Found this article by church historian D.G. Hart on different strands of Protestantism in American history and how they relate faith to politics.
The most important distinction here, accordign to Hart, is between pietistic evangelicals and what he calls “liturgicals.” Pietists deemphasize the institutional church, the sacraments, etc. and focus on individual conversion resulting in a transformed life. Since merely belonging to the visible church and receiving the sacraments was no proof that one was truly converted, an activist outlook was encouraged to supply such evidence. But since the church tends to fall out of the picture as the vehicle of God’s inbreaking kingdom, American evangelicals have often turned their attention to the nation as a whole as the place where God’s kingdom is to be realized. The emphasis sometimes falls on personal holiness and other times on social reform, but the main point is to remake the world.
In this sense Hart sees 19th century evangelical reform movements such as Prohibition as part of the same tradition as modern evangleical politics whether of the Right (Fallwell, Robertson) or the Left (Wallis, Sider, Campolo). They all share an emphasis on activism and making more godly according to a certain biblical pattern.
By contrast, says Hart, liturgicals (Episcopalians, Lutherans, some strands of Presbyterianism) are heirs to a different style of piety and, correspondingly, a different style of politics:
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. … 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.
Liturgicals tend to adopt some version of Luther’s “two kingdoms” doctine. The church was the primary locus of God’s inbreaking kingdom, embodied in the preaching of the Gospel and the administering of the sacraments. Society at large, while ultimately under God’s providential guidance, was not to be identified with the Kingdom. “This teaching,” Hart says, “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.”
This didn’t prevent liturgicals from engaging in public life however. In the 19th century, for instance, evangelicals adopted Whiggery and supported the Republican Party and its various programs of social reform while liturgical Protestants (as well as Catholics) flocked to the Democratic Party, which, at the time, stood for limited, populist government. While evangelicals wanted to use the state as an instrument of godly social reform, the liturgicals sought “insurance that the state would not encroach on their churches, parochial schools, or the lives of their members.”
Hart says that liturgicals were less inclined than their evangelical brethren to simply read the Bible as a set of prescriptions for remaking the social order:
[L]iturgicals 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.
Hart thinks that this makes the liturgical tradtion more compatible with secular modernity and the pluralism that goes along with it. He is careful to note that “secular” here does not mean “irreligious.” Rather, secular should be thought of, not as the opposite of sacred, but as the opposite of eternal. In other words, the secular deals with “this age” while the eternal deals with “the age to come.”
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. 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.
The liturgical tradition, he contends, provides a better model for Christian engagement with politics than the evangelical-pietist Christian Right (or Left):
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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.
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. (footnotes omitted throughout)
Hart suggests that Christians can participate in deliberations about the common good by using the language of natural law that focuses on restraining evil and fostering justice. The upshot is a politics of limited government as opposed to attempts to coerce virtue. Hart clearly has some libertarian sympathies, revealed by his discussion of the views of fundamentalist theologian J. Gresham Machen.
[Machen] was particularly 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.” 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.”
He concludes:
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. In the case of Anglo-American Protestantism, such efforts have not worked out well either for the republic or for the churches.
I think this offers a helpful alternative perspective (one that I’ve expressed sympathy for in the past – see for instance this overly long post) to the Christian Right vs. Christian Left mode of political discourse that seems to get the most attention. I think Hart would see a confusion of the two kingdoms when Christian Rightists want to use the Old Testament law as the basis of public morality, or when Isaiah’s eschatological vision is used by the Christian Left as a model for the welfare state. Also of interest is Hart’s emphasis on how the deemphasizing of the church as the locus of God’s saving action (through Word and Sacrament) in some low-church evangelicalism seems to go hand-in-hand with a kind of reforming zeal to transform society.
However, one worry I have is whether the appeal to natural law or common justice will still carry any weight in as pluralistic a society as ours. Natural law itself is at this point a contested “thick” account of morality that competes with hedonistic utilitarianism and other philosophies of justice. Once we’ve banished such thick accounts of the good life from the public sphere, will what is left over be enough to sustain a viable society? Or do we end up with a society of “moral strangers” who have only the barest minimal commitments in common?
Still, I think that any scheme of relating faith to politics has to reckon with pluralism. Even if you deplore the principles of Enlightenment liberalism, pluralism as a social fact isn’t going away anytime soon. And I do think Hart makes a good point when he says that the essence of the Gospel is obscured when it’s turned into a laundry list of political prescriptions.
A Thinking Reed 