A new generation of evangelical elites is imploring evangelicals
to step back from the culture wars. Mostly they want to escape
polarizing strong stances on same-sex marriage and abortion, and
perhaps also contentious church-state issues, like the Obamacare
contraceptive mandate.
Purportedly the evangelical church is failing to reach young,
upwardly mobile professionals because evangelicals, who now broadly
comprise perhaps one third of all Americans, are seen as
reactionary and hateful. On their college campuses, at their coffee
shops, and in their yoga classes, among other venues, some
outspoken hip young evangelicals want a new public image for their
faith.
One such prominent voice is Jonathan Merritt, a progressive
Southern Baptist and son of a former Southern Baptist Convention
president. His new book,
A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture
Wars, has earned him many recent bookings on cable talk
shows.
A popular young evangelical blogger echoing Merritt’s theme is
Rachel Evans, who conveniently grew up in the Tennessee small town
famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial. Her 2010 book was
Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers
Learned to Ask the Questions. “We are tired of the culture
wars,” she explained in a recent interview. “We are tired of
politics.” Lamenting the church’s preoccupation with “shame and
guilt,” she urged evangelicals to reconsider their opposition to
same-sex unions.
Other young evangelicals complaining about culture wears don’t
go so far and remain faithful to historic church teachings while
still yearning for new emphases that they think would earn
evangelicals a helpfully upbeat persona.
Most of these young evangelicals, and many of their older
supporters, often seem to forget that culture wars are not new for
Americans or its churches. America has had dozens of them, all of
them with intense religious involvement. And some of them have
exemplified some of religion’s finest moments in shaping America.
Across several decades, the Civil Rights Movement, led primarily by
clergy, was intensely gut wrenching and sometimes precipitated
violence. Some churches, black and white, lost members over it. The
push for women’s rights of the 1960s and 1970s that closely
followed was also deeply controversial and was at least initially
often rooted in faith before secular feminists took the fore.
Prohibition was one of America’s most intense culture wars,
pitting mostly Anglo Protestant small town and rural America
against more ethnic and Catholic urbanites. Churches were its chief
champions. Women’s Suffrage, closely aligned with Prohibition, and
nearly as divisive, was also touted by many Protestant churches and
leaders, such as the Methodist suffragist Anna Howard Shaw. And
during Reconstruction and afterwards, many northern church
activists tried to help southern black freedmen, often amid
violence, with even many northerners preferring to avoid the
struggle.
Early in the republic, frontier evangelical religion aligned
with Thomas Jefferson against the Federalist Party and its East
Coast supporters in the established churches. Some feared the
transition from Federalist to Jeffersonian rule might lead to war.
Later in the mid-19th century, many Protestants mobilized against
Catholic immigrant influence through the Know Nothing movement.
They prompted Abraham Lincoln’s famous retort that he preferred the
purity of Russian czarist tyranny to hypocritical democracy in
America that disputed the citizenship of Catholics. Lincoln’s own
eventual Republican Party was partly the creation of northern
evangelical revivalists, many of them abolitionists, and all of
them steadfast against slavery’s expansion. Lincoln’s 1860
election, of course, transitioned the slavery issue from a culture
war to a Civil War.
Last year, David Goldfield of the University of North Carolina
wrote
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, in
which he argued that anti-slavery northern evangelicals, with their
ostensible refusal to compromise, ensured the Civil War and over
600,000 dead. He specifically faulted the Second Great Awakening,
which ostensibly made politics not about compromise but matters of
good and evil, worthy of sacrificing human life. Goldfield clearly
intended his argument also to reflect on today’s evangelical
political activism.
Recently I visited central New York to visit the home of William
Seward, abolitionist, Republican Party founder, and most famously
Lincoln’s secretary of state. Central and western New York in the
early 19th century was called the “burned over” district, having
boiled over with revivalism and social reforms, including
abolitionism. Seward’s home in Auburn, New York, also served as a
stop on the Underground Railroad. Mrs. Seward was especially a
fervent abolitionist, having been raised a Quaker. Sometimes she
chided her politically pragmatic husband, an Episcopalian, for not
being sufficiently zealous.
But Seward’s anti-slavery speeches as a U.S. Senator about
“irrepressible conflict” and a “higher law” helped to inflame the
nation. Seward had been influenced toward abolitionism by the
religious college he attended, headed by a Presbyterian clergy. The
Sewards were close to freed slave and abolitionist leader Harriett
Tubman, who bought land from the Sewards and built her home down
the street. Besides religious influences, the Sewards’ anti-slavery
stance was reinforced early in their marriage when they visited
Virginia, witnessing young slave boys chained together and herded
like cattle, later crying themselves to sleep when locked in a
barn.
Seward’s own Episcopal Church never formally divided over
slavery. But America’s then largest denominations, the Methodists
and Baptists, both split over slavery in the 1840s, foreshadowing
the nation’s split. Originally themselves anti-slavery, southern
Methodists and Baptists over time accommodated to their local
culture. Methodism’s founding bishop, Francis Asbury, was
anti-slavery but stopped talking about it lest he lose access to
southern audiences, black and white.
Today’s culture wars over marriage, abortion, and domestic
religious freedom seem terribly tame compared to the supreme
culture war over slavery that concluded with Civil War. Even before
the war, abolitionists, including Seward, often risked mobs and
lynching, even in the north. In the interest of social harmony,
should they have relented?
Evangelical Left icon Jim Wallis, who often appeals to young
evangelicals with his message of supposed post-partisanship, likes
to compare himself to 19th century evangelicals such as evangelist
Charles Finney. Wallis often recounts that Finney, at his revivals,
enlisted converts into the abolitionist cause. Unmentioned by
Wallis is that Finney mailed abolitionist tracts into the South,
where they were often gathered into bonfires and fomented rallies
against intrusive northern preachers. Finney did not foster social
harmony. He and other evangelicals of their era were the ultimate
culture warriors.
The non-confrontational, therapeutic evangelicalism that some
young evangelicals, and their older mentors, seemingly advocate
today as they denounce culture war is at odds with much of
evangelical history, which has always thrived on conflict. No less
important, it’s also at odds with much of American history, dating
to the 17th century New England Puritan divines, who envisioned a
righteous nation. Even supposed secularists of today often walk in
that tradition as they demand contentious social reforms,
including, in their view, same sex marriage.
Hoping evangelicals and other serious religious believers in
America will en masse shun social controversy as they retreat to
quiet cafes to read the New York Times is not realistic.
The antebellum Methodists and Baptists who abandoned earlier
convictions to accommodate their culture’s acceptance of slavery
purchased only a temporary peace. Today’s evangelicals who hope
they can delete marriage, abortion, and religious freedom from
their political menu might be similarly outflanked by irrepressible
historical tides rooted in four centuries of American religion.
