In red letters printed in the shape of a cross upon a jet black background, Newsweek summarized the obit on the front cover: “The decline and fall of Christian America.” The obviously overstated title also underrepresented the subject. Editor Jon Meacham’s report about the decreasing influence of conservative Christianity in the United States quotes one of the leaders of conservative Christianity, Albert Mohler. Missing are interviews with the likes of Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin.
Meacham accurately tells of the city-on-a-hill visions of the conservative-minded Puritans and Anglicans in America’s earliest centuries, of 19th century revivals and the late 20th century Moral Majority. What he fails to mention are the liberally-minded mainline Christians, like Fosdick and Coffin, who dominated America’s religious leadership for the hundred-year stretch between Charles Finney and Jerry Falwell. Mainline churches, spurred on by the successful eradication of chattel slavery, poured their efforts into promoting a Christian America, too. In fact, they started the year 1900 with such optimism that they dubbed the near future, “The Christian Century,” and launched a magazine to usher it in.
So what IS a Christian America? Meacham says, “Evangelical Christians have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and theological principles.” He’s right. But he leaves out the fact that the same goes for mainline Protestants.
For two centuries now, we in the mainline denominations have been pleading openly and lobbying intensely for our government to enact and enforce policies consistent with our interpretation of Biblical and theological principles, like Sabbath-keeping, women’s suffrage, civil rights, racial integration, gender justice, gay rights, international peace-making, and nuclear disarmament. The big difference is that those causes haven’t always meshed with the causes being promoted by the Religious Right.
The timing also has been somewhat different. After decades of enjoying access into the inner sancta of the national political process, the mainliners’ influence shrank as the conservatives’ influence expanded. Now that the conservatives’ fortunes seem to be ebbing – due in large part to the change of executive leadership in Washington – will we reoccupy our old seats and return to our old modi operandi? Or, might our years of exile have provided sufficient chastening that we now will exercise our influence with wisdom?
Wisdom would teach us at least two things.
First, in order to bear Christ’s purposes to the world, we need to advocate policies with both eyes open. While our left eye focuses on women’s equality, the right eye needs to focus on minimizing abortions. While our left eye focuses on economic justice, the right eye needs to focus on free enterprise. As the left eye would defend the rights of sexual minorities, the right eye needs to warn against sexual promiscuity. As the left eye attends to welcoming strangers and defending the rights of imprisoned enemy combatants, the right eye needs to sustain the rule of law and to protect against terrorism.
The other thing wisdom would teach us is to avoid hitching our wagon to the partisan political process. If we get “unequally yoked” to a system that operates best by way of “the art of compromise,” then we will plow in circles. We dare not pin our hopes on governmental leaders who succeeded via personal ambition and have cultivated great skill at building whited sepulchers around the dead bones of their own shortcomings (a/k/a depravity). Both political parties deserve a word of affirmation from the church when their initiatives promote social righteousness and a prophetic scolding when their intentions or initiatives fall short.
The true “Christian America” is not dead. It continues on in the hearts of believers. It shows in communities of faith. It spreads and influences in random acts of kindness and organized mission endeavors. It also expands from time to time through lobbying and other political initiatives. About that, Fosdick and Falwell surely would agree.
— JHH
