christ on the cross, who bearing the sins of his people, was at that moment a “God-damned sinner.” The rest of those in the congregation that Sunday morning shifted nervously.

The recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, combined with the response of many Americans with a show of flags and the singing of “God Bless America,” have raised questions about Third Commandment and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why is it wrong to say “God damn” but okay to say “God bless”? Surely the latter phrase isn’t a form of cursing by the lights of Heidelberg’s authors. But does “God bless” qualify, as Q&A 99 goes on to say, as the use of God’s holy name “with reverence and awe.” When it is as common as hand-painted messages on the rear windows of cars mixed with America’s civil religion of national messianism, the phrase “God bless” could legitimately be counted as a kind of cuss word. And yet few Christians seem to be aware that the Third Commandment requires the careful invoking of God’s name. In fact, because the idea that God has a special affection for the United States runs so deep in the American Protestant soul, responding to the terrorist attack with the phrase, “God bless,” is as natural as the Irish Catholic uttering “glory be” in reaction to a marvelous or unusual occurrence.

Another piece, “Faulty Towers,” noticed that invocations of Augustinianism were less coherent than what biblical theology gleans from the story of the Tower of Babel:

In reading some Internet “pastoral letters,” one common irony emerges. Pastors are frequently invoking the name of Augustine, and yet Augustine is being cited on behalf of some very un-Augustinian sentiments about American destiny and its role in the unfolding of the kingdom. Consider two messages from PCA pastors. “America is not the new Israel,” writes Larry Ball (on PCAnews.com), but “America has been special to God.” Now God is judging us, because “we have ejected the Christian God from our schools by denying prayer and refusing to teach his law.” Chief among American culprits was the immoral and heretical former administration (which seems to cast some doubt on God’s timing). America is a “cesspool of immorality and lawlessness . . . America has lost her peace because America has lost her righteousness.” It should not surprise us that God has used ungodly people to judge us, because that is the way he chose to judge Israel. America is not Israel, but she’s pretty darn close.

Slightyly more nuanced are the pastoral reflections from Tim Keller, a PCA pastor who ministers in Manhattan. He commends the mayor and governor for their public vision of the “resurrection” of New York City. “I personally believe that this is the right way for NYC to deal with its grief. It must reflect the gospel dynamic of death-into-resurrection at a civic level. Through this New York could become less a place of individualistic achievement and more of a community. Through this Americans could become on the one hand humbler and more sensitive to the injustice and pain in the world and yet more committed to and (rightly) proud of our nation than ever before. In summary, we could become stronger through this weakness, not just in spite of it. That is the basic gospel dynamic.”

This is as profoundly anti-Augustinian as you can get. To whatever extent New York City recovers, it is not in any sense being resurrected or redeemed. It remains the city of man, and therefore, at best, an instrument of God’s restraining grace. It does not reflect any reestablished role of America’s special purpose, nor is its recovery marking the breakthrough either of the gospel or the kingdom.

Is it too much to suggest that the better biblical metaphor to recall is the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? In a consistently Augustinian understanding, the fall of the Tower of Babel was both judgment and blessing upon the city of man. In Meredith Kline’s words, it was a blessing in the sense that God was frustrating the “apostate ideology infecting the city of man,” frustrating their dialogue and “so ungluing the bonds of their ecumenical union.”

To close by saying that 9/11 stands above theological posturing may seem like a kind way to avoid using the tragedy to score religious points. In fact, the point of drawing on theology to interpret events in the life of a nation is to indicate that no success or failure of a political body is independent of theological interpretation. In which case, the choice of theological material for assessing dramatic events in the life of a nation is telling.

Mencken Day 2026

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If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professional patriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign alliances, and denounced their evils in harsh, specific terms. He had a liking for all forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whisky whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.

Inhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit. The Senate would never dare confirm him; the President would not think of nominating him. He would be on trial in all the yellow journals for belonging to the Invisible Government, the Hell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Money Power, the Interests. The Sherman Act would have him in its toils; he would be under indictment by every grand jury south of the Potomac; the triumphant prohibitionists of his native state would be denouncing him (he had a still at Mount Vernon) as a debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer for insane asylums, a poisoner of the home. The suffragettes would be on his trail, with sentinels posted all along the Accotink road. The initiators and referendors would be bawling for his blood. The young college men of the Nation and the New Republic would be lecturing him weekly. He would be used to scare children in Kansas and Arkansas. The chautauquas would shiver whenever his name was mentioned….

And what a chance there would be for that ambitious young district attorney who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations—and grab him under the Mann Act! (“PATER PATRIÆ,” Damn! A Book of Calumny 1918)

Protestant Elites Then and Now

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What is it about the younger generation of manly Protestants who dabble in Christian nationalism and write for outlets like American Reformer and Davenant?  With all of the calls for Protestant ressourcement (the last syllable pronounced “maw”!), the awareness of the past among some of these writers is surprisingly limited when it comes to recent history. The case of evangelical elites as scholars with standing in the mainstream academy is a case in point.

A couple of recent complaints about the failure of evangelical institutions to hire and sustain scholars of distinction echo Aaron Renn’s argument about the absence of evangelical elites. [link to first article.  One asserts that evangelical colleges do not snatch up “credentialed, talented, and scholarly” Protestants as they should. Why didn’t said institutions either snatch them up for themselves or work to propel them to “mainstream” posts? The piece goes into accusation mode:

 You, Evangelical elite, are not retaining potential talent, those people who fit the bill, who are “200% respectable,” as Renn put it. If you fail in this regard, you will not be able to reproduce or extend your rule. You aspire to elite status, you take all your cues from the broad mainstream elite world, but you neither staff your own colleges (i.e., elite production) nor staff those outside your predominantly clerical institutions.

The other complaint faults evangelicals for failing to think in theological categories about their scholarly work:

The bottom line is that Catholic intellectuals tend to assume that all theology is relevant to all areas of intellectual endeavor. If it’s not obvious how, it’s still worth assuming it nevertheless until it becomes apparent. On the other hand, theology for the evangelical scholar tends to be a sort of God-of-the-gaps, an occasional mortar to stick in crumbling joinery. 

What both of these writers, as well as Aaron Renn, miss is that as recently as twenty-five years ago evangelical scholars were actually elites in American universities.  The October 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly devoted a cover story to scholars at (then) Calvin College and Wheaton College as part of “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.”  Part of Alan Wolfe’s conclusion after covering the breadth of evangelical colleges and scholarship was a warning:

So long as they continue to marginalize themselves, evangelicals will be unable to equal the accomplishments of the generation that brought us Marsden, Noll, Plantinga, and Wolterstorff. That would be the true scandal of the evangelical mind.

That negative judgment should not obscure the recognition that evangelical institutions actually had nurtured elite scholars in philosophy, history, and sociology (for starters).  To be sure, Wolfe faults evangelicalism for separatism and parochialism which could support those calling for more and better evangelical elites.  Someone could say that with all the accomplishments of the generation of scholars associated with Mark Noll and George Marsden, they were still unable to create a set of institutions that reliably produce elite professionals.

And yet, those calling for evangelical scholars today do not consider the effort to create an evangelical mind that began roughly in the 1970s (I am currently writing a book about this, tentatively titled, The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Mind).  That collective endeavor which went from Gordon College in the East to Westmont College in the West, and depended on the Rust Belt center of gravity at Calvin, Wheaton, and Notre Dame (thanks to a Protestant provost), lasted all the way until 2015 or so (which coincides with Renn’s point about the start of the Negative World).  Today’s proponents of Protestant scholarship could well consider the earlier building blocks of the evangelical mind and how it unraveled. 

But the failure to consider the recent past is not the fault alone of the recent advocates of an evangelical elite.  Even those who promoted the creation of an evangelical mind, complete with a Kuyperian w(orld-and-life-vie)-w had not studied the efforts of mainline Protestants in the 1950s who themselves argued for a Protestant mind.  Those Christian scholars were remarkably successful in creating religion departments at colleges and universities where undergraduates studied Scripture, ethics, and church history.  That endeavor also ran out of gas eventually, partly because the professionalization of religion as an academic discipline inevitably watered down the aggressively Protestant character of religious studies.  But this is another case from which advocates of an evangelical elite might learn about the arguments, scholarship, and institutions that made a Protestant mind possible. 

Despite the lessons that history might teach about the creation of an evangelical elite now, a fundamental hiccup in the ideal, whether mainline Protestant, evangelical, or Christian nationalist, is the distinction between the sacred and the secular that pietists (high and low brow) refuse.  Simply put, teaching Sunday school and preaching is different from teaching an undergraduate seminar at a private college.  The church is not the academy.  The credentials the Christian ministry requires – a seminary degree and ordination – is not the same as the gate by which scholars may enter the academy – a terminal degree and accreditation.  The church is a private and voluntary institution in ways the academic is public and involuntary (through government oversight and regulation). 

Some proponents of aggressive Protestantism may object to the academy’s use of standards other than the ones that govern the church.  They could argue that all institutions should submit to Christ (which is the academic version of Christian nationalism).  But that is not how the world of universities and specialized research works.  Nor is the lack of a Christian vision the reason that Protestants use for using evaluating academic, medical, and legal experts whether or not they are Christian. 

What makes scholarship special is its capacity to make sense of most parts of the world, not that it is based on the Christian faith of the scholar.  To suggest that Christians need Christian scholars so that believers can have trustworthy learning is as pietistic as it is fundamentalist.