I've been reading Righteous Empire by Martin Marty this last week or so. It's a fabulous read. It is a broadbrush history of the Protestant history of the United States. One theme within the work is the idea that Protestantism, well into the 1900's, was married quite firmly to the ideals of Middle Class Americans. Though this took a hit in the Industrial Age creating rifts within Protestantism, generally speaking, the mores of Protestant America are the mores of its Middle Class. It's interesting. So, when I saw these two links today, I had to check them out.
Here is a link to an interesting article from Spiked about the conflict between the religious and the "liberal elite" in the UK. Facinating stuff.
Superstition and prejudice should continually be countered by rational argument. But the vitriolic invective hurled at Christian believers today is symptomatic of the passions normally associated with a fanatical Inquisitor. Like the old Spanish Inquisition, anti-religious fanatics are constantly on the look out for fundamentalist plots.
The second link if from the Chronicle. It is how many people are attempting to maintain a moderate position given the plethora of religious "absolutes" in the world.
In order to adopt such a moderate position, however, you have to loosen your grip on the absolutes that are apparently one of the main attractions of many religious creeds. It isn't easy being moral, and it seems to be getting harder and harder these days.All of this interests me because it continues the line of Marty's thinking. The seemingly monolithic western/Protestant perspective is no longer. It has been subsumed within multiple world views reflecting myriad concerns and conflations of ideals and mores. There is no singular Middle Class perspective...or at least the myriad majority suggests it. Posted by tripp at January 25, 2006 09:13 AM
I grinned at your sentence "The seemingly monolithic western/Protestant perspective is no longer." Because unless you grew up under its influence, it never was in the first place.
Are you finding that different Protestant denominations are drawing the distinctions among themselves more sharply than before -- widening the gaps between Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, etc.? How does the ever-proliferating phenomenon of schisms within established denominations, and the founding of new denominations or individual churches that don't adhere to any existing denomination, play into the breakup of the monolith you perceived?
Posted by: Megan at January 25, 2006 11:53 AMMegan, its not my perception but Marty's. He suggests in his book that though there were differing traditions early on in American history, that denominationalism did not really take hold until the 1800's. And even then concerns were pretty consistant among the traditions (read: anglo-saxon male culture). This was translated back and forth between American identity and Protestant identity. City on a Hill, the Promised Land, God's own Republic etc...all these images are ways that people spoke of the desire. Even as the churches started to split, around and after the civil war, the majority of Protestants kept to this ethos. You probably know the history and I don't know how to summarize 200 pages so easily.
Suffice it to say that Marty suggests that the current spectrum of belief and the level of intensity is relatively (within the last century) new.
What I find interesting is the way older ideas have held on: for example, Christian evangelism and the expansion of the American empire are conflated. That's an old idea.
I'm blathering.
Yup, you are, and I'm not equipped to follow it today. Check yer email, though.
Posted by: Megan at January 25, 2006 02:55 PMOkay, here's an attempt an not blathering. Wish me luck.
So, there is this interesting thing going on in the media and, admittedly, in mainline protestant circles. We are trying to discover/uncover/articulate a common voice. Since the last Presidential election this seems to be a Very Important Task. The effort is treated like it is brand new and has no precedent.
Marty's voice is a great reminder that nothing is new under the sun. This has always been the ebb and flow in American Protestantism. We come together. We distinguish. We fight. We schism. No new news here.
But it seems to me that there is a bit of a revival of religious consciousness in this country. I state the obvious. What I believe will happen however is that the Prots will reach back into their arsenal for old political tools only to find they don't work. Protestantism is too diverse. The Catholic church has too large a stake in this country. Immigrant groups now represent multiple traditions, multiple religions not just strains of the Judeo-Christian ethos. And the non-religious, non-institutional faithful, also have a much larger voice.
W and the other fabulous fifty listed on yesterday's post are an example of how we only know of the traditional conservative voices because they still, arguably, control the media. But they are not the majority. I am not sure anyone is. We might have a majority-minority but that would be all. I think that as the myriad religious voices make themselves known, the framework that many of us Protestants are used to working with will have to fall apart. There is no other viable political possibility.
Posted by: Tripp at January 25, 2006 03:29 PM