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| Mr. (Rev. Dr.) Al Mohler |
Transcript: http://www.albertmohler.com/?p=28380
Transcript:
Protestant Liberalism Revisited – A Conversation with Historian David Hollinger
Protestant
Liberalism Revisited – A Conversation with Historian David Hollinger
September
3, 2013
Dr.
R. Albert Mohler
Thinking
in Public
Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public.
A program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and
culture issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler your
host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Kentucky. David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at
the University of California at Berkley. He’s also a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been an a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow with
the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor at the University of
Oxford. He’s the past President of the Organization of American Historians, and
his latest work is After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in
Modern American History. Professor Hollinger, welcome to Thinking in
Public.
Hollinger:
Thank you.
Mohler:
I have to tell
you, the first of your books that came to my attention was it seems almost
twenty years ago. And that was the book Science, Jews, and Secular Culture:
Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History. And since
that time I have to tell you I’ve been a bibliographic voyeur of your writings.
Hollinger:
Well, thank you so much.
Mohler:
Gone after just
about everything you’ve written.
Hollinger:
Good
Mohler:
I’ve even tracked
down some of your less known works, and I just want to tell you I find your
approach to intellectual history just absolutely fascinating. And I’ve really
been looking forward to this conversation.
Hollinger:
Good
Mohler:
And it has to do
with the fact that not only is your field of study of tremendous interest, but
the particular topic of your latest book, the focus. Again the title of
Professor Hollinger’s book is After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant
Liberalism in Modern American History. Professor, you make the point and
indeed assert that protestant liberalism is missing from the narrative that
many intellectuals, secular and otherwise, have about America in the 20th
century.
Hollinger:
Yeah, and this has been very frustrating
to me because one of the reasons I did this book is because I thought there was
actually quite a lot of evidence that liberal Protestants were a big deal. And
I think one of the difficulties is that a lot of historians just sort of
haven’t taken religion seriously unless they think of it as sort of wacky. And,
you know, it’s very confident for secular historians to think of
fundamentalists as wacky but somehow liberals, well they can’t really be
relevant, or they’re not relevant to the study of religion. And I think that’s
a terrible mistake because if you really want to study all aspects of modern
American history these liberal Protestants are such a big deal. If you look at
the United States about 1960 almost everybody, there are exceptions, okay,
they’re Jewish people on the Supreme Court, there are various prominent
Catholics. But by and large, in 1960 if you were in charge of something big, if
you had an opportunity to actually influence the direction of the society the
chances are that you grew up in a white, Protestant milieu, and that you were
probably affiliated even if nominally with one of the big mainstream, as we say
mainline, denominations: the Methodists, the Northern Baptists, the
Presbyterians, and so forth. And without getting into over determination
without saying, “Oh yeah, liberal Protestantism explains everything,” I wanted
to commend this and say, “Look this is who we ought to be taking into account.
We’ve got labor unions. We’ve got civil rights organizations. We’ve got
congressional activity. We’ve got courts. We’ve also got liberal Protestants.
Let’s talk about them.”
Mohler:
Well, let’s talk
about them. And, by the way, I like the way you make that argument in your
book. You say back in at least the period through the 1960’s if you ran
anything big you probably were a mainline protestant.
Hollinger:
Yeah. This is a factor about American
history that we ought to confront whether you like it or not. A lot of people
don’t like it. They sort of wish that American history were less Protestant
than it is. And, you know, I just say let’s take history as it comes.
Mohler:
Well, I like the
way you take on this issue because you’re not doing what I would classify as
revisionist history here. But you are going back and very clearly documenting a
story that just wasn’t told, and as you said, wasn’t thought to be interesting
by many people. And yet you make an argument that goes beyond just the fact
that Protestant liberals were formative and influential and even essential to
the narrative. You go further to suggest that they actually over and against
the prevailing assumptions of, well, everyone from evangelicals to seculars.
The assumption is that they lost. You’re arguing, actually, that they won.
Hollinger:
Yeah. I think the way to assess the
history of religion of all kinds is to talk about what its consequences are
where ever you find them. And what you have with liberal Protestantism is that
beginning in the 60’s its membership goes down. But a lot of the people who we
might call post-Protestants continued to be effected by that Protestant
sedition. So I think it’s important to look outside the churches and look at a
lot of people who were formed by ecumenical Protestantism and what their role
is in the society. In making that argument I picked up on a point made maybe fifteen
or twenty years ago by N.J. Demerath, a sociologist, where does he teach,
UMass, and he said in this article that liberal Protestants had achieved a
cultural victory while organizational defeat. And I picked that up and ran with
it a little bit. They idea being that some of these ideas like tolerance and
pluralism and free inquiry and being respectful of various aspects of modernity
these are the things that became very popular in American life as with the
liberalization in many segments. And it was liberal Protestants who were
pushing this. Of course it was contested. You know there were people, like
Richard Neibuhr, who used to quarrel with his famous brother, Reinhold, that
liberal Protestantism under the leadership of people like Reinhold Neibuhr was
too worldly, was being organized too much, about its ability to advance liberal
agendas that were generated outside the faith. That’s a very common complaint
by more orthodox thinkers. But whatever we think of that argument and whatever
we think about orthodoxy and however we stand on the really fascinating
arguments between these two great thinks, the fact is, I think, that liberal
Protestantism did enable, advance, and promote a number of classically liberal
ideas in the culture as a whole. And that’s just something that historians need
to confront.
Mohler:
You know Demerath
does argue about a cultural victory even though mainline Protestants
suffered. And I think he’s right in organizational defeat. And you say
one of the problems from your perspective as a historian is that even mainline
Protestants themselves thought of their relative success in terms of their
church membership rather than their cultural influence.
Hollinger:
Exactly. Although I am not … a brief for
liberal Protestants the ones that do engage me on this and talk about my work,
I try to convince them that there’s nothing wrong with being a prophetic
minority. I mean anybody who knows anything about the history of Christianity
can cite all sorts of examples where people did great things without having a
large popular constituency. And I think Martin Marty was right in the direction
that he began to take the liberal Protestant establishment even as early as the
early 1960’s, in his writing on the Christian century. What he was saying,
“Look guys, we’re no longer the whole show. The old Protestant establishment is
now just one of many voices and it’s no longer like a Christian country in the
way that people like Henry Van Dusan used to say in the 40’s. And so we should content
ourselves to be a prophetic minority. And you have some liberal Protestants who
would continue to argue that. But when I follow the twaddle about the decline
of liberal Protestantism a lot of these peoples are really upset that they
don’t have the numbers that they used to. And, again, that’s for them to figure
out. But I try to give them a little bit of encouragement and say, “You know,
there’s nothing wrong with being a prophetic minority.”
Mohler:
Well, I want to
talk about the numbers in just a minute because that is part of the story. But
you make the argument, and, quite frankly, in a way I haven’t seen anyone else
make it. And that is that if you went back to the 1960’s for instance and you
spoke of the America that mainline, or you call them ecumenical, Protestants on
the one hand had, and then what evangelical Protestants on the other hand, the
world looks a lot more like that the liberal Protestants wanted than the one
that the evangelicals hoped for.
Hollinger:
I think that’s such an important point.
And I’m glad that you picked up on that. If somebody else has said it I haven’t
quite, but Demerath is probably the closest to saying that. And the reason the
people don’t notice it more is because the symbolic capital of Christianity is
now chiefly in the possession of evangelical Protestants, and there’s a lot of
attention to this. It’s politically prominent. You’ve got all these Republican
congressman and so forth, and Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and all that
stuff. And so people pay attention to that and they think that that’s where the
action is. Well, a large part of the action is there, but once you get outside
the Republican party, once you get outside some of the major evangelical
Protestant circles, then you look at the country as a whole, well if you
compared with Christianity Today with say in 1960. Then what the Christian
Century would say in 1960, the Christian Century is actually more in keeping
with popular views today that Christianity Today. That’s talking about the
whole nations. So much depends on whether or not your frame of reference is
Protestant or Christianity on the one hand, and the United States on the other.
And a difficulty with many of the students of American religious history, and I
suppose sociology and so forth, is that when they talk about the history of
these things they only talk about what stays within the community of faith.
Once you get outside the body of Christ so to speak then you have all this
influence of liberal Protestants in the society as a whole. So, yeah, I think
this thing about if you go back and read the kind of stuff that Carl Henry was
writing in 1960 and then you look at the kind of stuff that Harold Fay and
Martin Marty and these guys were writing, that in these cases we now days would
find fault with it no matter what our political or religious orientation would
be. We might be a little bit embarrassed by it in one way or another, but
there’s no question who won the argument nationally. So that’s why it’s really
important to say who controls the spiritual capital, the symbolic capital, of
Christianity. Answer: the evangelicals by and large. Who controls politics and
culture of the United States? The liberals by and large. I hope that makes
sense to you.
Mohler:
Oh, it makes so
much sense. That’s what I really wanted to talk about here and focus on. And as
an evangelical I have to say that I think you hit that squarely at a point of
not only accuracy but of profound importance. And Carl Henry was a personal
mentor to me, and I would say that the world as it is now, you’re right, is far
more in line with what Martin Marty, another good friend, would want rather
than Carl Henry. And Martin Marty’s been able to see it through all these
decades come to pass. In your article there is a chapter in the book entitled,
“The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: And Old
Drama Still Being Enacted.” I read it first when it was published in Daedalus,
you use two different moves; you identify two different aspects of this
accommodationism that mainline Protestantism affected. And I’d like for you to
talk about those two things. And the first of them had to do with a cognitive
move. And that is the very essence, I would argue as a theologian, of theological
liberalism.
Hollinger:
Yeah, there I talk about what I call
cognitive demystification and demographic diversification. And these seem to me
to be two really huge processes in American history when we talk about religion
and what happens to it. Now the story of cognitive demystification even though
that’s not the term that turns up very often, the concept is actually an old
one because we talk about the Darwinian revolution and natural history. And
when we talk about the development of biblical historical criticism, you know
Charles Augustus Briggs and all those people, there we talk about a series of
ideas that were embedded in a religious tradition that then become as we say
demystified, meaning that the people in the Darwinian science thing and the
people in the higher criticism were saying, “Hey, wait a minute, we’ve been the
victim of a series of mystical ideas but they’re not really accurate. And we
need to have an accurate understanding of what’s really going on.” So it’s an
enterprise of demystification. And that’s sort of the standard story of
secularization as told by all the great sociologists, you know Weber, Durkheim,
and all these people. And so you have this process and it goes on in one
episode after another. It’s also contested, people who are, “Oh, that’s not
real science,” as Charles Hodge used to say. “Oh that’s science falsely so
called.” …there are quarrels. They’re not saying it’s not contested. But the
overall thing by the time they get down to the 20th century of massive numbers
of educated people really saying that science is what tells us the way the
world is about, and the Bible is a great set of stories that we can take or
leave, but it’s not really something that tells us about the way the world is.
So cognitive demystification is something that the liberals developed so that
you have all these liberal versions of theology, all these liberal versions of
what Christianity is. And William James is one of my great examples of that and
there are a lot of others. I mean I would say Rauch and Bush, Lieber, I mean a
lot of the great accommodationists, William Ellery Channing was a great
cognitive demystifier. All the way down to Harvey Cox and some of the death of
God theologians. So you’ve got all of that going on in and out of religious
communities. Then at the same time you have demographic diversification. Now
that’s something that’s not been discussed as much, and I think it’s really
important because what happens is that a lot of Americans with their particular
faith community find themselves in this radically, pluralistic, immigration
intensive society, surrounded by a lot of other folks who have different tribal
traditions, different ideas of what’s really true, different notions as to what
even Christianity is. And so that’s why of course the United States is a great
place for denominationalism. You don’t have denominationalism on nearly the
scale developed in a lot of other societies, but you do in the United States;
and this plural kind of stuff. And you have people who are sort of living next
door that are really different from you. Now if you’re acculturated into a view
that you know what’s real and you know what’s true and then you encounter a lot
of people reasonably wholesome which you overcome the standard tribal
antagonism toward them. And they seem sort of okay, but they have very
different views. That begins to diminish the confidence in orthodoxy.
Now
the great example of that in terms of the most educated segment of the
population is the coming of Jewish intellectuals in the United States in the
middle decades of the 20th century. What the Jewish intellectuals do to
academia is really profound, so that you go from a 1920’s in which even secular
universities had a de facto Protestant culture in a sort of default
understanding that Protestantism was the common frame for everybody. And you
get into the 1960’s where the universities become the most conspicuous
institutional space in the whole United States where Christianity is not taken
for granted as a sort of default frame for cultural development. So these
people are not Christians and one after another the interaction that’s reported
at Yale or Berkeley or Chicago or … whatever, you have these people that are
really different and they don’t seem so bad. I mean they seem okay. Now this is
paralleled by a really interesting development that I’m now writing a book on
which is what happens with the Protestant missionary project. Now this is also
an enterprise in democratic and demographic diversification. Cause you
get all these Methodists and Presbyterians. They go to China. They go to India.
They’re going to convert the heathens. They know how bad those creeps are over
there. They come back and they say, “Wait a minute. These people aren’t so
bad.” So E. Stanley Jones in 1925 writes The Christ of the Indian Road,
a book that sold more copies than Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, and he says,
“Look all you Christians in Dubuque and Harrisburg, you should stop trying to
impose your parochial … on the Hindus because those people like Gandhi are
actually more Christ-like than you are.” This is a very tough speech coming out
of a lot of the missionaries. So the missionaries come back and they undercut
the provincial faith of a lot of the American … radical liberalizers. But the
point that I want to make is that the Jewish immigration and the foreign
missionary project are both episodes in demographic diversification that yield
liberalization. So if you look at the history of the Presbyterians or the
Congregationalists who are the big liberals in the 1940’s and 50’s? The bishop.
{COMMENTARY
BREAK}
Mohler:
This conversation
with Professor David Hollinger is really important because even though we’re
talking about Protestant liberals these same issues, especially the twin issues
of cognitive demystification and demographic diversification, these are things
that have direct impact on evangelical Christianity as well. We’re watching in
a sense how mainline Protestants, liberal Protestants, responded to the
challenges of modernity by these two moves. And it’s often easy for us to
imagine that evangelicals are innocent of these two moves ourselves. But we
need to watch, we need to look a little more carefully, to see just watch
mainline Protestants were doing with these two big intellectual moves.
{COMMENTARY
BREAK ENDS}
Mohler:
Professor
Hollinger, when you talk about cognitive demystification you’re talking about
what the prophets, the early prophets of secularization, called the loss of
enchantment, or disenchantment, and what more modern sociologists like James
Davison Hunter called cognitive bargaining. In other words, in the conflict,
you might even say the collision, between theistic truth claims, indeed
revelational claims based on the Scriptures as Christians with the claims of
modernity, this creates an intellectual crisis. You’re suggesting as I follow
your argument that the liberal Protestants actually rather successfully in
terms of a cultural strategy accommodated by this mechanism of cognitive
demystification. And it put them at a better position at least culturally
speaking to effect change in the culture.
Hollinger:
That’s right. We need to understand that
religion in America, Protestantism in America, consists to a very large extent
of this accommodation with the enlightenment. And that’s really quite different
than what happens in France or Germany or many of the European countries
because the United States is such a Protestant, religious intensive country to
begin with. So a lot of the intellectuals that are embedded in that, even the
scientists, are very eager for the harmony of science and religion. So they
come up with this series of strategies for doing this, and one of the reasons
that the Darwinian controversy was such a big deal in the United States is that
so many of the religious thinkers were eager to come up with ways that they
could accommodate evolution and still be Christians. And, again, the more
orthodox types, like the Princeton theology people and so forth, they didn’t
want any part of it. And then after 1911 the fundamentalists didn’t want any
part of it. But the massive majority of American church-going Protestants
especially the intellectuals that were part of Andover Seminary and so forth,
or the preachers they went very far in the direction. Henry Ward Beecher is an
example of that, you know, stick with a lot of the British evolutionists. I
think that the history of liberal Protestantism in the United States consists
very largely of a determination on the part of Protestant leading intellectuals
to bring the enlightenment into Protestantism rather than treat the
enlightenment as an enemy of Protestantism.
Mohler:
And about a decade
ago in a journal article you made the point that in the higher educational
environment a science is recognized to have cognitive superiority. So, this
cognitive demystification especially in the context of the university culture
where mainline Protestants definitely started the elites educated, the culture
being formed, they basically had to bend to this cognitive superiority of
science. So the accommodation I’m going to argue was pretty much one way. It
wasn’t a truce between science and theism. The Protestant liberals basically
just had to accept the overwhelming sense of the cognitive superiority of
science and just deal with it.
Hollinger:
I would say that it’s a two way street if
you count the doctrines of the liberal Protestants as in some way authentically
Christian because they have different ideas. I mean if you look at somebody
like Newman Smyth or George Harris around the turn of the century. Or if you
look later at somebody like Shailer Matthews at Chicago, you look at a lot of
the people that Gary Dorrien talks about in his magnificent history of American
theology, you know, these guys are affirming Christianity by their own lights.
And so what they’re saying is that as a result of the progress of science we
are able to articulate a more authentic and workable Christianity because we
have at our disposal a lot of stuff that the Nicaean fathers didn’t have. We
have at our disposal a lot of things that Jesus didn’t have. We have a lot of
stuff at our disposal that the Reformers didn’t have. Martin Luther was a good
guy, but, you know we’ve got science; he didn’t. So, there’s a matter of taking
all of these resources, and I think a lot of these liberals would view the
entire history of Christian thought as a series of accommodations with what
contemporary circumstances were, and that they were opposed to these —
orthodoxy. It’s like somehow people in the 17th century got everything right.
So the Hasidic Jews have got Judaism right. The Amish have got Protestantism
right. So, what the liberals are saying is, “Wait a minute. All of those are
historically contingent moments in the development of the faith. So, we now in
1896 and 1926 and 1946 we’re going to do the best we can on that.” Now that’s
what liberalism is. So when Gary Dorrien and the other students of liberalism
talk about liberal thought that’s what they mean by it. Now from an orthodox
perspective you can argue that all this is just a mistake. Well these people
are just selling out. “Oh, they’re not Christians; they’ve gone over to the
other side.” So I understand that there’s room for contest there, and there
were quarrels about that; but the story that I tell in my book, it’s a standard
story of liberalization through cognitive demystification demographic
diversification.
Mohler:
I think to make
the point you make in your book, you actually take it all the way when you use
an example such as John A.T. Robinson, bishop there in Great Britain, you make
the point that this cognitive demystification went all the way to practical
atheism. In which there was no theism whatsoever. And you also make, and I
think almost poetically, you make the point that for many people, especially in
the intellectual elites, liberal, and you choose to call it ecumenical
Protestantism, and I understand why, but liberal Protestantism basically
became, and I think this is your phrase, a “halfway house to a post-Protestant
secularism.” It was a way out.
Hollinger:
Definitely. And I think that that point
has to be made firmly and unapologetically while at the same time insisting
that this is not necessarily a paleological thing where everybody follows the
halfway house. Halfway houses are sometimes places that people stay forever. So
I don’t want to be in the position of saying all of Protestantism is somehow
doomed to some secular future. Although there are sociologists now who would
say that – Steve Bruce, David Boaz – I mean a lot of people to some extent. I
don’t think Mark Chaves would go that far. But a lot of the sociologist are
seeing more and more indications of the demise of Christianity, and they’re
more inclined than we historians to do — kind of stuff.
Mohler:
They have been for
a long time. That’s not new.
Hollinger:
No, they have. But I’m saying that right
now, I mean, I think for a long time after Peter Berger and David Martin and
some of these other guys pulled back, there was all this talk about
post-secular and how secularization had been a mistake. But you know the last five
years the kind of stuff that’s coming out now, you have a resurgence of
secularization theory. And my point now is not to make a judgment about that.
What I’m saying is that from the point of view of the history that I write I
always want to recognize that you don’t know what the future is going to be.
And while a lot of people who went into liberal Protestantism as a halfway
house to secularism, that doesn’t mean that everybody is going to do that. I
mean a favorite example of mine, actually, to switch to the liberal Catholics,
is Jim Carroll, who you probably know. And this fantastic book of his, Practicing
Catholic, he published four or five years ago, there he is a savage critic
of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. I mean defending his own Catholic stuff, and he
says the only way I can become a true Catholic was to leave the priesthood and
so on. But I mean there you have the vindication of Catholic liberalism. Now I
would never want to be party to anybody who said, “Oh Jim Carroll isn’t a real
Catholic.” You know it’s not my judgment to say that he’s not a real Catholic.
What I can say is that ideas very much like Jim’s are those that some people go
through on their way to something else. And I just think that’s a historic
reality. We historians are probably a little too stiff about resisting
predictions. So I’m acknowledging that with some of language probably betrays a
little bit more of the sociology than it should.
Mohler:
I think the
halfway house metaphor though is very helpful. It explains a reality that,
historian or not, one who looks at mainline Protestantism can see. When you
talk about these two moves of accommodation that were characteristic of the
Protestant liberals, cognitive demystification and demographic diversification,
you know, Peter Berger, and you mentioned this kind of shift in the last few
years in secularization theory, Peter Berger has come back to say that he
thinks now the major impact of secularization in the United States is what he
calls pluralization, very much like your second move here.
Hollinger:
I’ll have to go back and look him up then.
That’s good. I haven’t followed him recently.
Mohler:
Well, he talks
about how the existence of plural worldviews has actually been far more
secularizing than the hard truth claims of modernity. In other words the
evangelicals, I’ll just say, I think have had a stronger set of defenses
against the anti-supernaturalism of the elites than against the pluralization,
or, as you would say in the demographic diversification. All of a sudden having
an eighteen year old goes to college, and moves into the dorm and they’re
people with alternative worldviews all around them. He’s never seen that
before. That turns out, I think, to be a more potent engine for accommodation
on the evangelical side than the anti-supernaturalism.
Hollinger:
That makes perfect sense to me. I’m glad
to learn that there’s more and more evidence of that consistent with what I’ve
been arguing for the good.
Mohler:
When you talk
about mainline Protestants just to continue the story, you do get to the
numbers. And even as Demerath did twenty years ago almost, you point out the
fact that numerically mainline Protestantism or liberal Protestants have
basically disappeared into the mainstream culture. But you point out that this
wasn’t all due to the intellectual moves. You point out that there was a fall
off on the birth rate that came even prior to this.
Hollinger:
This is a huge thing and my colleague,
Mike Hout the sociologist, has been very important in making this clear.
Because what happens is that the ecumenical Protestant milieu was much more
friendly to the idea that women should be doing a lot of stuff other than
following Ephesians 5:24, and that it was fine for them to be out in the world
and in the work force, and sex for reasons other than procreation was just
fine. And so you have the liberals then moving in a direction, accepting
contraception at a much earlier time, so in the whole baby boom years, Presbyterian
women only averaged 1.6 births; whereas evangelical Protestants averaged 2.4
which is many more even than the Catholics. And you know we always have this
twaddle about Catholics not having birth control. But the evangelical
Protestants then produce all these young people. So I think that birth rates
are very important. And then that sort of feeds upon itself because the liberal
Protestants find themselves with fewer and fewer women of childbearing age. So
they don’t bear as many children cause there aren’t as many of them to bear
children. And then in the meantime a lot of the young people have decided that
they’ve had enough of this, and that secular views as they invite them from
Harvey Cox and all these people mean that sticking with the old faith isn’t
that important. We can liberate the captives as Harvey Cox put it by going into
— or something else.
I
tell a story in the book about motive and about the gay and lesbian Methodists
moving out of the Methodist church because they found it so oppressive. So I
think that there are a lot of things that are related to birth rates and
they’re cultural. I mean it’s not that birth rates occur in a vacuum, but the
birth rate differential had to do with intellectual and cultural distinctions
between the ecumenical liberal Protestants on one hand and the evangelical
Protestants on the other. It’s a crucial part of the story, and Mike Hout is
chiefly responsible for it.
Mohler:
There are deep
theological issues involved there as well. And one of the interesting sidelines
to that would be the immediate response to the contraceptive question in terms
of mainline Protestants. And the literature is really thick because you’ve got
these mainline Protestants celebrating the contraceptive revolution with rather
triumphalisitc language suggesting that this is really going to be a disaster
for Catholicism.
Hollinger:
Yep. Oh well of course these mainline
Protestants were vehemently anti-Catholic, I mean that’s a very important part
of this story.
Mohler:
Well you make the
point that they were far more anti-Catholic than anti-Semitic.
Hollinger:
Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, Catholics
are not mentioned in the Bible. Jews are. That doesn’t sort of tell the whole
story. But indeed Catholics were a great threat. I mean all these people in the
Federal Council of Churches back in the 1940’s and 50’s, people like G. Bromley
Oxnam, they were very deeply anti-Catholic. And you know a lot of support, Paul
Blanchard, Blanchard is a very interesting character in the history of American
religion, insufficiently analyzed and I think underappreciated. But that was
part of this whole anti-Catholic thing that went on at the time. And then if
you look at what the Catholics were doing, I mean they were like opposing the
dissemination of birth control information in the state of Connecticut. And it
was like it wasn’t as though there was nothing to discuss. So when I say
they’re anti-Catholic, I don’t just mean that they’re biased although manifestly
they were. But they were also dealing with some actual concrete issues that you
could be concerned about even if you were not biased.
Mohler:
It also got to the
issue of intellectual authority because you make the point in your earlier work
that as the Jews came into the university culture the mainline Protestants
discovered that they were Jews by identity, even many cases by practice, but
there was no intellectual authority that was in any way a rival to the
educational establishment. Whereas on the other hand the Catholic Church is by
its definition constituted around a teaching magisterium and was not so easily
accommodated in the university culture.
Holllinger:
Absolutely. That’s very crucial. And one of the
reasons again that the Jews are so important in this context is because they
all espoused epistemic universalism. And then when you get feminism and black
power and so forth you have although eventually those ideas are discredited
very widely but you have a kind of gender and ethno-racial essentialism
according to which there’s a black perspective on things. Or Carol Gilligan
used to say there’s a female voice and all this kind of stuff. Well, nobody
said in 1958 that there was a Jewish voice, at least no one who made it in American
academia. So that’s again why the Jews are very special because they carry out
demographic diversification and in the process they espouse the epistemic
universalism of the enlightenment. So many of them are secular to begin with,
so it’s the combination of the secularity of the Jewish intelligentsia coming
in from Europe, and the fact that they’re so different, that’s what really
makes them crucial players in this whole process. Now they were actually not as
upset about the Catholics as the Protestants. I mean they saw the Catholics as
the minority, and they sort of were annoyed by them, but they thought that they
were in the thrall of medieval superstition and all that. But they really
weren’t worked up about it. Whereas the liberal Protestant establishment was
very afraid that the Catholics would take over the country, and that’s one of
the reasons why they developed National Council of Churches and the World
Council of Churches because they feel that ecumenical unity is the only way to
stop the Catholic –
Mohler:
So let me ask you
to look at the present. And I know you’re a historian and that’s where you’ve
been doing so much work. But you are telling a story pretty much up to the
present here. And looking at the present, maybe even speculating about the
future, what do you see as the future prospects for mainline liberal
Protestantism? Where does it go from here?
Hollinger:
You know I wish I had better answer to
that than I do. Because one possible path for them is more of the same, and I’m
not sure that would be a bad thing. Another possible path for them would be
more energetic engagement against evangelicals, and I’ve been at a number of
forums where this is debated. And somebody will stand up and say Harry Emerson
Fosdick was not afraid to attack the fundamentalists; we are. Shouldn’t we do
more about this? And then there would be arguments back and forth as to whether
that wouldn’t be destructive in the long run. And then you get into this
fascinating discussion as to whether from a local Protestant point of view the
salient solidarity is the community of faith or is the salient solidarity a
liberal view generally. Now if the salient solidarity is the liberal view
generally then liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, and secularists, secular
liberals can all be part of the same thing, and the enemy, if I may, Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary.
But
then there’s another way of looking at it. And that is that the community of
faith is the salient solidarity. And evangelicals and the ecumenical should not
be so quarrelsome with one another. And we need to find an alliance whereby to
deal with the real enemy which is secularism. So I heard these arguments
carried out. I don’t have a strong feeling about it. The one prediction that I
would mention is this: I think that evangelical Protestantism of the kind that
is voiced in politics by Governor Perry in Texas by Sarah Palin by Michelle
Bachmann by Senator Coburn in Oklahoma, and so forth, I think that particular
style of evangelical Protestantism is going to continue to be a very prominent
feature of American life for a long time. I don’t agree with the people who say
it’s about to go away. Now the reason I think that is because of the Electoral
College and because of the way the congress is organized and because of the
redistricting. What this means is that one of the major political parties, the
Republican Party, given its constituency, it has great opportunity to continue
advance this particular style of religion. And so people who are invested in
that are very likely to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented
to them by the Republican Party. And so I think that just the way that if we do
have the Electoral College and if the congressional district is organized differently
then the big blue states, California, coastal California, New York, Boston,
Chicago, and so forth, would have a much greater role in American public
affairs than we do. If that were the case then evangelical Protestantism with
its political alliance with the Republican Party would be more likely to
diminish. But given the political context I think evangelical Protestantism is
here to stay. And I keep telling my friends, “Get used to it.”
Mohler:
Indeed, in your
book you summarize the research of Robert Putnam and David Campbell when you
write, “There are fewer and fewer political liberals in any church, and fewer
and fewer political conservatives outside the churches.” So there’s a very
clear distinction.
Hollinger:
Yeah, that’s a remarkable fact, I think,
about American politics today.
Mohler:
Well, Professor
Hollinger, thank you for a most interesting conversation and for a most
important new book. I’ll look forward to your new book on the impact of
Protestant missions on this liberalizing tendency.
Well
I think you can see why I was looking forward to that conversation with
Professor David Hollinger. The chapters of his new book, After Cloven
Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, have
been coming out in academic journals and they have definitely been a very
interesting introduction to where he was going as this book now finds its final
form. He’s looking at American Protestant liberalism. And by the way he refers
to liberal Protestants as ecumenical Protestants as over against evangelical
Protestants because he thinks the word liberal can easily be confused with
political liberalism and because the mainline as he says is just an
anachronism. So ecumenical Protestants on the one hand and evangelical
Protestants on the other have both suffered a relative disinterest from many
historians. But it’s David Hollinger who now comes back to say the neglect of
an interest of Protestant liberals, in these ecumenical Protestants, means that
you really can’t tell the story of the 20th century. As a historian that’s the
story he wants to tell. His field is intellectual history and he is a master in
that field; indeed, a very dominant figure. And when you look at this newest
book you note that what Professor Hollinger is doing is filling in the gaps in
a story that tells us how we arrived in the 21st century in terms of
the major intellectual moves of the last century. And many of the people making
those moves were, as he said, mainline Protestants. Indeed, I really like the
way he has of expressing the dominance of these mainline liberal Protestants in
their era. As he says, even into the 1960’s if you were running almost anything
big in America you were probably a mainline Protestant. You thought of yourself
as an Episcopalian, or a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Congregationalist,
members of the Disciples of Christ church, or a Northern Baptist. You saw
yourself, and, by the way, the overwhelming majority of those were
Episcopalians, the higher you got in the establishment. Or if not
Episcopalians, then Presbyterians, then you saw yourself as very much a part of
the mainstream. And as Hollinger makes very clear you wanted to stay in that
mainstream. As the mainstream secularized as the full impact of modernity as
they intellectual challenges of the enlightenment came upon them, especially
with full force in the 20th century, mainline Protestants responded
by accommodating. That accommodationism came in the two forms that Professor
Hollinger so well describes. Cognitive demystification, that’s the theological
or ideological move whereby theistic truth claims are cut down to size so that
they fit within a secular worldview. And as Professor Hollinger makes clear,
perhaps more clear in his writings even than in this conversation, when you had
the theistic truth claims come over against the claims of science and the
academy, science always won. Over ten years ago Professor Hollinger wrote about
the necessity of people who are looking at intellectual history to recognize
the cognitive superiority of science in the academy to such an extent that not
only Christianity, but for that matter, even those in the liberal arts had to
bend intellectually to the superiority of science and its truth claims if they
wanted to be at the heart of the intellectual experiment there in the 20th
century. Cognitive demystification is what we would otherwise call theological
liberalism. It is the accommodationism whereby the anti-supernatural truth
claims of the enlightenment force an accommodation in theology and the
surrender of significant doctrinal content.
Now
Professor Hollinger is not himself a mainline Protestant. Writing as a secular
historian he makes that very clear. And he basically thinks that move on the
part of mainline Protestants was both cogent and wise. In other words it kept
them in the mainstream. And that second move demographic diversification, the
reason why the liberal Protestants were there before evangelicals is because
the liberal Protestants were in the places where this kind of demographic
diversification happened first; for instance, in the American university
campus. And as this pluralization, as Peter Berger would call it, takes place
you have people beginning to perhaps even less consciously than before trim
their intellectual sails, begin to minimize some of their theistic truth
claims, begin certainly to surrender any kind of claim of exclusivity,
especially the exclusivity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is where
Professor Hollinger speaks of epistemic universalism as one of the entry
prices, the ticket prices, into the cultural mainstream. What we’re looking at
here is also a very honest assessment of Protestant liberalism. Honest in the
sense that I think Professor Hollinger is exactly right. If you had the
editorial boards of The Christian Century and Christianty Today reconstituted
from the 1960’s the world would be more like that that the editors of The
Christian Century wanted and clearly articulated in terms of their hopes; far
less than that of the editorial board of Christianity Today. Now what’s
questionable is the extent to which mainline Protestants really had anything to
do with that. They certainly did follow the accommodationist’s moves that
Professor Hollinger demonstrates here and illustrates. But the extent to which
that actually shaped the culture, that remains to be analyzed. And that’s where
many other historians coming along after Professor Hollinger and before him
would say you know all this is true, but we’re not certain how important it is.
Professor Hollinger thinks it’s important because it’s an essential part of the
American story. And he makes this clear by looking at figures such as John
Foster Dulles and others who were so central in terms of American life in the
20th century, and could not have thought of themselves as anything
other than Christians; and in particular as Protestants. And in his case
Presbyterian.
There
is so much in this conversation that should prompt our thinking. One of the
things that certainly came to my mind is the way that Professor Hollinger
contrasted the ecumenical Protestants with the evangelical Protestants in birth
rate. But I wish our conversation would have been able to continue to what
comes after birth rate. And that’s the retention of those who were born to the
families of these two different groups. Because as Professor Hollinger makes
clear, the evangelicals were not only having more children, as he says, they
had more children and they kept them. One of the stories that is essential to
telling the tale of liberal Protestantism in the 20th century is
especially in the last five decades the virtual inability of mainline
Protestants to keep their own children. And Hollinger tells why as he says,
“When these churches secularized, their children found a way to be secular
without needing the church.” And that should be a very cogent warning to
evangelicals who are facing many of the same temptations even now. But that’s
the bigger part of the story, isn’t it?
Looking at the history of mainline Protestantism and at Protestant liberalism we come to understand cognitive demystification is the temptation that still is always around us. It is only getting more intense as a matter of fact in terms of the pressures of late modernity. The enlightenment challenges are still everywhere around us, perhaps even more taken for granted in an increasingly secularized society. And yet evangelicals, most of whom at least have the concern about cognitive demystification, are often far less concern about demographic diversification, or again as Peter Berger says, pluralization. And so our young people arrive in the intellectual context of the college or university and in so many cases then if not before they run into rival truth claims and worldviews and they don’t know what to do. And I think a clear case can be made that this demographic diversification has been far more an engine for theological accommodationism among evangelicals than has cognitive demystification. In other words, we’re better at recognizing theological accommodationism when people say that’s what they’re doing rather than when we see it the result of where they’re living.
If
you want to understand the mind of the age or the mind of the ages behind us,
you have to look at intellectual history as a very serious discipline. And no
one has contributed more to that in America’s public and educational life then
David Hollinger. It was a privilege to have this conversation with him. And I
hope these ideas have prompted thinking on your part as well so that this will
lead to a conversation far beyond Thinking in Public.
Before
I close I want to invite you to join us here on The Southern Seminary Campus on
September 26 for one extraordinary day to commemorate the life and legacy of
Dr. Carl F.H. Henry. Hosted here in convenient partnership with the Beeson
Divinity School, Fuller Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School, and Union University, this one day event will feature addresses from
some of evangelicalism’s most prominent theologians and the heirs of Henry’s
legacy. 100 years after his birth, Carl Henry’s vision for a confessional and
global evangelicalism remains as timely as ever. For more information go to www.sbts.edu/events.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.
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