Evangelicalism in America

Randall Balmer

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781481305976, 9781481305976
• eBook ISBN: 9781481305990
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Evangelicalism has left its indelible mark on American history, politics, and culture. It is also true that currents of American populism and politics have shaped the nature and character of evangelicalism.

This story of evangelicalism in America is thus riddled with paradox. Despite the fact that evangelicals, perhaps more than any other religious group, have benefited from the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, several prominent evangelical leaders over the past half century have tried to abrogate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. And despite evangelicalism's legacy of concern for the poor, for women, and for minorities, some contemporary evangelicals have repudiated their own heritage of compassion and sacrifice stemming from Jesus' command to love the least of these.

In Evangelicalism in America Randall Balmer chronicles the history of evangelicalism--its origins and development as well as its diversity and contradictions. Within this lineage Balmer explores the social varieties and political implications of evangelicalism's inception as well as its present and paradoxical relationship with American culture and politics. Balmer debunks some of the cherished myths surrounding this distinctly American movement while also prophetically speaking about its future contributions to American life.

1

An Altogether Conservative Spirit

The First Amendment, Political Stability, and Evangelical Vitality

“Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “but nevertheless it must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.”1

De Tocqueville was not the last to puzzle over the relation of church and state, religion and politics, in American society. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution mandates, and this peculiar formula, unprecedented in Western societies, has attracted a good deal of notice from historians and legal scholars.

In 1844 historian Robert Baird extolled the voluntary principle in the United States as the “great alternative” to all European societies and their long, troubled history of church-state entanglements. “Religious liberty, fettered by no State enactment,” Baird wrote, “is as perfect as it can be.” Although Philip Schaff, a native of Germany, harbored some old-fashioned notions about the unity of the church and the ability of Christianity to “leaven and sanctify all spheres of human life,” he offered grudging admiration for the American configuration of church and state, which he regarded as a “peculiarity in the ecclesiastical condition of North America.”2

The willingness to give free rein to religious expression, to eschew an establishment, and to countenance the ambiguity arising from that configuration has prompted Sidney E. Mead to characterize the relation of church and state as a “lively experiment.” Winthrop Hudson regards voluntarism in America and the equilibrium between church and state as the “great tradition of the American churches.”3

Although unprecedented, the impetus for religious disestablishment as embodied in the First Amendment, historians have argued, grew out of disparate impulses dating back at least to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther had emphasized the priesthood of believers, each individual’s responsibility before God, which led almost inevitably (if not immediately) to the concession that everyone might approach God differently from his or her neighbor. The very splintering of Christianity after the Reformation demanded some sort of accommodation to its diversity. Several of the American colonies had done just that—Thomas Jefferson himself cited the examples of New York and Pennsylvania in his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781—though the established religions in other colonies, such as the Anglicans in Maryland and Virginia and the Congregationalists in Massachusetts and Connecticut, stubbornly defended their establishment status. Other historians look to such figures and movements as Isaac Backus and the Separate Baptists in Connecticut or William Livingston and the Presbyterian Party in New York as influential opponents of religious establishment. Most often, however, when historians retrace the steps of religious disestablishment in America, their paths lead to Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson.4

Williams, a Puritan minister at Salem, grew increasingly uneasy about the continued identification of New England Puritanism with the Church of England. In 1635 the General Court of Massachusetts brought charges against him for disrupting the social and religious order of New England by proposing that the church at Salem separate completely from the other Massachusetts churches. The General Court banished Williams from the colony, whereupon he fled south in January 1636 and founded Providence, which eventually became the charter colony of Rhode Island.

In 1644, responding to a letter from John Cotton, Williams set out his views regarding the relation of church and state. “When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world,” Williams wrote, “God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day.” Williams sought to protect religion from the depredations of the state, and he saw strict separation as the way to accomplish this. If God, Williams believed, “will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world; and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world, and added unto His church or garden.”5

In this memorable metaphor, Williams wanted to segregate the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “hedge or wall of separation.” Those images have become so familiar that they may have lost some of their meaning, and to understand the significance of that metaphor we must recall that the Puritans did not share our idyllic, post-Thoreauean romantic notions about wilderness. For the Puritans of the seventeenth century, struggling to carve a godly society out of the howling wilderness of Massachusetts, wilderness was a place of danger. It was a realm of darkness where evil lurked. So when Williams wanted to protect the “garden” of the church from the “wilderness” of the world, he was concerned to preserve the integrity of the church from defilement by too close an association with the state.6

Thomas Jefferson appropriated the same “wall of separation” metaphor but toward somewhat different ends. Jefferson, a Deist and a creature of the Enlightenment, believed passionately that religious beliefs were a private affair, that religious coercion violated natural rights, and that compelling someone “to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors” constituted a form of tyranny. Religious disestablishment, embodied in the First Amendment, Jefferson believed, provided guarantees against such tyranny. Writing in 1802, Jefferson attested to his “solemn reverence for that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”7

Although Jefferson carefully couched his rhetoric so as to appear that he was merely providing for the well-being of organized religion by guarding it against political meddling, it is difficult to escape the impression that he was at least equally concerned that religious factionalism and contentiousness might disrupt the functions of government. Toward the conclusion of his second term as president, Jefferson considered the experiment of religious freedom that he had helped to create in the new republic and pronounced it good precisely because it had proved conducive to political order. “We have solved by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom is compatible with order in government, and obedience to the laws,” he wrote to a group of Virginia Baptists. “And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving everyone to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason, and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.”8

Both Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson, then, although separated by more than a century, advocated religious disestablishment, albeit out of somewhat different motives. Williams saw the dangers of state interference in the church, the wilderness encroaching on the garden, while Jefferson recognized the dangers that religious interests and factions posed to the political order that he and others had so carefully fashioned. I should like to suggest, however, that the configuration of church and state embodied in the First Amendment—the guarantee of free exercise and the proscription against religious establishment—has succeeded over the past two-plus centuries beyond even the boldest expectations of either Williams or Jefferson. This wall of separation—which more accurately resembles a line in the dust, continually drawn and redrawn—has satisfied Jefferson’s concern that confessional agendas not disrupt political stability, and it has also ensured the religious vitality everywhere in evidence throughout American history.

***

One undeniable characteristic of the U.S. Constitution is the remarkable resiliency of that document forged in the heat of political debate and compromise more than two hundred years ago. It is, indeed, an extraordinary document, a tribute not only to the ideas of James Harrington, John Locke, Common Sense Realism, and the example of such documents as the Union of Utrecht, but also to the daring and inventiveness of a group of politicians willing to flesh out those ideas into a political system that would knit together thirteen disparate colonies. The writers of the Constitution showed remarkable prescience in anticipating some of the problems that the new society might encounter—so much, in fact, that a succession of Supreme Court nominees beginning in the 1980s have claimed that most contemporary legal disputes could be settled by recourse simply to the “original intent” of the writers—but they also crafted a document of elasticity and adaptability.9

The U.S. Constitution and the American form of government has endured for more than two hundred years, and that must surely be its singular achievement. One has only to regard the fragility of other governments—like Germany, France, Spain, or the emerging countries of eastern Europe, which have only recently found stability as republics after decades of uncertain national identities—to appreciate the resiliency of the U.S. government. But what lies at the heart of that stability? Surely the Constitution itself, with its checks and balances, its representative democracy, and its guarantees of free speech and a free press, underlies that durability. The gradual enfranchisement of the disenfranchised—women, minorities, and, more recently, hitherto illegal immigrants—has generally served to thwart insurrection.

The First Amendment, with its guarantee of free exercise and the proscription against religious establishment, also contributes to American political stability, because religious freedom has siphoned off social discontent that might otherwise find expression in the political sphere. In other words, the kind of factionalism that James Madison countenanced in Federalist Number Ten more often than not has flourished in religion rather than politics, with the effect that the energy and discontent that might be directed toward political change more often dissipates in religious bickering. In that respect, the disestablishment of religion has not only fulfilled Jefferson’s desire that the state remain free from religious pressure, but it has also ensured that religious factionalism provides a buffer against political radicalism.

The idea that religion upholds the temporal order and protects the prevailing political and cultural institutions is, of course, a common refrain in the modern era, repeated approvingly by Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, and various Erastian Anglicans and not so approvingly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. The notion that religious pluralism can sustain the political order, however, is a uniquely American construct. Roger Williams and the founders of Rhode Island in the seventeenth century recognized the salutary effects of religious freedom. A “flourishing civil state may best be maintained,” they believed, “with full religious liberty, and that true piety will give the greatest security for sovereignty and true loyalty.”10

By almost any standard, the civil state has endured, even flourished, in America. Indeed, one of the striking features of American politics, as compared with other Western nations, is the steadfastly centrist nature of its politics. Whereas European nations, most of them based on the parliamentary system, undergo periodic changes—new political parties, ever-shifting coalitions—the two political parties in the United States cling tenaciously to the ideological center and try their hardest in a rather comic quadrennial ritual to distinguish themselves from the other party. The very difficulty of breaking the pattern of the two-party alignment—H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, John B. Anderson in 1980, George Wallace in 1968, Henry A. Wallace in 1948, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912—attests to the persistence of moderate politics. The United States has no Green Party to speak of, no Communist Party outside of Berkeley and Greenwich Village, no Conservative or Social Democratic Party that mounts a serious challenge to the two-party hegemony.11

What America has, however, is religion. There is extraordinary diversity in American religious life, encompassing every conceivable tradition, confession, and ethnic group. The First Amendment gives all of them free rein; none of them is established; no one need belong to any of them or support them involuntarily.

And yet Americans do. Despite a recent dip in religiosity, only 9 percent of Americans in 2015 said they didn’t believe in God, and another 2 percent claimed they didn’t know. The Pew Survey found that over 70 percent of Americans claimed to be Christians, and of these Christians, 36 percent said they attended religious services “once or twice a month/a few times per year”; 17 percent said they attended seldom or never. Such religiosity is unheard of in England and Europe, but, by way of contrast, political participation is much higher there, while Americans are notoriously lackadaisical about exercising their right to vote. In the 2014 elections, for instance, only 36.4 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots, the lowest mark since World War II. The Center for Voting and Democracy says that approximately 60 percent of eligible voters in the United States cast their ballots during presidential election years, a number that drops to 40 percent in midterm elections.12

In America, then, religion rather than politics may serve as the argot for popular discourse and the expression of discontent. The lack of religious establishment set up a kind of free market of religion in America, which means that citizen-consumers are free to shop in the unregulated marketplace of religion. This free market also provides for entrepreneurs: anyone at all can gather around him or her a following that is disenchanted in one way or another with the existing religious options. American history is full of such examples: Alexander Campbell, Joseph Smith, Ellen Gould White, Mary Baker Eddy, Noble Drew Ali, J. Gresham Machen, David Koresh, Joel Osteen. These popular religious movements, I believe, divert social discontent away from the political and into the religious sphere. As such, religion in America serves as a conservative political force—that is, its very existence as a safety valve for social discontent tends to protect the state from radical zealots and the paroxysms of revolution.

Indeed, religious sentiments freely subscribed to without the coercion of the state have often served to shore up political values and the claims of the state, and it should be noted that religious groups have a vested interest in upholding the claims of the state because of the tax exemptions granted to religious organizations by all levels of government. The McGuffey Reader of the nineteenth century, with its unabashed celebration of Protestant, middle-class, patriotic values, comes to mind. The Catholic Church in America, eager to shed its immigrant image, has gone out of its way to affirm the political order and to prove itself patriotic, in spite of its putative loyalty to a foreign entity. All major religious groups provide clergy who serve as military chaplains. Most Protestants have taught their children and their congregants about the Christian’s duty to the state, as outlined in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Even the Mormons, after bitter disputes with the U.S. government in the nineteenth century, have become ardent defenders of the political status quo and a formidable conservative force. The civil rights movement, deriving much of its energy and leadership from the black churches, was, in many respects, a conservative movement, at least in its means. Evangelicals, because of their populist theology and their genius at communication, have succeeded best in this free marketplace of religion in America, and their reentry into the political arena in the midseventies—due in part to their contrived mythology about America’s “Christian” origins—has helped to sustain a conservative swing in American politics.

Both American politicians and foreign observers have acknowledged the extent to which religious sentiment in America upholds the political order. Extolling that connection has become a staple of political discourse. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” George Washington declared in his Farewell Address, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Dwight Eisenhower asserted that symbiotic relationship bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. An Altogether Conservative Spirit
• Chapter 2. Turning West
• Chapter 3. Casting Aside the Ballast of History and Tradition
• Chapter 4. An End to Unjust Inequality in the World
• Chapter 5. Thy Kingdom Come
• Chapter 6. A Pentecost of Politics
• Chapter 7. A Loftier Position
• Chapter 8. Re-create the Nation
• Chapter 9. His Own Received Him Not
• Chapter 10. Keep the Faith and Go the Distance
• Chapter 11. Dead Stones
• Notes
• Credits
• About the Author
• Index