The Fight for Denominations is the Fight for America
Brad East asks us to “imagine a world without Protestantism” in a recent First Things article. By this, he means the via media between Romanism and the radical Anabaptists. This was—and still is—called the magisterial Reformation, an attempt to reform (and by that, the reformers meant they wanted to conserve) the Church catholic. The magisterial Reformation was institutional, conservative, and Erastian.
It was also deeply at odds with America’s frontier spirit, according to East. Only in the soil of the American frontier could a radical third way emerge. That third way is now poised to eclipse the magisterial Protestant tradition entirely. East calls this third way evangelical. Hardly original, he readily admits, but if the shoe fits…
This “third species in the genus of Western Christianity” is biblicist (the Bible over all), autonomous (congregational polity), egalitarian (not so much opposed to women’s ordination as to ordination altogether), entrepreneurial (the pastor may run a lawn-care business, roast coffee, or monetize his podcast), evangelistic (always be converting), and, finally, affective (Hillsong).
Between these hinterland evangelicals and an elite Roman Catholic intelligentsia lies “the vast middle of American Christianity,” which, East says, is “utterly hollowed out.” To be sure, some believers struggle to hang on in groups like the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), or the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), where they try to enact the old mainline via media of theological conservatism and high institutionalism. You could argue that I am one of them. But we are too small to matter. “Each of these groups is a fraction of a fraction of the American population. Whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture,” East concludes definitively.
Not so fast.
Everyone forgets about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination, and, given its colonial heritage, arguably a “mainline” denomination, despite historical ties to the Old South. Though in steady decline, it still boasts over 12 million members and six theological seminaries. Its members exhibit many of the attributes East ascribes to his “third species” evangelicalism, but they are also organized and, by the standards of the progressive mainline, conservative.
That is why the SBC matters to the New York Times. If the SBC understood her potential political clout—the way my Jewish mother-in-law in New York City, who sends me links to Times articles about the SBC, does—her members might be more inclined to fight to keep her from being handed over to progressives.
East is right that magisterial Protestantism is on the ropes and that Catholicism will never be America’s successor religion. I even agree that the evangelical seed, carried over from the hothouses of European radicalism, indeed flowered into the genius of American frontier religion. But there is another genius still at work, an older seed transplanted to the ancient frontier of New England, that gave rise to that peculiarly American settlement and interpretation of Westphalia: the denomination.
As feudalism broke down in the Old World, the totalizing state took its place, with the church becoming a department of the state. But in New England, the story was different. Federalism was born in the ecclesiastical societies of Connecticut, a merger not of church and state but of town and church, with the covenant binding the two together, expounded from the pulpit. The covenant was rational and voluntary, not irrational and inherited. This local arrangement, by and for reasonable men, gave rise to a national vision, a patchwork social contract creating local, limited governments that citizens were obligated to govern.
Over time, these ecclesiastical societies lost their power to tax townsfolk for meeting houses and pastors’ salaries, as the arrangement, nearly 200 years later, had become inherited rather than chosen. New religious societies emerged from two great awakenings, but for the new nation to thrive, it needed national institutions—covenant institutions.
To be sure, under Federalism, these institutions would retain their peculiar doctrines and maintain their regional accents, but the wilderness beckoned, and the Pacific called. The genius of the New England social order was distilled and packaged for export to points west and, eventually, abroad. Thus, the American Protestant denomination was born. So effective was this arrangement of voluntary and contractual “binding and loosing” that even Episcopalians and Roman Catholics adopted its form. Denominated Christianity, not a state establishment, is the American social contract applied to religion: the Christian’s duty to worship God by a covenant standard.
As I write, Southern Baptists are once again preparing to define and defend that standard. Case in point: the Law Amendment seeks to clarify who can and cannot pastor a church. If Brad East is correct, evangelicals simply do not care about such things. I argue that Southern Baptists should. Why? Because they, through their Congregationalist forefathers, are heirs to that New England Federalism, to that rational and voluntary social order to which America so desperately needs to return. The SBC is not yet lost, but if she fails, America’s restoration becomes that much more difficult, the national vision that much harder to see.
I have pastored three churches in two troubled mainline denominations. My motives for writing are somewhat selfish. My prayer is for the SBC to make the restoration of her sister denominations part of her mission. The reconquista of the mainline churches has been called quixotic, but it is absolutely necessary. As national institutions, America’s Protestant denominations occupy a third civic space between the state and purely private associations.
Make no mistake, the progressive left is happy for American Christianity to be privatized. They are more than happy to subsidize the evangelicals’ tax-exempt irrelevance. It is the denominations they fear. That is why they have captured the major ones and are frustrated that the SBC still eludes them.
To my friends in the SBC, I say: do not give the left what it wants.
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