5. Luce, “A Speculation About 1980,” 195, 198–199 (emphasis in original). Luce later discovered Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who also enunciated ideas about the evolving collaboration between people and God; Luce even used the pages of Life in 1964 to promote the complex views of the scientist-theologian to the general public. See Jessup, ed., Ideas of Henry Luce, 324–335.
6. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964), xxv.
7. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960).
8. See William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
9. Martin Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 39, 74.
10. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
11. Blake is quoted in Marty, New Shape, 77.
12. Marty, New Shape, 10, 31–44, 77, 79, 83, 110.
13. Morton White, “Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics” (1956), in Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning: A Collection of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 117–118.
14. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), 138.
15. Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); White, “Original Sin, 117–118. Finstuen makes the point that the doctrine of original sin enjoyed considerable popularity.
16. Niebuhr, Irony, 110, 7, 1–16.
17. Ibid., 80. Niebuhr also quoted psychologist Gordon Allport as using a similar analogy (p. 81n). Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), xiii, where he quotes Dewey. In discussing Niebuhr’s critique of Dewey in Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), Ronald H. Stone cites Dewey as recognizing, by 1936 at least, that the obstacles to creating a scientifically based society could be insuperable (p. 230; cf. 210–214).
18. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Ideology and the Scientific Method” (1953), in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert McAfee Brown, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 210, 215.
19. Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 175, quoted in Ronald H. Stone, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 207–208. On Niebuhr’s relationship to pragmatism and to James and Dewey, see Stone, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, 205–215, and Martin Halliwell, The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 19–78.
20. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Coherence, Incoherence, and Christian Faith” (1951), in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert McAfee Brown, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 232–233. As usual, Niebuhr saw his view regarding faith and reason as standing between two extremes: Roman Catholic neo-Thomism, which put too much trust in reason, and the radical neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, which put no trust at all in natural human wisdom or natural theology. Ibid., 226–231.
21. Morton White himself made this point in offering a scathing attack on Protestant attempts to retain their privilege in higher education. All of these attempts, he said, tried “to avoid identifying religion with any claim to knowledge that might have to run the gauntlet of scientific test.” Morton White, “Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning” (1954), in Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 89.
22. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Pious and Secular America” (1957), in Pious and Secular America (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 1, 2, 4, 13.
23. David A. Hollinger provides some insightful reflections on this point in “Epilogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and Protestant Liberalism,” in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 211–225.
24. The term is borrowed from Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
Chapter Six: Sequel: Consensus Becomes a Fighting Word
1. The terminology can sometimes be confusing. Much of the conservative side of American Protestantism has been shaped by the revivalist tradition. Emphasizing the authority of the Bible, and the necessity of personal conversion made possible by the redemptive work of Christ on the cross, this revivalist tradition was also known as “evangelical.” In the early twentieth century, in reaction to modernism in theology and changes in cultural mores, many of these evangelical revivalists were involved in the “fundamentalist” movement, which was characterized by particularly militant opposition to those trends. By the 1950s, some of the heirs to fundamentalism were adopting a somewhat more moderate tone and calling themselves “neo-evangelical” or just “evangelical.” Billy Graham, who began his career as a fundamentalist, became associated with this new evangelicalism. The revivalist heritage, or evangelicalism, includes many separate denominations and submovements, so it is sometimes necessary to use a variety of these terms to cover all who are involved. For a more complete analysis, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1980]), and especially the chart regarding terminology, 234–235.
2. For examples, see the bibliographies offered at the website of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at www .wheaton.edu/isae.
3. Tim LaHaye, The Spirit-Controlled Temperament (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1966); James C. Dobson, Dare to Discipline (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970). Randall J. Stephen and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 97–138, provides a helpful introduction, on which I am drawing here. On the background of evangelical alternative psychologies I am indebted to Daniel DuBois Gottwig, “Before the Culture Wars: Conservative Protestants and the Family, 1920–1980,” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2011.
4. Alan Ehrenhalt points this out in The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 21. Ehrenhalt also explains that in fact the sense of community was more widespread in America in the 1950s than it was in later decades.
5. For a biography of Francis Schaeffer, see Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). For more information about Francis Schaeffer’s son Frank, see Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007); on the making of the films, I drew from p. 266 of this work. The book versions were Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976), and Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Exposing Our Rapid Yet Subtle Loss of Human Rights (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1979).
6. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (1976), in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 226. Schaeffer had just cited both Daniel Bell and economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the increasing role of elites in modern technological society (pp. 223–224). Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind: A Subtle Warfare (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1980).
7. Falwell is quoted in Ronald A. Wells, “Schaeffer in America,” in Ronald W. Ruegsegger, ed., Reflections on Francis Schaeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1980), 234. The quotations by Schaeffer are in Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Ma
nifesto (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1981), 424, 482. Schaeffer often used the term “humanism” to refer to “secular humanism,” a human-centered philosophy based on the belief in an impersonal, chance universe.
8. Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984), in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 416n. Schaeffer said there was never a “golden age” and allowed that there had been flaws at the time of consensus, including racism and earlier slavery, the wrong use of wealth, and identification of America as God’s “chosen nation” (pp. 416–417). Darren Dochuk, in From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plainfolk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), provides an insightful account of the sense of longing for more Christian-friendly times and places during this era, especially among those who had migrated to Southern California. The mid-1930s was when, according to Schaeffer, his former denomination, the mainline northern Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), had become apostate, so that he believed it necessary to separate from that prestigious institution. He was part of the fundamentalist Bible Presbyterian Church, led by Carl McIntire, from 1937 to 1956. Thus Schaeffer usually dated the American turning point as in the 1930s.
9. Francis A. Schaeffer, “Special Note to Christians,” in How Should We Then Live? (1976), in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 255 (emphasis in original).
10. Francis A. Schaeffer, “Foreword,” in John W. Whitehead, The Second American Revolution (Elgin, IL: David C. Cook, 1982).
11. Quite a few authors have suggested that the religious right is more pervasively shaped by a movement, often called “Reconstructionism,” dedicated to reinstituting “theonomy,” or Old Testament law. For example, see Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (New York: Viking, 2006). Sometimes Francis Schaeffer is represented as promoting such views because he borrowed some historical analysis from Reconstructionist founder Rousas J. Rushdoony. However, according to Frank Schaeffer, Sex, Mom, and God (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 2011), 110, Francis Schaeffer often referred to Rushdoony’s full-blown Reconstructionist scheme as “insanity.” See also Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America, 193–194. Accusations that Reconstructionism is widespread in the movement fail to take into account the extent to which most conservative evangelicals are committed to the American political heritage.
12. David Barton, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012). The book’s many inaccuracies were exposed by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter in Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President (Grove City, PA: Salem Grove Press, 2012).
13. I am not saying, of course, that no one in the Protestant religious right addressed such issues, only that the popular calls for a return to a “Christian America” contributed to a characteristic neglect of that issue. See Conclusion, note 8.
Conclusion: Toward a More Inclusive Pluralism
1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Walter Lippmann: The Intellectual v. Politics,” in Walter Lippmann and His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1959), 222; David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]), 37.
2. The term “the noble dream” is from Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
4. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995 [1955]), 201.
5. I provide much fuller argumentation for these views regarding higher education in my book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
6. For mainstream America’s failure to address religious diversity, see David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), which provides a valuable overview and interpretation of these issues.
7. A good indication of their inattention to religion is found in Daniel Roger’s The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). The subject of how to deal with religious diversity arose only indirectly in this impressively comprehensive recounting of mainstream intellectual trends of the late twentieth century.
8. Since the 1980s, a good bit of the recent thought on the topic of religious and cultural diversity has come from Roman Catholic thinkers. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, offers important perspectives on intellectual pluralism in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Richard John Neuhaus, a convert from Lutheranism in 1990, wrote much on the topic, most famously, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986). He also provided a neoconservative forum for discussing such subjects in his intellectual journal, First Things, founded in 1990.
Protestant conservatives as well as Catholics have made recent contributions to the discussion. A nice sampling is found in Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay, eds., Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). The necessities of practical politics have also forced attention to the issue. E. J. Dionne Jr. remarks in the Foreword to that work that the goal expressed by political strategist Ralph Reed, of simply asking for “a place at the table,” “represents a true triumph of religious pluralism” (p. xiv).
For an account of how nuanced views of Christians on such topics are eclipsed by simplistic populist views, see Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
9. For understanding Kuyper in his own time, see the excellent biography by James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013).
10. Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, trans. J. Hendrik De Vries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980 [1898]), 150–159.
11. Ibid. Cf. “Common Grace in Science” (1901), in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, James D. Bratt, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 441–460.
12. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology.
13. For another introduction to the views I am endorsing here, see James W. Skillen, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civil Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994). For a briefer summary, see Corwin Smidt, “The Principled Pluralist Perspective,” in Church, State and Public Justice: Five Views, P. C. Kemeny, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 127–153. The Center for Public Justice website provides an extensive bibliography on the subject at www.cp justice.org/content/christianity-politics-bibliography. Regarding the Court’s recommendations for objective study of religion in Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), see Warren A. Nord’s discussion of such opinions and of the problem of the biases of such “neutrality” in Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 236–261.
14. For the background of the epistemological differences between the American conservative Protestant commonsense heritage and Kuyper’s outlook, see “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science” in George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 122–152. The creation science movement is the best example of conservative Protestant claims that objective scientific study will support traditional interpretations of the Bible.
15. On “mediating institutions,” cf. Richard J. Mouw, Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2011), 42–44.
16. For example, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Jacobsen,
eds., The American University in a Postsecular Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
17. See, for instance, John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen Mahoney, “Religion and Knowledge in the Post-Secular Academy,” in The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, Philip S. Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 215–248.
18. See David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in and Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). For a nice sampling of the variety of views that have been shaping evangelical outlooks, see P. C. Kemeny, ed., Church, State and Public Justice: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007).
Index
Abortion, opposition to, 136, 138, 139, 141
Academics, 4, 16, 159, 176
Adams, John, xxi
Adams, John Quincy, 19
Adler, Mortimer, 47
Advertising, 36, 87, 93
African Americans, 63, 64, 67, 152, 174
Allport, Gordon, 40
American Century, xxxii, 104
American enlightenment, xv, xx, 127, 149, 168, 172
cultural arrangements of, xxiv–xxv
importance
of, xxii–xxiii
inadequacies of, 175
American Revolution, xxxiii, 41, 121, 125, 142, 146
Anti-Catholicism, 52, 107, 138, 159, 161
Anti-Communism, 7, 115
Anti-intellectualism, xxv, 16, 17, 18–19, 21, 62, 177
Anticommunism, xxv, xxxiii, 140
Arendt, Hannah, 11, 12, 15, 23
Arts, 4, 7, 166
Atomic Energy Commission, 102
Augustinian Christians, xxviii, 165, 166, 170
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment Page 20
