{"id":108507,"date":"2013-07-24T12:33:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T16:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/getreligion\/?p=108507"},"modified":"2013-07-24T15:07:30","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T19:07:30","slug":"are-mainline-liberal-churches-leaders-or-followers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/getreligion\/2013\/07\/are-mainline-liberal-churches-leaders-or-followers\/","title":{"rendered":"Did mainline churches lead or follow the culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I love it when a good religion story gets people chatting. The New York Times<\/em> has accomplished this with the publication of \u201cA Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a news story in the Books section of the paper and begins:<\/p>\n

For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box.<\/p>\n

But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama \u2014 a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remember, of course, that when the New York Times<\/em> talks about human rights they are not including the youngest humans, a group that they and mainline Protestants tend to either ignore or dehumanize. But parsed through the newspeak code, you get the point. How could one say, when looking at the culture around us, that mainline Protestants have been anything other than wildly successful? If you look in their pews, it may look dire \u2014 but looking at the general academic, media, arts, and political culture, mainline liberal churches seem to have prevailed.<\/p>\n

And isn\u2019t this a great idea for a story? I love it. It\u2019s based on the fact that a rash of books have come out with this \u201cnew look\u201d on religious history. The story notes the dominant newspapers \u2014\u00a0 \u201cThe Christian Century,<\/a> the de facto<\/em> house magazine of mainline Protestantism\u201d and \u201cChristianity Today,<\/a> the magazine founded in 1956 by the Rev. Billy Graham.\u201d<\/p>\n

We get a bit of the debate in question:<\/p>\n

But other scholars take a markedly different view. In \u201cAfter Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,\u201d<\/a> published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We hear that Hollinger\u2019s argument got people talking. But I\u2019d like to know why. <\/p>\n

Sadly, it\u2019s not included in the story. Here\u2019s why I think it should have been: Few people would argue that the doctrines that mainline Protestants espouse have cultural dominance. In fact, those critics of mainline denominations might be hollering that the loudest. The typical critique is that as mainline Protestants have chased the culture, they\u2019ve lost both traditional Christian teachings and souls in the pews. That the culture shares their values is not as newsbreaking as it seems in this story. It\u2019s kind of the point of much criticism leveled against mainliners.<\/p>\n

Still, I greatly enjoyed the story. It gave a nice little look at one corner of academia. It quotes Leigh E. Schmidt, one of my favorite religion historians. It does get a bit clunky at the end of the piece, but in a way that makes me wish editors would have permitted more space for a fuller discussion.<\/p>\n

For instance:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d<\/a> phenomenon, [Matthew S.] Hedstrom argues, owes a strong debt to midcentury liberal Protestantism. In his book \u201cThe Rise of Liberal Religion\u201d<\/a> he traces the role of religious book clubs \u2014 which helped turn titles like the liberal pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick\u2019s \u201cOn Being a Real Person\u201d (1943) into best sellers \u2014 in creating a broad-based \u201cmiddlebrow religious culture\u201d that emphasized personal ethics and inner experience over theology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe focus on personal religious experience being at the heart of religious life, which does come out of liberal Christianity, seems to me alive and well,\u201d Mr. Hedstrom said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think we need much more on this point. I mean, speaking as a confessional Lutheran, from our perspective \u201cinner experience over theology\u201d is something we see both among mainline Protestants and the evangelical movement. <\/p>\n

For more on this, read religion historian D.G. Hart<\/a>. He argues that the media think the two sides of Protestantism are the mainline left and the evangelical right. He sees them more as two sides of the same coin, both focused on personal experience, cultural change and, in general, the temporal. They obviously have their political differences, but that\u2019s a separate issue.<\/p>\n

The article ends by noting that not everyone is on board this revisionist look at mainline influence. It ends:<\/p>\n

That point is seconded by Ms. Coffman, who worked as an editor at Christianity Today before entering academia. She currently teaches at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution where pastors in training, she said, are less likely to be savoring their broad cultural victories than debating which elements of evangelical worship they should adopt to attract a viable congregation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI teach at a mainline seminary, and we do not feel very triumphal,\u201d Ms. Coffman said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, that the cultural values espoused by mainliners have been victorious isn\u2019t really the debate, is it? Whether mainliners led the charge or merely followed it is. One wishes that this story would have at least engaged that question, if not focused on it. Still, this is precisely the type of big idea story I\u2019d love to see more of on the Godbeat. Kudos to those who worked on it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love it when a good religion story gets people chatting. The New York Times has accomplished this with the publication of \u201cA Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered.\u201d It\u2019s a news story in the Books section of the paper and begins: For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":605,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,27,50,3,1],"tags":[2022,2021,2023,2024,326],"class_list":["post-108507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-evangelicals","category-mainline","category-politics","category-uncategorized","tag-christian-century","tag-christianity-today","tag-d-g-hart","tag-matthew-s-hedstrom","tag-new-york-times"],"yoast_head":"\nDid mainline churches lead or follow the culture?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I love it when a good religion story gets people chatting. 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