Column 11/22/2022: An Apologia for American Evangelicism

An Apologia for American Evangelicism

There is a great need for narratives of the present and recent past that are not simply based on mass media or partisan politics.

The problem with most narratives of the recent past is that they are typically based on nothing--neither small-scale empirical experience reflected upon over time nor large-scale rational analysis of trends over time--and they are even more typically driven by unexpressed, hidden external goals: to win elections, get back at family members, salvage projects, denounce enemies, win arguments, and/or "own the libs."  Direct experience, even anecdotal experience, is extraordinarily valuable--so that in that way at least recent history is the ideal kind of historiography--but it becomes far more valuable when reflected upon and placed into a broader context, and not merely thrown into a blender with "other stuff" and served cold as one soggy inedible mass.

Economic history has made something of a comeback over the last decade, as incoherent, disorganized Leftism and increasingly organized Labor have had a general resurgence. It is still very much needed, however, and still very much not the norm. Religious history remains much rarer, and is just as much needed.

The history of American Evangelicism will prove, I think, to be one of the most important accounts for understanding the last roughly fifty years of American political and social history. But that history will have to leap over many high hurdles to make it into existence. At the present moment, accounts and analyses of Evangelicism are not wanting, but mostly come from (1) the crowing hatred of its partisan enemies, who have never understood it but have been growing ever more enraged by being defeated by it for so many decades, (2) the disdain and contempt of its natural enemies, the upper classes, the academics, the intellectuals, who always despised it but understand it now no better than they did in the '80s, and finally (3) its own former adherents, the "exvangelicals," who hate it and blame it as only disappointed sectarians can, for many genuine sins, but also for falling short of their current sectarian causes and failing to establish the utopia they were promised.

Evangelicism is, to say the least, no longer popular. Not only that, but it is increasingly, oddly obscured in the public and political world and mass media, as though it were entirely a thing of the past--except for among the exvangelicals, who speak of it like John Birchers of the United Nations, trying to constantly warn everyone of its crimes and its conspiratorial plots and its sole responsibility for all the problems of the world.

Yet for all that, it is simply true that the Evangelical movement was one of the most important religious and cultural and political events in America since WW2--and that things would have been, would be, very different without it.

This essay, then, is, if not an apologia in a strong sense, simply a basic, analytical theory of Evangelicism that places its nature in a broader context, and so works against accounts of it as a bizarre, uniquely wicked aberration. 

The Structure of American Religion

To understand Evangelicism, one must understand American religion--for Evangelicism is, in origins, if not in present existence (having spread throughout the world thanks to American cultural and political hegemony), an absolutely and uniquely American phenomenon.

American religion was derived from English religion, and imitates it, but took its basic dynamics much farther. It is thus defined by two basic, opposing but mutually reinforcing modes of religion: in England known as the "establishment" and the "dissenters," but in America transformed into the "mainline" and the "sectarian." 

In England, the Established Anglican Church, mandated and regulated by public law, brutally enforced upon the populace, but upheld by genuine national and patriotic and Imperial and pietistic feeling, was opposed by various "dissenting" bodies, groups unwilling for various reasons to operate within the strictures of public law but increasingly granted analogous legal status under the Crown. The opposition between the two modes of religion was by no means absolute or irreconcilable, but as much a matter of organization as doctrine or theology or practice, since dissenting churches emerged out of and were organized with reference to the dominant Anglican system, and since one could hold almost any theology or carry out any practice while falling into either camp. In this, the fabled "via media" of Anglicanism--state-enforced institutional and structural hegemony combined with a general indifference to religious doctrine or practice--played a large role. This basic model (analogous to other continental Protestant regimes) was extremely effective in practice at holding most people within certain religious bounds, if not of actual belief, at least of general structure and nationalistic-cum-Christian piety.

America retained this basic organizing principle for religion, but spread it out, so to speak, like butter scraped over too much bread. Instead of one Established Church, there were now four or five different "mainline churches," each representing a trend or aspect within the Anglican Church, but now organizationally and doctrinally dissevered from one another and increasingly separated from explicit state support. Instead of a small constellation of dissenting churches, organized in limited opposition to the dominating Established Church, there were now an infinite, fissiparous array of "sects," each one more opposed clearly to each other and the mainline, and growing more radical and apocalyptic over time. 

For all the greater degree of religious difference and conflict occasioned by American religion, though, the basic system retained much of the strength and durability of its English model. Sects might be entirely disorganized, formed out of nothing and returning to nothing, and expressing the most extreme possible beliefs and practices, but they nonetheless all upheld a basic pietistic Protestant nationalism and Imperialism, i.e. "Americanism." Mainline religions might be detached from each other and defined as such more by their differences in organizational structure (Presbyterian versus Episcopalian versus Methodist) than in belief or practice, but they nonetheless provided a strong and pervasive moral and religious framework to American society and American public institutions from the top down.

Relatively unique, though, was the degree to which the component elements of American religion were fragile and unstable in themselves and hence reliant on each other for their continuing existence. The very multiplicity of American religion, stretched over such great geographical spaces and subject to the dominance of explicitly secular American Imperial and national structures, made it hard to sustain strong, supernatural belief. Sects came into existence, fought each other, failed to establish any lasting institutional or cultural hold, and died: mainline churches were absorbed by the broader secular American political and cultural life, secularized, and died. This is not a new dynamic, but dates back in some form to the American founding. 

Mainline religion had already come close to dieing by the time of the American founding, having faded in much of America into Unitarianism, political liberalism, and open secularism: it was then revived by the Great Awakenings, perhaps the most important and underappreciated event in American history. The Great Awakenings are educational in many ways, in that they were largely driven by people like George Whitefield who were, in fact, mainline institutionally (Whitefield was an Anglican cleric), but sectarian and radical in their beliefs and activities. The Great Awakenings flowed out of the sources and structures of mainline religion into a thousand sectarian channels, which in turn flowed back into the  mainline churches to keep belief and activity going. 

The separation between the mainline churches and sectarianism has always, in America, also been driven, even more than in England, by class. Mainline churches, like their Anglican mother, have been closely identified with the state and the nation and the central social and political institutions, and so inevitably "secular" and "secularizing" in the sense of being attached to and reliant on the powers of the saeculum, the present age and present order, first and foremost, rather than to universalizing structures or supernatural belief. Unlike in Anglicanism, however, mainline churches were divided, and so could not draw from either patriotic national feeling or actual legal coercion to keep the masses attached to them; and so they quickly became identified with the rich and the powerful and the socially-well connected and dominated by oligarchies local or state or national. The sects, meanwhile, have been driven by the greater degree of desperation and personal religiosity generally found in the poor, without much in the way of moderation or structuring from historical doctrine and institution and practice.

To summarize simply: the sects needed mainline religion to carry forward the basic religious practices and doctrines and sources of Christianity, which otherwise would be lost in the world of fighting, dying, mutating sects, while mainline religion needed the sects to keep alive actual Christian belief, which otherwise would have been lost through total assimilation to the prevailing secular American world. In this way, America remained, somewhat surprisingly, a secular society with an always surprisingly strong presence of religious belief and practice nonetheless.

This is the basic sketch of American religion without which, I firmly believe, it is impossible to understand Evangelicism.

The Crisis of American Religion

What, then, is Evangelicism? Put simply, it was an attempt to create, out of the materials of American sectarian religion, a broad, non-sectarian form of religion capable of not informing, but actually taking the place of, the mainline churches.

What occasioned the Evangelical movement was the complete, unexpected death of mainline religion itself in the post-war period. The 'Great Apostasy' of America in the '50s and '60s is one of the great underrecognized events of American history, and did truly represent a different mode of religion, or even religious failure, than had been seen before. Mainline religion had secularized before, gradually and without giving up institutional power or hegemony, and been saved by movements and currents from below. In the 'Great Apostasy,' however, the rich and the powerful did not merely, in the generally-accepted mainline way, gradually secularize in belief and way of life while retaining and gradually altering their institutions to match: they left institutions, suddenly and catastrophically and in huge droves, in the process wrecking the institutions themselves and leaving little or nothing behind.

For American mainline religion, this rapidly reached a point of no return: a point where there was no realistic way to retain or reconstruct American mainline religion, not only due to lack of belief, but due to lack of adherents, lack of institutions, and lack of continuing connection with the rich and powerful and the cult of the nation. The new American oligarchic classes that have emerged since then have, to say the least, not been either Methodists or Episcopalians, even in the most detached sense. The mainline churches have been, since then, hollow shells of themselves, 'mainline' in no genuine sense and so with no real reason for existing other than the slow winding-down of their asset portfolios. 

The key thing to understand, though, and the key to understanding the Evangelical movement, is that this crisis, which gripped the mainline churches, was also and at the same time a crisis for American sectarian religion. This sectarian religion was not, at least at first, threatened in its numbers of adherents or even in the number and fervor of sects. What it was threatened in, however, immediately and catastrophically, was in its basic, underlying ethos and sense of the world and society. 

American sectarian religion needed to exist in a Christian context, defined by societal Christian institutions and morality. True, it frequently and even normatively had posed itself against this Christian context, seen as corrupt, hypocritical, nominal, even Satanic--but it had nonetheless drawn its sources and its self-identification from it. It also needed the influx of Christian doctrine, tradition, institutional continuity, even practical adherents, from the mainline in order to be coherent and, in the long run, survive. Then, too, American sects, however apocalyptic they might be, had been, like their Anglican forebears, deeply patriotic and deeply committed to the broader cult of the American nation-state. The falling-away of the American nation-state from even nominal adherence to mainline Christianity was, then, a profound crisis of identity and even of doctrine for American sectarian religion.

Thus was born the American Evangelical Movement: an attempt at a "Great Awakening" style revival and revitalization of American religion from below, but now without the structure and tradition formerly provided by the mainline. 

Thus the extreme oddities and even self-contradictions of Evangelicism: apocalyptic forms of religious belief obsessed with institution-building, sectarian forms of religious belief pushing for non-denominationalism and ecumenicism, lower-class forms of religious belief appealing to the rich and powerful, anti-intellectual forms of religious belief trying desperately to colonize science and the academy, historically progressive and utopian forms of religion suddenly obsessed with conserving the past, structurally anti-Catholic forms of religion suddenly allying with and praising Catholics, anti-artistic forms of religious belief trying desperately to develop their own counter-traditions in music and film, moral-minority forms of religious belief appealing to "the moral majority."

As I said earlier, accounts of Evangelicism these days are typically written from stances of total, uncomprehending contempt: and many of them center on these contradictions and conflicts, which are frequently presented as though they were simply the result of the aberrant, unique personal moral corruption, stupidity, and/or dishonesty of individual Evangelical leaders and adherents.

The basic apologia for Evangelicism, then, that is absolutely necessary for any kind of basic understanding, let alone fair judgment, is the simple realization that most of these tensions and contradictions were simply baked into the Evangelical movement from its role and origins and context--and that they arose, to a certain degree, not from dishonesty, but rather from a mix of desperation and genuine, even heroic belief: desperation at the failure of mainline religion, genuine belief in their audacious project of rebuilding it from scratch. At the very least, one must respect the audacity of this great, quixotic project.

The Death of Evangelicism?

There seems to be little doubt at this point that Evangelicism failed, at least in its societal and political goals. This almost everyone, even most Evangelicals, seems to agree on.

Yet for all that, reports of the death of Evangelicism are greatly exaggerated. Evangelicism failed at its self-conscious goal of making American society, and in particular the central societal structures and ways of life and halls of power, recognizably Christian again. This failure, however, was, if not inevitable, certainly highly probable from the beginning.

On the one hand, mainline religion itself had already failed far more catastrophically precisely because the political and institutional and national structures necessary to sustain it had changed beyond recognition. The 'Great Apostasy' of the 20th century was not simply a one-off, aberrant event, capable of being easily course-corrected back to a mainline Christian America. The American Empire, as a global power now incorporating huge portions of the global population of different civilizations and different religious and backed up by enormously greater technological and military and mass-media power, no longer needs even the nominal Christian sanction of the mainline to support it. There is no Christendom outside, and far less institutional pressure from below, to make either the government itself, its corporate and economic systems, and its ruling classes, seek any legitimacy and sanction from Christian belief or doctrine. Likewise, the sexual revolution and the general atomization of American life thanks to capitalism has rendered the maintenance of basic, "mainline" religious practice and activity without strong belief largely impossible. Put simply, people without a strong belief in supernatural religion have very little reason to go to the Episcopal Church every Sunday.

On the other hand, the kind of religiosity promoted by Evangelicism was, as indicated above, simply a drastically poor fit for the role of new mainline American religion. The overwhelming majority of complaints made by middle-class and upper-class exvangelicals are simply derived from the basic lack of fit between their religion and their class and lifestyle: one generally resolved by abandoning their religion for said class and lifestyle.

Lower-class religions are generally more moralistic (in a context where life is more desperate and moral failings more harmful), more rule-based, more intellectually simplistic, more structurally authoritarian, but also more accepting of personal failure and suffering; upper-class religions are generally more morally flexible, aesthetically appealing, intellectually broad, personally affirming, but ultimately far more based around status and so far harsher towards those outside their bounds. The strange mixtures of the two produced by "mainline Evangelicism" rarely pleased anyone.

Nevertheless, Evangelicism, in its time in power, achieved a great deal that will likely last. It built many institutions, albeit marginal and sectarian rather than "mainline" institutions, that will likely endure for many decades in some form or fashion. It provided a mode and idiom of worship and personal religiosity that will endure for some time both in itself and within other religious traditions (including Catholicism). And it did, in fact, revitalize American religion as a whole, making it, albeit with severely diminishing returns over time, much more common to believe in God, to believe in Christianity, to practice some Christian morality, in the general, secular population of America, not only among the poor, but among the middle-class and even the rich and powerful. And probably its most enduring success has been to colonize large parts of the world with an indelibly American form of sectarian religiosity which is currently mutating and growing in the form(s) of Pentecostalism and political Protestantism throughout much of the Third World.

Then, too, sectarian American Protestantism is far from dead. It is still, in some form, the religion of the American poor, the American desperate, the American dispossessed, as it was two hundred years ago. This anyone who has regular contact with these groups can hardly deny.

In the absence of mainline American religion, however, American sectarianism grows less Christian with each passing year, more political, more inflected with other religious traditions and conspiratorialism and UFO cults and many other things: but in basic form, it remains much the same as it has ever been.

Evangelicism is dead; long live Evangelicism.

Note: I have deliberately avoided, in the above account, discussing American Catholicism and its role in the above narratives. This I will likely do elsewhere and on a later date, but for now suffice it to say that American Catholicism has largely either existed apart from the dominant currents of American religion or been incorporated in whole or in part into this broader picture. Still, no account of the Evangelical movement would be complete without taking strongly into account the irreplaceable role of American Catholicism in frequently participating in and lending its prestige and institutional power and deeper Christian traditions and forms of belief to Evangelicalism and its projects. In this sense, Evangelicism used Catholicism at times as a sort of replacement "mainline" religion, and it is doubtful it would have been anywhere near as successful without drawing from Catholic sources and relying on Catholic institutions. But that is a topic for another time.