The New Pantagruel 2.1

A funny thing happened on the way to the White House–that is for students of American Christianity, anyway. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the support he attracted from evangelical Protestant groups such as the Moral Majority, faith became a going and relevant concern. Of course, Christian devotion had mattered to the civil rights movement, but white politicians accustomed to a naked public square, whether Republican or Democrat, applied a different standard to African-American political leadership and their arguments. But the rise of the Protestant Right was different–not in its appeal to equal rights for all but in its indictment of secularism as a form of oppression that turned religious Americans into victims without meaningful participation in debates about the nation’s well-being. Accordingly, as faith became a leading predictor of political behavior–the recent spin of the 2004 election reinforces the point–students of Christianity in America suddenly went from irrelevant scholars of the obscure to pundits capable of interpreting the transfer of power in the mightiest nation since the coming of Christ. The outpouring of scholarly books and articles on American religion since 1980, especially evangelical Protestantism, only confirmed the importance of faith, demonstrating that editors and readers were trying to figure out what had happened to turn roughly twenty-five percent of the American population (as some estimates have it) into the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc.

Theology in America
by E. Brooks Holifield

Yet, the boom in scholarship on American religion, whether explaining the dynamics of evangelical political engagement or the religious roots of born-again Protestantism, has not entirely been a boon for understanding American Christianity. For at the same time the tide of American Protestant historiography swelled, denominational history went belly up. This is not to say that the study of American Protestant denominations was always exceptional. But from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the mainline Protestant denominations regained stability after the fundamentalist controversy to resume their status as the Protestant establishment, the history of American Christianity paid deference to the differences, however slight, reflected in denominational headings. After the rise of the Protestant Right, however, the greatest nuance generally speaking in the literature on Protestants was that spiritual something that distinguished “born-again” Christians from mainline Protestants. James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991) was emblematic of new studies on American religion. As Hunter himself argued, conservative Jews, Catholics and Protestants had more in common with each other than they did with liberal members of their own communions. Of course, that sort of analysis might make sense of electoral results. However, it hardly does justice to differences among Presbyterians, Baptists and Lutherans, let alone Orthodox, Reform or Conservative Jews.

The publication of recently of two beefy books by important university presses written by senior religious historians on American theology, consequently, represents something of a watershed in the scholarship on American Christianity. After all, theological differences have generally been at the heart of denominational variations (theology here being construed with sufficient breadth to encompass ecclesiological matters that affect church polity and orders of worship, e.g. liturgy). What is more, the study of theology proper has languished amid efforts to account for believers’ political preferences or the influence of religion on society. Forays into “God-and …” topics have been easier to pitch to editors looking for relevant titles than studies merely of God. America’s God by Mark A. Noll and Theology in America by E. Brooks Holifield thus offer the possibility of a return to an older style of religious scholarship, the kind conducted by Sydney Ahlstrom, Robert Handy, Sidney Mead, and Winthrop Hudson, when denominational differences mattered because the beliefs regulating those communions mattered as well.

Splitters and Lumpers

THE overwhelming conclusion generated from these narratives is not so much that theology separated Americans into different churches but that the doctrinal convictions of American Christianity has declined in vigor, insight and truthfulness. Declension was a primary theme of the older religious history, especially the many volumes on the Puritans. Because both of these books begin with New England, perhaps these authors cannot resist seeing failure as American theologians left behind the rigor of Puritanism. Still, the cumulative effect of America’s God and Theology in America is that American theology (mainly Protestant) prior to the Civil War makes most sense not as a cacophony of different churches but as a departure from the solidity of New England’s Puritan order.

The study of theology proper has languished amid efforts to account for believers’ political preferences or the influence of religion on society. Forays into “God-and …” topics have been easier to pitch to editors looking for relevant titles than studies merely of God.

One adage about historians is that they may be divided in two between the lumpers, the ones looking for consensus and continuity, and the splitters, the ones reveling in diversity. Of the two historians, Holifield shows the greater knack for splitting and hence gives greater attention to denominational differences. His book is divided into three sections, the first on Puritans, the second on what he calls “the Baconian Style,” and the last on the non-Baconians. This arrangement reveals Holifield’s own strategy for finding a lump amid the splits, but it does bring out the diversity of American Christianity before the Civil War in a manner that contrasts strongly with Noll. Consequently, Holifield’s section on New England Puritans expounds the diversity of views from the start of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the controversy over antinomianism all the way down to the disagreements that separated the New Divinity men, Old Light Calvinists and the proto-Unitarians. The middle section of Theology in America devoted to those who tried to square Protestantism with the scientific ideals of Sir Francis Bacon’s empiricism includes a spectrum of theologians, both professional and amateur, running from fringe expressions (Deists, Unitarians, Mormons and African-Americans), to Protestants with origins in English dissent (Methodists and Baptists), to the respectable mainstream views of Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The final third of Holifield’s book surveys those antebellum Christians who could not find room under the Baconian umbrella–Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Transcendentalists, and a variety of unclassifiables such as Horace Bushnell (the only person to merit a whole chapter aside from Jonathan Edwards), Philip Schaff, John Williamson Nevin, Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson. The danger Holifield runs in trying to include such a range is the one that attends most catalogues; by including almost everyone (though women do not even show up in cameo roles) no particular group or figures stand out as worthy of special attention. In fact, Holifield could have roped in some of this diversity by attending only to scholarly theological expressions, thus focusing on the groups that engaged in formal learning, a decision that would have harbored elitism but also given room for greater depth.

Instead, to achieve some order out of this remarkably diverse lot of theological expressions, Holifield resorts to the theme of Christianity’s reasonableness. He includes other themes such as theology’s practicality, its ethical dimension, the legacy of Calvinism, ties between North America and Europe, and denominationalism. But rationality is the dominant theme, thus accounting especially for the division between parts two and three. This decision is not without merit, but Holifield does not explain it sufficiently. The reasonableness of the faith was not original to North American Christianity prior to the Civil War but has been a feature throughout church history with various apologists giving accounts in the hope of making Christians plausible to non-Christians. At the same time, the period covered in Holifield’s book is one in which the Enlightenment did set the terms for most thinkers, theologians included. Yet, Theology in America is remarkably free from interaction with secondary sources that would indicate science’s rise to prestige and the need for theologians to adjust. This is not to say that Holifield neglects the Enlightenment; his discussion of Scottish and German philosophy is reliable and helpful. Still, he does not adequately define reasonableness or why it makes sense of antebellum Christian theology. (For example, classic Christian doctrines like the Trinity and original sin were significant items of debate and reflection during these years, but these receive scrutiny primarily through the lens of rationality when cosmology or human nature might have worked better to sustain the investigation.)

In contrast to Holifield’s underdeveloped interpretive choices, Noll leaves little doubt about the significance of his decision in America’s God to lump all Antebellum American Christian theology under the larger rubric of Christian republicanism. For Noll, this unique constellation of ideas and intuitions combined both the enthusiastic zeal and doctrinal reductionism of revivalist Protestantism and a republican conception of politics that nurtured suspicion of centralized power, resentment of hierarchical authorities, and fear of vice among citizens. America’s God is the history of words such as freedom, virtue, benevolence, slavery, vice and selfishness, specifically how the meaning of these terms evolved between 1730 and 1865, thanks to Christian theologians who imbued these political concepts with religious significance. Noll admits that his contribution to the history of republicanism in antebellum America is one among many, and his text and notes are jam-packed with references to and interaction with an incredible range of secondary sources. But where Noll sees America’s God making a singular contribution is in the following manner:

America’s God
by Mark Noll

Within this interpretive strategy Noll finds most Protestant theologians fitting neatly into the Christian republican mold, hence executing a work of historical lumping. To be sure he includes a section of contrast between Calvinist and Methodist appropriation of America’s political philosophy, thus showing attention to particular patterns of variation. Noll also distinguishes among evangelicals, noting polarities between anti-formalists and formalists, whites and blacks, North and South, and men and women. He includes as well the minority of dissenters, from Deists at the time of the Revolution to such critics of the American theological consensus as Bushnell or Nevin. Still, these are exceptions that prove the rule that American theology (again mainly Protestant) embraced republican political theory and in so doing helped to Christianize the new nation while also losing its bearings. The outline of the book, from colonial theological developments, the ingredients of the Christian-republican synthesis, evangelical mobilization, case studies of Calvinism and Methodism, to the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, indicates well the pieces of Noll’s argument.

One question that keeps returning, however, is whether America’s God is truly a history of theology or rather a history of theologians doing political philosophy. (Academic specialization had yet to cordon theology off into its current intellectual ghetto, so theologians were public intellectuals who wrote on practically everything). As with Theology in America, Noll’s book does not run through developments in the classic loci of Christian dogmatics. In fact, the chief theological heading to emerge from Noll’s argument is anthropology, or the doctrine of man. America’s Man would make for a less attractive title for a work on the history of theology than America’s God. Still, because the central question raised by America’s politics is not the deity of Christ, the application of redemption, the ministry of word and sacrament, but whether men and women are capable of maintaining virtue in the context of unprecedented political liberty and social dislocation, Noll’s effort to cover theological developments from Edwards to Lincoln falls short.

Narratives of Decline

DIFFERENCES between interpretive choices aside, Noll and Holifield render American theology before the Civil War as a body of thought in decline. This is not surprising given the attention each book grants to the new views about knowledge and society that the Enlightenment encouraged. But it is a bit startling, and a welcome development, in an era when most historians consider declensionist narratives passé. Finding the theme of declension in these books is not always easy, and harder in Holifield than in Noll, but even seemingly unprejudiced interpretive choices reveal a body of American divinity veering ever so steadily from the course set by New England’s Puritans.

For Noll, the evidence of decline, like his argument, is hard to miss. The reference to Edwards in the subtitle is key, though Abraham Lincoln also receives high marks for recognizing the mystery of providence in a manner more profound than his theologically trained contemporaries. At the end of America’s God Noll admits that if he had to recommend “only one American theologian for the purposes of understanding God, the self, and the world as they really are,” he would reply as the Congregational minister Israel Holly did when engaged in theological debate: “Read Edwards!” “Read Edwards!” “Read Edwards!” But signals of Noll’s regard for the older divinity over the antebellum expression are also evident in his interpretation of the rise of republicanism. He underscores how republicanism usually found support from Deists and Socians in England. But to avoid the genetic fallacy Noll also shows that republicanism was decisive for departures from Christian orthodoxy, particularly for revising estimates of human sinfulness while making virtue possible apart from divine grace. Even so, this line of reasoning does seem to beg the question of what form of government is finally compatible with orthodox Christian teaching. Someone has to rule, and that person (or persons) needs to be fit for rule, a necessity that suggests a certain amount of virtue. If that virtue belongs to a non-Christian, it raises the possibility of affirming that people outside a state of grace have sufficient goodness to govern, whether as monarchs, senators, or democrats.

Still, Noll’s final verdict is far from straightforward. On the one hand he credits Christian republicanism with civilizing and Christianizing the new nation. He writes, “the theologians translated the historic Christian message into the dominant cultural languages of politics and intellectual life so successfully that these languages were themselves converted and then enlisted for the decidedly religious purposes of evangelism, church formation, moral reform, and theological construction.” On the other hand, this success arguably corrupted the faith once delivered. Here Noll lets Dietrich Bonhoeffer be the bad cop: “American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” As Noll explains, “The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America,” thus molding the gospel “in the contours of [the nation’s] own shape.” Is it any wonder that Noll, as he wrote in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is “a wounded lover” of evangelicalism?

Holifield is less direct about declension and may even find it unfair to be accused of adopting it as a narrative device. Because his book is mostly descriptive and inclusive, the pattern of degeneration is not self-evident. But his arrangement leaves clues. Consider that the first third of the book covers New England Calvinism down to the first generation of so of New Divinity men. In contrast, he covers all of Lutheran theology in roughly twenty pages, and Roman Catholic teaching in approximately the same space. A reader might responsibly conclude that theology after Hopkins and Bellamy was all downhill.

Notwithstanding Holifield’s treatment of Puritanism, he is explicit in arguing that theological debates over slavery did signal the demise of American theology. According to Holifield, the slavery controversy “revealed … the inability of theology to unite Americans or to help them transcend the pull of economic and political interests.” He adds that the “cultural language that supposedly united Americans proved itself able to contribute even more forcefully to their division.” This is a curious way to interpret the controversy over slavery, since Holifield’s very outline suggests that Americans were hardly united by theology. Perhaps Holifield’s insistence on attending to an allegedly common “cultural language” causes him to miss a deeper discussion of theological diversity and its impact on Antebellum America.

Does Theology Matter?

BECAUSE both books end with the Civil War and the division among Christians over slavery (not over preserving the Union), they do little to deter the idea that theology is relevant or, at least should be, to national life and political affairs. Of course, this is the obvious point, even if highly nuanced and complex, that Noll makes by demonstrating the mingling of Protestant convictions and American political thought from the War of Independence to the Civil War. In fact, he could not be more ready to answer that most difficult of historical questions: so what? The peculiar brew that blended born-again Christianity and republican political theory was, according to Noll, “profoundly significant” for “the articulation of Christian theology” in the United States. “The process by which evangelical Protestantism,” he writes, “came to be aligned with republican convictions and commonsense moral reasoning was also the process that gave a distinctively American shape to Christian theology by the time of the Civil War.” To be sure, Noll is sufficiently ambivalent about the mixture of piety and politics. He laments the secular turn in American intellectual and political life, but also credits the antebellum synthesis of Christianity and republicanism with making American religious beliefs and practices “so relatively vigorous as they remain to this day.” For Noll, clearly theology mattered in the early republic. The desirability of theology’s significance for public life is almost as clear in Noll’s [Holifield’s] narrative, more so for the cause of ending slavery, less so for the cause of American autonomy from England.

Holifield is less concerned with the question of significance. On the one hand, his insouciance is admirable because Theology in America seems to indicate a resolve to tell the history of the nation’s theology whether or not readers find it important. On the other hand, Holifield misses an opportunity to cultivate among religious historians at least a palate for theological discourse. At a time when the field shows a doctrinal illiteracy that is remarkable for scholars who are supposed to be specialists in religion (theology included), Holifield could well have provided some instruction not simply on the finer points and variety of Christian teaching but also why such theological learning is important to understanding religion. The most he can muster in the Afterword is a series of historical reflections by prominent American liberal theologians from the early twentieth century on the old theology that had passed out of favor. One was George Gordon, who, according to Holifield, in his 1903 Beecher Lectures “could look back at the older theologians and recognize the force that they had once exerted on the religious culture of the nation.” Holifield adds, “[Gordon] thought it was a history worth remembering.” That line finishes the book. Unfortunately, the worthiness of that older theology remains buried in the subtext for the eye of perceptive beholders.

Even so, by ending his story with the debates over slavery, Holifield shows some sign of feeling compelled to refer outside theology’s internal developments to larger questions regarding whether theology is relevant to American society and politics, and whether it ought to be. Trying to distinguish the descriptive “is” from the imperative “ought” is difficult today when believers have returned to the public square with a vengeance and secularists have insisted with equal vigor that the public square remain naked and unashamed. If historians are by nature reluctant to render normative judgments, historical knowledge can be instructive for describing the “is” to see if arguments for the “ought” hold up. This is no less the case for the books under review. For if ever a time in American history existed when theology mattered to public life it was the antebellum era, when for Noll theology was a prominent voice in political debates and for Holifield it was dominant in religious culture. So if theology should matter to the current scene in national and religious affairs, perhaps the antebellum era offers assistance for contemporary ruminations on faith and society.

Both books show that theology provided very little assistance for the public discussion of slavery. (A cynic could argue that theology took a bad situation [e.g., constitutional impasse] and turned it into a mess [e.g., civil and religious war]). Holifield, following the lines of his own themes, concludes that slavery “raised questions about the practicality of theology, the interpretation and authority of the Bible, and the Baconian ideal of theological rationality” (495). In other words, during the public crisis over slavery, Christianity lost its hold on the American public and the churches entered an era of trying to recover their former glory, either with the renewed relevance of the Social Gospel or the heightened certainty of fundamentalist Protestantism. What is a bit puzzling about the damage that slavery and war did to the churches is that these matters were equally revealing of the inadequacy of politics, and yet rare is the historian who says that after the Civil War the American people gave up on their political system.

Because Noll has political philosophy in view throughout his entire book, his assessment of the damage slavery did to theology is more nuanced than Holifield’s. Here is Noll’s version of Holifield’s conclusion:

Noll adds details to this compelling point that raise questions, however, about how well the Bible really had been used to civilize and evangelize the United States. For instance, in a chapter on interpretations of the Civil War Noll demonstrates that none of the theological programs can account for the different perceptions of the war’s meaning. Christian republicans continued to mix and mangle providence and national purpose, dissenters followed with similar patriotic excess, while Lincoln in his Second Inaugural allegedly propounded a view of providence unparalleled by any contemporary theologian. I write allegedly because I am not sure Lincoln, who was executing a war with the power of the federal government behind him, was all that uncertain or magnanimous at other points in the conflict. Was he, for instance, so concerned about the inscrutability of divine providence when deciding in 1861 whether to retake Fort Sumter, or in 1863 whether to manumit the slaves? Yes, Lincoln was an intelligent and at times sensitive man, but that is not always how the losers saw him.

Of course, theological systems rarely hold up under conditions like those endured during the Civil War. But what doesn’t seem to occur to Noll is that the failure of Christian republicanism or the theology of its critics to make sense of the war may stem from a prior problem of assuming that the task of Christian theology is to interpret politics and society. A related point is that the mingling of theology and political philosophy in the Christian republican synthesis may really have been one way, with politics dictating the terms of engagement and theology providing the baptismal water, to consecrate the nation’s politics (or as H. L. Mencken might have said, give them uplift). In other words, Christian republicanism may have been the last gasp of an older western European ideal, namely, Christendom, which however noble its dreams and worthwhile its achievements, failed to consider that the reason Christ and the apostles died (in the former case, atonement; in the latter case, martyrdom) was not for the sake of Western Civilization (or Eastern Civilization for that matter). If theology is irrelevant to politics–in the sense that it doesn’t speak to the subject, not in the sense that believers continue to long for heaven on earth and so impute eternal purpose to their temporal arrangements–then perhaps Holifield’s avoidance of the “so what” question was the right interpretive strategy. For theology maybe no answer exists.

In the section from which Noll quoted Bonhoeffer’s observations of the United States, published in No Rusty Swords (1947), the German pastor, who by no means would agree with the last assertion, offered a comment that is still relevant to the point. Bonhoeffer noticed that the American revolution derived from Puritanism a fundamental conviction about human sinfulness, but that this Puritan vision easily morphed into “spiritualism,” that is, the idea that “the kingdom of God on earth cannot be built by the state, but only by the community of Jesus Christ.” This notion gave the church in the American setting “clear pre-eminence over the state.” As such, the church “proclaims the principles of social and political order, the state merely provides the technical means of putting them into effect.” More preferable, in Bonhoeffer’s estimate, was a separation of church and state that rested on the Reformation’s distinction between the “two offices or the two realms, which will remain ordained by God until the end of the world, each with its own duty fundamentally different from the other.” The lesson implicit in Bonhoeffer’s remarks was that both the ecclesial order and the political order in the United States remained underdeveloped thanks to the heavy hand of Christian thinking. As much as Noll and Holifield have failed to return to an older style of religious history, one in which Christian thought was the dominant trope for understanding religion, culture, and politics, their books have the virtue of reinforcing, even if only implicitly, Bonhoeffer’s point. At a time when faith is supposed to be so important to public life, Noll and Holifield provide healthy cautions to that supposition.

So What? Theology and American History

by D. G. Hart

Splitters and Lumpers

Narratives of Decline

Does Theology Matter?