Paul Gottfried and America’s Decaying Protestants: II…By Paul Gottfried Paul
Gottfried on America’s National Question Problem:
Decaying Protestantism Allow me
to address the key points raised by those who commented
on my remarks concerning the relation between liberal
Protestantism and the politics of guilt. My critics
observed that I had not stressed sufficiently the
differences between Evangelicals and mainline
Protestants. While liberal mainline denominations, we
know, are declining in membership and resources,
conservative Protestant congregations are growing by
leaps and bounds. This trend reflects the growing
dissatisfaction among Protestant Americans with the PC
substance of the Protestant mainline. It is not by
accident, I was told, that on average Evangelicals vote
more conservatively than members of liberal Protestant
denominations. My friend Clyde
Wilson
of the University of South Carolina attributed the
ideological distinctions among Protestants to a regional-cultural
variable as well.
Southerners, he contends, are less subject to the
expansive humanitarianism and passion for social control
that has characterized Yankee religion since the early
nineteenth century. Mainliners are descended from the
Protestant do-gooders who created or joined the
abolitionist, temperance, and suffragist movements.
Unlike Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians,
Wilson contends, Northern Protestants are the recent
products of a secularized form of Puritanism that
stretches back generations. While
conceding that these criticisms have the merit of
forcing me to reconsider broad generalizations, I should
call attention to certain relevant facts. The political
and social distance between Evangelicals and other
Protestants is narrowing, as Alan Wolfe joyously shows
in the October
2000 Atlantic
Monthly. It is no longer the case that
Evangelicals stand for traditional rural values
interwoven with Old Testament moral prescriptions. They
may vote Republican more often than Democratic, but are
mellowing on all kinds of social issues, including
feminism and the need to atone for the American
Christian racist past. One should
not confuse the slightly right-of-center voting
practices of Evangelicals with hard-core rightwing
anything. The Evangelicals I encounter at my own
denominational college are certainly not outspoken
conservatives. Moreover, while the men vote Republican,
often like their non-Evangelical parents and siblings,
their wives, like other suburban Protestant women,
support more often than not liberal Democrats. A huge
scholarly
literature
is available that explains why this is so. Note I
never deny that there are theological differences
between Evangelicals and mainliners, though sometimes
these appear less salient than they really are because
of the uninformed but orthodox-sounding responses that
most Protestants give to survey questions dealing with
faith. What I stress is that despite differing degrees
of theological fervor, Evangelicals and mainliners are
both afflicted by the politics of guilt. As for the
insistence on Southern exceptionalism, I suspect by now
it is less important than it once was. Mark
Shibley,
Wade C. Ruf, and James
D. Hunter see the major sociological divide among
Evangelicals as the split between urban-suburban and
relatively rural congregations. This divide may be
politically and culturally at least as critical as the
one separating mainliners and Evangelicals. It splits
Southerners as well as Northerners into ideologically
identifiable groups. Going back
further in time, I am less impressed than Professor
Wilson by the dissimilarities between Southern and New
England religions. Much of the antebellum Southern
gentry were Presbyterian, and even the Southern Baptists
were influenced by the theological and ethical
peculiarities of eighteenth-century Calvinism. As Eugene
Genovese shows in A
Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind
of the White Christian South, the Protestant clergy
throughout the South repeatedly called upon their
congregations to do penance after the Civil War. Many
attributed the suffering and humiliation of their region
to the failure to practice slavery in a humane,
Christian fashion. Though it
may be a stretch from such calls to atone to the present
PC, it is equally one from the sermons of Jonathan
Edwards to contemporary liberalism. All that is
being suggested is that there may be lines of continuity
in both cases. And those lines must be taken into
account to understand the reaching
out to minorities and endorsement of Third World
immigration by predominantly Protestant Republican
leaders. The mere effort by Republicans to pick up votes
from anywhere explains neither very well. Finally
let me emphasize for those who might think otherwise: I
am not at all hostile to the Protestant Reformation; or
to Calvinist societies in general. Both represent a
distinctly Western achievement, fundamental to what was
once the moral soul of
America. My criticism concerns the egregious deterioration of Protestant societies, and what in the Protestant past might have led to this process. Paul Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of After Liberalism and Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory. March 16, 2001 |
