The Guilty Secret of Liberal Christianity

Classical theories of secularization provide only limited understanding of religion in America, and that geographical deficiency in turn reveals the most important element lacking in most of those theories overall — a recognition of the primacy of cultural, and indeed religious, factors in the very process of religion’s decline.

In Western Europe secularization is closely related to industrialization, the classic pattern being pious peasants who, upon moving to the city, cease to practice their faith. That pattern has been traced roughly in proportion to the magnitude of urban centralization — large cities are more secular than small — and the size and complexity of the industrial enterprise itself.

Why this should be is not all that clear. Most obvious is the trauma of profound social displacement, as the familiar rural world, in which everything has its place and everything is taken for granted, dissolves into a wholly unfamiliar terrain where it seems nothing has its place. For many European industrial laborers, it was apparently simply a matter of having been raised in a religious environment in a rural village, then losing the habits of faith in the process of uprooting.

In many countries formal religion in the 19th century came to be identified with oppressive social structures. The self-respecting worker who was conscious of injustice, and believed that organized militancy was the only hope for improvement, came to regard the church as being in league with government and business in causing his oppression.

Except in limited situations, the latter attitude did not take root in the United States, perhaps as much as anything because of religious diversity. If the local business elite was Episcopalian or Presbyterian, for example, the workers might be Baptists, and in certain situations religion actually became a vehicle for social and economic resistance rather than a prop to the established order.

Despite its conservative image, the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. often functioned as a champion of the poor, mainly because few in the business elite were Catholics (many were anti-Catholic) whereas close to a majority of the workers were Catholic. Even where the Church was not overtly a partisan of labor, she was often the only community institution laborers could think of as their own.

The pattern whereby European peasants who moved a few miles from their native villages lost their faith, while the majority of those who dared cross the ocean probably kept theirs, remains mysterious. The fact that the churches in America often had strong ethnic identities, and thus served as havens for the immigrants, was certainly important. Possibly the magnitude of the immigrants’ dislocation itself drove them into the arms of the only institutions where they could feel some continuity with the old ways. One of the greatest pastoral triumphs in the history of Christianity — the way in which the churches in America successfully ministered to generations of working-class immigrants, molding them into vital communities of faith — has never been adequately appreciated. (The same story could be told about the other advanced industrial societies that were once colonies of Great Britain — Canada, Australia, New Zealand.)

If the Catholic achievement was particularly impressive, other immigrant religious groups were less so only in proportion to their size. As late as 1960, before the decline of heavy industry, the working class of the cities was comprised (in addition to Catholics) of churchgoing Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, etc.

Immigration does not exhaust the story. The U.S. replicated the European pattern of internal migration, first to the West, later rural people, especially from the South, moving off their small farms to seek employment in the factories of the cities. But they too, black or white, tended not to lose their religion but to transplant it. Churches multiplied fast in the Northern black community, even as the traditional “poor white” denominations not only remained strong but spawned numerous offshoots.

If in Europe, not long after the Industrial Revolution began, it was possible to see religion as a concern only of segments of the middle class, in the U.S. the churches were populated by all social classes, roughly proportionate to their numbers in the larger society. If anything, the “common people,” even in urban areas, were the deepest repositories of traditional moral and religious beliefs.

Classical theories of secularization have much to say about urbanization but little to say about suburbanization, another massive social dislocation, which occurred in the U.S. after World War II. To take merely the Catholic example, over a period of two decades after 1945, the life went out of large numbers of once flourishing city parishes, but for the most part the Church was again able to create churches and schools for those moving to the suburbs, and by 1960 American Catholicism was perhaps even more vital than before, as the “family values” of the new suburbia centered in the local parish.

Protestant congregations were not even hindered by the restrictions of geographical boundaries, and local Protestant churches commonly responded to suburbia simply by moving along with their members. Meanwhile many new Protestant congregations, as well as new denominations, were also established in the suburbs, and most of them flourished.

Altogether, for whatever reasons, American religion has shown a remarkable capacity not only for surviving massive social dislocations but for actually thriving in their midst.

The most far-reaching theory of secularization speaks of the “disenchantment of the world,” supposedly set in motion irrevocably by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and given practical focus by the Industrial Revolution. According to this theory, industrialization inevitably leads to secularization because technology reveals to people how they as human beings actually create and manipulate their world, thereby making belief in unseen powers much less credible.

But, as some anthropologists long ago pointed out, even “primitive” people are not devoid of such knowledge. They understand fully the connection between planting and harvesting, for example, or the fact that particular animals are only found in certain places and can only be hunted in certain ways.

But even if industrialization is regarded as an especially massive dose of “de-mystification,” so that quantity affected quality, the historical evidence for this in the U.S. is scant. Rudolf Bultmann’s famous remark that a man who turns on an electric light and shaves with an electric razor cannot believe in biblical miracles has always been refuted by the plain fact that many such men do. Indeed, sociologists have even found that highly trained technical people are often more “naïve” about their religion than are practitioners of ancient disciplines like poetry.

Whatever may have happened in Europe, the people of the U.S. for many decades took every kind of technological change in stride, becoming more and more sophisticated in their understanding of the human ability to manipulate the world, without any noticeable diminution of their religious faith. Even today people who know that their lives depend on medical science do not cease to pray.

From the beginning religion was intimately a part of the culture of most of those societies that would eventually form the United States — the 13 British colonies, the Mississippi Valley, the Southwest, and California notably — so that at no time did religion seem alien. This in itself probably had an influence on the immigrants, who quickly understood that an American was supposed to have religion.

Of course by the beginning of modern times, religion had been ingrained in the culture of Europe much longer. However, for complex reasons, modernity was experienced in Europe, mainly through the Enlightenment, as necessarily opposed to religion, giving rise to the bitter cultural battles which continued at least until the time of World War II in some countries and which often seemed to force a choice between being religious and being modern.

America, on the other hand, only experienced the Enlightenment partially, and in the relatively peaceful and benign English form. Throughout American history the assertion that it was necessary to choose between progress and faith, whether on the part of certain religions (the Amish) or the militantly anti-religious (Robert Ingersoll) was always dismissed as eccentric.

The big change occurred during what is imprecisely called “the Sixties.” The mystery of that cultural explosion remains only partially explained, but, in turning its guns against every institution in American life, it was not likely to spare religion, which in the end fit better than any other institution the definition of oppression which the revolutionaries assumed — something exercising authority in people’s lives.

Those institutions — government and business — that had material power at their disposal emerged relatively unscathed from that revolution, while those relying primarily on spiritual authority — churches, schools, and families — were profoundly damaged by an uprising which was only superficially political but really aimed at the moral heart of Western culture. Except for the universities, no grouping in American life showed itself less able to withstand the assault, more pathetically eager to make accommodations, than did the liberal churches.

The roots of this capitulation go back as far as the Enlightenment, to an awareness of those “cultured despisers” of Christianity to whom Friedrich Schleierrmacher addressed his “apologetics.” For almost three centuries, many within the churches have lived with a permanent, even obsessive, sense of inferiority before the modern world, and have made endless accommodations for its sake.

The effect of this was blurred during the 1960s in part because the cultural revolution was itself a revolt against enlightened critical rationalism, especially its technological forms. In Charles Reich’s convenient terms, Consciousness III (psychedelic consciousness) undermined both Consciousness I (the older morality) and Consciousness II (the technocratic mentality). Similarly, religious believers in the 1960s were spared the necessity of choosing between their faith and their country, because the revolutionaries condemned both.

But also in the 1960s, and for the first time, Americans were told in a forceful way that they had to choose between their religion and the future, since the revolutionaries had no doubt that the latter was theirs. For the first time simple churchgoing was condemned as complacent naïveté at best, if not willful ignorance and objective complicity with injustice.

Liberal Christianity, dating back nearly three centuries, achieved its modern identity essentially by making itself an adjunct of the secular university, so that the task of liberal theologians has been that of assimilating the theories of secular thinkers. Even though the universities too were savagely attacked by the revolutionaries in the 1960s, they were still the centers of the new consciousness, and liberal clergy dutifully set to work adapting to this new message, a task they had to perform with great speed in an atmosphere of near hysteria. (On one level, the battles of the 1960s were between the older business elite and an emerging quasi-intellectual “new class,” a battle in which liberal clergy unhesitatingly sided with the latter, despite the fact that many of the former were loyal church members, while very few of the latter were.)

Although the churches were accused during the 1960s of merely being adjuncts of the “capitalist-industrialist system,” in fact they were most savagely attacked by the revolutionaries because of their sexual morality, which has remained the chief point of assault by those who seek to nullify Christian influence altogether.

A few years after the initial cultural revolution, the status of women became the second great front in the war against tradition. The rise of militant feminism has been one of the most serious crises in the history of orthodox religion, because women have always tended to be more pious than men and the churches are thus being alienated from some of their hitherto most faithful communicants, and because militant feminism logically rejects not only a male savior but the very idea of monotheism.

As the centers of the cultural revolution moved away from the campuses — to feminist discussion groups, for example — the habits of theological accommodation merely hardened, to the point where liberal religious leaders such as Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong appear able to conceive no role for themselves except that of repudiating an endless series of traditional Christian beliefs, at the demand of wave after wave of iconoclastic cultural movements.

As a strategy, this was self-defeating. In a formula confirmed numerous times, the more liberal the religion, the more likely it is to lose members, even as the reverse is usually true.

For a while, liberal religious leaders probably did believe that the future was theirs and that only the kinds of accommodations they were making could insure their churches’ survival. But once this expectation was defeated, they ceased to care and willingly presided over the dismantling of their denominations. (There is an obvious parallel in Catholic religious orders.) Although leftist politics has been one of the chief passions of liberal Christians, their alliance with the political Left is usually the result, rather than the cause, of religious disintegration. Self-consciously modern Christians turn to political causes in an effort to fill the religious void they themselves have created in their churches.

The guilty secret of liberal Christianity is that it has never really been an attempt to win converts from the secular world, but has always been aimed merely at winning nods of condescending approval from Christianity’s cultured despisers. Thus for most liberal clergy it is less important that their churches be full on Sunday mornings than that they enjoy a positive image among the kind of people whose opinion they value. Loss of membership can even be interpreted as a positive sign, if the cleric can offer it as proof of his own courage and honesty in “facing up to doubt” and “speaking out on the social issues.”

As the liberal churches continue to hemorrhage and the conservative churches continue to grow, liberal religion now finds that its main effect is showing people that they do not really need religion at all. As layer upon layer of teaching and practice are stripped away, as it becomes clear that there are virtually no traditions that must be held sacrosanct, as the seat of wisdom is gladly conceded to lie with nonbelievers and even with the antireligious, as subjective personal “needs” finally become the only accepted criteria of truth, many people in the liberal churches reach the point where they naturally become mere “alumni,” in the words of Bishop Spong’s spiritual predecessor, James A. Pike. Although it condemns the religious “ghetto” and urges openness toward the larger culture, liberal religion is now mainly inward looking, at best indifferent to the tasks of evangelization, and catering to the theological doubts of its members. Whatever good the churches do, in terms of counseling, political action, moral awareness, etc., is usually done better by other social agencies, and church membership comes more and more to be a matter of a habit which is easily broken (often between one generation and the next).

Theories of secularization were nowhere more in error than when they posited the disappearance of the religious sense among modern people, dissolved in the acids of technological rationalism. In some ways American culture, directly as a result of “the Sixties,” is more religious now than it was 40 years ago, in the sense that there is a pervasive, inchoate belief in unseen powers by people who have no love of traditional religion. Astrology, reincarnation, “out-of-body” experiences, ghostly “channeling,” goddess worship, and innumerable other beliefs now have a respectability which would have been ridiculed in 1960.

In fact, modern man — modern technocratic man, modern bureaucratic man, modern skeptical man — retains great residues of almost primitive religiosity, at least in the U.S. Since the 1960s America has become almost a religious tropical jungle precisely because of the decline of the churches, which traditionally have been far more effective than sheer rationalism in controlling “superstitious” beliefs.

Devotees of “New Age” religion rightly see the traditional churches as their enemies, and rightly accuse those churches of claiming a monopoly on spiritual truth. Such is indeed basic to the nature of both Judaism and Christianity, although it does not exclude a carefully defined ecumenism.

Bereft of religious leadership, many “modern” men do not become fully secular but instead fall prey to unbridled religiosity of a kind which classical Christianity thought it had an obligation to quell. (Historically Protestantism strives to suppress such beliefs altogether, while Catholicism is usually content merely to control them.) Thus the New Age movement is not a counter-force to the secularization of the 1960s but a result of it. But it is also only superficially religious, being fundamentally secular in that it does not recognize the existence of real higher powers in the universe but merely makes the subjective apprehensions of individuals its ultimate criteria of truth.

People often join churches because they experience vague spiritual longings for which they seek fulfillment. Usually they join in an essentially docile frame of mind — they sincerely seek answers and are willing to make themselves disciples. Typically, at least in America, they believe in miracles, in life after death, in the supernatural authority of the Scriptures, and many other orthodox Christian teachings. But the liberal cleric sees it as precisely his task to “demythologize” beliefs which to him are embarrassingly naïve. He actually dampens the enthusiasm of the seeker’s faith, and his guidance in effect tells the convert that “the world” is after all correct in its skeptical judgments. Thus the churches themselves are often the principal agencies of secularization.

The objective social conditions that sociologists identify as undermining belief are of course real, and they would, under even the best of circumstances, exert a corroding effect on faith. But the churches by no means function as magnets exerting maximum religious pull on their members, moving them back from the brink of unbelief. Often they do quite the reverse, and people become secular precisely at the bidding of their religious leaders. Spiritual authority is systematically used to undermine spiritual authority.

The same occurs on the larger cultural scene, as the kind of people whom the media prefer to recognize as spokesmen for faith proclaim to the secular culture, once again, that it is correct in most of its perceptions; that, insofar as the churches go against the culture, especially in resisting feminism and the sexual revolution, they are themselves perpetrators of error and oppression. But those who applaud the liberal clergy for their “honesty” in admitting past errors do not therefore begin to take religion more seriously. They logically assume that churches which have made so many errors in the past will continue to do so, and they wonder why the liberal clergy do not recognize the obvious truth that, as its critics have been saying for almost 300 years, historical Christianity was simply unsound from the beginning and should be rejected altogether.

Without a highly visible liberal religion in America, secularization would be far less pronounced, and the U.S. an even more religious society than it already is. As much as professors, journalists, or any other professionals, it is the clergy who pull the levers that undermine belief. Whatever may have been their intentions 40 years ago, most liberal clergy now would probably prefer to see their congregations shrink to the vanishing point rather than to reclaim their vitality by catering to the conservative laity.

Theology aside, clergy and laymen in the liberal denominations are often at cross purposes with one another even in basic terms of what they expect from the churches. Lay people immersed in secularity most of the week look forward to Sunday morning as an uplifting experience which reminds them of the supernatural end of existence. Clergy, on the other hand, may feel stifled in a religious hothouse, and use the pulpit “boldly” to proclaim the need for Christians to immerse themselves in the world.

Classical theories of secularization identify the ways in which the social role of religion, in various times and places, was rigid and reactionary and thus provoked implacably hostile responses. This was especially true in Catholic countries. However, the historical reality was much more complex and, while every rigid religious system will probably sooner or later crack, with disastrous results, such systems can be sustained for very long periods of time, and they succeed in many of their purposes (e.g., maintaining the stability of family life).

The distinguished historian R.R. Palmer showed years ago, in Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France, that, contrary to stereotype, the Church offered only feeble resistance to the militancy of the Enlightenment, and many of the clergy simply went over to the enemy. In recent times rigid national churches like those of the Netherlands and Québec (and now Ireland) have collapsed only after a major internal crisis, primarily affecting the clergy, and involving strategies for “updating” the Church which soon proved disastrous. The spread of secular attitudes in Catholic cultures has not been primarily the work of professors and journalists, but of priests. Laymen who would be disposed to resist secularization, especially as they see it emanating from hostile sources outside the churches, abandon their resistance at the apparent bidding of their spiritual leaders.

Although opposition to religious liberalism is as old as liberalism itself, it was once again the experience of the 1960s that galvanized the conservative churches into a heightened sense of their identity, an apprehension of the threats they faced and the opportunities they enjoyed. Belatedly, secular social commentators, and liberal religious leaders themselves, came to realize the existence of this amorphous force, to the point where the honorific title “mainstream” is no longer automatically bestowed on the liberal churches.

Although there is a considerable range of beliefs and practices within the conservative churches, they are united by their belief in supernatural authority definitively revealed from on high, and the corresponding obligation to oppose the culture at many points. Just as the liberal churches are the single most potent force for secularization in the country, the conservative churches are by far the greatest, indeed almost the only, organized force in the opposite direction.

Here the historic religiosity of the culture is perhaps determinative. A nation that has experienced countless evangelical awakenings of various kinds since its colonial founding has a residue of piety which suffuses the culture like petroleum suffuses the earth — just as one deposit has been declared dry, others spurt forth, amidst a growing suspicion that the reservoirs are far deeper and more extensive than anyone imagined.

Classical theories of secularization also identify the power of the state as a major force in the decline of religious influence, a reality almost wholly absent from American history. But now that too appears to be changing. Although Catholics might often have felt that public discourse was inhospitable to them, only in the past few decades have there been militant voices insisting that religion itself ought to be a wholly private affair and that its public manifestations are dangerous to the Republic, to the point where to be a good American almost requires being a secularist.

The liberal churches are powerful forces for secularization in that they also now stand as one of the most energetic opponents of religiously motivated political activity. While they have long had political agendas of their own, those agendas have almost never emanated from the religious tradition itself, except perhaps in the cases of war and racial justice, and have almost always consisted of giving religious support to secular agendas (feminism, homosexuality, etc.). Thus when liberals do see political agendas that are clearly religious in nature (opposition to abortion, emphasis on the traditional family), they cry the alarm. Liberal tolerance, deference, and self-doubt evaporate when the enemy of “fundamentalism” comes into view.

The secularist view that religion is really a danger to the public good and must be rigorously excluded from the public forum has much influence in the courts but little with the general populace. What influence it does have comes mainly through the liberal churches, which would prefer to see America a wholly secular society than concede legitimate influence to any form of orthodox Christianity.

It is little noticed that religion is being made into a wholly private affair, as the onmicompetent welfare state assumes the responsibilities that once belonged to the churches, not only the relief of the needy but the power, through education, court decisions, and public policy, to define and enforce acceptable moral conduct. Certain political leaders — e.g., Mario Cuomo — have openly bid for status as spiritual leaders as well and, rather too prematurely, former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in effect excommunicated conservative religious believers from any legitimate voice in public life. A state of conflict between a secular government on the one hand and the churches on the other, which has been almost entirely absent from the Anglo-Saxon countries, may yet emerge in the U.S.

America’s national myth, the citizens’ view of its history and purpose, has always been not only compatible with religious belief but, in most forms, almost coterminous, with it (the Pilgrims, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, etc.). Only now is the claim that America in its founding was a secular enterprise being seriously debated, a view accepted not only by secularizers but by some conservative believers as well.

For decades religious liberals (and some religious leaders not theologically liberal, such as Catholic bishops) have automatically hailed the expansion of the welfare state on humanitarian grounds, without seeming to reflect whether the expansion of this political power would in the end make the state a kind of super-church, in conflict with organized religion. The conservative churches have awakened to that danger, although the Catholic bishops have not.

In traditional sociological categories, America has always had both churches and sects in abundance. But, if sects are essentially a religious response to the perceived secularity and inhospitality of the larger society, all conservative religious bodies, even the Catholic Church herself, are now in danger of being defined as sects, and so treated.

Thus America, several years into its third century, for the first time faces realities hitherto largely absent from its history — sharp religious conflicts (now not between denominations but along fault lines running through denominations), political positions heavily determined by religious beliefs, the state in competition with the churches for the moral leadership of the nation, religion treated by influential people as permanently on sufferance and repeatedly required to prove that it deserves toleration.

In the years ahead, we shall see whether America, perhaps alone of the modern advanced industrial societies, will continue to grant religion a central and honored place in public life, or whether it will follow what in other parts of the West has seemed like almost a preordained path to an irreversible worldliness.

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One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention. — Flannery O’Connor