President George W. Bush is ending his Presidency.
It was 8 years of some objectives that were fulfilled, but
also – in his own words – 8 years of many hopes that were disappointed.
It appears that those who are most disappointed are the
group that is known as “the Religious Right.” This unfortunate term includes
conservative Protestants, most evangelicals, charismatics, and fundamentalists.
There are many in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities who would
sympathize with much of the Religious Right agenda. Frequently, I count myself
one of these (and I hasten to add that I genuinely like W, if not some of his more idealistic advisers).
President George W. Bush was the leader that was earnestly
hoped for in this movement. He was their high-water mark. More than Ronald
Reagan ever was, George W. Bush not only “talked the talk” of the Religious Right,
but he also “walked the walk.” Leigh Schmidt, professor of religion at
Princeton University (and reviser of The Religious History of America, mainly written by Edwin Gaustad), called Bush the most powerful ally that the Religious
Right has had since Reagan, and an ally that actually shares the “conversionist
vernacular of popular evangelicalism” and speaks it fluently.
The candidacy and Presidency of George Bush may turn out to
be the high mark of the particular form of American Protestantism that we call,
simply, evangelicalism. Bush was a man produced by the American “camp meeting” tradition.
He carried a real sinner’s testimony and conversion. He had been a lackluster,
irresponsible and dissolute young man, whose academic, military and business experiences
were hardly creditable. A crisis had brought him to a point where he
acknowledged his shortcomings, and he called out to the Lord in a religious
experience, and was converted. Since then he has given up drink (and other
dependencies), and he has talked with Billy Graham, Tony Evans (of Promise
Keepers) and many others in the evangelical community.
Reagan’s connection with the evangelicals (and with any
Christian community, for that matter) was always tenuous. He identified himself
strongly as “pro-life,” but one wondered whether that was due more to his
conservative identification. In Reagan there might have been a strange reversal
of the customary evangelical immersion into politics: where the evangelical
became political because of his religious convictions (i.e., he attended the
National Right to Life March in January because of his biblically-founded
ethics), Reagan, on the other hand, made the reverse movement. Because of his
political objectives (i.e., the construction of a conservative political
coalition comprised of eastern financial, large corporation, and anti-modernist
Christian communities), he espoused certain ethical/political positions which
were salient in the evangelical agenda.
Moreover, Reagan’s “walk” in Christianity was spotty. He
attended church rarely. His wife consulted with astrologers and other esoteric
practitioners. His family was torn by divorce and internecine conflict. His own
wife and son have gone on record, after his death from Alzheimer’s, as
supporting fetal cell research.
I do not question Reagan’s Christian self-identification.
But with him, there is a sharp disconnect between the public rhetoric that was
always careful to reinforce his affiliation with the Religious Right, and
numerous behaviors that violated the historical evangelical ethic.
It seems that George W. Bush was much more to the
evangelical liking. Here was a penitent sinner who did not mind at all the
language of “being born again.” He attended church. He opposed not only
abortion, but also stem cell research. He pushed through legislation for
faith-based community services.
At the same time, however, he perpetuated and
exaggerated
the old Religious Right political agenda. In the late 1970s, the
Religious
Right, under the aegis of people like Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, Pat
Robertson
and James Dobson, sponsored on one hand the customary “natural law”
agenda of
opposition to gay rights, radical feminism, abortion, and other forms
of
libertinism. This was a reaction to the experiential and
overly-privatized
(and subjectivistic) “born again” Christianity made popular by Jimmy
Carter, and to a simultaneous perception of the secularization of
American culture. It
was in this period that the Religious Right recognized the
anti-abortion work
which had been carried on by the Roman Catholics: and this recognition
alone
accounted for the enormously significant rapprochement between the
conservative
Protestant movement and the Roman Catholics (a relationship heretofore
which
had been frigid at best, if not downright antagonistic).
But for some reasons still shrouded in obscurity
(though I
have my own suspicions, which I will discuss later), joined to this
“natural
law” reaction were classic Republican emphases, which were not
naturally connected to the evangelical mindset: promotion of nuclear
weapon
strategy and production; promotion of “neo-conservative” use of
military to
advance national interests; promotion of laissez-faire economics and
high-finance/corporate interests; acceptance of domestic intelligence
surveillance; and opposition to market regulation and environmental
protection.
This came to a critical development under Reagan, who fostered a
“trickle-down”
economic theory which clearly favored the interests of the aristocracy
– a
class for which that the evangelicals had historically reserved some of
its
most trenchant criticism. It is really a Reagan legacy that someone
like Rupert
Murdoch, who has constructed a journalistic empire on soft-porn and yellow journalism, to
be called a “conservative” … even a “fellow-traveler” with the Religious Right. I have to believe that in another, more prurient and more consistently conservative age, that such a one as Ann Coulter would never have been counted in the conservative ranks: conservativism then meant being civil and wearing clothes.
The evangelical dalliance with Republicanism reached full
maturity in the neo-conservative policies of Vice-President Dick Cheney, who –
while President Bush typified the evangelical leader of a Christian nation –
designed and executed the perfect earthly and millennial vision of the Religious Right: the
New Crusade (and call it for what it was) against the earthly menace opposing Christianity
… the invasion of Muslim Iraq, and the gain of carbon wealth from anti-Christian
forces.
(Crusades do not work
because they cannot work,
since the Church has no earthly
enemies,
and what enemies she has
cannot be fought against by earthly fire)
There is an odd and terrifying dynamic that history reveals:
time – whatever it is – corrodes falsehood, and only permits that which is true
to stand and remain. American history is a pageant of houses which have been
raised up upon the sand, and the storms have come and lashed unfounded
structures built on bad ideas. And many of these houses have carried Christian
addresses.
It appears in this dynamic that at the very moment of
triumph, the falsity is revealed in complete emptiness. It is as if the
Religious Right was given everything that it wanted: indeed, it did, as for a
space of one congressional term, the Republicans and Religious Right were in
control of the Executive Branch, both houses of the Legislative Branch, and –
to a degree – the Supreme Court.
But wars change everything, and this is especially true of
the latest one. Some of the very stated rationales of the war (i.e., weapons of
mass destruction; linkage to al-Qaeda) were not confirmed. Some of the expected
results of the invasion (i.e., welcoming of the troops; cooperation with
occupying power; profit-making oil-production) did not occur. Instead, a
profound, wide-ranging insurgency and internecine Islamic civil war developed
in the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam Hussein. The war turned from being a
rhetoric-producing resource (that actually served to re-elect Bush in 2004) to
a domestic political disaster that helped hand the Republicans the worst defeat
it has suffered in decades (let alone the real costs of human life and material
resources).
And this was by far not the only event which seemed to
reckon judgment against the seeming triumph of the Religious Right. The very hallmark
of the Republican agenda – the very issue which I believe forced the most
profound complicity (and compromise) on the evangelical affiliation with the
Republicans – was the pursuit of an international environment favorable to corporate
interests.
The recent financial collapse of the usury
"bubbles" should be interpreted for what it is. It was the pulling down
of false gods. And this latest Wall Street crisis should have resonance
within the heart and soul of American religionists, especially the
evangelical community, since Wall Street had become the object of so
profound a material faith: funds from churches, seminaries and
"para-church" organizations were entrusted to the almost-delphic
stewardship of the investors ... clergy pension funds were surrendered
to the esoteric charms of fund managers in the certain hopes of golden
transmutation.
You (and evangelicals) say "free economics"
and shockingly impious declarations
like "the miracle of compounded interest":
I say alchemy and the occult.
President Calvin Coolidge once said that “the business of America is
business.” A Republican President who typified the over-confidence in
laissez-faire “hands-off” economic policy, he also revealed the American
middle-class naiveté about corporate interests – the same naiveté that produced
the blindness of the Religious Right against its own historic critique of the
aristocracy and mercantile interests. Coolidge was President from 1923 until
1929: he applied his admirable sense of fairness and liberty to the context of
national economics – a common application (and simplistic distortion) which led
to the disaster of the 1929 collapse of Wall Street.
That same Coolidge foolishness was reincarnated in
the Reagan
coalition, which also garnered middle-class, good-natured support from
the
overwhelmingly blue-collar, non-mercantile and definitely
non-aristocratic
evangelical population. They endorsed – with very little requirement
for rational persuasion – the solidly pro-corporate “trickle-down”
agenda: this was an agenda that was
not abstract in the least. There was not even a modicum of concern for
farmer, family or micro-business capitalism: there was only the bald
claim that
exorbitant profiteering, along with derivative usury programs (like
hedge funds
and other speculative enterprises), would somehow benefit the secondary
classes
in its wake.
In this period of Reaganomics, the Religious Right was happy
in its economic prosperity and in some measured successes. Some pro-life
Supreme Court Justices were appointed (although the loss of the Robert Bork nomination was
a particularly hard defeat). Some regulation of the pornography industry was
legislated. Some defenses were made of Christian activity in the public sphere,
notably some church activity in the public schools, some leeway given to
creationism/intelligent design in discussions of cosmogony.
More important (I wonder) than these political victories was
perhaps the material prosperity that
the Reaganomic programme offered not only to the American population, but to
the evangelical community in particular. This is when you began to see the
extraordinary material development of national televised ministries like Focus on the Family, the 700 Club (Pat Robertson), the PTL Club (before its squalid
demise), and the Swaggart
empire. This history of televangelism itself is worthy of close study, as
it is a particularly American religious phenomenon, spreading worldwide insofar
as American culture obtains. Oddly enough, the televised phase of this
phenomenon began in the early 1950s with the pop-theology of the Roman Catholic
Msgr. Fulton Sheen,
whose positive thinking emphasis (very close to the message of protestant
Norman Vincent Peale) continues to find expression in most of the
televangelists, but especially in the Lakewood Florida enterprise of Joel Osteen, who captains a
hybrid teleministry and a megachurch, along with much work in media (DVD, audio
and print sales).
Soon after Fulton Sheen were the crusades of Billy Graham,
which started in Los Angeles, and then spread quickly to stadiums across the
country. It would be difficult to underestimate the impact of these Crusades on
the fundamentalists and evangelicals in particular, and the Protestant
community in general. Indeed, Billy Graham has made his influence felt upon the
Catholic and Orthodox communities, especially given the friendly reception he
has received in Rome and Moscow in the 1970s-1990s. When he was invited to join
Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” in 1979, Graham’s response is
interesting:
"I'm for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to
human freedom and social justice. We as clergy know so very little to speak
with authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. Evangelists
cannot be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to
stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left. I haven't
been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will be in the future."
The Religious Right did not heed this
advice. Instead, the Graham Crusades firmly established, for the Religious
Right, a centralizing religious principle: the evangelical revivalist tradition
of a crisis decision “to accept Jesus Christ as one’s own personal Saviour.”
As unifying as this new "lowest common
denominator" as this formula turned out to be, it also produced a
rejection of asceticism, a simplification of
repentance, an overvaluation of individual experience, and a diminution
of
doctrinal and ritual into the category of “denominational distinctives.”
Megachurches flowered in the years of Reagan,
Clinton
and the Bushes. Evangelicals had a lot more disposable income, as their
religious endorsement of hyper-capitalism was amply rewarded (if only
at first, say for 1260 days). The asceticism
of simplicity, small-church humility and “invisible” local charity had
been eclipsed by the
visible success and health/wealth emphases of modern evangelicalism.
Land and construction
costs were manageable when leveraged. Various lay groups such as the
Full
Gospel Business Men Association, the Christian Business Men’s Alliance,
the
Lions and Rotary served to provide financial, real estate and project
management networking that is so critical to non-hierarchical
institutional
development.
Megachurches made a lot of sense to protestants. On one
hand, they appeared to fulfill a simplistic understanding of the Great
Commission: a great big group of people looked successful when compared to the
words in the Book of Acts, “and the Lord added to their numbers daily.” What
was often overlooked is that most of the people who were added were already
affiliated with some Christian community. The construction of a megachurch
often had the same damaging effect on local smaller congregations that the
erection of a super WalMart store had on mom-and-pop shops nearby.
Moreover, what was also overlooked was the fact that the
particular ministries that required locality and intimacy – ministries such as
indoctrination, disciplined fellowship and apostolic catachesis – were the very
ministries that were eclipsed, if not disposed of altogether. The rubric of
anonymity was actually embraced as a virtue, even a commodity, in the
megachurch.
And thus megachurches accepted their role as “escape zones” for
people who were malcontents and disaffected with their particular communities.
They provided an immediate “opiate” to the demands
of authentic fellowship and to the commands
of Christian dogma – demands and commands that often aroused feelings of shame,
which was the only way that many now understand the experience of “contrition,”
which should naturally lead to
repentance … but in American religion, usually
does not.
In the atriums and program brochures of the
megachurches,
one can find the natural extension of American evangelicalism from its
revivalistic roots to its contemporary quest for application in the
modern
individual life. The Gospel has been re-defined as a “crisis
experience” of
belief, and then a psychosocial development along the lines of various
“felt
needs” (this term is significantly distinguished from “real needs,” as
it was
once explained that people are motivated more from “felt” needs as
opposed to
real ones … this was the same source that said that there was a greater
need in
the American church for pastors who were administrators than pastors
who were
theologians or Bible scholars). One found in the megachurches an
uncertain “anti-dogmatism”
that persists to this day. Some ill-defined, ambiguous and simplistic
beliefs (assumed to be derived from a self-evident reading of the New
Testament, without any mediation by a historic church), were held to be
necessary: everything else was negotiable, and indeed was defined as
secondary,
drawn from a primitive sectarian past that must be surmounted. There
were
strong affirmations of Biblical authority (in the sharply reduced
Reformation
understanding of the term), but there were also many explicit
endorsements of not only
political issues, but political candidates, parties and platforms.
The megachurch is really the icon of the height and
extension of the American religion, which started in revival, and developed through
phases of camp meetings, crusades, and then tele-media and large corporate
structures. There is a simple reason why megachurches often look corporate in
their architecture: they have simply become on the exterior what structure they
have adopted on the interior. Megachurches are built on the prevailing “consumeristic”
religion of America, whether it goes under a Christian name, New Age, Jewish or
Muslim:
This style thrived in
the world of high-rise apartments, long weekends, and airport newsstands; it
was made up of clienteles and not congregations, of consumers more than
converts, of do-it-yourself experimenters more than people who felt called to
be judged by a living God. The journey of the new American individualists is
likely to be characterized by ever more paths, by ever more bewildering choices
between options (Martin Marty, Pilgrims
in Their Own Land, p. 475).
We will look, later on, at the profound hypothesis of Harold
Bloom – literature critic and professor at Yale, who suggests – with a great
deal of reason – that the American religion has always been and is manifesting
itself outright as a gnostic ethos.
We have seen this American Gnosticism induce a lot of privatized,
subjectivist emphasis in the protestant movement, even in the conservative
evangelical movement. We see it especially in the charismatic/Pentecostal yearning
for ecstasy and for esoteric experiences and knowledge. More generally, we see it
in the “radical individualization” of religion.
There are two developments
which reveal this individualization. One is obviously the megachurch movement.
The other is the “emergent” movement, which is a lot more honest and
intellectual about its philosophical underpinnings (vs. the megachurch business
model, which is rarely divulged and is often masked by religious-sounding “mission
statements”).
The emergent movement, too, is a particularly American
phenomenon.The Emergent Church
emphasizes Christianity
as a journey, and as an experience, more than a destination. It frequently
confuses humility with uncertainty: very often, you will hear emergents
tolerating or being open to doubt and skepticism about the Faith. They oppose
dogmatism, and are generally uncomfortable talking about dogma, or “normative
belief” or “faith-propositions” at all, since that seems to be too limiting,
too patriarchal and too “western/colonial” and not multicultural enough. This
is really a self-consciously “post-modern” movement that chooses an
individualized “mysticism” over traditional dogma: this movement is very much
built on a smorgasboard approach to Christian spirituality. In this “mood,” you
will often hear emergents say, “Give me Jesus, not doctrine.” They will insist
on the priority of “orthopraxis” over “orthodoxy,” especially in terms of
doctrine (and we have to be cautious, because that same notion is gaining
currency in our own community – the easiest response to this fallacy is that
while one certainly sees deficiencies in orthopraxis, one never sees superfluity in orthodox doctrine; and it is certain
that deficiencies in orthopraxy are produced by more profound deficiencies
in doctrine).
While God is addressed as the “Wholly Other” in emergent
speech, there is almost a complete lack of reference to God’s Holiness as wrath
against sin and unrepentance. Moreover, there is almost a palpable avoidance of
any reference to eschatology and the “Last Day.” Frequently, emergents and
other postmodern evangelicals will diminish the Church’s traditional moral
teachings (e.g., against homosexual behavior) with a rationalization like “Jesus
never said anything about gays.” This rhetoric has now labeled itself as a
movement: “Red-Letter
Christians.”
You might be impressed by the frequent references to eastern
Orthodoxy: but this is only because postmodern evangelicals in general see
Orthodoxy as an attractive “mystical” alternative to the over-familiar and
worn-out categories of their fundamentalist upbringings. They recognize that “more”
is needed in their doctrine, but they cannot bring themselves to the humility
and full repentance of catechism and obedience (this probably explains the sad
reality of certain numbers of evangelical converts to Orthodoxy failing after a
few years, and either returning to their upbringing or lapsing into
irreligiosity).
The Emergent Church is attractive in that it is a more
reasonable correction of the Religious Right political program. They reject
some of the militarist and hyper-capitalist agenda of the Republicans, and they
claim to reject the Democrats (I rather doubt that there is much of the
Democrat agenda that they reject, as they too quickly “hedge” on issues like
homosexuality, stem-cell research, and even abortion). It appears that the
Emergents will turn out to be simply a subset within the Evangelicals who are steadily moving
toward a mainline position, which has generally rejected the dogma of the traditional
Church.
In any case, the political movement of the Religious Right
has been hammered, and this last election may turn out to be its death knell.
The evangelical community – which used to be completely represented by the
Religious Right – is now a collection of associations, ill-defined
congregations, movements and organizations, and a minimum of normative beliefs
still centered around the crisis-centered revivalist identity.
The Religious Right, it could be argued, got everything they
wanted politically in the years of George W. Bush. No President has ever before
been so friendly to their aims as
evangelicals. No one in the White House had ever talked the talk the way he
did. Certainly, no one had ever walked the walk.
Now, they are left out in the record-setting cold, in political Siberia.
Their
only political hope lies now in arranging some coalition with Democrats
(like
Obama) who are trying to prevent a return to the old culture war
delineations.
What Republicans remain are busy denouncing social conservatives and
blaming their woes on the Religious Right. They are
working fast to construct an “inclusive” Republican party that is more
amenable to
pro-choice and pro-gay constituencies. Even Bush, in his final press
conference
on 12 January 2009, said that the Republicans needed to be more
inclusive. After all, both his fathe and Colin Powell said that the
Republican Party has a "big tent." When this cliche is uttered, it is a
code word for another rejection of Natural Law.
With the permeation of the megachurch into American culture, and the prevalence of “smorgasboard
spiritual experimentation,” it could be argued that the evangelicals possessed, for a
while, everything they wanted. In the years from Carter to George W. Bush, the
evangelicals were at the very top of American society, both politically and culturally.
In 1978 (two years after the “born again” cover stories in
Time and Newsweek, brought on by Jimmy Carter), Richard Quebedeaux
enthusiastically wrote these words about evangelicals at the top of the world:
“Now, of course,
evangelicalism, in its Protestant, Catholic, and charismatic forms, is really
the mainline brand of American Christianity” (cited in Marty, p. 470).
This is probably still the case, if you want to use rather
unfortunate terms like “brand.”
But it is a weak, diluted Protestantism. It is nothing like
the strong flavors of the Reformation, where the propositions of Luther, Calvin
and Zwingli (as heretical as they were) were clearly pronounced in honest (if
combative) rhetoric. Now, the real goals have moved away from truth and
faithfulness, and have become more “business-like”: the objectives are
institutional development, recruitment, numeric gain. Programs are evaluated in
terms of audience endorsement: real evaluation forms are sometimes handed out after
“worship services.”
Evangelicals continue to succeed nowadays because it is much
easier to call oneself “evangelical.” There are far few doctrines that must be
espoused, and far few behaviors that must be practiced. Moreover, “affiliation
standards” or “membership criteria” have been confused to the point where it is
possible to change affiliation several times over the course of one year …
indeed, it is possible for one person to be a member of more than one institution,
and not even know it … and I wonder how many Orthodox individuals are counted
as members of large evangelical churches because they attend those churches
most of the year except for Christmas and Pascha.
So it is easier to be Evangelical, to be a member of the
American religion, but it is probably less meaningful. It is certainly less
important on the political stage.
Why spend time studying evangelicalism? Because
evangelicalism has been the American religion, as we will carefully show
throughout the duration of this course.
In American evangelicalism, you have the full development of
democratized Protestantism, not only extant within the Protestant community,
but also showing up significantly in the Roman community and also in some of
the latest controversies of the Orthodox movement.
Evangelicalism is
American religion. The study of the history of Evangelicalism, which we probably ought to call American Protestantism,
is the best way to understand the genius
of this country or a nation.
What is critical now, however, is that this American
religion may be changing, along with American society. We are going to study
carefully the newest sociological “pictures” of society and religion,
especially the Pew Forum U. S.
Religious Landscape Survey.
We are going to take a close look at recent American
religious history, so that we can understand what happened to the mainline Protestant
movement after 1950. We will look further back at the Revivalist movement in
America, and how it developed and changed with the rise of the Sunday School,
the Graham Crusades, and tele-evangelism on the radio, TV and now the Internet.
Then, we will look at where American religion and society
are heading. Like it or not, we live in a world that is very different from the
culture that prevailed after WWII. More people are in more debt, but more
people live more comfortably. America may be losing her primary status to China
and India. The economy may force a simpler lifestyle and a lowering of material
expectations. The old Protestant mainline churches may be joined by postmodern
evangelicals in their reaction to natural law. The fundamentalists are becoming
less and less understandable, and more and more alienated in the modern world.
Religion is the
teaching of the “genius” of a country to pray. That, I know, is the oddest
formulation you have heard today, but we will take the rest of this course to
try and figure it out. But suffice it to say that I think Harold Bloom is
right: American religion has always been at least latently gnostic – it is only
becoming more explicit. It is gnostic, because the American genius is gnostic. It cries out for ecstasy and esoteric power. It wants freedom from other selves, being allergic to koinonia, and it seeks (foolishly) a bareheaded solitude in the face of the demiurgic abyss.
Apostolic dogma
is the only anodyne
for gnostic neurosis
I think, after our careful study, that we will find that
American Protestantism is receding. It
is either fading into mainline renunciation of eschatology and dogma (e.g., “the
journey is better than the destination”), or a fundamentalist minimalization of
doctrine and a gross simplification of the end-times (which itself is a
renunciation of history, and the Incarnation).
It has been disappointed by the Wall Street collapse of an
economic structure it had worked so hard (ever since Calvin’s day) to justify
and cooperate with. It has been disappointed by the failure of the Iraqi
campaign to produce a missionary success for the Gospel of American democracy.
I suggest that these are more than disappointments. These
are, like the wildfire growth of Islam, Divine
judgments.
Judgment – however it occurs – is the fire that destroys
falsehood, the storm that pulls down houses built on sand. Nothing can stand
for long unless it is built on true, apostolic foundations.
At the end, there is complete apostasy, or there is
Orthodoxy. American Protestantism is heading in both directions.
