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Mainstream Protestantism, “Conservative” Religion, and Civil Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

D. G. Hart
D. G. Hart
Affiliation:
Westminster Theological Seminary
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Just fifty-five years ago, the idea of a front-running presidential candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties campaigning at Bob Jones University was unthinkable. After all, BJU was on the cultural periphery owing to its fundamentalist reputation. Having lost the battles in the mainline Protestant denominations and having suffered the ignominy of the Scopes Trial, fundamentalists like those who sent their children to Bob Jones in the 1940s were so busy trying to recover from these defeats that the thought of deciding a presidential election would have been delusional. Carl F. H. Henry spoke volumes for the movement when in his important little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism (1947), he lamented that for “the first protracted period in its history,” the evangelical faith of fundamentalists stood “divorced from the great social reform movements.” Henry, who was emerging as an influential leader of a new generation of fundamentalists, neo-evangelicals as they would call themselves, wrote this book as a protest against fundamentalism's self-chosen social and political isolation. In other words, the task for evangelical leaders at mid-century was to prod fundamentalists back into public life. And this is what makes George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the weeks leading up to the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary truly remarkable. It reveals a seismic shift among conservative Protestants. Within a brief period, evangelicals went from denouncing politics as a form of worldliness to demanding a place at the table.

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Articles
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 13 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion, Politics, Policy , January 2001 , pp. 19 - 46
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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2001

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References

Notes

1. On Bob Jones University and fundamentalism in the 1940s, see Dalhouse, Mark Taylor, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens, Ga., 1996)Google Scholar; Turner, Daniel L., Standing without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, S.C., 1997)Google Scholar; and Lucas, Sean Michael, “Fundamentalisms Revived and Still Standing: A Review Essay,” Westminster Theological Journal 60 (1998): 327–337Google Scholar.

2. The best book for understanding what the fundamentalist controversy means to evangelical Protestantism in the United States remains Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1875–1925 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

3. Henry, Carl F. H., The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1947), 36Google Scholar.

4. On neo-evangelicalism, see Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. In this essay the words “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are used interchangeably since the differences between the two are not great in the arena of politics. In fact, the point of this essay is that the religious style of evangelicals and fundamentalists, namely, pietism, has specific consequences for political engagement and reflection that turns whatever religious differences evangelicals and fundamentalists have into sociopolitical commonalities.

6. Woodward, Kenneth L. et al. , “The Year of the Evangelicals,” Newsweek, 25 10 1976, 68–68Google Scholar.

7. On the emergence of the religious right, see Fowler, Robert Booth, A New Engagement: Christian Evangelical Political Thought, 1966–1976 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1982)Google Scholar; Lienesch, Michael, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, 1993), 1–4Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., “Preachers of Paradox: Fundamentalist Politics in Historical Perspective,” in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991), 104–109Google Scholar.

8. The phrase “religious right” as I will be using it covers more than simply the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition. For the purpose of this study, religious right means the constellation of evangelical Protestants engaged in politics whose leadership includes Paul Weyrich, Ralph Reed, Cal Thomas, Jerry Falwell, Don Eberly, James Dobson, and Charles Colson, along with the organizations they oversee and the publications for which they write. This list, though debatable, was the one that editors of Christianity Today, evangelicalism's magazine of record, made in their feature, “Is the Religious Right Finished? An Insiders' Conversation,” Christianity Today, 6 September 1999, 43–59. As will become apparent throughout this essay, the particular style of evangelical politics, that is, of looking to the Bible for social and political solutions, can also be found among evangelicals on the so-called left, individuals such as Ron Sider and Jim Wallis. But to avoid confusion I will use “religious right” only in connection with those people and institutions identified by Christianity Today.

9. On the largely unfavorable depiction of fundamentalism in the historiography prior to 1970, see Cole, Stewart G., The History of Fundamentalism (New York, 1931)Google Scholar; Furniss, Norman, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918–1931 (New Haven, 1954)Google Scholar; Ginger, Ray, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Chicago, 1968)Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962)Google Scholar. This negative estimate only changes with Carter, Paul A., “The Fundamentalist Defense of the Faith,” in Braeman, John, Bremmer, Robert, and Brody, David, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s (Columbus, 1968), 179–214Google Scholar;

10. See, for instance, Wilcox, Clyde, God's Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), 1–20Google Scholar; Lienesch, Redeeming America, 4–9; Marsden, “Preachers of Paradox”; and Ribuffo, Leo P., “God and Contemporary Politics,” Journal of American History 79 (1993): 1515–1533CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. On the origins and rise of the religious right, see Lienesch, Redeeming America; Bruce, Steve, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America, 1978–1988 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Martin, William C., With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and Wilcox, God's Warriors.

12. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 1079, emphasis hisGoogle Scholar.

13. See, for instance, Marty, Martin E., Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1961 (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Hutchison, William R., ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in American, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; and Warren, Heather A., Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

14. See Sweet, Leonard I., “The 1960s: The Crises of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism,” in Marsden, George, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 29–45Google Scholar; Sloan, Douglas, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, 1994)Google Scholar; and Billingsley, Lloyd, From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches (Lanham, Md.:, 1990)Google Scholar.

15. Howe, Daniel Walker, “Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North,” in Noll, Mark A., ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York, 1990), 124Google Scholar.

16. On this point, see ibid., 121–45; Robert P. Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Culture,” in Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics, 146–171; Marsden, George, “The Religious Right: A Historical Overview,” in Cromartie, Michael, ed., No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics (Washington, D.C., 1992), 1–16Google Scholar; and Guelzo, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999), chap. 1Google Scholar.

17. Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior,” 152–53. See Kellstedt, Lyman A. et al. , “It's the Culture Stupid! 1992 and Our Political Future,” First Things 42 (04 1994): 28–33Google Scholar, for evidence of these differences between Republicans and Democrats even after the 1930s.

18. Noll, , “The Scandal of Evangelical Political Reflection,” in Neuhaus, Richard John and Weigel, George, eds., Being Christian Today: An American Conversation (Washington, D.C., 1992), 73Google Scholar.

19. On contemporary evangelical attitudes toward American society, see Smith, Christian, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago, 1998)Google Scholar; idem, Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000); and Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

20. For the influence of premillennialism on evangelical politics, see Noll, “The Scandal of Evangelical Political Reflection,” 74–82; and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, chaps. 22 and 23.

21. See Moberg, David O., The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (Philadelphia, 1972)Google Scholar, a popular book that faulted evangelical quietism during the Nixon era. Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (1957; Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar, made a similar argument about a reversal among evangelicals, without Moberg's practical application. See also Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture; and Carpenter, Revive Us Again. While this argument makes sense for much of the fundamentalist movement, it does not account for real political involvement by such fundamentalists as Gerald Winrod, William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, or Carl McIntire during the precise decades when evangelical quietism was supposed to be at its zenith. On fundamentalist politics, see Ribuffo, Leo, The Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983)Google Scholar; Jeansonne, Glen, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge, La., 1997)Google Scholar; Trollinger, William Vance Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, Wis., 1990)Google Scholar; and Hankins, Barry, J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, Ky., 1996)Google Scholar.

22. See James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965; and Carter, Paul A., Another Part of the Fifties (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

23. On mid-twentieth-century evangelical concerns, see Watt, David Harrington, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991)Google Scholar. The moral and familial concerns may also help to explain how the religious right differs from the Christian far right. Although both groups opposed communism and the centralizing efforts of the state, the religious right's opposition to government control is less ideological. In other words, the religious right tends to be more concerned with politics as they relate to the family and less interested in a consistently conservative set of political principles.

24. Marty, Martin E., Modern American Religion, Volume 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919–1941 (Chicago, 1991), 63Google Scholar.

25. On the cultural significance of 1920s politics, see Lichtman, Allan J., Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill, 1979)Google Scholar; and Dumenil, Lynn, “‘The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy’: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 77 (1990): 499–524CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The reason for claiming that A1 Smith might have been able to affirm the five points of fundamentalism (i.e., biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, vicarious atonement, the resurrection, and Christ's miracles) is that the Roman Catholic Church affirmed all of these doctrines and in 1899 condemned modernism as a heresy.

26. Only a decade ago, pollsters discovered that 34 percent of Americans perceived evangelicals as a menace to civil society, compared to only 14 percent who had similar perceptions of the Ku Klux Klan. See Guiness, Os, “Tribes People, Idiots or Citizens? Evangelicals, Religious Liberty, and Public Philosophy for the Public Square,” in Kantzer, Kenneth S. and Henry, Carl F. H., eds., Evangelical Affirmations (Grand Rapids, Mich, 1990), 461Google Scholar.

27. Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” originally published in Commentary (1985) and reprinted in Neuhaus, Richard John and Cromartie, Michael, eds, Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Washington, D.C., 1987), 18Google Scholar.

28. See Caplow, Theodore, Bahr, Howard M., Chadwick, Bruce A., and Hoover, Dwight W., All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (Minneapolis, 1983)Google Scholar.

29. Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” 16.

30. See, for instance, Green, John C. et al. , Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front (Lanham, Md., 1996)Google Scholar; Marty, Martin E. and Appleby, R. Scott, eds. Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar; Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988)Google Scholar; Guth, James L., The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy (Lawrence, Kan., 1997)Google Scholar; Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, The Churching of American: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992)Google Scholar; Ammerman, Nancy T., Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987)Google Scholar; Warner, Stephen R., New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988)Google Scholar; Stoll, David, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990)Google Scholar; Martin, David, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; and Bruce, Steve, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

31. Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), 65–66Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., 215, 221–22.

33. Ibid., 158–61.

34. Ibid., 161–65, quotation on 157.

35. Bruce, Steve, Conservative Protestant Politics (Oxford, 1998), 12–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation on 19.

36. Ibid., 219.

37. Ibid., 19, 21. Arguably the best recent estimate of evangelicalism's scope is Smith, American Evangelicalism. The classic statement of evangelicalism's variety is Smith, Timothy L., “The Evangelical Kaleidoscope and the Call to Christian Unity,” Christian Scholar's Review 15 (1986): 125–140Google Scholar.

38. It is my conviction that this is true for all Christian traditions, not just Protestants. Still, the Catholic experience in the United States teaches that Christian involvement in public life is not inevitably geared toward establishing a Christian America. My sense is that the pronouncements of the Catholic bishops have been directed more toward policies that protect Catholics from the state rather than trying to make the state conform to Catholic views and practices.

39. Henry, Carl F. H., “Response,” in Cromartie, Michael, ed., No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics (Washington, D.C., 1992), 75Google Scholar.

40. This is a group of Protestant theonomists, whose leaders include Rousas J. Rushdoony and Gary North. They believe that biblical law should be the norm for modern society. For an introduction, see North, Gary, Christian Reconconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn't (Tyler, Tex., 1991)Google Scholar.

41. Henry, “Response,” 77, 75.

42. This statement might sound patently obvious. But evangelicals are different from other Christians in thinking that the Bible speaks to all of life. Other Christian traditions would speak instead of the Bible teaching all things necessary for salvation, meaning that Scripture does not speak to numerous areas of life that are not directly related to salvation. In those areas, wisdom applies. For one expression of the Bible's applicability to all of life, see Frame, John M., “In Defense of Something Close to Biblicism: Reflections on Sola Scriptura and History in Theological Method,” Westminster Theological Journal 59 (1997): 269–291Google Scholar.

43. Neuhaus, , Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 36–37Google Scholar, quoted in Casanova, Public Religions, 165.

44. Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics, 185.

45. Ibid., 188, 189.

46. Casanova, Public Religions, 214, 230, 233.

47. This distinction finds support from the two best books on fundamentalism and liberalism—Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, and Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)Google Scholar.

48. Robert Wuthnow, “The Future of the Religious Right,” in Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles, 30. What David N. Livingstone writes of the fundamentalist psyche—“passion to hammer down history, to touch the transcendental, to earth the supernatural in the mundane”—is an equally fitting description of evangelicalism more generally. See Livingstone, , “Introduction: Placing Evangelical Encounters with Science,” in Livingstone, David N., Hart, D. G., and Noll, Mark A., eds., Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York, 1999), 9Google Scholar.

49. For some of the contributions to the ethno-cultural interpretation of nineteenth-century American politics, see Kleppner, Paul, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; idem, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979); Formisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar; idem, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983); Kelly, Robert, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and Swierenga, Robert P., ed., Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays of the Civil War Era (Westport, Conn., 1975)Google Scholar. For the importance of ethnicity to Anglo-American Protestantism, see Higham, John, “Ethnicity and American Protestants: Collective Identity in the Mainstream,” in Stout, Harry and Hart, D. G., eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York, 1997), 239–259Google Scholar.

50. Two books that show how liturgical Protestantism evolved through conflict with revivalistic Protestantism are Gustafson, David A., Lutherans in Crisis: The Question of Identity in the American Republic (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar; and Guelzo, Allen C., For the Sake of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of Reformed Episcopalians (University Park, Pa., 1994)Google Scholar. Another important figure in liturgical Protestantism is John Williamson Nevin, who grew up in Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, moved into the German Reformed church, and penned what is arguably the best critique of revivalism written in the nineteenth century, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, Pa.: Weekly Messenger, 1843). On Nevin's place in nineteenth-century Protestantism, see Appel, Theodore, The Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin (1889; New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

The formal similarities between liturgical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are obvious but no less real. My suspicion is that in Anglo-American Protestant circles the similarities between Proestantism and Catholicism became unbearable once Roman Catholics after 1840 began to threaten Protestant dominance. At that point, Protestants began to stress their low-church piety to set themselves off from Catholicism's churchliness. For the affects of anti-Catholicism on Anglo-American Protestantism, see Wolffe, John, “Anti-Catholicism and Evangelical Identity in Britain and the United States, 1830–1860,” in Noll, Mark A., Bebbington, David W., and Rawlyk, George A., eds. Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York, 1994), 179–197Google Scholar.

51. See, for instance, Jacobsen, Douglas and Trollinger, William Vance Jr., “Historiography of American Protestantism: The Two-Party Paradigm,” Fides et Historia 25 (1993): 4–15Google Scholar, which shows implicitly that religious historians have ignored liturgicalism, identifying evangelicalism as the right wing of American Protestantism.

52. For historiographical examples of this tendency, see Heyrman, Christine, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Conkin, Paul K., Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar; and Sutton, Willliam R., Journeyman for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park, Pa., 1998)Google Scholar, all of whom dissolve denominational differences into revivalist Protestantism. For examples from the social sciences that make the same mistake, see Liniesch, Redeeming America; Wuthnow, Robert, The Struggle for America's Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1989)Google Scholar; and Hunter, Culture Wars.

53. Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “The Bright Line: Liberalism and Religion,” New Criterion 17 (03 1999): 10Google Scholar. The distinction between public and private religion is not very helpful. The reason is that “public” may be applied to churchly and political aspects of human society. Public worship, for instance, would technically fall on the private side of Elshtain's dichotomy. It is public in the sense that, in most Christian traditions, it is open to everyone in the community. But to hold a public worship service in the public square, thereby implying the endorsement of the civil authority, would violate American canons of propriety. The words “civil” and “churchly” as modifiers of “religion,” then, would seem to work much better than “public” and “private.” But few of today's advocates of public religion would want to take up the cause of civil religion because of that phrase's association with the older Protestant establishment.

54. Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior,” 152.

55. On the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, see Synod, Lutheran Church–Missouri, Commission on Theology and Church Relations, Render unto Caesar … and unto God: A Lutheran View of Church and State (St. Louis, 1995)Google Scholar; and Noll, Mark A., One Nation Under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (New York, 1988), chap. 2Google Scholar. On the Presbyterian notion of the spirituality of the church, see Hart, D. G., “The Spirituality of the Church, the Westminster Standards, and Nineteenth-Century American Presbyterianism,” in Leith, John H., ed., The Westminster Confession in Current Thought: Colloquium in Calvin Studies VIII (privately published, 1996), 106–118Google Scholar.

56. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, chap. 1, shows with great effect the differences between the social outlook of Republicans and the Jeffersonian tradition inherited by Democrats.

57. The literature on liturgical Protestantism and its political significance is generally confined to nineteenth-century developments. On the twentieth century, see Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics; Dumenil, “‘The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy’”; Bratt, James D., “Protestant Immigrants and the Protestant Mainstream,” in Sarna, Jonathan D., ed. Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Experience (Urbana, Ill., 1997), 110–135Google Scholar; and Granquist, Mark, “Lutherans in the United States, 1930–1960: Searching for the ‘Center,’” in Jacobsen, Douglas and Trollinger, William Vance Jr., eds, Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1998), 234–251Google Scholar.

58. Of course, liturgicals could be drawn into the mainstream of American civil religion. But ethnic differences along with theological depth prevented total submersion. For one example of these tensions within Dutch-American Calvinism, see Bratt, James D., Dutch Calvinism in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 40–66Google Scholar.

59. For this conception of secular, see O'Donovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

60. See, for instance, Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square; Carter, Stephen L., The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael J., Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)Google Scholar; Greenawalt, Kent, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; McBrien, Richard P., Caesar's Coin: Religion and Politics in America (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Stackhouse, Max L., Public Theology and Political Economy (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987)Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Hunter, Culture Wars; Eberly, Don E., Restoring the Good Society: A New Vision for Politics and Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994)Google Scholar; Thiemann, Ronald F., Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1996)Google Scholar; Tinder, Glenn E., The Political Meaning of Christianity: An Interpretation (Baton Rouge, La., 1989)Google Scholar; and Kramnick, Isaac and Moore, R. Laurence, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York, 1996)Google Scholar

61. In the words of the Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, who is by no means a member of the religious right but echoes evangelical sentiments, “to suppress the religious voice in the public arena would be to suppress the most powerful force available to us for the cause of justice and human flourishing.” Wolterstorff, “Inner Voices,” Civilization (August–September 1999): 67.

62. The bipolar character of these matters applies as much to evangelicals on the political left as it does to the religious right. Although James Dobson, the voice of Focus on the Family, and Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners, disagree about any number of policies, both agree that evangelicalism is relevant to public life and that evangelicals need to be active politically. In which case, the tension between religion and public automatically ensues, since the claim that religion is good and necessary for politics life does not address the rules that apparently forbid mixing religion and politics. Compare, for instance, Christianity Today's recent coverage of the religious right and its evangelical peers on the left: “Is the Religious Right Finished? An Insiders' Conversation,” Christianity Today, 6 September 1999, 43–59; Stafford, Tim, “The Criminologist Who Discovered Churches,” Christianity Today, 14 06 1999, 35–39Google Scholar; Wilson, John, “Mr. Wallis Goes to Washington,” Christianity Today, 14 06 1999, 41–43Google Scholar; and Maudlin, Michael G., “God's Contractor,” Christianity Today, 14 06 1999, 45–47Google Scholar. See also Charles W. Colson, with Pearcey, Nancy, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill., 1999)Google Scholar, a book that appeals directly to the public relevance of evangelical Protestantism.

63. This is the point well made in Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989)Google Scholar.

64. This is a point developed more fully in Noll, Mark A., The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994)Google Scholar. For other episodes illustrating the way Protestantism polarized public debates: on public schooling, see Glenn, Charles L. Jr., The Myth of the Common School (Amherst, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar; on church and state matters during the Progressive Era, see Handy, Robert T., Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880–1920 (Princeton, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on Protestants and higher education, see Hart, D. G., The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies and American Higher Education (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar.

65. For a good brief recent statement of this view, see Myers, Kenneth A., “Biblical Obedience and Political Thought: Reflections on Theological Method,” in Neuhaus, Richard John, ed., The Bible, Politics, and Democracy (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987), 19–31Google Scholar. A fuller and older expression is Robinson, Stuart, The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel (Philadelphia, 1858)Google Scholar.

66. Part of the problem, of course, is that the public and private spheres increasingly overlap thanks to the growing interdependence of local and national institutions. But this is a political problem, one that may call for greater limits on government. It is not something to be solved by adding more religion to public life.

67. Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976; New York, 1996), xiiGoogle Scholar.

68. On Machen, see Hart, D. G., Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar.

69. Machen, J. Gresham, Christianity and Liberalism (New York, 1923), 149, 151Google Scholar.

70. Machen, , “The Necessity of the Christian School,” in Stonehouse, Ned B., ed., What Is Christianity? And Other Essays (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1951), 299Google Scholar.

71. Mencken, H. L., “Doctor Fundamentalis,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 18 01 1937Google Scholar.

72. Other scholars to make this point include Berger, Peter L., “Different Gospels: The Social Sources of Apostasy,” This World, no. 17 (Spring 1987): 6–17Google Scholar; Jelen, Ted G., “In Defense of Religious Minimalism,” in Segers, Mary C. and Jelen, Ted G., A Wall of Separation? Debating the Public Role of Religion (Lanham, Md., 1998), 3–51Google Scholar; and Guroian, Vigen, “The Struggle for the Soul of the Church: American Reflections,” in Ethics After Christendom: Toward and Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994), 83–101Google Scholar.