Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant?

Modern evangelical culture is radically different from the Protestantism of the past.

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

You see this change in ethical outlook on life in basically any book on the topic. It’s a move away from the old Calvinist outlook and behaviors and towards modern American post-bourgeois consumerism.

In his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Calvinism’s concept of calling and election - which he distinguishes from that of Lutheranism - led to furious activity to attempt to objectively demonstrate that one was among the elect.

The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis….Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.

He describes how this manifested itself in various ways, such as in the Puritan ethics of Richard Baxter:

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with [Benjamin] Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.

The mention of Benjamin Franklin shows that this was one form in which these values were transmitted to American culture. Again, far from contemporary America, which puts a high premium on leisure and consumption over asceticism and production.

Weber’s book is actually short and readable, so is very much worth picking up.

We see the same in French writer Emmanuel Todd’s provocative book The Defeat of the West, which I wrote about earlier this year. Todd sees Protestantism as the foundation of the modern West, and describes it similarly to Weber:

Let us conclude our review of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is an ethic of work: we are not on earth to have fun, but to work and save. Here we are at the antipodes of the consumer society. Protestantism has also long been synonymous with sexual puritanism.

He sees the collapse of Protestantism as the core factor in the decline of the West, one which lies underneath many of today’s social pathologies.

The original religious matrix was slowly built between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately thickened by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. If it was the arrival at a religious zero state that made the national sentiment, the work ethic, the notion of a binding social morality, the capacity for sacrifice for the community disappear, all these things whose absence makes the West fragile in war, it becomes obvious that they will not reappear in the next five years, the time I have given the Russians to carry out their war.

He cites Ross Douthat’s assessment in condemning modern evangelicalism:

Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion teaches us that evangelicalism is a heresy, with no real connection to classical Protestantism. Calvinism and Lutheranism were strict; they demanded that man observe a moral code, economic and social for example, and it had given birth to progress. The religious revival of the 1970s, while it allowed some of its inspirers to make a lot of money, has above all carried regressive elements: a literalist reading of the Bible, a generally anti-scientific mentality and, above all, a pathological narcissism. God is no longer there to demand, but to cajole the believer and distribute bonuses, psychological or material.

I haven’t read Bad Religion, but my understanding is that Douthat may have been referring to some specific strains like the prosperity gospel here.

Nevertheless, there’s some truth here we’d be wise to pay attention to. Evangelicalism’s culture is not even contiguous with that of mainline Protestantism, much less classical Protestantism. It is very populist and dominated by charismatic pitchman type pastors. It tends to emphasize a therapeutic gospel over a strict ethic. In fact, any type of moral or behavioral code followed too seriously is likely to draw a caution for being legalistic. It’s very aligned with American consumer culture, and American culture generally. And of course it is anti-intellectual, something well-documented in such work as Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

So even if Douthat and Todd go overboard, there’s something there that represents a break with historic Protestantism.

To the extent that modern American, and evangelical, culture represents a Protestant culture of the past, it is that of Quakerism (similar to the Anabaptists) rather than Calvinism, a point made by the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell in his book Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. Baltzell notes that the different strands of Protestantism each had a different ethos:

Accordingly, the Lutheran attitude toward the world was one of resigned participation; the Anabaptist, one of withdrawal, and the Calvinist, one of activist conquest. The logic of Lutheranism bred a race of pious bourgeoisie; of Anabaptism, a band of suffering martyrs, and of Calvinism, an elite of heroes. Whereas Lutheranism eventually became culture-bound (state churches in Germany and Scandinavia and ethnic denominations in the United States), both the Anabaptist and Calvinists remained transcultural and international: the Anabaptist spirit sought the fringes and frontiers of cultural authority; the Calvinists fought to Christianize the centers of civilization.

Calvinism had been the Protestantism that most shaped the American experience, although as Baltzell noted, “Although America as a whole has been Puritan and Calvinist throughout most of its history, it has now moved—especially since the 1960s—far closer to the ideas of Quakerism.”

If you want to see how far it has moved, read historian David Hackett Fischer’s wonderful book Albion’s Seed, which looks at the origins of American regional culture in four different groups of British settlers in America. The Puritans will certainly seem alien and off putting. The only group Fischer profiles that is remotely relatable to the modern American is the Quakers.

Baltzell noted that the ideas of election and calling in Calvinism are more than simply salvation and career, but rather included the idea that people were called to positions of authority and leadership. This produced a hierarchical society in Puritan Massachusetts, but one imbued with an extraordinary culture of leadership. Virtually all of the key figures in the Revolutionary era were either from Massachusetts or Virginia, for example.

It also put a high value on education, leading to an incredible record in the production of top educational and intellectual institutions, and scientific and literary accomplishment.

As Matthew Yglesias noted just this week:

Today, the American state with the highest share of college graduates is Massachusetts. If you go back to the 1650s, Massachusetts was the only American colony that had a college. The leaders of the colony founded Harvard because “after God had carried us safely to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the city government; one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” Almost all of the early colonists were Protestant, but the southern states were home to lots of Anglicans, who were mostly comfortable relying on the home country to educate ministers. Quakers and Calvinists, on the other hand, were more motivated to found schools early.

Those eight early northeastern colleges include two of the top three on the current US News rankings, seven of the top fifteen, and eight of the top 40. And the northeast remains the best-educated part of the country today. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth as primarily places to train Congregationalist ministers, but some very specific religious ideas have had wide-ranging social and economic consequences over the course of centuries.

Massachusetts still retains some of the old Puritan habits and values, even as it has become one of the least religious states.

The Quakers were also interested in education, but mostly primary and secondary education rather than higher education. Their institutions were also private and sectarian, rather than public institutions. Massachusetts created the nation’s first public schools, whereas Pennsylvania lagged in creating public schools and in passing compulsory school attendance laws. Quakers were also more focused purely on moneymaking in contrast with the Puritans, who were successful in business but had other pursuits as well.

Contemporary evangelicalism is similar. It also tends to be skeptical of mainstream and public institutions, has developed its own sectarian schools and such. Evangelicals have been very successful in business, but mostly in prosaic industries like fast food (Chik-Fil-A) and retail (Hobby Lobby) rather than strategically important or culturally influential industries.

It’s important to note that I am talking primarily about culture here, not theology. Modern evangelicals might argue that they are theologically in continuity with the past even if their culture has changed.

It is the case that culture is a product of specific people, places, and times. It is not and never could be static. As Benjamin Mabry recently noted in these pages, just because other people have different folkways doesn’t mean they are any less authentically Christian.

Undoubtedly, Christianity in modern America will reflect modern American values and folkways in important respects. It would be similar for Christianity in China, Africa, etc.

However, when you consider that at least some of the cultural characteristics of Protestantism, and especially the Calvinism that so shaped America, were theologically inspired, then if today’s evangelicalism produces different and even opposed cultural traits, does it really understand theology in the same way?

Imagine people on an island who find a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution washed up on the shore. They decide to use those to set up their own government modeled on our constitution and laws. Would such a thing really end up being genuine American government? No. Because so much of what America is about is not in a written document. It is written in ourselves.

All is not well for American Christianity to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but given the manifest and widely publicized problems within evangelicalism, I would submit that at least as much time should go into introspection and internal reform.

This, I think, should be a time to consider our ways. Where might we be out to sea and completely wrong on important topics? We all, myself included have to be willing to consider that we might have gotten important things wrong,

The fact that today’s evangelicalism is so different from yesterday’s Protestantism should be at least an indicator that it’s off base in some key ways.

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Cover image credit: ToBeDaniel/Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0