James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.
Significantly, Kurth rooted both opposing streams of American culture in America’s Protestant heritage. As an evangelical (he’s a deacon at Proclamation Presbyterian Church pastored by Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary), Kurth argues that theologically liberal Protestantism has morphed into a psuedo-religious secular multiculturalism. This is the “Protestant Deformation.”
Kurth begins by positing that the anti-hierarchical and anti-communitarian emphases of the Protestant Reformation bled over into the secular realm. Thus American Protestants were historically supporters of free markets and liberal democracy, secular corollaries to religious individualism and egalitarianism.
But over time, these emphases changed. Kurth lists six stages of Protestant declension: salvation by grace, grace evidenced through good works, salvation by works, the Unitarian Transformation, the American Creed, and universal human rights. Historic Protestantism believed that eternal salvation was ensured by grace alone, God’s unmerited favor towards desperate sinners. But as Protestant communities grew, it became hard to distinguish the nonbelievers from the elect. So, as observed by Max Weber, works became a litmus test for the saved community.
Eventually, the theological concept of grace lost favor in some Protestant circles, creating a de facto belief in salvation by works. This works-based theology transformed into Unitarianism, a deemphasis of the person and work of Jesus Christ. A personal savior had been replaced by a distant Supreme Being. Over time, even that abstract, remote idea of god was relinquished, creating the secular American Creed. This Creed was no longer distinctly Protestant, but “it was clearly the product of a Protestant culture and was a sort of secularized version of Protestantism.” Finally, the American Creed became universalized and reformulated as a belief in human rights.
Kurth’s “Protestant Deformation” is a pretty convincing explanation of the development of American civil religion from an evangelical perspective. It also speaks to historians in a wide variety of fields, like diplomatic, religious, and political history.
Do you find the “Protestant Deformation” convincing? Why or why not?
Bonus: I particularly like this article by Kurth. I sympathize with his politics, including his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism and his isolationism. I suspect that he is a fellow confessional libertarian in the mold of Gresham Machen.
I find this notion of a “Protestant deformation” entirely unpersuasive. Of course, there is something to the whole idea, if one were to state its propositions in the vaguest of terms. But stated precisely as a historical narrative, as you have done in this post, and as Kurth does in his essay, the argument just won’t wash. Let me briefly explain my reasons.
The supposed six-step narrative doesn’t fit the facts of American history. In the section on “Six Stages of the Protestant Declension,” Kurth mentions fewer distinct historical facts than he has points, and might even be including Europe in his argument. But let’s see if the pivot points between these stages are actually plausible. (a) I doubt that there ever was a boundary between “salvation by grace” and “grace evidenced through good works,” and if there was, it was a boundary between two different Protestant traditions, not a chronological boundary within the entire “Protestant” tradition. (b) With what theologian or sect of Protestants did “grace evidenced through good works” become “salvation by works.” That’s simply not how changes in theology work. A denomination or sect does not suddenly forget one doctrine and promote another. And that description of the soteriology of liberal Christians (in colonial America, presumably?) doesn’t fit their message. (c) The idea that Unitarianism came from a works-based theology is the most historically precise of these statements, and so it’s also the easiest to refute historically. True, Unitarianism did come from New England liberal Christianity that emphasized man working out his own salvation. But that was not the driving force behind the unitarian (or Arian) theology of Unitarianism. Rather, that seems to have found its source in the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, the same source that drove the works-based soteriology. It’s also worth noting that arianism is at least as old as the fourth century, and periodically appeared in Christian theology since then. Was its every appearance motivated by a prior existing works theology? And why are Unitarians singled out as the representatives of liberal religion, considering that they never got much farther than Boston? True, they are the most influential of liberal religion for that period, but far more widespread were the liberal mainline Protestants of the early twentieth century, but that just doesn’t fit Kurth’s narrative. (d) The notion of a vague God in the American creed (by which I presume he means American civic religion) arising so late in American history is mistaken. American civic religion was vague about God at least as early as the founding, and I think you could argue the precedent for vagueness was set early in the colonial period. Also, the driving force behind civic religion is usually (not always) evangelical Christians. Witness the vague statements on our currency “In God We Trust,” which are the product not of Unitarians sometime in the nineteenth century or twentieth century, as I can only guess Kurth’s model would predict, but of evangelical influence in the 1950s. (e) Finally, the idea that the American creed was universalized as a belief in human rights in the 1970s is simply ludicrous. The idea of universal human rights is a tenant of the democratic revolutions of late eighteenth century, and the ideology that produced them. If Protestantism produced American belief in universal human rights, did Catholicism or the Enlightenment produce a similar French belief? As much as I sympathize with arguments that evangelical Protestantism is responsible for a lot of American history, we have to understand that American political ideology has its roots in many other sources.
Please note that I’m not suggesting that everything Kurth says about history is wrong–far from it. I’m merely arguing that his interpretation or model doesn’t work.
Perhaps it would be helpful to look beyond the specific argument to the way that Kurth argues.
Throughout his essay, Kurth is dealing with Protestantism–in all places, in all times. In the debate between lumpers and splitters, one doesn’t always have to side with the splitters. But “Protestantism” is an awful big lump to explain with so facile a set a steps.
Kurth is also writing a polemic, not a history. Is there a polemical use for history? Maybe. Is there a historical use for polemic? No. Polemic often motivates historians, but in itself it doesn’t produce reliable historical models.
FInally, Kurth’s entire model is a declension model. Declension models can be very useful. As someone who has been so influenced by Perry Miller, I can hardly think otherwise. But declension models are only useful when they fit the facts. And declension scarcely models the history of religion in America, where church membership has grown in every generation since the Revolution, and where evangelicalism (since Kurth is speaking from that perspective) is still a significant religious, cultural, and political influence. Rather, evangelicals keep falling into declension models because they’re so useful for polemic. In short, “that’ll preach.” Kurth’s essay is (in a loose sense) just another jeremiad. What we need in American religious history is something other than a declension model. Aren’t we beyond that model by now?
Good rule of thumb: if a slight touch of more generality would make your model fit the first four centuries of the church, it’s probably not a good explanation for Protestantism.
Kurth is not a historian, so I’m not overly suprised at the lack of historical detail in his argument. Political scientists build models. Historians tear them down. Good fun to be had by all! (-:
But although his argument here is short on detail, I did find several bits persuasive. Lincoln, you’re the resident expert on colonial religious practice, but I thought that Kurth’s model helped explain the Halfway Covenant. New England Puritans allowed church membership for people who would or could not confess a conversion experience. This was not a top down decision driven by a shift in systematic theology. Rather it was the other way around, a grassroots pragmatic concession that had important [and unfortunate] consequences for Puritan theology. Bottom up. My impression was that the Puritan leadership acceded to the Covenant under significant popular pressure.
This also speaks to your broader question of how Kurth accounts for theological change. You seem to be operating on the assumption that theology is like intellectual history, the relatively orderly transfer of ideas from theologian to theologian. Kurth’s model might work better when approached from a “lived religion” perspective.
I agree with your broader point, but I do have a quibble with your example of evangelical influence on civil religion. While putting “In God We Trust” on our currency was certainly popular among evangelicals in the 1950s, I don’t think it is accurate to give evangelicals the credit for the legislation. In 1955, members of Congress were far more likely to listen to the lobbying arm of the National Council of Churches than to the National Association of Evangelicals. National policymakers like Harry Truman, John Foster Dulles, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were members of mainstream denominations and, at least in private, espoused modernist theology.
Declension models. Hhmmmm. This is something I’ve thought about here and there over the last couple of years. Like you, I usually think that declension narratives are too facile or simplistic. But I’m not convinced that pointing to increased church attendance is an accurate counter to a declension argument. Sure, more people attend religious services, but does that necessarily make them more religious? Is religion a matter of affiliation and attendance? Besides, by lumping all Americans in all places and times into one general “church attending” category, you are yourself doing what you [rightly] criticized Kurth for doing.
I think our difference here runs deeper than the question whether Kurth’s model is valid or not. You like theoretical models (and politics), and I don’t have much use for either. But working out where we differ on this model can help expose our underlying approaches to history.
About the Halfway Covenant. Though it’s a commonplace to take the Halfway Covenant as a sign of declension, I’m not sure the case for that interpretation can be made unambiguously. I see the Halfway Covenant as the resolution of two tensions within the very specific dilemmas of Puritanism that was (1) congregational and (2) in early New England. The first dilemma was the problem of visible sainthood. The Anglican tradition out of which congregational Puritanism came held that everyone who was a part of the state was also a member of the national church. The purpose of the church was to bring salvation to the people who were under its care. Puritans, on the other hand, were moving to the idea that the church should be a body only of those who were “visible saints,” and especially that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (but not baptism) should be given only to visible saints. At the same time, Puritans retained the idea that everyone should be members, and so they baptized infants. The dilemma came when children who were provisional members never came to the point of visible sainthood. Should they be offered the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? Should their children be baptized? The Halfway Covenant said no to the first question, but yes to the second. It was a compromise on the dilemma of visible sainthood. Halfway members (those who were baptized but not admitted to communion) would be permitted to have their children baptized, so that the children would not be cut off from the redemptive work of the church. But halfway members were not permitted to take communion, in order to preserve the idea of visible sainthood. Thus, the Halfway Covenant was not so much a “grassroots pragmatic concession” as an attempt to preserve the distinctive ecclesiology of Congregational Puritanism.
The second dilemma, which can be summarized more briefly, is that the franchise was tied to church membership. With declining numbers of full church members, the state was in danger, and the Halfway Covenant was an attempt to maintain the tie between church membership and political membership in a more workable way.
I’m indebted here, even for the use of the word dilemma, to Edmund Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Let me quote from him:
My point is not just that the facts don’t fit Kurth’s model. My point is that we don’t need Kurth’s model to interpret the facts.
Thanks for the correction about the relationship between evangelicals and “In God We Trust.” I had no idea that mainline Protestants in the 1950s were more responsible for that legislation than evangelicals. Since I’m doing some work in that period this semester, that will help my conception of post–World War II religion.
You are right, of course, that I was too simplistic in suggesting that rising church membership refutes a declension model. I merely offer that piece of evidence as one of the very few quantifiable indicators of religion. No matter what indicator you look at—political influence of religion, pervasiveness of religious ideas—I think you’ll find that it belies a simple declension model like Kurth’s.
Lincoln, thanks for your reply. I do think that you are overly abstract in your discussion of the Halfway Covenant. Rather than thinking like an intellectual historian, try and look at the H.C. from the perspective of a lay congregant or parish pastor in colonial New England. The pastor is confronted by increasing numbers of parishioners who want their kids baptized so they could be full members of the community and have the right to vote (the propertied white men at least). The H.C. was not discussed in a theoretical vacuum. It was not a prima facie discussion of ecclesiology. Rather it came as a result of bottom-up pressure. The resulting compromise was as much political as theological.
In Puritan New England where the institutions of church and state were intertwined, politics and theology were comingled. I doubt if the Puritan divines kept their political philosophy and their theology in separate mental boxes.
Thus, I have to reject Morgan’s analysis, that the H.C. was an “attempt to rescue the concept of a church of visible saints from the tangle of problems created in time by human reproduction.” Human reproduction may have been the proximate cause, but predicating citizenship upon church membership was the ultimate cause. So it was the Puritan’s political philosophy that precipitated the controversy.
I am not so sure about whether the H.C. was evidence of spiritual decline. But I am much more confident about arguing that the H.C. contributed to spiritual decline. The end result of the H.C. was to graft dead fruit into the Church. The covenant community was no longer limited to people who professed the covenant between man and God. Should we then be surprised when the body of Christ begins to whither?
Perhaps we should do a post on whether religion can be quantified…