The innovation of the early American church

Q: Was that impulse primarily an evangelical mindset, or is that more of an American Protestant mindset?

I think the free-form entrepreneurial attitude and practices in the United States were a combination of strongly evangelical Protestant impulses and democratic impulses.

Evangelical Christianity does not require a free-form democratic system. There were strong evangelical elements in the Church of England in the 18th century that remain to this day.

But there was a kind of elective affinity, a kind of — a kind of alliance between a religious emphasis that stressed the need for individuals to hear the Christian message, respond to the gospel and act on that response, and a more democratic form of society in which you looked to the people as voters to select the leaders that would guide the society.

So there is this strong affinity, and I think it’s one of the reasons why we have, for example, in the United States a much higher proportion than anywhere in the world of Baptist churches. That was a form of Christianity that fit very nicely into American patterns.

Q: Are there threads in this history that pull through to the current day?

There probably are a number of threads that link the late-18th-century and the 19th-century American religious life and the present.

One would be that the success of churches like the Methodist under Bishop Francis Asbury had a great deal to do with the ability to compete.

They really were not nervous about saying, “We’ve got to provide a religion that is every bit as gripping and as …” — they wouldn’t have used the word “exciting”; that’s a modern word, but — “… every bit as gripping and as worthy to be committed to as anything economic, anything political in our society.”

Since the Second World War, competition in American culture has become fierce, has become intense. Some of the churches have competed better than others because they have not relied upon bureaucratic or group decisions but have relied upon entrepreneurial activity.

That’s, I think, one tie back to the early history.

Q: In the contemporary context, do you think that those more entrepreneurial or competitive church organizations and church leaders are, again, the evangelical?

Since being at Notre Dame, I’m aware of ways that Catholics have mobilized to compete.

But probably it would be the case that forms of the Christian faith that emphasize personal decisions, personal responsibility and a personal tie to the organization are those that do better than organizations that rely upon past traditions and past achievements to gain success.

Groups like the Mormons continue to expand, and I think they’re an interesting group that, in form, is a lot like the early Methodists.

They do demand a lot individually, but then they also have a strong network of sharing and communication that somehow combines the need for individual commitment and individual choice with connections. And that certainly was a genius of the early Methodists in American history.

Q: Do current trends in the church have historical parallels?

My own historical sense is that churches that have been effective and have thrived mostly are concerned more about the communication of the Christian message. What turns out to be the most effective way of strengthening the organizations is not always looking at the organizations, but it’s looking at the message.

What is the church for? It’s to communicate the love of Christ and the doing of Christ’s work in the world. It seems to me that the effectiveness of institutions will depend upon, not clarity of thinking about institutions, but the success of church institutions will hinge upon the clarity of thinking about the message that they want to communicate.

That may be an evangelical prejudice in itself, as well as a historical prejudice.

I do have one example. I really am a great fan of Francis Asbury and his kind of dictatorial style with early Methodism, because he did have a very strong conception of how you organize things.

But when he died, people talked only a little bit about the organization.

They talked about his dedication as a preacher, his love for the Bible, his desire to help people out. The organizations clearly sprang from those desires, but what was really significant was his mission.