I’ve been away from blogging for several months now. Did anybody notice? Well, perhaps you did since you happen to be reading this now.
In any event, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of our nation and the church’s relationship to it. The histories of both are, of course, inextricably intertwined.
As contemporary culture struggles clumsily to make sense of our world, the mainline churches continue daily to prove their astonishing and ever-burgeoning irrelevancy.
This same Protestant church, which for most of our history was integral in forming and defining us as a people, both personally and corporately, has now all but lost touch with its roots and the people it once served. What once bound and informed a great nation now flails and founders, ineptly and inconsequentially.
So how did we get here? The answer, in my view, goes back to the emergence of the “Social Gospel” in the early 20th century (something I’ve discussed critically in this blog before).
The Social Gospel’s defining sentiment was to reform, even Christianize, the wider culture. Its intentions were good. Employing the tools of science and its ever-expanding knowledge base, the church hoped to get in on the wave of the future, one that promised to fix all that ails us. In reality, this movement merely reframed the Enlightenment’s naïve belief that science and reason could replace God in subduing all social and physical ills.
Faith in progress had become all the rage. Even after WWI had chastened its overheated optimism, the idea that superior ideas were steadily replacing older, inferior ones was still characteristic of the age (C.S. Lewis called it at the time “chronological snobbery”).
Ultimately, as George Marsden observes, and with no small amount of irony, the Social Gospel “turned religion from being the highest value into an instrument for promoting other values that in practice proved to be a person’s higher concerns.”
In other words, the gospel came to be viewed as outdated, sectarian, and in desperate need of revision, rehabilitation, even displacement. New, secular, scientific, pragmatic, “objective” values held far more promise. Besides, rather than dividing people into separate spheres defined by belief, tradition, and dogma, these new enlightened, science-based values promised to bring all peoples together, not just here but all over the world. They were, after all, objective universal truths.
What could go wrong?
Enter Walter Rauschenbusch (the name just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). Though Rauschenbusch was hardly the first to advance the cause of the Social Gospel, he became its figurehead (its ideas were regnant within various intellectual circles starting in the late 19th century and before).
Rauschenbusch embraced the idea that the gospel was too sectarian, too narrow, and must yield to the then-emerging progressive consensus. This was the only way, or so the argument went, that the church could remain relevant in a changing world.
But something else was afoot as well. The new progressive consensus rejected the church’s earlier, time-tested approach to human flourishing. While the “older” gospel championed personal salvation and personal growth as the spiritual antidote to sin and evil (what ails us), the new Social Gospel focused instead on purifying not the soul but society.
Centuries earlier the Enlightenment, as we’ve said, believed science and reason could replace God in its inexorable march to perfection. What previously had been the province of religion was being replaced by empirical, evidentiary, scientific truth. Thus, what once was thought to involve the supernatural, the mysterious, was replaced by the harsh, prosaic glare of human “reason.”
The world, in effect, had been drained of its mystical wonder, the inscrutable and wondrous things of God, and gradually replaced by cold human logic. Rauschenbusch’s genius was to repopulate the world with a mystical charge: Sin and evil were real after all, but not in the fashion of the old gospel.
Where once the evils of society were interpreted as individual, existential sin writ large, the new thinking argued that society alone was the cause of all that ails us. With the proper application of the newest insights, perhaps especially by the new social sciences (and their objective expertise), society could be rejiggered to free the human soul from all harm. Anyone or anything standing in the way of this enlightened project was to be rejected.
To this point, Rauschenbusch identified 6 social sins that stood in the way of a perfect future: bigotry, power, corruption, the groupthink of the vulgar mob, militarism, and class oppression.
But his solution for addressing these problems moved decidedly away from those of traditional Christianity. Redemption for Rauschenbusch involved not the personal struggle for spiritual salvation, but of holding to a proper sense of these social ills. Self-esteem resulted from opposing his six social evils.
As Joseph Bottum points out, all that was needed was a simple awareness of “the demonic evil of society and the angelic good of a future kingdom – a good manifested by personal recognition, by a feeling, of the supernatural entity that is social evil in the present world.”
The goal of preaching now became, as Rauschenbusch wrote, “to create a ganglion chain of redeemed personalities in a commonwealth.” If we all hold to the right social dispositions, in other words, “all things become possible.”
Curiously, though,, “proof of possessing the regenerated personality,” Bottum writes, “lies not in action but in a sense of the ‘revaluation of social values.’”
As Rauschenbusch said, “Unless a man finds his judgment at least on some fundamental questions in opposition to the current ideas of the age, he is still a child of this world and has not ‘tasted the powers of the coming age.’”
Bottum defines the unwitting result, evident among today’s post-Protestants: “Freed from the stultifying churches, freed from any theological requirement for faith in Jesus, freed even from the need for any particular action, they found that salvation demands only the sense that, in personality, one had chosen the right side of the almost Manichean divisions between the supernatural entities of the coming Kingdom of Heaven and the present Kingdom of Evil.”
All that’s necessary for salvation for this “new class” of post-Protestants, Bottum concludes, is a sense of solidarity with other redeemed souls who reject the present “metaphysical” evils of bigotry, power, militarism, and the groupthink of the vulgar mob.
This, of course, betrays a startling belief that simply holding the right social views, along with those of like mind, will bring about the Promised Land of perfection and human flourishing.
Conversely, anyone not of this same mindset is by definition part of the vulgar mob, backward in thought, undermining the righteous cause of the redeemed, and robbing these same redeemed of their rightful place of perfection.
In time, Bottum observes, “the post-Protestants captured the credentialing machinery of American culture as a class fiefdom – and formed a new class that rent-seeks, hoards privilege, self-righteously congratulates itself, and arrogantly despises other classes as thoroughly as any group in American history ever has.”
“They want, they need, to feel a kind of superiority to the backward types who lack their class-marking manners.”
Ouch!
What we have, in effect, after 100 years of this sort of thinking, is a Social Gospel without the gospel, an “eliter than thou” class of post-Protestants who’ve rejected traditional Christianity yet who, ironically, possess a self-righteousness equal if not surpassing that of their Protestant ancestors!
Bottum sums it up: “When the post-Protestants began fleeing their dying Mainline churches in the 1970s, they left much behind, beginning with the Bible and ending with a coherent vocabulary with which to express both praise and censure of the nation. One thing they didn’t leave behind, however, was the Mainline, middle-class certainty that they held the most advanced view of modern social morality and manners.”
“The desire for certainty about being good people – to know that they were saved, to feel they belonged among the elect – could be satisfied only in the terms Walter Rauschenbusch had laid out in his 1912 Christianizing the Social Order: by being part of the “ganglion chain of redeemed personalities in a commonwealth.”