The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (18 page)

Francis Schaeffer, of course, does not represent the whole of the religious right—he had, for instance, little connection with the important conservative Catholic part of the movement—but his outlook serves to illustrate some significant dimensions of the fundamentalistic evangelical wing of that movement. Viewed in relation to the mainstream American outlooks of
the 1950s, one feature of the movement was its strong reaction
against pragmatic liberalism, which it now understood in Schaeffer's framework as part of the “secular humanism” that had led to the moral relativism evident in America since the late 1960s. Schaeffer added the motif, reminiscent of Erich Fromm, that if a society lost its moral moorings, totalitarianism would fill the vacuum. So pragmatic liberalism, which to its proponents in the 1950s seemed the best defense against ideological extremes, now could be seen as opening the door to totalitarianism. Even if Communists were rare on the home front in the 1980s, secular humanists were everywhere, and only a stance of cultural warfare could stop their destruction of American liberties. Schaeffer repeatedly called for reestablishing a Christian consensus, but ironically, “consensus” had become a fighting word. He depicted the cultural crises in the most urgent terms as he issued calls to arms. So he wrote in 1982 with typical hyperbole in a foreword to his associate John Whitehead's
The Second American Revolution
, “If there is still an entity known as ‘the Christian church' by the end of the century, operating with any semblance of liberty . . . it will probably have John Whitehead and his book to thank.” The book, he went on, “lays the foundation and framework for fighting the tyrannical, secularist, humanistic power.” Like the early American patriots, Christians would have to be ready to fight for their liberties. Restoring America's “Christian base” would require enlisting in America's culture wars.
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Granting that there were and are many highly significant issues involved in these political concerns that deserve consideration on their merits, it is also important to recognize that once the matters are framed in terms of warfare and simple
either-or choices it becomes virtually impossible to negotiate those issues in a pluralistic society. That is especially the case when the issues are framed in terms of returning America to its Christian roots, as is standard fare in the outlooks of the fundamentalist-evangelical political right. Partly the problem is rhetorical. Typically, evangelicals speak of their views as shaped by “the Bible alone.” The more fundamentalistic or militant they are, the more they divide reality into simple dichotomies, such as “Christian” and “non-Christian.” That leaves little room for making other distinctions. So when they talk about reinstituting America's Christian basis, it sounds as though they are proposing a return to something like the early New England Puritan order of the 1600s, when the government was based on explicitly biblical principles, and discrimination against non-Christians was taken for granted.

Even though the rhetoric sounds authoritarian, as though the nation would be redefined as exclusively Christian and its law would be based on the Bible, the vast majority of fundamentalists and evangelicals of the religious right were—and are—in fact committed to religious liberty. Many are Baptists, whose forebears were in the forefront of the campaign for religious freedom at the time of the American Revolution. More broadly, despite their exclusive-sounding “Christian” rhetoric, they are also deeply committed to the principles embodied in the nation's founding documents. They are heirs to the synthesis of Protestant and more secular principles that were characteristic of what is here being called the American enlightenment.
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Once again, they need to be understood as deeply ambivalent toward the American heritage. On the one
hand, they often speak as prophetic outsiders proclaiming that the nation is under judgment for its many failings. On the other hand, they also speak as the true insiders who are preserving an eighteenth-century national heritage that was essentially “Christian.”

Fundamentalists and evangelicals of the religious right often have difficulty recognizing their own mix of biblical and more secular principles because they typically use only two categories in their analyses: Christian and non-Christian. That limitation can be best illustrated in the outpouring of books in recent decades claiming to prove that the founding fathers were Christians. In their own ministries, the authors of these books insist that only the “born again” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet when it comes to the nation's founders, most of whom were not orthodox evangelical Christians, these very conservative biblicists end up endorsing a remarkably broad definition of “Christian.” Perhaps the most telling of the many examples that could be cited is that in 2012, David Barton, the most popular and influential writer on America's Christian
origins, published a book celebrating Thomas Jefferson's faith.
The fact of the matter is that Jefferson was openly and sometimes militantly anti-orthodox and anti-evangelical. During the
election of 1800, many orthodox Protestants strongly opposed him for his unconventional religious views. Barton's zeal to claim Jefferson as a Christian believer led to so many distortions that, when these were documented, his publisher, Thomas Nelson, ceased publication.
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Francis Schaeffer, who recognized the unorthodoxy of most of the founders, tried to solve the problem by attributing
their views regarding rights and freedom to the Reformation. In fact, though, the early Protestant governments of the Reformation period were not concerned about protecting liberties in the same way that the founders later were in the American republic. Those ideals developed in the British enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did have a discernibly Protestant lineage, such as in concerns about the sanctity of conscience, but the founders' ideals were also shaped by factors beyond the Protestant principle of “the Bible alone.” These influences included classical political principles, classical and Christian natural-law traditions, modern scientific empiricism, the growing trust in the authority of common rationality, emerging ideals that individuals should be self-determining, and practical self-interested concern regarding political and economic freedoms. It is one thing to say that some versions of the resulting mix were “Christian,” in the sense of being compatible with biblical or church teachings. Yet, historically speaking, the actual mix was far from being simply Christian or Protestant, even if it included significant Christian elements.

The complex heritage of the evangelical religious right, as shaped, among other things, both by biblicist born-again revivalism and broader principles developed during the eighteenth
-century American enlightenment, helps to explain some of its paradoxes, apparent contradictions, and blind spots. The biblicist side is often absolutist and militant, invoking stark choices between serving the Lord of Hosts or the Baal of secular humanism. The enlightenment heritage allows militantly conservative fundamentalists to in fact affiliate
with the wide coalition represented in the Republican Party and to participate in the give-and-take of practical politics, despite all the compromises that inevitably requires. In the strict biblicist view, the American nation can be seen as having forfeited any claim to God's blessings and as being under judgment for its open sins, so that the only hope is to trust in Jesus to return to set things right. But the enlightenment heritage tells the evangelical religious right that the American principles of civil freedom, self-determination, and free enterprise are the best there are, and that evangelicals can therefore unreservedly embrace the American civil religion and condemn anyone who questions that America has a special place in God's plan. The strictly biblicist heritage fosters a rhetoric that sounds theocratic and culturally imperialist, and in which a Christian consensus would seem to allow little room for secularists or their rights. The enlightenment heritage means that the leading motif in their politics is the necessity of protecting freedoms, especially the personal and economic freedoms of the classically liberal tradition. So when members of the evangelical religious right speaks about returning to a “Christian” America, they may sound as though they would return to days of the early Puritans; yet, practically speaking, the ideal they are invoking is tempered by the American enlightenment and is reminiscent of the days of the informal Protestant establishment, when Christianity was respected, but most of the culture operated on more secular terms.

Even though the populist religious right is marked by paradoxical features, it should also be given credit for drawing attention to important questions about the role of religion in
American public life. After the decline of the mainline Protestant establishment, the society was left with no real provision as to how religious viewpoints would be represented in the public sphere, such as in politics or education. At the same time, an immense revolution in mores had been accelerated by the upheavals of the late 1960s. Many prevailing moral standards promoted in popular culture, in commercial culture, by the government, and in public education were at odds with the traditional religious teachings not only of conservative Protestants but also of many of the other traditionalist religious groups across the country. An important question was how such conservative religious viewpoints, which were largely minority viewpoints, might be represented and protected in the public domain. Advocates of the religious right were rightly concerned to guard their own freedoms of religious expression and action. Yet they seldom had a theory of how to do the same unto others as they would have done unto themselves—that is, they rarely spoke of how to provide equal protection
for religious and secular viewpoints with which they did not
agree.
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CONCLUSION

Toward a More Inclusive Pluralism

Popular fundamentalist and conservative
evangelical
leaders who speak of returning to a Christian America are not alone in their failure to address questions of how to deal with both religious and secular diversity in public life. The mainstream secular culture of the past half-century, despite its concerns for justice regarding other sorts of diversity (such as racial, ethnic, or sexual diversity), has not yet effectively addressed the difficult question of religious diversity. One way to understand that neglect is as an inheritance of the way that the mainstream liberal-moderate secular and religious culture dealt with such matters in the 1950s. An account of the characteristic midcentury outlooks and their legacy can help us today in thinking about alternative approaches for the future.

Despite the prestige
of mainline Protestantism in the 1950s, and despite all the public expressions of a broad piety, some of the most prominent and pervasive ideals of the
mainstream culture were in deep conflict with the traditionalist sorts of religious faith held by many Americans. To return to a theme mentioned before in other contexts: one of the major implications of the midcentury consensus critiques of conformity and affirmations of scientific outlooks and individual autonomy was that they seemed to promise a new moral order that would help to free individuals from traditional communities and moral strictures. Much of the religious revival was fostered in a myriad of traditionally religious communities—Catholic, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, holiness, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, African American, Midwest Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and many more. Yet the message that one would most often hear from the cultural mainstream—as in the national media, public education, and academia—was that one would be better off as an individual liberated from such community constraints. Individual self-development and self-fulfillment should be one's overriding goals.

That often subtle message—that it was better to trust yourself than to follow subcommunities or their traditions—was symptomatic of the way that midcentury mainstream consensus-minded
culture most often dealt with diversity and pluralism. A chorus of voices, including the more progressive mainline Protestant leadership, affirmed a flexible, inclusive pluralism as one of the great virtues of mainstream American life. At midcentury, American society still had a long way to go before it was truly inclusive, but the ideal was at least in place that openness and tolerance were essential to a healthy, thriving society. To be truly “pluralistic” meant to be open-minded
rather than sectarian and dogmatic. That was especially the message of the more secular liberal thinkers. When, for instance, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Walter Lippmann's advocacy of a return to natural law, it was on the grounds that the pundit was forgetting “the reality of pluralism.” Intellectually, to be pluralistic meant that one should be empirical and pragmatic, following the evidence wherever it led, rather than being guided by preconceptions. When David Riesman, for instance, wrote of
The Lonely Crowd
in his 1961 preface that it
“
was one of a number of books which in recent years have eschewed dogmatism and fanaticism and preferred openness, pluralism, and empiricism,” he was simply summarizing the consensus liberal ideals of the day. These were ideals held not only by scholars; they were also becoming widely prevalent in business, politics, the media, and everyday life.
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An important feature of this outlook was that it took for granted a progressive and cumulative model of truth. It assumed that, ideally, the human race progressed by accumulating new insights and discoveries that proved valuable for collective human flourishing. Because impositions of irrational ideologies or dogmas could inhibit or even destroy this growth, a society needed to cultivate the qualities of being empirical, open-minded, and inclusive. Disinterested scientific methodology provided one valuable model, and accumulated scientific knowledge was the surest way to weed out folk beliefs and other nonsense. Although this version of inclusive pluralism allowed room for considerable varieties of experiences and outlooks, such as religious or imaginative ones, that went beyond what science might teach, it also took for
granted that educated people should test their beliefs against shared, accumulated, scientifically based knowledge. Such empirically tested beliefs and practices would provide the best hope for building consensus and promoting collective intellectual and social progress. Though people would inevitably disagree on particulars, they would have a shared foundation for agreement as to basics. That had been “the noble dream” of progressive-minded people since the eighteenth century. Even if the philosophical foundations for such hopes were admittedly more flexible, or perhaps more shaky, than in the days of enlightenment confidence, the assumptions regarding shared, scientifically tested outlooks still held out hope for social progress.
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Thomas Kuhn, a Berkeley historian of science, would in 1962 publish his groundbreaking book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, which would help to undermine the remaining foundations for these progressive cumulative views of truth. In the context of the radical pluralism of the later 1960s, Kuhn's book would emerge as one of the most influential American texts of the twentieth century. Kuhn argued that even natural science itself was not a cumulative enterprise built on a foundation of objective starting points. Instead, it was shaped by “paradigms,” or fundamental assumptions about reality. These paradigms could undergo revolutionary changes, such as in the Copernican revolution, when scientists replaced the assumption that earth was a fixed place with the model that everything was in motion. Such paradigm shifts made the seemingly objective science of one era incommensurable with the seemingly objective science of the next era. Eventually, the
term “paradigm shift” would become commonplace in American thought, and the idea of objective social authority based on scientific models would be widely questioned. But in the 1950s, almost everyone was working within the old paradigm, in which it was assumed that natural scientific methodologies did provide more or less objective foundations so far as they went and hence could provide essential common components in building cultural consensus.
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So the idea of progress
was still alive at midcentury. Most commentators took for granted that, generally speaking, the best ideas were recent inventions. Faith in progress had become somewhat chastened since World War I, but the assumption that newer, superior ideas were steadily replacing older, inferior ones—C. S. Lewis at the time called it “chronological snobbery”—still was characteristic of the era. Such assumptions, even if sometimes tempered, were particularly strong regarding views that purported to have the authority of science on their side. That included fields such as psychology and sociology that offered the latest insights on human nature and behavior. It was not uncommon to speak as though people should bring their views up to date with the latest scientifically based findings in such areas, much as they might need to keep up with the latest technology. Even though the sciences often led to disagreements, and even though one had to be pluralistic in the sense of allowing for differences among various modern schools of thought, empirically tested views could provide the basis for an evolving consensus of opinion among right-thinking people.
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The most striking example of such assumptions of progress and normativity was the assumption that parochial traditional religious views would eventually die out as civilization and education advanced. Scholars typically took for granted “the secularization thesis,” which said that as modernity advanced, traditional religions would decline. Ethnoreligious communities and Bible-belt religion were assumed to be on the way out. The frenzied activities of groups such as Pentecostals and fundamentalists, even if they attracted large audiences, could
be viewed as the last flaming of a dying culture. Many factors
—
such as industrialization, urbanization, mobility, and new technologies—were contributing, ushering in an essentially secular age. Amid these other forces, modern scientific outlooks could help people become autonomous individuals. People were taught that they should adopt a new, scientifically informed ethic of constructive self-realization and self-determination as they freed themselves from the restraints of their parochial origins
.

Such assumptions, together with accompanying ideals of inclusive pluralism shaping a progressive consensus, left mainstream American culture with little concern for incorporating real religious diversity into its public life. If traditional religious voices were backward and dying out, there was no need to develop a rationale for incorporating them into mainstream discussions in the sophisticated media or academia. Efforts to cultivate and preserve a place for religion in public life concentrated instead largely on religious views that were themselves up-to-date and progressive, such as those of liberal Protestantism.

By the 1980s, mainline Protestant voices, although still present, had lost much of the prestige they had enjoyed at midcentury. In addition, the symbolic privileges of broadly Protestant Christianity had been reduced, as they were in, most famously, the Supreme Court rulings of the 1960s banning mandated Christian exercises in public schools. Mainline Protestantism also voluntarily stepped away from some of its privileged status. Many church-affiliated colleges and universities, for instance, greatly reduced the presence of their own denominational heritages and cultivated a diversity of voices similar to that found in the rest of academia.

So, with the voices thus muted of the group that traditionally had most effectively represented religious interests in public life, the prevailing outlook became that the public domain—whether in education, politics, or public discourse—ought to aim at operating without reference to specific religious viewpoints. The most common means to promote such
neutrality was by way of more consistent privatization of religious
belief. That approach had considerable appeal. All religious views could be treated equally. They could be respected as personal choices, so long as they did not get in the way of
the public business of society. This view was often expressed in a metaphor taken from Jefferson, that of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The Supreme Court had invoked this image as early as 1947, and it was used again in the 1960s as a basis for ending prayer in public schools. It also became popular shorthand in the moderate-liberal mainstream for thinking about relationships between religion and the public sphere
.

The great problem with the “wall of separation” metaphor was, as the courts came to recognize, that it proved to be impossible to draw any consistent line between the secular public sphere and the religion of the private sphere. A sizable minority of Americans was seriously religious, and their religious beliefs had inevitable influences on their activities in the public domain, whether in politics, business, or education. It is one thing to try to draw a line between “church and state,” two sorts of institutions. But no consistent line of separation can even be imagined between the far larger entities of “religion and society.” Religion is seldom a strictly spiritual matter; rather, it involves moral prescriptions as to how to act in everyday secular affairs. Although religious people may reasonably be expected to act with a degree of civility in the public domain, showing respect for others and their differing views, it is not reasonable or practical to expect them to act in the public realm without reference to their deeply held, religiously based moral convictions. So, even if privatization has proven valuable as a way of encouraging social harmony up to a point, it is a principle that cannot address the question of equity in the public sphere in dealing with inevitable differences based on religious conviction.
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Mainstream American culture has never had a fully adequate way of dealing equitably with religious diversity in the public domain. On the positive side, one of the great achievements of the new nation was that religious toleration was instituted from the beginning. What was missing (and understandably so, in that era of religious establishments, when Protestants were in the vast majority) was a principle
for moving beyond mere toleration. Rather, Protestants understandably protected their own influence and interests, but they also worked to keep other faiths out of the public domain, as their long record of militant anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism illustrates. Even so, because America was a democracy, Catholics and Mormons could gain some political power, and thus some influence in the public domain, despite Protestant efforts to the contrary. When the mainline Protestant establishment did become more tolerant, in the mid-twentieth century, it was in the form of a tri-faith (Protestant-Catholic-Jew) inclusive pluralism. That sort of inclusivism, based in liberal religion, failed to include fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and other conservative evangelicals as well as Mormons, Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, and many others who did not fit the mainline religious profile.
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The major historical alternative to Protestant dominance and privilege was a more secular approach that made privatization the ideal. That seemed to be the implication of Jefferson's “wall of separation,” a position shared by some Baptists, who had histories of opposing religious establishments. It became the favored view of secularists in the twentieth century. It offered, as has just been observed, no theory for dealing with inevitable expressions of religious diversity in the public domain. Secularists and academics generally, who had made recognition of other sorts of diversity one of the great causes of the 1960s and 1970s, were seldom interested in religion. Race, class, and gender were the new categories of the present, while religion, they typically thought, was a fading category from
the past. They still took the secularization thesis for granted, much as their predecessors had in the 1950s.
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