The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  The promise that religion would fall victim to modernization "has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry," one of the "key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations," wrote political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.7 Which means, of course, that a central tenet of the social sciences over the past three hundred years has been proved spectacularly wrong. (Berger had the good sense to recant in 1997.) But a modernizing, industrial society did have an impact on faith in America. The economic panics of the late nineteenth century, the influx of immigrants, and the contradictions between scientific discoveries (say, evolution) and religious faith led to a split in the Protestant church. The division that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century was not so much between denominations; it was more about how people viewed the world. On one side was what Martin Marty has called "Private Protestantism."8 Private Protestants promoted individual salvation and promised that personal morality would be rewarded in the next life. On the other side of that great divide was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society. The latter laid the foundation for Democratic liberalism. The former provided the moral footing and rationale for Republican conservatism.

  Private Protestantism considered the consumption of alcohol a personal failing; Public Protestantism looked at drunkenness as a social ill. Private Protestants supported "blue laws" (closing places of business on Sundays); Public Protestants promoted the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Dwight Moody, a Private Protestant revivalist, witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known." Public Protestants, Marty wrote, saw the Chicago labor strife and reasoned, "either the people were to be evangelized and their needs were to be met and their rights faced, or the Kingdom of God would not come." At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, both a session on the Social Gospel (the name given to Public Protestantism) and a revival conducted by Reverend Moody were held. While the Social Gospel ministers confronted industrial life and sought human perfection through political reform, Moody defined his task differently: "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'"9

  Josiah Strong, a turn-of-the-century Congregationalist minister, described "two types of Christianity" alive in the country. The division was "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong wrote in 1913. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social." The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world.*10

  Walter Rauschenbusch was the most well-known proponent of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch pastored a church in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and from that vantage point in the new urban slum, he watched the modern industrial order rub raw against humanity. He was an optimist, believing in the "immense latent perfectibility of human nature."11 Perfection, however, required social intervention. Rauschenbusch wrote in 1908 that a "sense of equality is the basis for Christian morality." And to reach that equality, the Social Gospel theologian promoted legislation: a minimum wage, shorter workdays, better food, and cleaner air. The Social Gospel was a moral crusade against the cruelty of the industrial city. Western civilization was at a "decisive point in its development," Rauschenbusch wrote. "Either society confronted social injustice or society would fall: It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge."12

  The country—or at least a majority of its citizens—followed Rauschenbusch. In 1908, the Methodist Church adopted its Social Creed, a list of social reforms, including "equal rights and complete justice for all men," the end of sweatshops, the prohibition of child labor, the protection of workers from dangerous machinery, and the "abatement of poverty." The title of Charles M. Sheldon's 1896 novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, would become the inspiration for W.W.J.D. bumper stickers and woven bracelets sported by Evangelicals in the 1990s. But the original book was a call for Christian socialism. Ecumenicism was the organizational form of the Social Gospel. Thirty-three denominations were represented when the Federal Council of Churches was formed in 1908. The combined representation of Protestant faiths quickly adopted the Methodist Social Creed.13

  There was a period of intradenominational conflict, but the Social Gospel crowd won most of these organizational disputes. (For instance, modernist Baptists took over the denomination's theological schools and missionary boards, steering them in the direction of the Social Gospel.) The so-called Fundamentalists "lost in their efforts to gain control of any of the denominations" in the early twentieth century, Marty wrote. So the traditionalists responded by setting up institutions parallel to those dominated by practitioners of the Social Gospel.14 Left out by the mainline denominations, Private Protestant pastors established councils of Fundamentalist preachers, printing houses, and seminaries.*15 The traditionalists published their own manifesto, twelve booklets printed between 1910 and 1915 titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. These scholarly works fenced off the theological boundaries of Private Protestantism: the Virgin Birth of Christ, the inerrancy of the Bible, Christ's death on behalf of sinners, his Resurrection, and the Second Coming. Three million copies of these booklets were distributed; this was the birth of Fundamentalism.16

  But after the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, where a public school teacher was found guilty of violating the state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, the contest was over. The Fundamentalist movement was brought to an "abrupt halt" by the ridicule resulting from the trial, according to the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Christian Century magazine predicted in 1926 that Fundamentalism would be a "disappearing quantity in American religious life." There was a "noticeable drop in attendance" at the 1926 meeting of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. What followed was the "Great Exodus," Falwell's description of the mass movement of Fundamentalists out of mainline denominations and public life.17 Evangelicals didn't disappear, of course; they separated. Conservatives organized the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. They experimented with radio and television. (Between 1967 and 1972, membership in the National Religious Broadcasters increased fourfold.18) Occasionally, religious conservatives poked their heads out and showed some political force, supporting, for example, the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. But the purpose of the church was saving souls, not saving society.19

  For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the people who would become the Republican religious right were pre-political. They were either unaligned or stuck in political formations established by the Civil War or the New Deal. In 1960, 60 percent of Evangelical Protestants identified themselves as Democrats.20

  "Is God Dead?"

  In the mid-twentieth century, the strands of what we would recognize as modern conservatism were mostly unconnected. There were libertarians, business conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and conservative intellectuals. But they didn't have a party, and they didn't have each other. After World War II, there occurred what historian Sara Diamond has called a "conservative transformation." The various threads of conservative thought and faith began to intertwine, and social, religious, and ideological movements slowly braided together.21

  The groups found they had things in common. Libertarians saw as primary the conflict between the individual and the state. They distrusted a government that substituted programs for personal responsibility and freedom. Christian traditionalists also thought that the country lacked discipline and distrusted a government that substituted programs for salvation. (James Dobson sold more than 2 million copies of his 1971 book Dare to Discipline, which encouraged parents to spank children who were disrespectful. The conservative movement simply hoped t
o extend family discipline to the nation.)22 New York neoconservatives, libertarians, and southern fundamentalists distrusted "social engineering" by the state, whether it was Stalin's Five-Year Plan, Johnson's Great Society, or textbooks recommended by English teachers in West Virginia. Finally, libertarians and fundamentalists found ready allies in the business wing of the Republican Party, those pressing for smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive government.

  Historian Lisa McGirr has described the shift in conservative politics in the 1960s from stiff anticommunism to a tossed salad of libertarianism, racial homogeneity, social conservatism, and fundamentalist Christianity. She found the formation of the "New Right" a continent away from Kanawha County, in Orange County, California. The people in Orange County in the 1960s "embraced a set of beliefs whose cornerstone element was opposition to the liberal leviathan that was, in their eyes, the postwar federal government ... Many Orange County conservatives, then, drank a heady and muddled cocktail of traditional and libertarian ideas, linking a Christian view of the world with libertarian rhetoric and libertarian economics." The new conservative movement didn't grow just in the rural South or in coal country. Fundamentalist churches and right-wing politics also thrived among a "modern, young, and affluent population" in California.*23

  During the late 1960s and early 1970s, this impromptu conservative movement in Orange County steered toward the public schools.† Anaheim fought over sex education from 1968 to 1970. In 1969, Orange County parents protested and eventually shut down a sex education program in the public schools. Parents warned that "secular humanists" were worming their way into the classrooms.24 The John Birch Society in Orange County reprinted and distributed copies of the nineteenth-century McGuffey Readers. By the time the textbook fight began in West Virginia, Orange County conservatives' "concerns about 'morality' and permissiveness would become the driving force behind a full-fledged battle over schools."25

  The New Right was starting to coalesce. Religious traditionalists melded with anticommunists. Advocates of traditional morality and personal responsibility found themselves in sympathy with laissez-faire capitalists and Private Protestants. They all had a common enemy in government.26 Free markets, small government, anticommunism, and traditional values, Martin Marty wrote, were all deemed by Private Protestants to be part of "the mission of Christ to the world."27 The "enemy of my enemy" connections could be bizarre. Intellectual conservatives and religious conservatives, for example, found common cause in their distrust of international law and the United Nations. The hardheaded neoconservatives who emerged from New York University thought that the UN was a "charade kept alive by liberal piety about international cooperation and world peace."28 Similarly, in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series of "end of time" novels, the Antichrist takes power in the world by first gaining control of the UN. Nicolae Carpathia (the Antichrist) becomes secretary-general of the UN, promoting disarmament and "global community."29 (In the early 1960s, the Magnolia School District in Orange County banned the UN as an "unfit" topic for the schools.30) Intellectuals who opposed the supremacy of international law would gradually join those who had millennialist fears of world government—and fundamentalist Christians living in West Virginia coal camps would eventually find common ground with neoconservative urban Jews and suburban Californians.

  The Social Gospel, meanwhile, became the equivalent of a state religion, its policies enacted by Progressives, New Dealers, and purveyors of the New Frontier and Great Society.31 Public Protestantism dominated most of the mainline churches, denominations that all grew at a steady clip through the 1950s. There was a surge of interest in ecumenicism. Time magazine placed Eugene Carson Blake on its cover after he gave a sermon in 1960 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco proposing to merge four major Protestant denominations. (Blake was later named the head of the World Council of Churches.) Mainline denominations were prominent in the early civil rights movement. Blake was arrested along with other religious leaders when they tried to integrate a Baltimore amusement park on July 4, 1963.32 The National Council of Churches (formerly the Federal Council of Churches) called for a "mass meeting of this country's religious leaders to demonstrate their concern over racial tensions in Selma" in 1965.33

  There was talk of a "new reformation" in the mid-1960s, and it was a religious movement designed by Public Protestants. The future lay with the "servant church," announced a Time cover story in 1964.34 Theologians found in the Bible ample teachings that Christianity was a life in service, that the "purpose of the church is mission," not worship or revival.35 Time reported that "modern church thinkers" questioned the need for an organized church at all, believing that "God may well be more apparent in a purely nonreligious organization or movement—such as the civil rights revolution or the fight against poverty and hunger in the world—than in the actions of the churches."36

  In May 1966, Time asked what was a very reasonable question in a country dominated—or so it seemed—by Public Protestantism. In large red letters against a pitch-black background, the magazine invited Americans to consider "Is God Dead?"37

  "Even Hillbillies Have Constitutional Rights"

  Kanawha County was contemplating new textbooks in the spring of 1974 because it had been ordered to. The West Virginia Board of Education had passed a resolution directing local districts to adopt books that "accurately portray minority and ethnic group contributions" to American history and culture.38 The Kanawha County school superintendent recommended 325 books and then put the volumes on shelves in the county's main public library. The board didn't comment on the books; the local press didn't report that new books were on the way. For nearly a month in March and April, the books sat and few people bothered to crack a cover. In mid-April, however, Kanawha County school board member Alice Moore—"Sweet Alice," as she would come to be known—piped up.

  Moore was the wife of a fundamentalist preacher in St. Albans, West Virginia. She had run for a seat on the Kanawha County school board in 1970, beating an incumbent in a campaign that was dominated by debate about the propriety of including sex education as a classroom subject. In 1969, the school board had adopted a sex education curriculum recommended by the state and written under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. In good Social Gospel style, the school board announced that the "public school system should assume responsibility for instruction in any important area of community or family living which is not being adequately assumed by home or other agency or institution."39

  Moore disagreed. She considered sex education a descent into moral relativism, a "denial of absolutes." Moore argued that the classes represented "the humanistic approach of reasoning out right and wrong on the basis of circumstances," which was "a denial of God." And to Moore, "God's law is absolute!" Her opponent, Dr. Carl Tully, didn't curl up in his confrontation with Sweet Alice. He charged that the John Birch Society supported Moore's campaign. ("Lies Inspired by Birchers Hit Campaign, Tully Says," blared one headline in the Charleston Gazette.) Moore and her supporters wouldn't be happy simply to scrub the schools clean of sex education, Tully warned; they intended to "gain control of the school board and in turn dictate what textbooks will be used, what books to have in the library, and what subjects can be taught and who will teach them."40 Rumor spread around Kanawha County that Texas oilman H. L. Hunt had given $100,000 to Moore's 1970 school board campaign. Moore denied it. She also denied a connection with any "Birchers." Moore obviously didn't need much outside help. A week before the election, she appeared on television holding two Bibles she claimed a janitor had retrieved from a school incinerator. "And they [Tully's supporters] have the nerve to call me a book burner," Moore said, holding the crispy sacred texts, fresh from the fiery furnace.41 Moore defeated Tully in May 1970, and sex education classes were soon banished from Kanawha County schools.42

  Moore's initial questions about the 1974 books concerned the use of an African American dialect in some of the language arts texts. "My main objection is that they simply
attack traditional philosophy of good grammar and English," Moore said at a May meeting. A week later, Moore's objections were more strenuous. She told the board she represented "a wide constituency of people who don't want this trash." The books presented a view of America from the black perspective, she argued, but they didn't convey the point of view of middle-class whites. "I'm not asking for something anti-black, but we have got to have something from both sides," Moore said. "I want to see something patriotic in those books."43

  In the summer of 1974, Marvin Horan was hauling rock used to construct the interstate highway running through Charleston. One of the road job superintendents gave the minister a pamphlet and asked him to read it. Horan said that he glanced at the pamphlet and saw that it was about books in the county schools, "and then I forgot about it." But in August, Horan came home one evening to find a crowd gathered at his neighborhood church, the Point Lick Gospel Tabernacle. His wife told him that the group was examining a set of textbooks, and she suggested that they take a look, too. Alice Moore was there. So were the books. The crowd grew, overflowing the building, so Horan recommended that the group move to a nearby park. Horan mounted the stage. He said a prayer to open the meeting. "And I never did get off that stage because people were insistent that I speak for them," Horan said. "It just happened. Nothing was preplanned. There were no meetings. Nobody talked it over and said this was the way to do it and this would be our approach. None of that was done. It all happened just instantly."