Mainstream Protestantism, "Conservative" Religion, and Civil Society

D. G. Hart

Just fifty-five years ago, the idea of a front-running presidential candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties campaigning at Bob Jones University was unthinkable. After all, BJU was on the cultural periphery owing to its fundamentalist reputation. 1 Having lost the battles in the mainline Protestant denominations and having suffered the ignominy of the Scopes Trial, fundamentalists like those who sent their children to Bob Jones in the 1940s were so busy trying to recover from these defeats that the thought of deciding a presidential election would have been delusional. 2 Carl F. H. Henry spoke volumes for the movement when in his important little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism (1947), he lamented that for "the first protracted period in its history," the evangelical faith of fundamentalists stood "divorced from the great social reform movements." 3 Henry, who was emerging as an influential leader of a new generation of fundamentalists, neo-evangelicals as they would call themselves, wrote this book as a protest against fundamentalism's self-chosen social and political isolation. 4 In other words, the task for evangelical leaders at mid-century was to prod fundamentalists back into public life. And this is what makes George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the weeks leading up to the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary truly remarkable. It reveals a seismic shift among conservative Protestants. 5 Within a brief period, evangelicals went from denouncing politics as a form of worldliness to demanding a place at the table.

In fact, only thirty years after Henry's book came out, Newsweek magazine dubbed 1976 "the year of the evangelicals." 6 The reason for this appellation stemmed directly from the recently discovered political strength of conservative Protestants in the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter [End Page 19] and Gerald Ford. Evangelicals differed in their preferences for Carter and Ford, each of whom played up his religious identity. But by 1979, with growing dissatisfaction over Carter, a Gallup poll indicating "born again" Christians comprised forty percent of the population, and conservative political strategists courting fundamentalist Protestants, evangelicalism entered the political mainstream as a definite segment of political conservatism. 7 Since then, the religious right has been a permanent fixture in United States' electoral politics, first with Jerry Falwell's formation of the Moral Majority and later with Pat Robertson's and Ralph Reed's engineering of the Christian Coalition. 8 Although its legislative success has been marginal, the religious right has been a factor in presidential, senatorial, and congressional races since 1980 and shows no signs of becoming less so. But the reality of these developments over the last two decades should not minimize how fantastic today's evangelicalism's political presence looks from the vantage of 1945. Not only was secularization supposed to have ended religiously inspired politics, but prior to 1970 most observers regarded fundamentalism as part of a lost world that could never be recovered. 9

The most common way of accounting for this phenomenal reversal is to trace the ideology and activities of fundamentalist political leaders since the 1920s. In this rendering, the religious right emerges as the most recent stage of Protestant right-wing politics to surface periodically throughout the twentieth century. The first stage surfaced during the 1920s, when fundamentalists participated actively in campaigns against alcohol, Catholicism, and evolution. In the aftermath of the fundamentalist controversy and in opposition to the New Deal, some conservative Protestants became virulently anticommunist, picking up the strains of fascism and anti-Semitism that has afflicted twentieth-century conservatism. By the 1940s, fundamentalist politics lost some of its extremism but retained its animosity to communism and socialism. During the Cold War, the second wave of fundamentalist politics crested, this time led by such well-known anticommunist preachers as Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, and Edgar C. Bundy. When anticommunism lost credibility thanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy's tactics, and after political conservatism more generally suffered through the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, who ran as the Republican presidential nominee, fundamentalists assumed their default location of political isolation. But just as Ronald Reagan in 1980 reinvigorated American conservatism, so fundamentalists achieved greater political respectability in their third and more recent phase of notoriety through broad-based and well-organized organizations designed to eliminate various social evils, such as abortion and pornography, and to counter the [End Page 20] dominance of secularism in public life, especially in public education. The religious right, according to this perspective, is the latest manifestation of a variety of twentieth-century political conservatism known as the Christian right. 10

As helpful as this way of viewing the religious right may be, it neglects a longer and arguably more obvious context, namely, Anglo-American Protestant involvement in public life. What follows is an effort to trace the premises and instincts of the religious right back to important religious, cultural, and political developments in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. During the 1840s and 1850s, the religious style of evangelicalism combined with new political alignments to give Anglo-American Protestantism a specific cultural outlook that would have important repercussions for liberal Protestants during the Progressive Era and for evangelicals later in the twentieth century. Rather than regarding the religious right as another variety of the Christian far right, the argument here is that the recent evangelical engagement with public life reflects religious and cultural habits that Anglo-American Protestants, both liberal or evangelical, learned when threatened by Americans of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Although such an understanding of the religious right lessens some of its unsavory associations with right-wing politics, this perspective nonetheless raises deeper and perhaps more troubling questions about the legitimacy of religion in public life. Despite the difficulties surrounding religion and politics, the history of American Protestantism provides an alternative to the religious right, also addressed in what follows, that is every bit as conservative religiously but better suited to contribute to civil society in the United States.

Whiggery and Revivalism
Most scholars locate the origins of the religious right in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chief catalysts for evangelical politics were a series of developments that threatened the family, such as the sexual revolution, feminism, and abortion. Closely related were national debates that changed the character of public schools, at least in the religious right's mind, such as busing to achieve racial integration and banning prayer and Bible reading. Finally, disputes over the United State's involvement in Vietnam nurtured a sour estimate of the country that did not sit well with many Protestants, who regarded America as at the very least a generically Protestant nation that had been mightily blessed by divine favor. 11 Historians, political scientists, and sociologists may differ on how profound these changes [End Page 21] were for American society, but the estimate of Sydney Ahlstrom, longtime historian of American religion and civilization at Yale, seems particularly apt for understanding the rise of the religious right:

[T]he exploration and settlement of those parts of the New World in which the United States took its rise were profoundly shaped by the Reformation and Puritan impulse, and . . . this impulse, through its successive transmutations, remained the dominant element in the ideology of most Protestant Americans. To that tradition, moreover, all other elements among the American people--Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Jewish, infidel, red, yellow, and black--had in some way, negatively or positively, to relate themselves. Or at least they did so until the 1960s, when the age of the WASP, the age of the melting pot, drew to a close. 12
This is another way of saying that the fortunes of Protestantism reversed drastically at the same time that the religious right was waking from its political slumbers.

The challenges to Protestant hegemony that America witnessed in the 1960s caught the mainline denominations off guard. Those churches had worked diligently during the middle decades of the twentieth-century to shore up their stature as the Protestant establishment by making liberal democracy and domesticated free markets virtually synonymous with the message of Christianity. These efforts were particularly apparent during World War II and the Cold War, when it became a Christian duty to defend the American way of life against totalitarianism on the left and the right. 13 But after the social and political adjustments of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the blessings of Protestantism for the United States were not altogether obvious. In fact, in the minds of at the least the most vocal blacks, women, and college students, Protestantism was a liability, if not actually a curse. Consequently, at the same time that the religious right was assembling to march on the public square in defense of Protestant mores, mainline Protestants were taking out old notes on modernist theology, in search of another way to adjust the gospel to modern culture, this time a post-Puritan one. In other words, the collective leadership of the National Council of Churches, the ecumenical arm of the mainline Protestant denominations, was leaning decisively to the political and cultural left in the name of Christ just about the same time that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were searching their Bibles and audiences for support of the right. 14

The recent political cleavage between liberal and evangelical Protestants makes it hard to remember that prior to the 1960s conservative Protestant [End Page 22] politics were virtually indistinguishable from those of mainline Protestants, except perhaps for differences owing to class. It might even be appropriate, even if confusing, to say that mainline Protestant political reflection generally bears the imprint of evangelical ways of understanding government and the destiny of the United States. The reason for putting it this way is that from the middle of the nineteenth century until today, most Protestants of Anglo-Saxon stock have identified politically with the Whig-Republican tradition. This close identification between Protestants of British descent and capital "r" Republicanism stems from political realignments during the middle decades of the nineteenth century that reflected the influence of piety as much as political philosophy.

The crucial link between revivalist Protestantism and Whiggery was individual commitment to Christ, manifested first in the conscious decision of a person to convert, and second in a concerted effort to live a disciplined (read: holy) life. This understanding of Christian devotion differed importantly from older corporate forms that looked to infant baptism as the beginning of Christian life and took sustenance from family and church for spiritual nurture. The revivalist emphasis on individual responsibility and self-denial was a crucial ingredient in the Whig outlook, which promoted "rational order over irrational spontaneity" and "self-control over self-expression." 15 What is more, it fed naturally the demands of an expanding market economy, which the Whigs and Republicans favored, and hatched any number of social reforms that were designed to Christianize America (a revivalist desire) and achieve cultural uniformity (a Whig goal). 16 Revivalist Protestants gave the Whig and Republican parties a particular religious stamp after the arrival in the 1840s of large numbers of Catholic immigrants who identified with the Democratic Party. To be sure, some of these differences were explicitly political, but they also stemmed from divergent convictions about Christian faith and practice. Unlike Democrats, who believed in a limited, populist government that did not legislate social behavior but rather gave room for the expression of self-interest and local autonomy, Republicans trusted government to enact laws based on eternal truths that would nurture virtuous citizens and a righteous society. 17

By the late nineteenth century, the Democrats had also begun to incorporate reformist and moralistic perspectives as evidenced by the evangelical politician, William Jennings Bryan, and his less evangelical colleague, Woodrow Wilson, both of whom were Presbyterian and who represented regional constituencies of Anglo-American Protestants that would not countenance voting for the party of Lincoln. Despite the traces of evangelicals in both parties at the turn of the twentieth century, revivalist Protestants [End Page 23] were still indistinguishable from liberal Protestants of Anglo descent. In a good summary of Anglo-American Protestant politics in the Bryan era, Mark A. Noll writes:

Protestants in the progressive era relied instinctively on the Bible to provide their ideals of justice. They believed in the power of Christ to expand the Kingdom of God through the efforts of faithful believers. They were reformists at home and missionaries abroad who felt that cooperation among Protestants signaled the advance of civilization. They were thoroughly and uncritically patriotic. On more specific issues, they continued to suspect Catholics as being anti-American, they promoted the public schools as agents of a broad form of Christianization, and they were overwhelmingly united behind prohibition as the key step toward a renewed society. 18
Rare would be the white Protestant today who could not agree with this progressive Protestant view of American politics (minus some of the hostility to Catholics, and minus some of the confidence in public schools). 19

The tricky period in American Protestant history for showing broad political agreement among evangelical and liberal Protestants is the era after Bryan's death. This is, of course, the time when two parties in Anglo-American Protestantism are clearly visible, when the terms "mainline" and "evangelical," or "liberal" and "fundamentalist," as used today, begin to make sense. What makes the time from 1925 to 1965 especially difficult for understanding evangelical politics is the effect that fundamentalist understandings of the end of history had on evangelical notions about public life. Fundamentalists believed that the United States was hurling precipitously toward moral degeneracy and religious apostasy. This downward turn in American history, they also believed, corresponded with the end of history prophesied in the Bible. Fundamentalist eschatology, consequently, undermined political involvement by making the reform of society pointless. 20

Many historians have concluded that after 1925 and the humiliation that fundamentalists received at the Scopes Trial, they withdrew from public life, formed their own ghetto-like culture held together by a variety of religious organizations, and abandoned hopes for constructing a Christian America. 21 Nevertheless, the America in which fundamentalists lived was not overly threatening to conservative Protestant ways of life. To be sure, they did not worship alongside mainline Protestants. But fundamentalists did benefit from the Christian culture that the Protestant establishment labored to keep patched together, no matter how generically Christian it [End Page 24] was. The schools included prayer and Bible reading, abortion was illegal, federal officials were not threatening to transport young children to school in another neighborhood, and women were still models of domesticity. Even liberal Protestant weeklies like the Christian Century rated and reviewed the products of Hollywood according to the good taste of the Protestant home. All in all, the Protestant establishment maintained exactly what the religious right today desires--standards of public decency. So even if mid-twentieth-century evangelicals were not politically active, they did not need to be. The United States from 1925 to 1965 was generally friendly to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants whether they were members at either First Presbyterian Church or Calvary Baptist Church across town. 22

If the culture of the United States before 1970 was generally decent according to Anglo-American Protestant conceptions, then the reason for the religious right's emergence in the 1970s is clear. Evangelicals only took to the political arena once their culture was threatened--a culture that may be described in ethnic categories as WASP. Prior to 1970 they did not need to be active politically because most of their social and cultural concerns, which revolved around the sanctity of the home and the ability of parents to reproduce their ways, were safe in the hands of the Protestant establishment. 23 In other words, after the 1920s, the right wing of Anglo-American Protestantism benefited from the cultural hegemony of their liberal Protestant rivals.

This would be an ironic outcome to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy if that conflict were merely theological. And this has been the primary way of accounting for differences between evangelical and liberal Protestants, even if it yields a caricature. On the one side, accordingly, are fundamentalists (and later evangelicals) who were chiefly concerned with right doctrine because of their interest in the salvation of souls, that is, an individual gospel. On the other were their opponents, the modernists (and later mainline), who refashioned the message of Christianity for the sake of saving society, that is, the Social Gospel. But this perspective on the 1920s obscures the culture wars of that decade, which, instead of pitting orthodox against heterodox Protestants, actually caused fundamentalists and modernists to join hands politically. As Martin E. Marty described it, taking his cue from André Siegfried's opening question in America Comes of Age, "Will America Remain Protestant and Anglo-Saxon," by the late 1920s "original-stock Protestants could still credibly dream of keeping their cultural dominance." 24 And Anglo-American Protestants decisively asserted that dominance in response to the 1928 presidential candidacy of Al Smith, governor of New York, who ran for the highest office on the Democratic ticket. The results of this election proved what the politics of Prohibition [End Page 25] had already demonstrated, namely, that when it came to maintaining a Christian society, the deity of Christ, the vicarious atonement, and the virgin birth did not really matter. In 1928 practically all low church southern Protestants abandoned the one candidate who could have likely affirmed the five points of fundamentalism--the Roman Catholic, Smith--in order to vote with New York's businessmen for Hoover, whose Quaker upbringing shored up liberal Protestant support. 25

From a longer historical perspective, however, evangelical indebtedness to the Protestant establishment from the 1920s to the 1960s looks much less ironic. Perhaps in textbook treatments of American religion evangelical and mainline Protestants are enemies. But the ethno-cultural interpretation of American politics teaches that they are siblings whose parents are revivalist Protestantism and Whig-Republican ideology. In the nineteenth century, the Protestant establishment harmonized reform and evangelism. In the twentieth century, Anglo-American Protestants had greater difficulty executing that harmonization. But even if liberals and evangelicals circa 1950 found themselves in different denominations, both sides were hard pressed to choose between reform and evangelism. And this is because Anglo-American Protestantism's understanding of the Christian life has been inherently activist and reform-minded; it creates virtuous individuals who pursue an equally virtuous society. In sum, the heirs of revivalism and the Whig tradition, both evangelicals and liberals, believe in reforms aimed at maintaining a Christian social order, though the techniques of implementing this order may differ. In which case, today's religious right is merely following in a path already well trod by nineteenth-century evangelical social reformers and liberal Protestant social gospelers.

The Religious Right and Secularization
If the goals of the today's politically engaged evangelicals are not essentially different from earlier generations of Anglo-American Protestants, then the religious right should have had an easier time justifying their concerns. After all, the United States has a long history of religious involvement in public life. Why, then, should the religious right appear so threatening to the nonevangelical segment of the American population? 26

This question clearly haunted Richard John Neuhaus, one of the first public intellectuals to defend the religious right. In a 1985 essay for Commentary, Neuhaus compared the resurgence of evangelicals in politics to that of "country cousins" who had "shown up in force at the family picnic." "They want a few rules changed right away," he explained. "Other [End Page 26] than that they promise to behave." 27 This way of explaining the rise of the religious right had a disarming character about it. But it also suggested unease. As much as Neuhaus sympathized with the religious right, a sense lingered that something was amiss.

One reason for this suspicion was that the religious right contradicted much of the social scientific literature on religion and modern society. For instance, Neuhaus objected to the sociological convention that linked secularization (i.e., the disappearance of religion from public) to modernity. He cited the updated survey of Middletown that gave evidence of the American people, contrary to the logic of secularization, becoming even more religious, with 86 percent of Muncie's residents affirming the deity of Christ and 97 percent believing the Bible to be inspired. 28 Those statistics made evangelicals look normal. If so many Americans believed the way they did, and if the United States is some form of democracy, then what was wrong or unusual about evangelicals giving political expression to their beliefs? By citing evidence of how mainstream the religious right's beliefs were, Neuhaus was trying to show that its political agenda--prayer and Bible reading in public school, a pro-life amendment, restrictions on pornography, fewer regulations on Christian schools, opposition to gay and feminist legislation, increased defense spending, and terminating social welfare programs--were really moderate. 29

Still, the explicitly evangelical character of the religious right made many wonder if religion and politics could mix in such an open way, or if the norms of liberal democracy required a different kind of public religion. Since 1980, the sociological literature on religion and politics has exploded. 30 But two recent studies by sociologists, both of which question the convincingness of the secularization thesis, are helpful for considering the propriety of the religious right's appeal to evangelical Protestantism for specific political initiatives.

The first comes from José Casanova, whose perspective on the religious right is generally favorable. The heart of his book, Public Religions in the Modern World, has less to do with the religious right than with the problem that the secularization thesis has posed for understanding religiously inspired political endeavors such as those of American evangelicals. According to Casanova, the dominant sociological perspectives on religion and modernity are mainly useless when trying to explain the recent phenomena of public religion in such diverse settings as Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States. He describes this trend as the "deprivatization" of religion, that is, "the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society." 31 Although Casanova's case studies come from recent events, his [End Page 27] argument has more of a theoretical quality to it. His aim is to articulate an understanding of religion in the modern world that not only accounts for these particular examples of public religion but also recognizes and accommodates the essentially public dimension of religion in modern society. Instead of dismissing public religion as either duplicitous ("an instrumental mobilization of available religious resources for non-religious purposes") or extremist ("fundamentalist antimodern reactions of hierocratic institutions unwilling to give up their privileges"), Casanova regards modern efforts to politicize religion as "new types of immanent normative critiques of specific forms of institutionalization of modernity which presuppose precisely the acceptance of the validity of the fundamental values and principles of modernity." 32 The religious right, then, may represent an instance of the valuable contribution religion makes to public life.

Yet, despite the elegance and nuance of Casanova's theory of deprivatization and his masterful grasp of sociological theory, the religious right leaves several difficulties unresolved. On the one hand, as Casanova observes, leaders in the world of the religious right use words such as "restore" and "reestablish" when talking about Christianity and public life. What they want to resurrect is not entirely clear, but, as Casanova admits, the theocratic impulse in some of this language is out of step with modern politics. 33 On the other hand, the religious right sometimes speaks of another Great Awakening that will contribute to a moral renewal of the United States. This may take either a national form, one where Americans turn to religion like they did in the 1950s, or a local form, where evangelical institutions gain new recruits and energy. The ambiguity of the religious right on what evangelical resurgence means leads Casanova to conclude that "Protestant fundamentalism has not made up its mind which public identity it should assume" and that its impact on American public life is unclear. 34

Perhaps it is because Anglo-American Protestantism has yet to articulate a satisfying conception of religion in public life that Steve Bruce, another sociologist who has written several books on the religious right, takes a different view. Unlike Casanova, Bruce is less concerned with general theories of religion and modernity, even though he is equally critical of many of the assumptions driving the secularization thesis. Still, in his most recent book, Conservative Protestant Politics, a case study of Protestant public religion in Ulster, South Africa, Scotland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Bruce begins with a theoretical chapter that explains his skepticism about the religious right. Instead of using the concept of secularization, he relies instead on the idea of modernization and starts with the premise that this process fundamentally undermines religion. [End Page 28] As sociologists are wont, Bruce employs four "unfortunately inelegant" neologisms to put flesh on this premise. First, modernization involves social differentiation--that is, the separation of the pragmatic and instrumental public sphere from the expressive and emotional private domain. Along with social differentiation comes societalization, or the displacement of small-scale communities with large-scale bureaucracies. The third feature of modernization is rationalization, which describes the way that people in a modern society think about the world without reference to God. (Bruce acknowledges that the origins of this aspect of modernization are religious or at least have strong affinities to Judaism and Protestantism.) Finally, modernization yields cultural diversity, which leads to an increasingly neutral state, and terminates a social ethos that makes a particular religion plausible. Bruce concludes that these developments in modern, Western societies automatically produce secularization "except where religion finds or retains work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural." 35

From the perspective of modernization, the religious right is for Bruce less an instance of the contribution that evangelical Protestantism may make to public life than a recurring manifestation of "ethnic interests" in which religion provides the language of dissent. 36 According to Bruce, religious beliefs have been the principal means, at least among the Protestants he studies, of negotiating the onslaught of modernity. On the one hand, religious institutions, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helped immigrants assimilate to American society by perpetuating the older ways of the homeland and providing stability during difficult periods of adjustment. On the other hand, religion throughout the twentieth century has functioned as a catalyst for native-born Americans to defend a national, local, or ethnic pattern of living. For Bruce, the religious right fits neatly in the latter category--religion as a mechanism of cultural defense. No matter how much the older depictions of fundamentalism as southern and rural relied upon a caricature, the southern and provincial qualities of today's religious right are hard to miss. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to date the religious right's most prominent spokesmen, hail from the South while speaking for many Americans who lament the recent decline of Protestant norms in national culture. Bruce observes, furthermore, that the religious right has not been successful in courting other ethnic groups, such as Catholics, Jews, and blacks, many of whom (especially blacks) share its concerns about public decency and family values. No matter what the polling data suggest about the extent of the religious right's appeal or what religious historians argue about the diversity of evangelicalism, Bruce is convinced that contemporary evangelical politics [End Page 29] is best explained as "a 'nativist' defence of the culture of native-born Anglo-Saxon Protestants." 37

By putting the matter this way, Bruce identifies a significant dilemma that confronts any religious group or tradition that seeks to shape public policy from explicitly religious ideals. The problem is not the religious right's alone. But as the most vocal religious community to assert itself in recent decades, evangelical Protestants offer a good example of the dangers that attend public religion. 38

One way to illustrate these dangers is to consider the remarks of Carl F. H. Henry at a 1990 Ethics and Public Policy conference devoted to evangelicals and politics. Henry not only called upon fundamentalists in the 1940s to leave their ghettos and enter the fray of mainstream society, but he later would become the leading evangelical theologian, writing shelves of highly acclaimed books, in addition to serving as the founding editor of Christianity Today. What is more, he knew almost firsthand the dilemmas confronting believers who serve in public office since his son, the late Paul Henry, held office in the U.S. Congress for close to a decade. Still, Henry made the mistake that even the less gifted Falwell or Robertson would commit when he praised the religious right for reentering "the cultural arena to press the claims of the biblical world-and-life view comprehensively upon modern society." 39 It would be one thing to have said something like the religious right deserved credit for taking underappreciated stands based on their religious convictions in the give and take of the democratic process. But Henry did not say that. To be sure, he disavowed the theocratic implications of pressing the claims of the Bible on modern society when he identified Christian Reconstructionists as an extreme wing of evangelicalism. 40 Nonetheless, Henry complimented evangelicals for furthering "the public relevance of both morality and religion." 41

The point here is not that the religious right has been explicitly theocratic in desiring a religious presence in public life. Most, if not all, of the public figures in the religious right have admitted that they do not want Christianity to become the official religion of the United States and so affirm the value of America's separation of church and state. Still, the ideal of applying the Bible to politics is what makes many people uncomfortable with the aims of the religious right. The Bible, according to evangelical beliefs, is an absolute standard of faith and life and is relevant to every sphere of human conduct. 42 Making the Bible a standard for public morality while also protecting religious liberty is an exceedingly complex feat. Neuhaus put it well when he wrote: [End Page 30]

the religious new right . . . wants to enter the political arena making claims on the basis of private truths. The integrity of politics itself requires that such a proposal be resisted. Public decisions must be made by arguments that are public in character. . . . Fundamentalist morality, which is derived from beliefs that cannot be submitted to examination by public reason, is essentially a private morality. If enough people who share that morality are mobilized, it can score victories in the public arena. But every such victory is a setback in the search for a public ethic. 43
The reason evangelicals even of Henry's intellectual caliber have not seen this tension may be the legacy of mainstream Protestantism. The United States used to welcome appeals to the Bible in public life, so why should matters be different now? The answer, for Bruce, is that only since the 1960s has the United States begun to reckon with the Enlightenment ideals that provided at least part of the inspiration for the American polity. And part of this reckoning involved the disestablishment of public Protestantism. But in Bruce's estimate, the process of secularization is not inherently hostile to the church and Christianity. Instead, it is the inevitable result of the demographics and political ideals of the United States. The illegitimacy of religion in public life, he writes, is the natural outcome of "a modern democratic society which happens to be culturally heterogenous and which places great stress on individualism." 44 Bruce adds:

Our societies permit (and in some places even encourage) the maintenance of distinctive religious world-views and thus encourage socio-moral contests, but they also create a structure (the division of the life world into public and private spheres) and a culture (universalism and tolerance) which of necessity restrain such contests and require that they be fought on general universalistic ethical and public-policy principles. In modern democratic culturally plural societies, no socio-moral interest group can plausibly promote its case on the grounds that "the Bible (or the Koran or the Book of Mormon) says so." Instead it must argue that equity or reason or the public good says so.
His conclusion is that the religious right has yet to embrace the "cultural pluralism" that results in "a democratic industrial democracy" such as the United States. 45

Casanova reaches a similar estimation, even if his argument is more sympathetic to the religious right. Like Bruce, Casanova is cautious about [End Page 31] the chances of biblically informed public policy proposals succeeding in a modern democracy. In fact, his case for deprivatization is grounded on the premise that the cases of public religion he has surveyed assume "a modern normative perspective." Casanova concludes, "only a religious tradition which reformulates its relationship to modernity" by incorporating the Enlightenment critique of religion while also upholding the "sacred" values of modernity, namely, human life and freedom, "may contribute to the revitalization of the modern public sphere." 46 If Casanova and Bruce are correct, then it need not be only secularists who have felt uneasy about the recent return of evangelicals to American politics.

Piety and Politics
If sociologists have turned up many of the social factors that make the religious right look out of place in recent American politics, political historians have unearthed patterns of personal piety that are equally important for understanding the peculiar character of evangelical approaches to public life. But here, as above, the unique features of evangelicalism should not be isolated from the larger context of Anglo-American Protestant piety or from considerations of how this conception of the Christian life nurtured a specific approach to politics.

Of the many parallels between evangelical and mainline Protestants, the this-worldly character of evangelical devotion is among the more striking. The conventional wisdom about Protestantism in the United States is that evangelicals maintain an expression of Christianity that is fundamentally otherworldly or directed toward the end of time, the salvation of souls, and of heaven. In contrast, liberal Protestants are supposed to be oriented chiefly toward the affairs of this world, either because they have diminished historic Christian teaching about the afterlife, or because of their conviction that the kingdom of God is being realized on earth. 47 Yet, despite this common way of regarding liberal and evangelical Protestants, most observers of evangelicalism are struck by the movement's pragmatic know-how and activist spirit. Robert Wuthnow put this irony well when he wrote, "It is, of course, peculiar to say that the Religious Right includes a this-worldly orientation, for many of its constituents are fundamentalists." 48

Wuthnow attributes this feature of the religious right to the general cast of American religion, which he concludes is absorbed with the present life. But linking such religious activism to the generally pragmatic quality of the American character is not as useful as showing the connection [End Page 32] between evangelicalism's this-worldly piety and revivalist Protestantism. Here the contrast between revivalism as it took shape in the nineteenth century and its Protestant rival, liturgicalism, is helpful for seeing the connection between piety and politics.

As alluded to above, evangelical low-church Protestants differed from another set of the Reformation's heirs, namely, Episcopalians, Lutherans, German Reformed, and some Presbyterians (politically this group included Catholics). These churchly Protestants held to an organic conception of religious life that was corporate in its piety in contrast to evangelicalism's individualism, sacramental as opposed to conversionist, and sober about human progress in contrast to revivalism's optimistic millennialism. Political historians have made the most of these distinctions, perhaps to the discredit of religious historians. In fact, the liturgical-pietist continuum developed in the works of Lee Benson, Richard Jenson, Paul Kleppner, Robert Kelly, Robert P. Swierenga and others, which refers to these differences between more traditional forms of Protestantism and the novel variety of Anglo-American revivalism, may turn out to be more useful than the liberal-evangelical dichotomy for analyzing the public role of American Protestants. 49

One obvious difference between liturgical and pietistic Protestants is the otherworldly character of the former's devotion. The best way of illustrating this is to consider the nature of the church's ministry. In contrast to evangelical piety, which was individualistic and experiential, liturgical spirituality was decidedly churchly and sacramental. The church, they believed, was a place for assisting members in their pilgrimage from birth, confirmation, marriage, child-rearing, and vocation to death. Clergy ministered chiefly through the means of grace, namely, word and sacraments, and these rites strengthened the faith of members as they looked for the world to come. In other words, the church was not an agency for social reform or nation-building, nor was faith a means for making good workers. Instead, the church was a spiritual institution with sacramental means for otherworldly ends. In today's vernacular, liturgical Protestantism was a private religion; revivalistic Protestantism was its public alternative. 50

The funny thing about most interpretations of American religious history is that scholars typically regard evangelicalism as the conservative expression of Protestantism. 51 What makes this line of analysis odd is that evangelical Protestantism is largely indifferent to those churchly and liturgical practices that have been part of historic Christianity, whether Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Instead of identifying devout Christians by their involvement in such acts of devotion as baptism, church attendance, receiving the Eucharist, or daily prayer, scholars of American [End Page 33] religion identify conservative Protestants according to the behavioral norms and minimalist doctrinal affirmations characteristic of the religious right's evangelical faith. 52 Conventional wisdom about American Protestantism, then, ignores large portions of traditional Christian belief and practice. What is more, the liberal-evangelical dichotomy virtually disregards Protestant liturgicals whose interaction with public life may offer a better alternative for engaging modern secular society than the religious right.

On the surface the otherworldly devotion of liturgical Protestantism would appear to be unfertile soil for political reflection or civic involvement. If someone thinks this world is not his home, he would seem to be guilty of doing exactly what Jean Bethke Elshtain thinks is impossible for any serious believer. Keeping his religion to himself, she writes, is "precisely what a devout person cannot do for religious faith isn't a private matter; it is constitutive of membership in a particular body." 53 But, in fact, liturgical Protestant piety came to terms with public life in the secular, modern, and religiously diverse United States in ways that tried to do justice to both parts of their dual identity as believers and citizens.

First, liturgical Protestantism's beliefs about the kingdom of God were especially fruitful for negotiating American political realities. According to Robert P. Swierenga, liturgicals believed that "God's kingdom was other-worldly, and human programs of conversion or social reform could not usher in the millennium." 54 Lutherans arrived at this conviction through the doctrine of the two kingdoms, Presbyterians via teaching about the spirituality of the church. 55 Both views emphasized that God's kingdom could not be identified with any earthly power. This teaching nurtured skepticism about political life that made liturgicals wary of pinning their hopes on the United States or thinking America had a special place in God's redemptive plan. The church, not the state, was the kingdom of God and efforts to make the state conform to the church always confused the ends of the church and politics.

But such skepticism did not prompt liturgical Protestants to withdraw from public life. Instead, in the nineteenth century many joined the Democratic Party, which, in contrast to the Republicans, worked toward a limited, populist government and opposed using state power to legislate social behavior. The Democrats, in effect, provided liturgicals with the greatest insurance that the state would not encroach on their churches, parochial schools, or the lives of their members. 56 Liturgical Protestant estimates of the state were not simply negative, however. The Bible clearly taught submission to political rulers. What is more, the doctrines of creation and providence assured liturgicals that political involvement was beneficial. If God really had created the world good, and if God actually used secondary [End Page 34] means to achieve divine ends, then participating in public life was not illegitimate or even a waste of time. To be sure, the goodness of government was not of an ultimate sort. Nor could its accomplishments achieve eternal significance. But being wary of politics did not require withdrawal. 57

In addition, liturgicals tended to steer clear of the biblicistic moralism that informed so much of evangelical Protestantism's political philosophy. Because the kingdom of God was different from the kingdom of man, the Bible was not a rule for political life. God's special revelation, from the liturgical perspective, was for the church. The norm for the state came from patterns revealed in creation and human nature, that is, general revelation. Indeed, because liturgicals recognized the revelatory character of creation and providence, they could accept arguments for the common good drawn from the wisdom and observations available to all people. In other words, while evangelicals looked to the Bible for standards of public decency and patterns of just rule (an outlook that invites making Old Testament Israel the model for good government), liturgicals believed that the ideals for politics were not so specific or explicitly Christian. Consequently, while evangelicals sought a Christian America, liturgicals desired an America where Christians could practice their faith, a position that made them willing to accept religious diversity. 58

Liturgical Protestant piety, accordingly, appears to have been well suited to adapt to the changes that accompanied the secularization and modernization of the United States. The reason is that liturgical forms of devotion presumed a different and older understanding of the secular. Most discussions of secularization, like those drawn from Casanova and Bruce above, follow sociological conventions in explaining the displacement of religion in the modern society. According to this conception, the "secular" vies against the "religious," public against private, church against state. But for liturgical Protestantism, the actual contrast to the "secular" is the "eternal." From this perspective, secular government is not irreligious since all legitimate authority comes from God. Rather, what makes government secular is its temporary and provisional character--it rules during this age but not for eternity. 59 Obviously such an understanding of secular politics fits well with liturgical Protestant otherworldly piety. The goal of history is the age to come, and in the new heavens and new earth government will no longer be needed to restrain evil and supply order. This understanding of the end of history allows liturgicals to accept the kind of differentiation that accompanies modernization as part of the provisional character of life on earth. Put simply, for liturgicals secularization is not a threat; it is simply a way of ordering the world until the second advent.

But whatever the relationship between liturgical Protestantism and secularism, [End Page 35] the contrast drawn here between liturgicals and evangelicals is important for seeing the religious right in a different light. On the one hand, the conservative religious credentials of contemporary evangelicals look less authentic when compared to those of churchly and liturgical Protestants, thanks to evangelicalism's low-church impulses. On the other hand, the contrast between liturgical and pietist Protestantism demonstrates how much more flexible a churchly religiosity may be for engaging modern politics. Genuinely conservative Protestantism (accepting for now that liturgical Protestantism qualifies as such) need not oppose secular modernity. Instead, secularism of the kind witnessed throughout U.S. history where church and state are separate, where religion is primarily private, and where public expressions of religion are out of place, is the kind of arrangement that suits liturgical Protestantism's understanding of this world, the purpose of history, and the nature of the Bible. By no means did liturgical Protestantism resolve the dilemmas that attend religious disestablishment. But by following a course similar to that of the early church prior to Constantine when Christianity was a private faith, liturgicals offered a strategy for engaging public life that was both consistent with their beliefs and compatible with the rules of American government.

Learning from Liturgicals
If Protestant liturgicals actually represent a viable way for conservative believers to participate in public life, they may also provide an escape from the impasse that has bedeviled recent discussions about the relationship between religion and civil society. 60 Ever since 1980 when the religious right emerged as factor in electoral politics, the typical approach to religion and public life assumed a bipolar perspective. Either the public square welcomes or excludes religion; either religious convictions are private or they legitimately inform the aspirations that guide public life. 61 In other words, no middle ground exists. If evangelicals are going to participate meaningfully in public life, the wall between church and state has to come down. Or, at least, some gates have to be added to allow for passage back and forth. In this way of looking at the problem, the religious right and secularists are made for each other. As much as evangelicals try to say all areas of life belong to God and so religion should not be excluded from public affairs, secularists see that such divine possession can likely end up dispossessing those who do not believe in the deity of evangelical Protestantism. 62 Of course, this is not the first time such an impasse has arisen. The bipolar character of most discussions about religion and public life is [End Page 36] the legacy of Anglo-American Protestantism's political philosophy. Ever since the heady days of the American republic's birth, when the United States tried to live without the older authorities of monarchy and established church, evangelicals have operated according to a simple political formula--if it is divine it is trustworthy, if it is human it is suspect. 63 Though responsibilities as presidents, chemists, parents and umpires have forced evangelicals to modify this formula, it still lurks within the evangelical soul and plays havoc with Protestant efforts to relate their religious convictions to non-religious walks of life. 64

Liturgical Protestantism offers a way around this impasse. A different way of putting it is to say that liturgical Protestantism represents a way for Protestant believers to support the wall between church and state. By looking for religious significance not in this world but in the world to come, liturgical Protestantism lowers the stakes for public life while still affirming politics' divinely ordained purpose. The public square loses some of its importance but retains its dignity. It is neither ultimately good nor inherently evil; politics becomes merely a divinely appointed means for restraining evil while the church as an institution goes about its holy calling. 65 For some evangelicals, the liturgical Protestant approach to public life is not a solution but rather a sell out. 66 Religious convictions demand unswerving allegiance in all spheres. In fact, the moral absolutes of Christianity require the same kind of conduct at home and city hall. To admit otherwise is inconsistent and leads inevitably to moral relativism. But if Daniel Bell is right about the nature of modern society, liturgical Protestantism may very well be the best approach for Protestants. In his 1978 foreword to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell described himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. "Many persons might find this statement puzzling," he explained, "assuming that if a person is radical in one realm, he is a radical in all others; and, conversely, if he is a conservative in one realm, then he must be conservative in the others as well." But modern capitalistic society does not permit such ideological consistency. According to Bell, "[S]uch an assumption misreads, both sociologically and morally, the nature of these realms." 67

In the end, the most important lesson the religious right could learn from liturgical Protestantism is not how to negotiate public life but how to prevent a legitimate concern for politics from distorting the faith. Here the religious right could well take a page from one of their neglected heros, J. Gresham Machen. A Presbyterian fundamentalist, Machen almost single-handedly fought liberalism within the northern Presbyterian Church during the 1920s until he was suspended from the ministry and started a new Presbyterian denomination. 68 What is more, he was particularly [End Page 37] active in fighting legislation that undermined, in his view, family life and the legitimate authority of parents. In other words, Machen would appear to meet the religious right's theological and political litmus tests. But he was keenly aware that religious liberty in the United States prohibited Christianity from providing the norms for public life. In fact, Machen ridiculed the hypocrisy of liberal Protestant churches that took pride in theological diversity while also supporting legislation aimed at achieving Anglo-American cultural homogeneity. Mainline Protestants were guilty of such duplicity precisely when they argued that religion was beneficial for community or public life. For example, Machen wrote, "there is the problem of the immigrants; great populations have found a place in our country; they do not speak our language or know our customs; and we do not know what to do with them." So religion is "called in to help." It is "thought to be necessary for a healthy community." And in the process, Protestants "proceed against the immigrants now with a Bible in one hand and a club in the other offering them the blessings of liberty," or what some called "Christian Americanization." 69 For Machen, the norms of America and the churches were necessarily distinct and to conflate them violated religious liberty.

But Machen was even more concerned about what politicizing religion did to Christianity. In order to make religion relevant to public life, he argued, Protestants had turned to the Bible only for its ethics while ignoring almost completely its ultimate message about sin and grace. This was one of the reasons for Machen's opposition to prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Aside from questions surrounding the separation of church and state, even more alarming was what this practice did to the gospel. "What could be more terrible," he asked, "from the Christian point of view, than the reading of the Lord's Prayer to non-Christian children as though they could use it without becoming Christians?" In effect, a politicized Christianity ends up being little more than moralism. "When any hope is held out to lost humanity from the so-called ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core," then, Machen concluded, "the Bible is represented as saying the direct opposite of what it really says." 70 Curiously enough, H. L Mencken, who admired Machen while abhorring the fundamentalist's Presbyterian colleague, William Jennings Bryan, the leader of the 1920s religious right, agreed with Machen's assessment. Mencken wrote:

It is my belief, as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible, not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, [End Page 38] but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general. Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony. . . . That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done, no doubt with the best intentions in the world. They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet, preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. 71
Mencken did not think one needed to be a partisan to see what politics was doing to the Christian religion. For him, as for Machen, the logic was simple. Anytime religion is forced to perform a function it cannot do, it necessarily becomes something different.

The lesson for the religious right should be obvious. The effort to bring religious values to bear on public life is similar to what Protestant modernists did seventy years ago when they advocated prayer and Bible reading in public schools, Prohibition, and a rating system for Hollywood's movies. And like the Protestant establishment during the middle decades of the twentieth century, today's advocates of public religion could presumably add greater dignity and decency to American society. But at what cost? What will happen to the non-evangelical citizens of the United States if they do not comply with evangelicalism's moral code? Even more important, what will happen to faith once delivered to the saints that evangelicals are so eager to share? As difficult as it may be to find a common ethical platform for public life without the foundation of revealed religion, the difficulties on the other side are just as great, if not greater. To be sure, the desire to make Christianity relevant for public life does not automatically force someone to deny the virgin birth or the resurrection of Christ. Neither is it immediately obvious, however, what these articles of belief have to do with limited government, free markets, or family values. And so, a comprehensive biblical program for American society and politics turns out to be little more than the second table of the Ten Commandments, the ones having to do with love of neighbor. Loving neighbors is a good thing. But historic Christianity involves much more. The irony is that by reducing Christianity to its ethical teaching the religious right and its defenders could be making one of the greatest concessions to modern secular life imaginable. For that reason it may be better to scrap altogether the project of public or civil religion. 72 In the case of Anglo-American Protestantism, such efforts have not worked out well either for the republic or for the churches.

Westminster Theological Seminary

D. G. Hart directs the library and is associate professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He also directed the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois. His most recent books are The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (1999) and Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America (1999).

Notes
1. On Bob Jones University and fundamentalism in the 1940s, see Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens, Ga., 1996); Daniel L. Turner, Standing without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, S.C., 1997); and Sean Michael Lucas, "Fundamentalisms Revived and Still Standing: A Review Essay," Westminster Theological Journal 60 (1998): 327-37.

2. The best book for understanding what the fundamentalist controversy means to evangelical Protestantism in the United States remains George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1875-1925 (New York, 1980).

3. Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1947), 36.

4. On neo-evangelicalism, see Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997).

5. In this essay the words "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" are used interchangeably since the differences between the two are not great in the arena of politics. In fact, the point of this essay is that the religious style of evangelicals and fundamentalists, namely, pietism, has specific consequences for political engagement and reflection that turns whatever religious differences evangelicals and fundamentalists have into sociopolitical commonalities.

6. Kenneth L. Woodward et al., "The Year of the Evangelicals," Newsweek, 25 October 1976, 68-68.

7. On the emergence of the religious right, see Robert Booth Fowler, A New Engagement: Christian Evangelical Political Thought, 1966-1976 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1982); Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, 1993), 1-4; George M. Marsden, "Preachers of Paradox: Fundamentalist Politics in Historical Perspective," in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991), 104-9.

8. The phrase "religious right" as I will be using it covers more than simply the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition. For the purpose of this study, religious right means the constellation of evangelical Protestants engaged in politics whose leadership includes Paul Weyrich, Ralph Reed, Cal Thomas, Jerry Falwell, Don Eberly, James Dobson, and Charles Colson, along with the organizations they oversee and the publications for which they write. This list, though debatable, was the one that editors of Christianity Today, evangelicalism's magazine of record, made in their feature, "Is the Religious Right Finished? An Insiders' Conversation," Christianity Today, 6 September 1999, 43-59. As will become apparent throughout this essay, the particular style of evangelical politics, that is, of looking to the Bible for social and political solutions, can also be found among evangelicals on the so-called left, individuals such as Ron Sider and Jim Wallis. But to avoid confusion I will use "religious right" only in connection with those people and institutions identified by Christianity Today.

9. On the largely unfavorable depiction of fundamentalism in the historiography prior to 1970, see Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (New York, 1931); Norman Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (New Haven, 1954); Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Chicago, 1968); and Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962). This negative estimate only changes with Paul A. Carter, "The Fundamentalist Defense of the Faith," in John Braeman, Robert Bremmer, and David Brody, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s (Columbus, 1968), 179-214;

10. See, for instance, Clyde Wilcox, God's Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), 1-20; Lienesch, Redeeming America, 4-9; Marsden, "Preachers of Paradox"; and Leo P. Ribuffo, "God and Contemporary Politics," Journal of American History 79 (1993): 1515-33.

11. On the origins and rise of the religious right, see Lienesch, Redeeming America; Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America, 1978-1988 (New York, 1988); William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996); and Wilcox, God's Warriors.

12. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 1079, emphasis his.

13. See, for instance, Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1961 (Chicago, 1996); William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in American, 1900-1960 (New York, 1989); and Heather A. Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920-1948 (New York, 1997).

14. See Leonard I. Sweet, "The 1960s: The Crises of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism," in George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 29-45; Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, 1994); and Lloyd Billingsley, From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches (Lanham, Md.:, 1990).

15. Daniel Walker Howe, "Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North," in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York, 1990), 124.

16. On this point, see ibid., 121-45; Robert P. Swierenga, "Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Culture," in Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics, 146-71; George Marsden, "The Religious Right: A Historical Overview," in Michael Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics (Washington, D.C., 1992), 1-16; and Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999), chap. 1.

17. Swierenga, "Ethnoreligious Political Behavior," 152-53. See Lyman A. Kellstedt et al., "It's the Culture Stupid! 1992 and Our Political Future," First Things 42 (April 1994): 28-33, for evidence of these differences between Republicans and Democrats even after the 1930s.

18. Noll, "The Scandal of Evangelical Political Reflection," in Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, eds., Being Christian Today: An American Conversation (Washington, D.C., 1992), 73.

19. On contemporary evangelical attitudes toward American society, see Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago, 1998); idem, Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000); and James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991).

20. For the influence of premillennialism on evangelical politics, see Noll, "The Scandal of Evangelical Political Reflection," 74-82; and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, chaps. 22 and 23.

21. See David O. Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (Philadelphia, 1972), a popular book that faulted evangelical quietism during the Nixon era. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (1957; Baltimore, 1980), made a similar argument about a reversal among evangelicals, without Moberg's practical application. See also Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture; and Carpenter, Revive Us Again. While this argument makes sense for much of the fundamentalist movement, it does not account for real political involvement by such fundamentalists as Gerald Winrod, William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, or Carl McIntire during the precise decades when evangelical quietism was supposed to be at its zenith. On fundamentalist politics, see Leo Ribuffo, The Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983); Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge, La., 1997); William Vance Trollinger Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, Wis., 1990); and Barry Hankins, J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, Ky., 1996).

22. See James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945-1965; and Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Fifties (New York, 1983).

23. On mid-twentieth-century evangelical concerns, see David Harrington Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991). The moral and familial concerns may also help to explain how the religious right differs from the Christian far right. Although both groups opposed communism and the centralizing efforts of the state, the religious right's opposition to government control is less ideological. In other words, the religious right tends to be more concerned with politics as they relate to the family and less interested in a consistently conservative set of political principles.

24. Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941 (Chicago, 1991), 63.

25. On the cultural significance of 1920s politics, see Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill, 1979); and Lynn Dumenil, "'The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy': Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s," Journal of American History 77 (1990): 499-524. The reason for claiming that Al Smith might have been able to affirm the five points of fundamentalism (i.e., biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, vicarious atonement, the resurrection, and Christ's miracles) is that the Roman Catholic Church affirmed all of these doctrines and in 1899 condemned modernism as a heresy.

26. Only a decade ago, pollsters discovered that 34 percent of Americans perceived evangelicals as a menace to civil society, compared to only 14 percent who had similar perceptions of the Ku Klux Klan. See Os Guiness, "Tribes People, Idiots or Citizens? Evangelicals, Religious Liberty, and Public Philosophy for the Public Square," in Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry, eds., Evangelical Affirmations (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1990), 461.

27. Neuhaus, "What the Fundamentalists Want," originally published in Commentary (1985) and reprinted in Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds., Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Washington, D.C., 1987), 18.

28. See Theodore Caplow, Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A. Chadwick, and Dwight W. Hoover, All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (Minneapolis, 1983).

29. Neuhaus, "What the Fundamentalists Want," 16.

30. See, for instance, John C. Green et al., Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front (Lanham, Md., 1996); Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (Chicago, 1993); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988); James L. Guth, The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy (Lawrence, Kan., 1997); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of American: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992); Nancy T. Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987); Stephen R. Warner, New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990); David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (New York, 1996).

31. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), 65-66.

32. Ibid., 215, 221-22.

33. Ibid., 158-61.

34. Ibid., 161-65, quotation on 157.

35. Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (Oxford, 1998), 12-16; quotation on 19.

36. Ibid., 219.

37. Ibid., 19, 21. Arguably the best recent estimate of evangelicalism's scope is Smith, American Evangelicalism. The classic statement of evangelicalism's variety is Timothy L. Smith, "The Evangelical Kaleidoscope and the Call to Christian Unity," Christian Scholar's Review 15 (1986): 125-40.

38. It is my conviction that this is true for all Christian traditions, not just Protestants. Still, the Catholic experience in the United States teaches that Christian involvement in public life is not inevitably geared toward establishing a Christian America. My sense is that the pronouncements of the Catholic bishops have been directed more toward policies that protect Catholics from the state rather than trying to make the state conform to Catholic views and practices.

39. Carl F. H. Henry, "Response," in Michael Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics (Washington, D.C., 1992), 75.

40. This is a group of Protestant theonomists, whose leaders include Rousas J. Rushdoony and Gary North. They believe that biblical law should be the norm for modern society. For an introduction, see Gary North, Christian Reconconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn't (Tyler, Tex., 1991).

41. Henry, "Response," 77, 75.

42. This statement might sound patently obvious. But evangelicals are different from other Christians in thinking that the Bible speaks to all of life. Other Christian traditions would speak instead of the Bible teaching all things necessary for salvation, meaning that Scripture does not speak to numerous areas of life that are not directly related to salvation. In those areas, wisdom applies. For one expression of the Bible's applicability to all of life, see John M. Frame, "In Defense of Something Close to Biblicism: Reflections on Sola Scriptura and History in Theological Method," Westminster Theological Journal 59 (1997): 269-91.

43. Neuhaus, Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 36-37, quoted in Casanova, Public Religions, 165.

44. Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics, 185.

45. Ibid., 188, 189.

46. Casanova, Public Religions, 214, 230, 233.

47. This distinction finds support from the two best books on fundamentalism and liberalism--Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).

48. Robert Wuthnow, "The Future of the Religious Right," in Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles, 30. What David N. Livingstone writes of the fundamentalist psyche--"passion to hammer down history, to touch the transcendental, to earth the supernatural in the mundane"--is an equally fitting description of evangelicalism more generally. See Livingstone, "Introduction: Placing Evangelical Encounters with Science," in David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, eds., Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York, 1999), 9.

49. For some of the contributions to the ethno-cultural interpretation of nineteenth-century American politics, see Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (New York, 1970); idem, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971); idem, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983); Robert Kelly, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York, 1979); and Robert P. Swierenga, ed., Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays of the Civil War Era (Westport, Conn., 1975). For the importance of ethnicity to Anglo-American Protestantism, see John Higham, "Ethnicity and American Protestants: Collective Identity in the Mainstream," in Harry Stout and D. G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York, 1997), 239-59.

50. Two books that show how liturgical Protestantism evolved through conflict with revivalistic Protestantism are David A. Gustafson, Lutherans in Crisis: The Question of Identity in the American Republic (Minneapolis, 1993); and Allen C. Guelzo, For the Sake of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of Reformed Episcopalians (University Park, Pa., 1994). Another important figure in liturgical Protestantism is John Williamson Nevin, who grew up in Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, moved into the German Reformed church, and penned what is arguably the best critique of revivalism written in the nineteenth century, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, Pa.: Weekly Messenger, 1843). On Nevin's place in nineteenth-century Protestantism, see Theodore Appel, The Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin (1889; New York, 1969).

The formal similarities between liturgical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are obvious but no less real. My suspicion is that in Anglo-American Protestant circles the similarities between Protestantism and Catholicism became unbearable once Roman Catholics after 1840 began to threaten Protestant dominance. At that point, Protestants began to stress their low-church piety to set themselves off from Catholicism's churchliness. For the affects of anti-Catholicism on Anglo-American Protestantism, see John Wolffe, "Anti-Catholicism and Evangelical Identity in Britain and the United States, 1830-1860," in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990 (New York, 1994), 179-97.

51. See, for instance, Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger Jr., "Historiography of American Protestantism: The Two-Party Paradigm," Fides et Historia 25 (1993): 4-15, which shows implicitly that religious historians have ignored liturgicalism, identifying evangelicalism as the right wing of American Protestantism.

52. For historiographical examples of this tendency, see Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997); Paul K. Conkin, Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1995); and Willliam R. Sutton, Journeyman for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park, Pa., 1998), all of whom dissolve denominational differences into revivalist Protestantism. For examples from the social sciences that make the same mistake, see Liniesch, Redeeming America; Robert Wuthnow, The Struggle for America's Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1989); and Hunter, Culture Wars.

53. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Bright Line: Liberalism and Religion," New Criterion 17 (March 1999): 10. The distinction between public and private religion is not very helpful. The reason is that "public" may be applied to churchly and political aspects of human society. Public worship, for instance, would technically fall on the private side of Elshtain's dichotomy. It is public in the sense that, in most Christian traditions, it is open to everyone in the community. But to hold a public worship service in the public square, thereby implying the endorsement of the civil authority, would violate American canons of propriety. The words "civil" and "churchly" as modifiers of "religion," then, would seem to work much better than "public" and "private." But few of today's advocates of public religion would want to take up the cause of civil religion because of that phrase's association with the older Protestant establishment.

54. Swierenga, "Ethnoreligious Political Behavior," 152.

55. On the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, see Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Commission on Theology and Church Relations, Render unto Caesar . . . and unto God: A Lutheran View of Church and State (St. Louis, 1995); and Mark A. Noll, One Nation Under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (New York, 1988), chap. 2. On the Presbyterian notion of the spirituality of the church, see D. G. Hart, "The Spirituality of the Church, the Westminster Standards, and Nineteenth-Century American Presbyterianism," in John H. Leith, ed., The Westminster Confession in Current Thought: Colloquium in Calvin Studies VIII (privately published, 1996), 106-18.

56. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, chap. 1, shows with great effect the differences between the social outlook of Republicans and the Jeffersonian tradition inherited by Democrats.

57. The literature on liturgical Protestantism and its political significance is generally confined to nineteenth-century developments. On the twentieth century, see Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics; Dumenil, "'The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy'"; James D. Bratt, "Protestant Immigrants and the Protestant Mainstream," in Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Experience (Urbana, Ill., 1997), 110-35; and Mark Granquist, "Lutherans in the United States, 1930-1960: Searching for the 'Center,'" in Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger Jr., eds., Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1998), 234-51.

58. Of course, liturgicals could be drawn into the mainstream of American civil religion. But ethnic differences along with theological depth prevented total submersion. For one example of these tensions within Dutch-American Calvinism, see James D. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984), 40-66.

59. For this conception of secular, see Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (New York, 1996).

60. See, for instance, Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square; Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, 1993); Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Kent Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (New York, 1987); Richard P. McBrien, Caesar's Coin: Religion and Politics in America (New York, 1987); Max L. Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987); Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York, 1990); Hunter, Culture Wars; Don E. Eberly, Restoring the Good Society: A New Vision for Politics and Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994); Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1996); Glenn E. Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: An Interpretation (Baton Rouge, La., 1989); and Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York, 1996)

61. In the words of the Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, who is by no means a member of the religious right but echoes evangelical sentiments, "to suppress the religious voice in the public arena would be to suppress the most powerful force available to us for the cause of justice and human flourishing." Wolterstorff, "Inner Voices," Civilization (August-September 1999): 67.

62. The bipolar character of these matters applies as much to evangelicals on the political left as it does to the religious right. Although James Dobson, the voice of Focus on the Family, and Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners, disagree about any number of policies, both agree that evangelicalism is relevant to public life and that evangelicals need to be active politically. In which case, the tension between religion and public automatically ensues, since the claim that religion is good and necessary for politics life does not address the rules that apparently forbid mixing religion and politics. Compare, for instance, Christianity Today's recent coverage of the religious right and its evangelical peers on the left: "Is the Religious Right Finished? An Insiders' Conversation," Christianity Today, 6 September 1999, 43-59; Tim Stafford, "The Criminologist Who Discovered Churches," Christianity Today, 14 June 1999, 35-39; John Wilson, "Mr. Wallis Goes to Washington," Christianity Today, 14 June 1999, 41-43; and Michael G. Maudlin, "God's Contractor," Christianity Today, 14 June 1999, 45-47. See also Charles W. Colson, with Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill., 1999), a book that appeals directly to the public relevance of evangelical Protestantism.

63. This is the point well made in Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989).

64. This is a point developed more fully in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994). For other episodes illustrating the way Protestantism polarized public debates: on public schooling, see Charles L. Glenn Jr., The Myth of the Common School (Amherst, Mass., 1987); on church and state matters during the Progressive Era, see Robert T. Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880-1920 (Princeton, 1991); and on Protestants and higher education, see D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies and American Higher Education (Baltimore, 1999).

65. For a good brief recent statement of this view, see Kenneth A. Myers, "Biblical Obedience and Political Thought: Reflections on Theological Method," in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., The Bible, Politics, and Democracy (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987), 19-31. A fuller and older expression is Stuart Robinson, The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel (Philadelphia, 1858).

66. Part of the problem, of course, is that the public and private spheres increasingly overlap thanks to the growing interdependence of local and national institutions. But this is a political problem, one that may call for greater limits on government. It is not something to be solved by adding more religion to public life.

67. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976; New York, 1996), xii.

68. On Machen, see D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, 1994).

69. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York, 1923), 149, 151.

70. Machen, "The Necessity of the Christian School," in Ned B. Stonehouse, ed., What Is Christianity? And Other Essays (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1951), 299.

71. H. L. Mencken, "Doctor Fundamentalis," Baltimore Evening Sun, 18 January 1937.

72. Other scholars to make this point include Peter L. Berger, "Different Gospels: The Social Sources of Apostasy," This World, no. 17 (Spring 1987): 6-17; Ted G. Jelen, "In Defense of Religious Minimalism," in Mary C. Segers and Ted G. Jelen, A Wall of Separation? Debating the Public Role of Religion (Lanham, Md., 1998), 3-51; and Vigen Guroian, "The Struggle for the Soul of the Church: American Reflections," in Ethics After Christendom: Toward and Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994), 83-101.

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borrowed from The Journal of Policy History, Pennsylvania State University, 2001