The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  The effort by the religious right to create, in effect, a new informal Christian establishment, based on a “Christian consensus,” is the subject of the next chapter. The resulting “culture wars” made it especially difficult to dispassionately address the question of religious pluralism in public life—which is the subject of the reflections in the conclusion.

  SIX

  Sequel: Consensus Becomes a Fighting Word

  By the early 1960s, the era of the white male Protestant and secular cultural leadership was in its last days. Midcentury hopes for a moderate-liberal cultural consensus were about to be blown away by the cultural upheavals and fragmentation of the later 1960s. The civil rights movement, and its aftermath of frustrations, opened the door to new forms of interest politics and to conflicting demands regarding diversity and inclusivism. No longer could it be taken for granted that white males would hold a near monopoly on cultural leadership. The American enlightenment ideal of a consensus based on rationally derived, shared humanistic principles congenial to a broadly theistic Protestant heritage was falling apart. The Vietnam War disrupted Cold War harmony regarding patriotism. The counterculture took to the streets with calls for nonconformity and for rejection of the depersonalizing effects of mass culture, thereby bringing down the monopoly on cultural authority of the generation’s elders, who a decade earlier had been politely urging those same themes.

  One of the most intriguing and momentous manifestations of the cultural fragmentation that followed the consensus era was the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and its continuance ever since as a major player in the politics of the culture wars. That development is particularly striking because, during the 1950s, Christian fundamentalists themselves, along with other revivalist or conservative evangelical Protestants, typically prided themselves on their lack of political involvement. Most revivalist and conservative evangelical Protestants were simply Bible-believing Christians who emphasized being “born again”; the “fundamentalists” could be defined as those who were more militant—even, at times, “ultramilitant”—in fighting perceived doctrinal and moral evils.1 In reaction to the “social gospel” of more liberal Protestants earlier in the century, revivalist conservatives often emphasized that the only concerns of the church and the evangelists should be to preach a gospel of salvation. They might promise, as Billy Graham did, social and political benefits for a nation of converted people, but they also held that direct involvement of churches in politics would be a distraction from their primary evangelistic task. Not everyone in the very diverse revivalist movement consistently followed such standards; even Graham himself did not observe them strictly. Revivalist Protestants were agreed in their anticommunism, and they often made comments on specific political issues, as individuals, in publications, or through organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals. Sometimes they mobilized at the local level—for example, over what was being taught in the public schools. Wealthy evangelical businessmen helped to finance conservative political causes and urged their fellow believers to do the same. So it is easy enough to find anticipations of later political involvement. Nonetheless, at midcentury most revivalist Protestants were ardent premillennialists who held that the world was getting worse and that the only true hope for rescue from pervasive evil was the imminent personal return of Jesus Christ to set up his millennial kingdom on earth for a literal 1,000 years. Political programs, they often said, were like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Accordingly, they were probably less concerned with practical politics than most other Americans were. Nor were they unified in most of their political views or in their party allegiances. The well-worn critique that liberal Protestants made of revivalist evangelicals was that their gospel was too privatized and otherworldly.

  Reflections on the cultural crisis of the 1950s shed light on the dynamics of the remarkable transformation of revivalist Protestantism from a mostly apolitical phenomenon into a formidable political force. Of course, many elements were involved in shaping the religious right, and the movement already has been viewed from many helpful angles.2 Nevertheless, viewing the dramatic politicization of the fundamentalist-evangelical heritage through the lens of the preceding “consensus” era can provide some fresh perspectives on today’s most persistent cultural divisions.

  Historical change is, of course, driven by a host of factors, some of which are beyond anyone’s control. So understanding the shared beliefs of cultural leaders in the 1950s provides only one angle among many for assessing the reasons for change. That angle does tell us, for example, some important things about the ideological resources a mainstream culture may have for responding to new challenges and for shaping culture-forming institutions such as education, the media, and government. In these cases, we find that mostly secular moderate-liberal cultural leaders had little to offer beyond piecemeal solutions to the cultural challenges that they identified, and even less to offer to counter the unanticipated challenges of fragmentation that would begin to emerge in the next decade.

  It is not hard to see why the center could not hold. Even in its heyday in the 1950s, centrist liberalism had been largely dependent on pragmatism, broadly speaking. Indeed, one of the claims of the day was that the culture had reached the historical stage that Daniel Bell had tagged “the end of ideology”—and this was seen as a sign of American progress. Pragmatism itself was a sort of ideology, or broad set of beliefs, but the point was that its flexible approaches to social issues were superior to rigid ideological approaches. That basic point seemed to be confirmed by the collapse of world communism later in the century. But the problem with pragmatism is that, although it can work admirably when it can draw on shared moral capital, it does not provide much basis for establishing first principles or deciding among contending moral claims. That failing became evident by the late 1960s, when numerous competing and often strident interest groups each presented the first principles of their respective causes as self-evident. The pragmatist has little basis for adjudicating among such claims when they conflict. Furthermore, in a consumer economy where the popular media constantly promote a culture of free choice and self-indulgence as the essence of the good life, the pragmatist has difficulty finding a widely compelling moral basis for alternatives.

  These problems of moderate-liberal pragmatism were already discernible in the 1950s. Walter Lippmann, for instance, pointed them out when he called for a return to some sort of natural law as the basis for a public philosophy. His establishment critics responded by pointing out that such a return was impractical because there was no way to determine whose first principles should count as laws. In the setting of the 1950s, shoring up the foundations of public policy did not seem to them an urgent matter, because the public culture already enjoyed a remarkable de facto sense of unity. That sense of unity had been generated by World War II patriotism, Cold War anxieties, inherited American ideals, similar religious and moral heritages, and a burgeoning economy that provided most people with at least the hope of sharing in the American dream. In such a setting, pragmatism could draw on shared moral capital and act both as an effective broker and as a moderating influence that could help build further consensus, despite calls for individualism and despite the many deep cultural and ideological differences that lurked beneath the surface.

  Once those differences surfaced in the next decades, pragmatism remained the mainstay of moderate liberals, particularly in politics, where the art of compromise had long been recognized as the key to success. There is a good argument, furthermore, that in a highly diverse society where there is no way to settle on first principles, pragmatism as the basis for a public philosophy is preferable to any truly ideological alternative in which the ideals of a minority would be imposed on everyone else. Even granting that argument, however, it is not hard to see why the heirs to moderate-liberal pragmatism of recent decades so often look ineffectual. Theirs may be the best approach, compared to more rigid alternatives.
Yet it is an approach that is inherently weak when it comes to taking stands on first principles. Even when it was in its prime, as in the consensus era of the 1950s, pragmatism was dependent on shared moral capital. The problem since then is that the less there is of such shared capital, the less effective the pragmatist tradition appears.

  The midcentury emphases on individual autonomy and nonconformity also tended to weaken the nation’s resources for cultivating moral capital. Traditionally those resources had been cultivated by subcommunities, often ethnic and/or religious in nature, that provided some grounding in a moral tradition and in mores that encouraged community loyalties and responsible citizenship. Yet one of the implications that might be drawn from the celebration of autonomy was that one should leave the petty constraints of one’s community of origin, and become a law unto oneself.

  Recognizing this weakness in the moderate-liberal pragmatist tradition, which may be a weakness inherent to modernized, secular, non-ideologically driven, widely diverse societies, helps us to better understand why the promise of restoring firmly based first principles would seem so attractive, particularly to people with traditional religious sensibilities.

  The 1950s was an era when Protestant Christianity still held a respected, even if mostly honorary, place in American public life, and part of the appeal for fundamentalistic (or militantly conservative) evangelical Protestants in the late 1970s to organize as a major political movement had to do with restoring that respect. The irony, of course, was that the mainstream public Protestantism of the 1950s was broad and often mixed with “the Judeo-Christian heritage,” and hence it was just the sort of liberal religion that revivalist Protestants typically denounced. Yet, at that same time, fundamentalists and other revivalist Protestants were enthusiastic about generalized religion in politics when it appeared in the form of civil religion. They were pleased that many political leaders routinely and with evident sincerity invoked Americans’ shared faith in God as what most separated them from communism. And they were also happy that Bible reading and prayers were still mandated in many public schools and that Christian invocations were commonplace at public events, even if they thought these should be taken more seriously. So, for conservative evangelical Protestants two decades later, one of the attractions of joining in a national political movement was the promise to restore public acknowledgment that America had a Christian base.

  This rapid transition—the transition from being avowed outsiders during the 1950s to proclaiming themselves, by the late 1970s, the “Moral Majority,” as well as true American insiders who should have cultural dominance—was possible because of a deep ambivalence in the American fundamentalist-evangelical heritage. On the one hand, conservative evangelicals were heirs to twentieth-century fundamentalism, which often involved militantly separatist reactions against mainstream American religion and culture. They set up their own separatist denominations, Bible churches, parachurch ministries, and Bible colleges; insisted on strict mores that would distinguish them from unbelievers; and were premillennialists, disparaging social and political solutions as they waited for Christ’s return. Yet, on the other hand, they were heirs also to an even more deeply rooted American evangelical heritage that went back to the nineteenth century, when Protestant dominance was taken for granted. In some regions of the country, especially the South, revivalist Protestants still enjoyed that sense of cultural ownership. Furthermore, almost no matter how separatist and ardently premillennialist the fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals became, they had remained fervently patriotic and anti-Communist. That part of their insider heritage continued intact. Hence, they were shaped by the patriotism of World War II and the Cold War at least as much as other Americans were. So, in the 1970s, when conservative evangelicals called for “taking back” America, they were tacitly calling for a return to a time when such strongly anti-Communist patriotism had been more widely shared, in the 1950s. They were also drawing on an older white evangelical sense of cultural guardianship, or an informal “Christian” establishment, that they were proposing to restore.

  Conservative religious people often felt most keenly a desire to restore the public standards of the 1950s in the area of family values and sexuality. Before the religious right coalesced as a political movement, many of its constituents had already been alarmed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In part, their reactions involved direct revulsion against the permissiveness of the counterculture, but they also saw modern psychology and its celebration of individualistic self-expression as a source of the breakdown of traditional standards. Conservative evangelicals had been exploring alternative psychologies for some time, and radical, “biblically based” psychological theories as alternatives to secular outlooks had wide appeal. For instance, Tim LaHaye, later a leading figure in the political right, first rose to fame as the author of a pop-psychology volume, The Spirit-Controlled Temperament (1966), which sold in the millions. Even more influential was the work of Dr. James Dobson, a trained psychologist, who published a parenting book, Dare to Discipline, in 1970. That book also sold in the millions. One of Dobson’s targets was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whom Dobson saw as having contributed to the breakdown of strict discipline of children and so having helped to foster the undisciplined and morally lax young people of the counterculture. Dobson went on to found the organization Focus on the Family in 1977, and as an author and radio host he became the nation’s leading advocate for strict traditional family values, as opposed especially to the agendas of gays and feminists. Dobson attempted to avoid direct political organization, but through the Family Research Council, founded in 1979, he became a leading lobbyist, and he long remained one of the most influential voices of the political right. Even more than forty years later he was implicitly invoking the 1950s by reminding audiences of the damage that the 1960s had done to American sexual morality.3

  But how did this alarm over cultural changes become transformed into a political movement? One major factor was the reaction in conservative religious circles to the role of the national government in promoting the secularizing and permissive trends that were under way. The US Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963 banning mandated prayers in public schools were early fire bells that would long echo as warnings that the government was turning away from religion. Those decisions were in fact part of a larger effort by the Court not only to end Protestant privilege, but also to limit governmental promotion even of “religion-in-general.” The Court, moreover, seemed to condone permissiveness when, during the next decade, it came to accept that sexually explicit materials had First Amendment protections as free speech. The contrast between what was permitted and even commonplace by the late 1960s compared to the 1950s was dramatic. In the long run, the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion was especially momentous. At first, by far the strongest opposition to Roe came from conservative Roman Catholics. For the first several years, fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants did not respond with any great outcry, since abortion had not been one of their traditional concerns. Nonetheless, they did see the decision as part of a larger disturbing permissive trend regarding sexuality. Within the span of little more than a decade, the government had abandoned any role in being an ally of the churches in regulating sexual mores. In the name of pluralism, and reflecting the trend of the time to maximize individual free choice, it seemed to be condoning the sexual revolution.

  Not only was the government stepping away from its traditional role in regulating sexual behavior, it was actively promoting the rapidly developing revolution in women’s rights, gender equality, homosexuality, and definitions of the family. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Although the amendment seemed simply to guarantee nondiscrimination for women, conservative Christians came to see it as having ominous implications in that it would advance feminist agendas. Phyllis Schlafly, a Roman Catholic, led a strenuous and ultimately successful campaign to prevent ratification of the amendment in a suffici
ent number of states. Her efforts during the mid-1970s were instrumental in forging a coalition among conservative Catholics and conservative Protestant evangelicals that continued to grow.

  Into the mid-1970s conservative Catholics were more active than conservative evangelical Protestants in organizing what would eventually become a larger political coalition. The story of the transition of the American Catholicism of the 1950s to that of the 1980s is both dramatic and complex. Broadly speaking, the Catholic community became divided between, on the one hand, the more liberal elements, which were eager to put the days of authoritarian Catholic ghettoes behind them and assimilate with the American mainstream, and, on the other hand, the more conservative Catholics, who were alarmed by mainstream cultural trends and eager to preserve a strong Catholic identity and the essentials of church teaching, especially regarding marriage and sexuality. Conservative Catholics had a relationship to the early American heritage that was very different from that of most evangelical Protestants. Early “Christian” America had often been anti-Catholic. In the 1950s, anti-Catholicism was still strong, but, simply because of the sheer numbers of Catholics, the church could command some deference. By the 1980s, conservative Catholics had an acute sense of how much that deference had slipped, especially regarding film censorship, birth control, and abortion. Catholics also had a sophisticated heritage of church teaching regarding natural law and the establishment of church teachings in societies. And, after the moderating reforms of Vatican II, these teachings could be adapted to the late twentieth-century American scene in ways that dovetailed with evangelical concerns to restore Christian influences.