The Rise and Fall of Liberal Protestantism in America

David R. Carlin

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666736571, 9781666795097
• eBook ISBN: 9781666795103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

When I speak of liberal Protestants, I have in mind those Protestants who feel free to depart from classical Protestantism (the Protestantism of the Reformers) in order, as they see it, to keep Christianity in step with the best of secular wisdom--a secular wisdom that often includes attacks on Christianity. Over the past 250 years there have been three great attacks on Christianity: deism, agnosticism, and the sexual revolution. And so, beginning with Unitarianism more than 200 years ago, liberal Protestantism has adjusted to these attacks by dropping more and more of traditional Christian doctrine, until today the more advanced liberal Protestants are only barely distinguishable from atheists.

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Introduction

From the time of the first English settlements in the early 1600s, and for centuries thereafter, the country that was then British America and would eventually become the United States of America had a dominant religious worldview—Christianity; more specifically, Protestant Christianity. But this dominance seems to be ending. The dominant, or at least very nearly dominant, worldview in the United States today is a kind of atheism or near-atheism that may be called “secular humanism.” Or, if we wish to name it after the factor that is most influential in it, it may be called “atheistic humanism.” It seems to be on its way to replacing not just Protestantism but Christianity in general (including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Mormonism) as the commanding “religion” in the USA.

When I say this atheistic or semi-atheistic worldview is now “dominant or very nearly dominant,” I don’t mean that it is numerically the most common worldview. No, most Americans still call themselves Christians. And most of those who are not Christian—Jews, Muslims, and so on, along with persons who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”—would say that they believe in God; they would claim to be theists, not atheists.

Why, then, do I say that secular/atheistic humanism is now the “dominant or very nearly dominant” worldview in the USA? For a number of reasons.

•Not all secular humanists are hardcore atheists; many of them are agnostics. But most agnostics (at least in America today) are virtually indistinguishable from outright atheists except for their reluctance to apply the word “atheist” to themselves. Why are they thus reluctant? For a few reasons: (a) “atheism” has always been something of a dirty word in the USA; (b) they don’t want to shock friends and relatives who think atheism is a dangerous mentality; and (c) absent a mathematical proof, how can anybody be absolutely certain that God does not exist?

•Secular humanism is the taken-for-granted worldview among many, perhaps most, of those who control America’s most influential institutions of propaganda. I have in mind such command posts of American popular culture as the entertainment industry, the mainstream journalistic media, our best colleges and universities (including law schools), and the Democratic Party. It is also by and large the dominant view of those who control our public schools. It is these people, our “masters of propaganda” as they may be called, who have great power to shape American beliefs and values, especially the beliefs and values of young people.

•Great numbers of religiously liberal Protestants (as opposed to religiously conservative Protestants) are, for all practical purposes, secular humanists. Despite claiming to be Christians, and for the most part honestly believing that they are Christians, they “lean” heavily, very heavily, in the direction of secular humanism. This can be seen in the many instances in which, when they come across a fight between conservative Protestants and secular humanists (fights for example about school prayer, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, sex education in schools), liberal Protestants take the side, not of their evangelical fellow Protestants, but of secular humanists. These liberal Protestants attempt to blend what they regard as the best of traditional Christianity with what they see as the best of secular humanism, thereby producing a “new and improved” version of Christianity. The result in most cases is a blend that is 10 percent old-time religion and 90 percent secular humanism. These liberal Protestants have watered down the strong drink of traditional Protestantism with gallons of secular humanism.

•A high percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians are “soft” in their commitment to Christianity, while a high percentage of those who are secular humanists are “hard” in their commitment to secular humanism. As history has demonstrated ten thousand times, a relatively small group of “hard” believers can outfight a much larger group of “soft” believers—just as, in the days of the Wild West, a handful of determined bandits could rob three or four hundred train passengers. Secular humanism, like Christianity and Islam, is a missionary “religion,” and at the moment its missionaries are having tremendous success in spreading their “gospel.”

•Secular humanism is especially popular among our younger generations. Why? Because of two of its essential values: personal liberty and “social justice.” (a) Personal liberty offers young people sexual freedom (along with the freedom to use recreational drugs), a freedom that is particularly attractive to the young, who are by nature full of sexual energy. (b) Social justice gives them a “cause” to fight for, and this cause entitles them to feelings of moral superiority.—By contrast, secular humanism is not very popular among older persons (people, for example, like the old man writing this book). But we old people are, of course, dying off, as is the way with old people. Young people continue living, and in a few years they will be running the country and almost all of its important institutions; and if as they grow older and somewhat more conservative they retain even a small portion of the beliefs of their younger days, they will move American further and further in a secular humanist direction.

•Above all, secular humanism has the “big mo”—momentum. For decades now, American culture has been drifting in the direction of secular humanism, which usually includes a somewhat incoherent blend of personal liberty and socialism. Think, for example, of how readily Americans generally have accepted sexual freedom, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism; and many among today’s young people seem to be accepting the notion that socialism is a fine thing. In recent years, movement in this leftist direction has been accelerating. Many people, especially young people, have the feeling that “everybody” is going there, and that if I myself don’t go there, there must be something wrong with me.

In sum, if secular humanism is not yet the worldview of the numerical majority of Americans, it is moving rapidly in that direction.

How did we get here? How did America go from being a thoroughly Christian country to being a country which is today on the verge of embracing atheism or semi-atheism? That’s the question this book will try, at least partially, to answer, and it will do so by focusing on the history of two developments.

1.The rise of anti-Christianity in America, and in particular three great anti-Christianity ideological movements: deism (eighteenth century), agnosticism (nineteenth century), and, in the twentieth century, the sexual revolution.

2.Liberal Protestant responses to these three anti-Christianity movements. Again and again liberal Protestantism has adopted a policy of strategic withdrawal (retreat), giving away more and more Christian doctrine in order that it might better retain what it considers to be the essence of Christianity. The end result is that in today’s version of liberal Protestantism very little, if any, Christianity is left. Liberal Protestantism has become the helpmeet of secular humanism.

Let me note four things.

First, when I say that early America was a “thoroughly” Christian country I do not mean to suggest that all Americans in that early period were pious, church-going Christians. Far from it. Many were not church-going; many were not pious; many were plain villains. America has always been, and still is today, a country with great multitudes of people who behave rather badly: many of them are downright criminals, many others are not quite criminal themselves, but provide an atmosphere of tolerance in which criminality can flourish: they are the semi-criminal sea in which criminal fish can swim. But in early America even the least pious, if asked to name their religion, would with few exceptions have answered “Christian”—and by “Christian” they meant “Protestant.” And if you had asked them if God had given mankind a holy book, they would have answered, “Yes, the Bible”—even if they had never read a single page of the Bible.1

Second, when I say that I will try “partially” to answer the question of how we got from Christianity to something very like atheism, I mean that I won’t be attempting a complete answer. That would require a much bigger book that I am prepared to write. To give a complete answer to the question, I would have to discuss a great number of social, economic, and political factors. In this book I will largely (but not entirely) skip those factors and keep my focus on ideological factors, that is, philosophical or theological factors. I will look at a series of ideological revolutions—deism, agnosticism, and the sexual revolution—that have gradually, over a more than two-hundred-year period, served to undermine American Protestantism.

Third, when I speak of persons who are “liberal” in their Protestantism, I mean people who, while professing—and in most cases sincerely professing—to be Protestant Christians, feel free to modify that religion in order reduce the apparent contradictions between it and the beliefs and values of the modern secular world. Hence these liberals may also be called “modernists” or “modernizers.”

Finally, when I say I’ll be focusing on liberal Protestantism, I don’t mean to suggest that there have been no liberal forms of Catholicism or Judaism. In the USA Judaism has been more or less liberal since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the first great influx of Jews came to America from Germany, where the Jewish religion had already been “modernized.” It wasn’t until Jews came into the USA from the Russian Empire (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that Orthodox Judaism became a significant factor in American Jewish life; and most of the children of these Orthodox Jews, as they quickly grew Americanized, soon gravitated either in the direction of liberal versions of their faith or in the still more radical direction of infidelity. As for liberal Catholicism, it was almost nonexistent in American until the late 1960s, following the Second Vatican Council. Since then it has grown and flourished. But Catholics got into the business of being liberal much later than did Protestants, and to this day lag far behind Protestants in their degree of liberalism. Liberal Catholics and Jews aid and abet liberal Protestants. But Protestantism, not Catholicism or Judaism, has been far and away the most important of American religions. And so if I am to tell the story of liberal religion in America, I have no choice but to focus on liberal Protestantism.

1. It is perhaps worth no...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Protestant Doctrinal Consensus
• Chapter 3: Skepticism
• Chapter 4: The First Assault
• Chapter 5: Unitarianism
• Chapter 6: The Second Great Awakening
• Chapter 7: Transcendentalism
• Chapter 8: The Second Assault
• Chapter 9: Modernism
• Chapter 10: Lyman Abbott
• Chapter 11: Fundamentalism versus Modernism
• Chapter 12: The Third Assault
• Chapter 13: The Liberal Response to the Sexual Revolution
• Chapter 14: Evangelical Response to the Sexual Revolution
• Chapter 15: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Bibliography