Real Clear Politics / from : Wall Street Journal
Behind the Decline
The magazine that fueled liberal Protestantism's brief ascendancy in
American culture.
By
* BARTON SWAIM
The first known use of the word "mainline" to describe the largest
Protestant denominations and distinguish them from their growing evangelical
and
fundamentalist counterparts appeared in the New York Times in 1960—at the
very moment when mainline Protestantism began its rapid decline. You don't
call something "mainline" or "mainstream" unless its supremacy is being
disputed (think of the "mainstream media"). And the supremacy of older, more
socially prestigious churches within American Protestantism was being directly
disputed in the mid-1950s. It's impossible to speak with precision about
what constituted mainline Christianity, but in general the mainline churches
de-emphasized doctrinal differences; were Northern and Midwestern rather
than Southern; promoted social causes rather than personal conversion or
repentance; and virtually always took the liberal line in politics. By 1960,
liberal Protestantism enjoyed almost nothing of the authority that had seemed
unassailable 15 years earlier.
In "The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline," Elesha
Coffman charts the half-century ascendancy of liberal Protestantism in
American society from its beginnings in northern seminaries at the turn of the
20th century to its brief triumphant moment immediately after World War
II, when it had no effective rival. She does this through the lens of the
magazine that, in the absence of any formal governing body, was effectively
this strand of Protestantism's voice and conscience: the Christian Century.
The Christian Century (its original title was the Christian Oracle) was
founded in 1884 as a magazine of the Disciples of Christ, one of the seven
principal mainline denominations. Charles Clayton Morrison, a young minister
with intellectual ambitions, purchased it in 1908, soon made it
nondenominational and edited it for 39 years. Morrison had strong opinions, and
he
knew how to acquire and use what Ms. Coffman, following the French social
theorist Pierre Bourdieu, calls "cultural capital"—assets in the marketplace of
political and social influence.
Ms. Coffman's use of Bourdieu's concept captures the essence of
20th-century American Protestant liberalism. For the men who created and
sustained
that movement—the anti-fundamentalist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the
religious pragmatist Edward Scribner Ames, the Social Gospel theologian
Shailer Mathews, and Morrison himself—the aim wasn't to convert sinners or
even
to persuade the unconvinced but to use status and credentials to shape the
wider culture. Morrison filled his magazine with contributions by chaired
professors and college presidents, and his style was less polemical than
oracular. Ms. Coffman relays a revealing episode early in his editorship in
which the Century (then still a denominational magazine) expressed an editorial
view on the subject of baptism that directly contradicted the official
position of the Disciples of Christ and the beliefs of a great majority of its
members. Roundly criticized, Morrison defended his editorial on the
grounds that the Century's job wasn't to "reflect" the denomination's views
but
to "interpret" them. In other words: You may have your opinions, but we will
decide what you really believe.
The Century's target audience was, as Morrison put it with characteristic
pomposity, "those who might be said to represent the Christian
intelligentsia of all the churches." The Christian Century, he thought, would
influence
the "best minds" in the church, and they in turn would influence the
laity.
It didn't work out that way in reality. Ms. Coffman has read six decades
of correspondence to the Century, including hundreds of testimonial letters
sent in 1928 to celebrate Morrison's 20th anniversary at the helm, and
finds evidence of a polite estrangement between the magazine's largely
clerical
readers and their less cerebral congregants. The Century provided
intellectual stimulus to the liberal clergy precisely because their more
conservative laity didn't go in for a lot of high-flown argumentation about
social
justice. Ms. Coffman clearly shows that any idea of a united liberal
Protestant establishment was always more a social construction than a unified
body
of believers.
That is the risk you run when you base your strategy on cultural capital
rather than the actual capital of money or popular support, and actual
capital is exactly what, beginning in the 1950s, fundamentalists and
evangelicals were realizing they had. With wealth and industry moving South and
a
burgeoning evangelical movement on the West Coast, conservative Protestants
could no longer be dismissed so easily as a lot of snake-handling bumpkins.
Ms. Coffman's research has uncovered a great deal of material about the
rise and decline of mainline Protestantism, and she tells its story well. In
my view, however, she treats her subject a little too delicately, with a
young scholar's reluctance to draw broad conclusions. So allow me. The
decline of liberal Protestantism that began in the 1950s had at least three
sources.
First and most obviously: the embrace by its leaders of political
positions that were either unpopular, manifestly ridiculous, or both. For much
of
its first four decades as a nondenominational magazine, for instance, the
Century embraced the prohibition of alcohol as a distinctively "Protestant"
position and just one part of an editorial stance that consistently skirted
along the edges of straight anti-Catholic bigotry. Morrison himself set the
Century on a firmly pacifist trajectory by embracing the cause of
"outlawry"—the belief that war could be eliminated by making it "illegal." "If
we
are to abolish war," Morrison wrote in 1927, "the first decisive thing to do
is to outlaw it!" The Century's pacifist line became deeply problematic on
Dec. 7, 1941, and the editors simply began to avoid the issue. But the
episode illustrates nicely the fact that liberal clergy and their flocks have
frequently been on the opposite sides of political debates.
Then there was the smugness and general unkindness of liberal
Protestantism's "intelligentsia." Ms. Coffman quotes a 1923 editorial in the
Century,
to take one of many examples, in which fundamentalism was said to be "a weak
imitation of the Ku Klux Klan." Or consider the 1947 piece on the rise of
conservative seminaries in which Morrison referred contemptuously to
"wealthy lay men and women who, as a class, are peculiarly susceptible to the
appeal of weird or reactionary interpretations of the Scriptures." Nor were the
editors above dirty tricks, at one point accusing Billy Graham of illegal
pecuniary arrangements without anything more than rumor as proof and even
hiring an investigative reporter to find some impropriety in his
organization's finances. None came to light, but in something of a scoop, Ms.
Coffman
has discovered documents linking the revered historian Martin Marty to the
rough anti-Graham campaign.
Third, and most important, Ms. Coffman's analysis of the Century and its
readers strongly suggests that liberal Protestantism, for all the eminence
it achieved in American society, was crippled from the start. She catalogs a
deep divide between liberal churchmen and their congregants. Even today,
many older members of mainline churches would be shocked to discover that
their ministers or priests don't believe that the Bible is in any sense
revelation or that God's existence is knowable. No movement can survive long if
its leaders have to sidestep expression of their beliefs in the presence of
the rank and file. And when the rank and file figure out that assent to the
old verities isn't mandatory, they'll either go where it is mandatory or
head to _Starbucks_
(http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=SBUX) _SBUX
+0.92%_
(http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=SBUX?mod=inlineTicker)
on a Sunday morning. And that, Elesha
Coffman's book suggests, has a lot to do with why the word "mainline" is so
often accompanied by the word "decline."
--
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