The news that one of our most invaluable quarterlies, The Public Interest, will cease publication has spurred me to browse through back issues. Last night I reread “The Unraveling of Christianity in America” by Clifford Orwin, which appeared in the Spring 2004 issue. As his title suggests, the author has little optimism about either of the two great camps, “mainline” and “evangelical” into which he divides American Christians. On the Christian Left,
Since the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the Social Gospel, the typical response of the mainline churches to the challenge of secularism has been to capitulate to it. Every one of these churches has been advancing (or retreating) from Christian orthodoxy down the road of secular progressivism. They have not done so without hesitation and confusion, which have sometimes brought them to the brink of schism. Nonetheless, within each of these churches, certainly at the national level, progressivism has eventually prevailed across theboard. . . .
Similarly, within the pastoral realm, the discourse of psychotherapy and personal fulfillment appears to have established itself as thoroughly in the mainline churches as in the lay world. Those who are looking for something different in church than is on offer outside it are increasingly less likely to find it there.
The evangelicals have avoided surrender to the dominant secular culture, forming a sort of counterculture. Unfortunately, they lack many of the qualities needed to prevail in the “culture wars”:
Perhaps most confusingly, neither are evangelicals themselves immune to the inroads of the mainline from which they seek to distinguish themselves. James Davison Hunter’s studies of evangelical divinity students show a marked tendency toward regression to the mean of Protestant religious opinion in America. And then there is the vogue for “Christian counseling,” a growth industry if ever there was one. Himmelfarb reports that “evangelicals are divided between those practicing a ‘classical’ spirituality derived from earlier Protestant and Puritan traditions, and those partial to a ‘postmodern’ or ‘existential’ spirituality, which is therapeutic andindividualist.” . . .
No counterculture fully realizes its aspiration to separate itself from the broader culture. I will note, however, one respect in which the evangelicals have failed not just themselves but the rest of us. This is the barrenness of their intellectual life. In many months spent over many years visiting in a pious household, I‘ve not come upon a single evangelical book that rose above mediocrity. On a recent lecturing trip to the South, I met a young evangelical intellectual who had just defected to Catholicism. First among his reasons was the intellectual wealth of his new, much older faith in contrast with the poverty of his former, much younger one. He disclosed that others of his circle were contemplating the same move for the same reason. It would be unfair to demand of evangelicalism that it produce a St. Thomas Aquinas or Pascal any time soon. Still, it had better develop some avenue of intellectual response to its own most thoughtful young people.
There is a great deal of truth to these indictments, though generalizing from the library of a single “pious household” and the dissatisfaction of one intellectual may be rash. Christianity is not, however, the only faith that is unraveling. Secular liberalism has, in Dr. Orwin’s view, lost its intellectual bearings in a more fundamental way:
In posing the question between humanism and theism as one of reason versus revelation, one risks being branded as passé in the most advanced secularist circles. This is not because the reigning theorists there will crow that reason has triumphed, but because they take it for granted that its pretensions have been decisively refuted. The earlier John Rawls, he of the Theory of Justice (1972), might have seemed to argue that secularist liberalism was the dictate of universal reason. This invested his enterprise with weight, as if he really was participating in the grand style of political philosophy. Later, however, he crumbled on this point, conceding that such liberalism was merely “our” perspective, no more grounded in the truth about things than any previous moral horizon. He thus made his peace with postmodernism.
Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist, candidly admits that at the end of the day liberalism is a matter of faith, not reason. Indeed, he goes further than this: He concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” he describes secularist liberals like himself as “freeloading atheists.” They continue to rely on the Judaeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern.
Rationalism that rejects reason is nothing but a refined superstition, as its adherents more or less acknowledge:
This twofold admission—that liberalism is merely a faith that remains dependent on an earlier faith, the authority of which it has rejected—should not, claims Rorty, dismay liberals in the least. No rational or coherent alternative to liberalism exists; all “foundational narratives,” upon inspection, will prove equally arbitrary and groundless. Thus our allegiance to liberalism progresses from the naive to the “ironic,” but the allegiance itself survives this transition unscathed. Through his supposed practice of unprecedented candor, Rorty achieves unheard of feats of having his cake and eating it too. Liberalism of this postmodernist sort pillages the Biblical tradition for everything up to and including its own moral core, while still priding itself on remaining a faith of the atheistic variety.
The other element in the American spiritual mix that Dr. Orwin describes is the “bourgeois bohemians” (David Brooks’ famous Bobos), who –
yearn for Something Higher, Shared, and Meaningful. Unfortunately, this vague impulse is attended by neither commitment nor belief. A Bobo never limits his options, so while he may dabble in a range of sacred practices (taking “helpings from the spiritual buffet table,” as Brooks puts it), he can never dedicate himself to any. Brooks cites the real life example of a “26-year-old disabilities counselor, the daughter of a Methodist minister, who describes herself as a ‘Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.’”
The conclusion that I draw from this taxonomy of American spiritual culture is that Christian pessimism is unwarranted. The enemies of the Faith have effectively yielded the intellectual background and fallen back on the fortress of emotion and impulse, where “moral laxity is a way of life, having mysteriously emerged as the fundamental principle of morality itself. Not only do they treat the sinner with charity, but they’ve become curiously indifferent to the sin.”
Bringing a message of repentance to those who say they have no sin can be frustrating, and developing ways to pierce the armor of indifference is a daunting challenge. Nonetheless, though anti-Christian sentiment may sometimes grow fierce, Christianity has, for the first time since the Middle Ages, an overwhelming advantage in the struggle for men’s minds.
Addendum: The last part of the essay has the air of having been tacked on in order to incorporate recent events. It takes a peculiar turn, arguing that President Bush’s support of democracy to the Islamic world puts him on the secular side of the cultural divide, because it accepts the premise that Christianity is not essential to democracy.
The Americanproject . . . . both implies and demands the abandonment of the link on which [Abraham Lincoln] so relied between liberal Christianity and liberal democracy. For it is crucial to our victory in the forum of world opinion (including, crucially, Muslim opinion) that we not couch our global project as akin to Christianity in anyway. . . .
By its deeds, not merely its words, this administration has exceeded all previous ones in rejecting the dependence of democracy on Christianity. It has adopted the premise that just as Confucianism, historically anything but liberal or democratic, has posed no insuperable obstacle to the democratization of East Asia, so Islam will pose none to that of the Middle East.
Dr. Orwin’s reasoning puzzles me. Is he saying that the proper Christian position is that non-Christian peoples ought to be left under the sway of tyrants until and unless they come to Jesus? Christians are aware the democratic idea got its start in ancient Greece, five centuries before Our Lord’s Incarnation. We may contend that belief in Christ has consequences that make democracy and liberty more likely to flourish, but political felicity is not a parochial blessing that we refuse to share with infidels.
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