The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the ...

The Accommodation of Protestant
Christianity with the Enlightenment:
An Old Drama Still Being Enacted

David A. Hollinger

Abstract: Throughout its history, the United States has been a major site for the accommodation of
Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment. This accommodation has been driven by two closely
related but distinct processes: the demysti½cation of religion’s cognitive claims by scienti½c advances,
exempli½ed by the Higher Criticism in Biblical scholarship and the Darwinian revolution in natural his-
tory; and the demographic diversi½cation of society, placing Protestants in the increasingly intimate
company of Americans who did not share a Protestant past and thus inspiring doubts about the validity
of inherited ideas and practices for the entire human species. The accommodation of Protestant Christian-
ity with the Enlightenment will continue to hold a place among American narratives as long as “diversity”
and “science” remain respected values, and as long as the population includes a substantial number of
Protestants. If you think that time has passed, look around you.

DAVID A. HOLLINGER, a Fellow In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin
of the American Academy since
1997, is the Preston Hotchkis Pro- Luther King, Jr., invoked the Pilgrims landing at
fessor of American History at the Plymouth Rock and Jefferson writing the Declara-
University of California, Berkeley. tion of Independence. In that 1963 meditation on
He is the immediate past President American national destiny, fashioned as a weapon
of the Organization of American in the black struggle for civil rights, King repeatedly
Historians. His publications in- mobilized the sanctions of both Protestant Chris-
clude The Humanities and the Dy- tianity and the Enlightenment.1 Like the great ma-
namics of Inclusion Since World War II jority of Americans of his and every generation,
(2006), Cosmopolitanism and Solidar- King believed that these two massive inventories of
ity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, ideals and practices work together well enough. But
and Professional Af½liation in the Unit- not everyone who has shared this basic conviction
ed States (2006), and “After Cloven understands the relation between the two in quite
Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Prot- the same terms. And there are others who have de-
estantism and the Modern Ameri- picted the relation as one of deep tension, even hos-
can Encounter with Diversity,” tility. Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment,
Journal of American History (2011). and a host of claims and counterclaims about how
the two interact with one another are deeply con-
stitutive of American history. We often speak about
“the religious” and “the secular,” or about “the

© 2012 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

1

The heart” and “the head,” but American life accommodation. The bulk of the men and
Accommo- women in control of American institu-
dation of as actually lived beneath these abstrac- tions–educational, political, and social–
Protestant tions has been much more particular and have sought to retain the cultural capital
of the Reformation while diversifying
Christianity demands scrutiny in its historical density. their investments in a variety of opportu-
with the nities and challenges, many of which
Enlighten- The United States, whatever else it may came to them under the sign of the En-
lightenment. The legacy of the Enlight-
ment have been in its entire history as a subject enment in much of Europe, by contrast,
played out in the rejection of, or indif-
of narration, has been a major site for the ference to, the Christianity to which the
Enlightenment was largely a dialectical
engagement of Protestant Christianity response, even while state churches re-
mained ½xtures of the established order.
with the Enlightenment. This engagement In the United States, too, there were peo-
ple who rejected Protestant Christianity.
was–and continues to be–a world-his- But here the legacy of the Enlightenment
most often appeared in the liberalization
torical event, or at least one of the de½ning of doctrine and Biblical interpretation
and in the denominational system’s func-
experiences of the North Atlantic West tioning as an expanse of voluntary associ-
ations providing vital solidarities mid-
and its global cultural extensions from the way between the nation, on the one hand,
and the family and local community, on
eighteenth century to the present. Still, the other.

the United States has been a uniquely The sharper church-state separation in

conspicuous arena for this engagement the United States liberated religiously de-
½ned af½liations to serve as intermediate
in part because of the sheer demographic solidarities, a role such af½liations could
less easily perform in settings where reli-
preponderance of Protestants, especially gious authority was associated with state
power. Hence in addition to orthodox,
dissenting Protestants from Great Britain, evangelical Protestants who have been
more suspicious of the critical spirit of
during the formative years of the society the Enlightenment, American life has
included a formidable population of “lib-
and long thereafter. Relatively recent eral” or “ecumenical” Protestants build-
ing and maintaining religiously de½ned
social transformations can easily blind communities even as they absorbed and
participated in many aspects of modern
contemporaries to how overwhelmingly civilization that more conservative Prot-
estants held at a distance. As late as the
Northern European Protestant in origin mid-1960s, membership in the classic
“mainstream liberal” denominations–
the educated and empowered classes of Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian,

the United States have traditionally been.

The upward mobility of Catholic and

Jewish populations since World War II

and the massive immigration following

the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965–producing

millions of non-Protestant Americans

from Asia, Latin America, and the former

Soviet lands–have given the leadership

of American society a novel look. To be

sure, there have long been large numbers

of non-Protestants in the population at

large, but before 1960, if you held a major

leadership position and had real opportu-

nities to influence the direction of society,

you most likely grew up in a white Prot-

estant milieu. The example of King is a

reminder, moreover, that the substantial

population of African Americans has long

been, and remains, largely Protestant.

In the United States, the engagement of

Protestant Christianity with the Enlight-

enment most often took the form of

2 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

and so on–reached an all-time high. secularists in disguise, as well as the feel- David A.
Because educated, middle-class Ameri- ing among ecumenical parties that their Hollinger
cans maintained Protestant af½liations evangelical co-religionists are sinking the
well into the twentieth century, the true Christian faith with an albatross of
Enlightenment was extensively engaged anachronistic dogmas and alliances forged
within, rather than merely beyond, the with reactionary political forces. These
churches. Had the educated middle class quarrels, shaped in part by the campaign
moved farther from Protestantism, the for a “reasonable Christianity” waged by
cultural capital of the Reformation would Unitarians early in the nineteenth century,
not have been preserved and renewed to continue to the present day, sharply distin-
the degree that made it an object of strug- guishing the United States from the his-
gle for so long. torically Protestant countries of Europe.
The Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
The intensity of the Enlightenment- and the Scandinavian nations have long
Protestant relationship in America result- been among the most de-Christianized in
ed also from the discomforts created by the world. The United States really is dif-
the very church-state separation that ferent. Accordingly, the copious literature
encouraged the flourishing of religious on “secularization” often treats the Unit-
af½liations. The United States is the only ed States as a special case.4
major nation in the world that still oper-
ates under an eighteenth-century consti- Never was the United States a more
tution, one that, anomalously in the gov- special case than it is today. Indeed, con-
ernance cultures of even that century, temporary American conditions invite
makes no mention of God. The U.S. fed- renewed attention to the historic accom-
eral government is a peculiarly Enlight- modation of Protestant Christianity with
enment-grounded entity, and for that the Enlightenment. An increasingly prom-
reason has inspired many attempts to inent feature of public life is the af½rma-
inject Christianity into it, or to insist that tion of religion in general and of Protes-
God has been there, unacknowledged, all tant Christianity in particular. Republican
along.2 candidates for of½ce especially have been
loquacious in expressing their faith and
The role of liberal religion in American ½rm in declaring its relevance to secular
history is too often missed by observers governance. Michelle Bachman, Mike
who consider the consequences of the Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Richard Perry,
Enlightenment only outside religion and Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum are
recognize religion only when found in its among the most visible examples.5 Lead-
most obscurantist forms.3 The fundamen- ers of the Democratic Party, too, includ-
talists who rejected evolution and the ing President Barack Obama, have pro-
historical study of the Bible and have lob- claimed their faith and have contributed
bied for God to be written into the Con- to an atmosphere in which the constitu-
stitution receive extensive attention in tional principle of church-state separation
our textbooks, but the banner of Protes- is widely held to have been interpreted
tant Christianity has also been flown by too strictly.
defenders of Darwin and the Higher Crit-
icism and by critics of the idea of a “Chris- The Enlightenment-derived arguments
tian America.” Quarrels within American of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas,
Protestantism revolve around the feeling which maintain that debates over public
among more orthodox, evangelical par- policy should be con½ned to the sphere of
ties that mainstream liberals are actually “public reason,” are routinely criticized

141 (1) Winter 2012 3

The as naive and doctrinaire. We are awash dynamic of “science and religion” dis-
Accommo- course, the speci½c content of religious
dation of with con½dent denunciations of “the sec- belief is reformulated to take account of
Protestant ularization thesis” (usually construed as what geologists, biologists, physicists,
astronomers, historians, and other natu-
Christianity the claim that the world becomes less re- ralistically grounded communities per-
with the suade religious leaders is true about the
Enlighten- ligious as it becomes industrialized) and world. Normally, the religious doctrines
rejected in this process are said to have
ment with earnest pleas to listen empathically been inessential to begin with. They are
cast aside as mere projections of histori-
to the testimonies–heavily Protestant in cally particular aspects of past cultures,
which can be replaced by formulations
orientation–of religious yearning and that reflect the true essentials of the faith
and vindicate yet again the compatibility
experience now prevalent in popular cul- of faith with knowledge. Sometimes, how-
ever, cognitive demysti½cation pushes
ture. The writings of “the New Atheists” people toward nonbelief.

revive the rationalist-naturalist critiques The second process, demographic diver-
si½cation, involves intimate contact with
of religion that had largely gone into people of different backgrounds who dis-
play contrasting opinions and assump-
remission during the decades when reli- tions and thereby stimulate doubt that
the ways of one’s own tribe are indeed
gion was widely understood to have been authorized by divine authority and viable,
if not imperative, for other tribes, too.
privatized and hence less in need of refu- The dynamic here is also classical: cosmo-
politanism–a great Enlightenment ideal
tation by skeptics. Af½rmations of a secu- –challenging provincial faiths. Wider ex-
periences, either through foreign travel or,
lar orientation less strident than those of more often, through contact with immi-
grants, change the context for deciding
the New Atheists provoke extensive atten- what is good and true. Living in proximi-
ty to people who do not take Protestant
tion, moreover, because debates about the Christianity for granted could be unset-
tling. Here again, the standard response is
nation and its future are so much more to liberalize, to treat inherited doctrines as
suf½ciently flexible to enable one to abide
religion-saturated that at any time since by them while coexisting “pluralistically,”
or even cooperating, with people who do
the 1950s. In a country that has now elect- not accept those doctrines. Sometimes,
however, awareness of the range of human
ed a president from a member of a noto- possibilities results in abandoning the
faith of the natal community altogether.
riously stigmatized ethnoracial group,
Philosopher Charles Peirce understood
atheism remains more anathema than how easily the two processes can be
linked. In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce
blackness: almost half of all voters are

still comfortable telling pollsters that

they would never support an atheist for

president. Observers disagree whether

American piety has religious depth or is a

largely symbolic structure controlled by

worldly interests; either way, religious

formations are indisputably part of the
life of the United States today.6

In this contemporary setting, it is all the

more important to understand how the
accommodation of Protestant Christian-
ity with the Enlightenment has taken place
and how the dynamics of this accommo-
dation continue to affect the public cul-
ture of the United States. Two processes
have driven the accommodation, growing
increasingly interconnected over time.
One is cognitive demysti½cation, or the crit-
ical assessment of truth claims in light
of scienti½c knowledge. In this classic

4 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

argued that all efforts to stabilize belief other faiths, con½dence in the unique- David A.
will ultimately fail unless you adopt be- ness and supreme value of Christianity Hollinger
liefs that can withstand exposure to the required a bit more energy to maintain.8
world at large. When you encounter other When Jewish intellectuals in the middle
people who hold very different opinions decades of the twentieth century ad-
than your own, and who can present vanced secular perspectives in a variety of
striking evidence to support those opin- academic disciplines and other arenas
ions, it is harder to be sure that you are of culture, a common Protestant culture
right. Your own experience and that of was more dif½cult to sustain. Cognitive
those around you may yield a particular demysti½cation can proceed within a
set of certainties, but if another group of tribe, but commerce with neighboring
people moves into the neighborhood and tribes can diminish the predictable resis-
obliges you to confront their foreign tance to it.
experience and the truth claims appar-
ently vindicated by that experience, your Cognitive demysti½cation operated
old certainties become less so. Can you
keep the rest of the world away from your most aggressively in the nineteenth cen-
own tribe? Perhaps, but it is not easy. tury, especially in relation to the Darwin-
Peirce made this argument in 1877, while ian revolution in natural history. Virtually
defending the superiority of science in the all Americans who gave any thought to
speci½c context of the Darwinian contro- the relation of science to religion prior to
versy. He understood science to entail the the Darwinian controversy believed that
taking of all relevant evidence into ac- reason and revelation, rightly understood,
count, wherever it came from, and truth reinforced one another. Bacon and Luther,
to be what all the world’s inquirers could it had often been said in the years just
agree on if all their testimonies could be before Darwin, were twins in the advance-
assimilated. He perceived modernity as ment of modern life. In the context of this
an experience of difference in which hid- deeply entrenched understanding of the
ing out with one’s own kind was not like- symbiotic nature of the Protestant Refor-
ly to work. In this way, he integrated the mation and the Scienti½c Revolution, the
Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism with religious implications of natural selec-
its critical spirit.7 tion were debated in the United States
with more intensity, and for a longer pe-
Hence demographic diversi½cation and riod of time, than in the other countries
cognitive demysti½cation can have their of the North Atlantic West. Although
own force, but also reinforce one another; some discussants concluded, then or
and they can even overlap. When West- much later, that Darwinian science was
erners brought modern medicine into lo- fatal to Christianity, the overwhelming
cales where it was new, indigenous belief majority of American commentators were
systems were put under stress by the “reconcilers.” The copious discourse of
Westerners and their novel and often the late nineteenth century sought main-
highly effective means of interpreting and ly to establish that science and religion
treating disease. When the 1893 Chicago were not in conflict after all, no matter
World Parliament of Religions made what the freethinking philosophers of
Americans aware of the sophistication of Europe asserted. Even Andrew Dickson
many non-Christian religions and of the White, author of the monumental 1896
ways in which myths assumed to be pecu- work, A History of the Warfare of Science
liarly Christian had ready analogues in with Theology in Christendom, insisted that

141 (1) Winter 2012 5

The the only warfare attendant upon the had sent them abroad. Returning home
Accommo- with positive readings of foreign peoples
dation of advance of science was caused by the mis- and with jarring suggestions for changes
Protestant taken efforts of theologians to go beyond in American churches and the surround-
ing society, missionaries and their chil-
Christianity their proper sphere. Christianity itself, dren, exempli½ed by the writer Pearl Buck,
with the often were potent liberalizers. But the
Enlighten- allowed the stolid Episcopalian president chief agent of change, which I focus on
here, was immigration compounded by
ment of Cornell University, was just as sound as upward class mobility.

ever. The persistence of strong creationist The prodigious increase of Catholic and
Jewish immigration starting in the 1880s
constituencies right down to the present positioned Protestant Christianity even
more ½rmly on the defensive. Certainly,
shows that the greatest single instance of Protestants well before the Civil War had
felt suf½ciently threatened by Catholic
cognitive demysti½cation remains con- migration from Ireland, and to some ex-
tent from Germany, to discriminate sys-
tested in the United States. At the other tematically against Catholics and thereby
keep “popish” corruptions from disrupt-
extreme, the fact that biologists are the ing their religious con½dence and their
control of American institutions. Public
most atheistic of all American groups schools in many parts of the country
became more secular in order to neutral-
today reminds us that the Darwinian rev- ize the charge that these schools were de
facto Protestant institutions (which to a
olution has helped lead many people out- large extent they had been, as Catholics
correctly discerned).11 But well into the
side the faith. But the larger truth is that twentieth century, two circumstances ren-
dered the numerous Catholics more of a
accommodation with evolution rather political problem for Anglo-Protestant
hegemonists than a religious one for be-
than rejection of it or of Christianity has lievers: the extensive system of Catholic
schools kept the bulk of the Catholic pop-
been the rule for Americans who are born ulation something of a thing apart in local
into Protestant communities.9 communities, and the relatively weak
class position of most Catholics until
Many other examples of the process of after World War II diminished the fre-
quency with which their ideas circulated
accommodation in the face of cognitive in the national media and academia. A
few Protestants converted to Catholicism,
demysti½cation could be cited, including but the vast majority of Protestants of all
persuasions felt so superior to Catholics
the adjustments compelled by the histor- that the latter’s opinions and practices
rarely called their own into question.
ical study of the Bible. But because this Demographic diversi½cation was held at
a certain distance.
process and its prominent examples are

well known, I will simply flag it with this

supremely important instance and move

on to the less-extensively discussed sec-

ond process, demographic diversi½cation,

which emerged most strikingly in the

twentieth century.

Demographic diversi½cation began

with some highly pertinent agents of
change functioning at a geographical dis-
tance. The sympathetic study of foreign
cultures by anthropologists promoted the
“cultural relativism” associated above all
with Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
This movement explicitly and relentless-
ly questioned the certainties of the home
culture by juxtaposing them with often
romanticized images of distant commu-
nities of humans.10 Another factor was
the gradual effect American Protestant
missionaries had on the communities that

6 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Yet only temporarily. The situation tant culture who were already stretching David A.
changed rapidly in the early 1960s with its boundaries in secular directions (in Hollinger
the election of John F. Kennedy as presi- the context of many episodes of cognitive
dent and the dramatic liberalization of demysti½cation) and were eager to explore
Catholic doctrine by Pope John XXIII’s the diversity Jews embodied.
Vatican II Council. These developments
turned Catholics into more serious inter- Unlike the Catholic population, more-
locutors. Catholics became suf½ciently over, many Jews were resoundingly secu-
intimate neighbors to compel the sympa- lar in their orientation and carried not an
thetic attention that helped “provincial- alien religion but rather the most radical-
ize” American Protestantism, pushing ly Enlightenment-generated strains of
Protestant leaders to renounce the pro- European thought, including Marxist
prietary relationship to the American na- and Freudian understandings of religion
tion that had so long been a foundation itself. Secular Jews were also leaders in
for their own authority. To be sure, the the exploration of modernist movements
most theologically and politically conser- in the arts that contested the more ratio-
vative elements within Protestantism nalist elements in the legacy of the En-
continued to espouse the idea that the lightenment while offering precious lit-
United States was a Protestant nation. But tle support to the Protestant orthodoxy
in the view of the mainstream leadership, against which the Enlightenment was so
as voiced by The Christian Century, Ken- largely de½ned. As non-Christians, the
nedy’s inauguration marked “the end of Jewish intellectuals were more foreign
Protestantism as a national religion” and than the Catholics, yet, paradoxically,
the fuller acceptance of the secularity of a their high degree of secularism created a
nation grounded in the Enlightenment.12 common foundation with liberalizing
Protestants, many of whom continued to
In the meantime, the much smaller see Catholics as superstitious dupes of a
population of immigrant Jews and their medieval establishment in Rome. Espe-
descendants presented a sharper chal- cially in literature, the arts, and social crit-
lenge to Protestant epistemic and social icism, Jewish intellectuals joined ecu-
con½dence. Enthusiastically immersed in menical Protestants and ex-Protestants
public schools and seeking full participa- in national leadership during the middle
tion in American institutions of virtually decades of the twentieth century. Two
all sorts, the highly literate and upwardly antiprovincial revolts, one against the
mobile Jewish population of the post- constraints of traditional Jewish life and
1880 migration was concentrated in the another against the constraints of tradi-
nation’s cultural capital, New York City. tional American Protestant life, reinforced
Jews were harder to dismiss as bearers of each other and accelerated the cosmopol-
ideas and practices at odds with the Prot- itan aspirations of both.13
estant heritage. Their witness was so com-
pelling that it eventually forced the devel- The role of Jewish Americans in the
opment of the concept of “the Judeo- process of demographic diversi½cation
Christian tradition.” But long before that increased when the barriers against their
phrase caught on in the 1950s, Jewish inclusion in academia collapsed after
intellectuals had begun to converse with World War II. The teaching and public
John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., discussion of philosophy, literature, his-
Randolph Bourne, Hutchins Hapgood, tory, sociology, and political science had
and other products of American Protes- remained an Anglo-Protestant reserve
long after resistance to Jews had dimin-

141 (1) Winter 2012 7

The ished in medicine, law, engineering, and tentous phases of the entire multicentury
Accommo- accommodation of Protestant Christian-
dation of natural science. The leading secular aca- ity with the Enlightenment, broadly con-
Protestant demic humanists and social scientists of strued, was the crisis experienced by the
old “Protestant Establishment” during
Christianity the prewar generation, exempli½ed by and after the 1960s. The theologically and
with the politically liberal leaders of the National
Enlighten- lapsed Congregationalist John Dewey, Council of Churches and its most impor-
tant denominational af½liates (the United
ment had been of Protestant origin. The post- Methodists, the United Church of Christ,
the Northern Presbyterians, the North-
war change was rapid and extensive. By ern Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Disci-
ples of Christ, and several Lutheran bod-
the end of the 1960s, the Carnegie Foun- ies) were caught in the ferocious cross ½re
of national controversies over all the clas-
dation reported that self-identifying Jews, sic issues of the period, especially civil
rights, Vietnam, empire, feminism, abor-
while constituting only about 3 percent tion, and sexual orientation. As ecumeni-
cal Protestant leaders tried to mobilize
of the national population, accounted for their constituencies on the leftward side
of these issues, they were simultaneous-
36 percent of sociologists, 22 percent of ly attacked by evangelicals for selling out
religion to social activism and abandoned
historians, and 20 percent of philosophers by many of their own youth for moving
too slowly. Membership in the histori-
at the seventeen most prestigious uni- cally mainstream denominations declined
rapidly in the late 1960s and 1970s while
versities. Later in the twentieth century, evangelicals, who maintained a strong
public following, moved aggressively into
the increase of female and black faculty national political leadership during the
1970s and 1980s.
brought a different sort of demographic
This religious crisis revolved around a
diversi½cation, one that discredited sex- particular outlook the ecumenical leader-
ship brought to the conflicts of that era. A
ist and racist traditions rather than reli- cosmopolitan and rationalist perspective,
it was inspired by the demographic diver-
gious biases. But there was also another si½cation that liberal Protestants observed
in their social environment and by the
difference: the addition of women and cognitive demysti½cation of their cosmos
that modern science had achieved. Self-
African Americans to the humanities and consciously “modern,” this viewpoint in-
cluded an increasingly generous opinion
social sciences was often justi½ed by the of foreign peoples and their inherited
religions, a revulsion toward the persis-
need for the special perspectives they tence of anti-black racism in their own
country, a recognition that the American
could bring to scholarship and teaching. nation was as much the possession of

This was decidedly not the case with

Jews. No one declared that there was a

need for “a Jewish perspective.” It was

instead the epistemic universalism of the

Enlightenment that de½ned intellectually

the coming of Jews into American acade-

mia. Hence that episode stands as a pecu-

liarly vivid case of the overlap between

demographic diversi½cation and cogni-

tive demysti½cation: the Jewish academ-

ics, like their counterparts in literature

and the arts, were living examples of how

life’s deepest challenges could be ad-

dressed beyond the frame provided by
Protestant Christianity.14

All these developments presented a

striking challenge to Americans with
institutionalized responsibility for the
preservation and critical revision of Prot-
estantism during the second half of the
twentieth century. One of the most por-

8 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

non-Protestants as of Protestants, a posi- ary function of preaching the gospel. David A.
tive response to secular psychology and When the ecumenical leadership ½nally Hollinger
sociology, and a growing receptivity to backed away from the traditional assump-
theologies that rejected or downplayed the tion that the heterosexual, nuclear, patri-
role of supernatural power. The accom- archal family is God’s will, evangelical
modations the ecumenical Protestant leaders seized the idea, called it “family
leadership made with secular liberalism values,” and ran with it to great success.
generated countermeasures from funda- Evangelicals remained largely aloof from
mentalist, Pentecostal, and holiness Prot- the civil rights movement–often declar-
estants. These conservatives, deeply re- ing racism to be an individual sin rather
senting the authority exercised by the than a civic evil to be diminished by state
mainstream liberals partly as a result of power–while ecumenical leaders widened
the latter’s generally strong class position, the gap between themselves and their
established a formidable array of counter- rank-and-½le church members by strongly
institutions. The National Association of supporting the activities of Martin Luther
Evangelicals was founded in 1942, Fuller King, Jr., and numerous kindred initia-
Theological Seminary in 1947, and Chris- tives, including the Freedom Summer
tianity Today in 1956. In the 1960s, evangel- operation launched in 1964 to register
icals were able to offer the public a credi- blacks to vote. The departure of civil rights
ble, highly visible alternative to the style issues from the agenda of American poli-
of Protestantism promoted by the Na- tics eliminated a barrier to the Religious
tional Council of Churches, the Union Right’s national credibility, facilitating
Theological Seminary, and The Christian their triumphs in the 1980s: evangelicals
Century. By 1965, when the liberal theolo- gained more power during the Reagan
gian Harvey Cox concluded his best-sell- years by merely acquiescing to civil rights
ing The Secular City with the injunction to measures that many of them had opposed,
stop talking about God and focus simply treating them now as a fait accompli. Ecu-
on “liberating the captives,” evangelicals menists engaged in extensive, probing
had provided religious cover for Protes- discussions of the antisupernaturalist
tants dubious about the captive-liberating, writings of the most radical of their theo-
diversity-welcoming, supernaturalism- logians. The buzz in the seminaries, Time
questioning projects of the ecumenists.15 reported in 1965, was that “it is no longer
possible to think about or believe in a
In a fateful dialectic, enterprising, transcendent God who acts in human
media-savvy evangelical leaders espoused history. . . . Christianity will have to sur-
a series of perspectives that remained vive, if at all, without him.” Evangelicals
popular with the white public during the stood fast for traditional understandings
turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, just of the Bible and made it clear that God
as the ecumenical leadership more ½rm- really was in charge of things. These cer-
ly renounced these views. The idea of a tainties played well in the average church
“Christian America” is a prominent exam- pew.16
ple, though there were many more such
cases. While the ecumenical leadership, The accommodating ecumenical Prot-
deciding that its missionary project was estants, having absorbed much of moder-
culturally imperialist, diminished its size nity, found their social base diminishing
and turned from preaching to social ser- while Protestantism was increasingly
vices, evangelicals took up and pursued associated with people who had resisted
with a vengeance the traditional mission- these accommodations. Ecumenists’ ap-

141 (1) Winter 2012 9

The proval of contraception and a role for sex not as aware as the president was of the
Accommo- risks they were taking, nor were they as
dation of other than reproduction had a marked blunt in the moments when the truth
Protestant effect on birth rate differentials between dawned on them. But they, like Johnson,
believed that the time had come to re-
Christianity the two Protestant parties: during the direct the institutions and populations
with the they were trying to lead, and they behaved
Enlighten- baby boom, Presbyterian women had an accordingly. They encouraged secular
alliances that blurred the boundaries of
ment average of 1.6 children while evangelical their faith community and risked the grad-
ual loss of their children to post-Protes-
women had an average of 2.4, a birth rate tant persuasions. Just as Democrats lost
most of the South to the Republican Party,
considerably higher than even for Cath- so, too, did ecumenists yield more and
more of the cultural capital of the Refor-
olic women during that era. Ecumenical mation to the evangelicals.

leaders encouraged their youth to explore But Protestantism is not America. Nei-
ther is the South. The Democrats did well
the wider world of which evangelical lead- enough in the national arena by paying
the price of turning the states of the Old
ers counseled their own youth to be sus- Confederacy over to white Republicans.
The ecumenists, even while they lost the
picious. They also accepted perspectives leadership of Protestantism, advanced
many of the goals of secular liberalism
on women and the family that reduced that they had embraced. The United States
today, even with the prominence of polit-
their capacity to reproduce themselves at ically conservative evangelical Protes-
tants, looks much more like the country
precisely the same time they took posi- ecumenical leaders of the 1960s hoped it
would become than the one their evangel-
tions on empire, race, sex, abortion, and ical rivals sought to create. Sociologist
N. J. Demerath III has put this point hyper-
divinity that diminished their ability to bolically: the ecumenical Protestants
scored a “cultural victory” while experi-
recruit new members from the Seventh encing “organizational defeat.” They cam-
paigned for “individualism, freedom, plu-
Day Adventist and Church of the Naza- ralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellec-
tual inquiry,” Demerath observes–exact-
rene, ranks which in earlier generations ly the Enlightenment values that gained
rather than lost ground in American pub-
provided many converts to the more lic culture in the second half of the twen-
tieth century.17 These values were not pe-
respectable Methodist and Episcopalian culiar to ecumenical Protestants, but their
emphatic espousal demonstrated an ac-
faiths. Evangelicals, by contrast, had more commodation with secular liberalism,
especially as instantiated in speci½c caus-
children and kept them. es such as civil rights, feminism, and the

What happened to ecumenical Protes-

tantism during the 1960s crisis and its
aftermath can be instructively compared
to what happened simultaneously to the
Democratic Party in national politics.
“We have lost the South for a genera-
tion,” President Lyndon Johnson is wide-
ly quoted as having said in 1964 when the
Democratic Party aligned itself with the
cause of civil rights for African Ameri-
cans. The manner in which ecumenists
risked their hold on American Protes-
tantism is similar to the way the Demo-
cratic leadership imperiled its hold on the
South, and with similar consequences. At
issue in the control of American Protes-
tantism was not only race–the crucial
issue for the Democrats–but also impe-
rialism, feminism, abortion, and sexuality,
in addition to critical perspectives on
supernaturalism. Ecumenical leaders were

10 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

critical reassessment of inherited religious lectuals never contemplated. The world David A.
doctrine. that American Protestants and their prog- Hollinger
eny eventually made their own, in coop-
To treat the ecumenical Protestant saga eration with Americans who had no Prot-
estant past whatsoever, is a vast expanse
of the last half-century as a culmination encompassing dispersed elements of cul-
of the accommodation of Protestant ture from throughout the globe. The En-
Christianity with the Enlightenment, as I lightenment was destined to be a great
do here, invites several quali½cations. It provider of stepping-stones for European-
will not do to suppose that the evangeli- derived American Protestants because the
cal Protestants, who in my telling of the Enlightenment was largely a product of
story are primarily resisters to moderni- European Christian self-scrutiny in the
ty, experienced neither transformations ½rst place.
within their own ranks nor internal di-
versi½cation. An excellent guide to dis- Finally, we are left with the mystery of
agreements within American evangelical where a given historical formation such
Protestantism is historian Mark Noll’s as “ecumenical Protestantism”–or even
well-titled The Scandal of the Evangelical “the Enlightenment” itself–is best con-
Mind, which characterizes the funda- sidered an agent and where it is best con-
mentalist movement of the twentieth sidered a vehicle. The heavily Christian
century as “an intellectual disaster.” But I foundations of modern science and of the
believe it is fair to say that many of the Enlightenment are now widely acknowl-
loudest voices in the evangelical con- edged. And the Christianity of Paul the
versation today, exempli½ed by Nancy Apostle was itself as much a collection of
Pearcey’s Total Truth: Liberating Christianity historical results as of causes. It is easy
from Its Cultural Captivity, make Noll look to say that Protestants who most fully
like no less impassioned a defender of the accommodate secular liberalism have
Enlightenment than Harvey Cox. It is all turned their institutions into vehicles for
a matter of degree and emphasis.18 agencies outside Christianity, but the tra-
jectories that flowed into ecumenical
Neither will it do to imagine that every Protestantism and helped make it what it
novelty prompted by cognitive demysti- became were not, in themselves, autoch-
½cation and demographic diversi½cation thonous: those forces were complex re-
amounts to a triumph of the Enlighten- sults of earlier conditions, like strong
ment narrowly construed as a set of natu- winds that had picked up many diverse
ralistic and rationalist dispositions. The materials from the various territories
Enlightenment as a presence in modern through which they had blown.
history certainly was just that; indeed,
much of its legacy can be traced to the The accommodation of Protestant
power of those dispositions to explain Christianity with the Enlightenment will
human experience and diminish suspi- ½nd a place among American narratives
cion of the alternatives to Protestant so long as there are Americans whose for-
orthodoxy confronted in the process of mation was signi½cantly Protestant and
demographic diversi½cation. But the En- who owe a large part of their understand-
lightenment provided more than an out- ing of human reason to the seventeenth-
look to accommodate increasing diversity. and eighteenth-century savants who in-
It functioned as an almost in½nite series spired Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
of stepping-stones to many ideas and Jefferson. If you think that time is pass-
practices that eighteenth-century intel- ing, look around you.

141 (1) Winter 2012 11

The endnotes

Accommo- 1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Christian Century, June 12, 1963,
dation of
Protestant 769–775.

Christianity 2 There were strong movements to this effect in the middle of the nineteenth century, and they
with the
Enlighten- continued episodically in the twentieth. In 1947 and again in 1954, the National Association
ment of Evangelicals attempted to amend the Constitution to include the following passage, intro-

duced into the U.S. Senate (where it died in committee) by Vermont Republican Senator

Ralph Flanders: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior

and Ruler of nations, through whom we are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God”; see

“The Congress: Hunting Time,” Time, May 24, 1954, 23.

3 The heavily religious character of the Enlightenment as it flourished even in late-eighteenth-

and early-nineteenth-century America is emphasized in what remains after more than three

decades the standard account of its topic, Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The range and vitality of liberal theological endeavors

throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been documented and analyzed in the

massive work of Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, 3 vols. (Louisville,
Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

4 Prominent examples from recent years include Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the
West (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Pippa Norris and Ronald Englehart, eds.,
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004); David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and
His Interlocutors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Callum G. Brown and
Michael Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod
(Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2010).

5 For an unusually probing exploration of this feature of American politics, see Ryan Lizza,

“Leap of Faith,” The New Yorker, August 15 and 22, 2011, 54–63.

6 Three excellent collections of original academic essays exploring these current engagements

are Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., Rethinking Sec-
ularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); George Levine, ed., The Joy of Secularism:
11 Essays for How We Live Now (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Ira
Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also the most searching and comprehensive recent

contribution to the sociology of religion in the United States, Robert Putnam and David Camp-

bell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

7 Charles Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877): 1–15.

8 An influential study of this pivotal episode in demographic diversi½cation at a geographic

distance is Grant Wacker, “A Plural World: The Protestant Awakening to World Religions,”

in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed.
William Hutchison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 253–277.

9 Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New
York: D. Appleton, 1896). Among the many excellent studies of the religious aspects of the

Darwinian controversy, two have been especially influential: James R. Moore, The Post-Dar-
winian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great
Britain and America, 1870–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Jon H.
Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–
1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). The standard work on the persistence of
creationist ideas is Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scienti½c Creationism to Intelli-
gent Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). For the religious views of
biologists, see Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Atheists: A Psychological Pro½le,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 312.
Biologists challenging a literal reading of the Bible remain in dif½culty even today in some

12 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Protestant colleges; see, for example, http://m.insidehighered.com/layout/set/popup/news/ David A.
2011/08/15/a_professor_s_departure_raises_questions_about_freedom_of_scholarship_at Hollinger
_calvin_college.

10 A recent, exhaustive treatment of this movement is found in John S. Gilkeson, Anthropologists
and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

11 Fresh light on the Protestant-Catholic relationship in the middle decades of the nineteenth

century is cast by Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of 19th Century America (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).

12 Martin Marty, “Protestantism Enters Third Phase,” The Christian Century, January 18, 1961, 72.
13 I have discussed the coming together of these two antiprovincial revolts in “Ethnic Diversi-

ty, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American
Quarterly 27 (1975): 133–151. A recent and highly original contribution to the study of these
developments is Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Associ-
ation and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
14 For an extended treatment with attendant documentation of the developments summarized

in this paragraph, see David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-
Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1996), esp. chap. 2, “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public

Culture in the Twentieth Century.”

15 Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New
York: Macmillan, 1965), 268.

16 “Theology: The God is Dead Movement,” Time, October 22, 1965. For a fuller account with
attendant documentation of the developments mentioned in this paragraph and those fol-

lowing, see David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestants and

the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History 98 (June 2011):
21–48.

17 N. J. Demerath III, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline

of Liberal Protestantism,” Journal for the Scienti½c Study of Religion 34 (1995): 458–469, esp.
458–460.

18 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1994);
Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, Ill.:
Crossway Books, 2004).

141 (1) Winter 2012 13