Protestant Providentialism
Technology, Eschatology, and America
But for myself, I shall never be persuaded, that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lanthorn of Aristotle’s brain… that God hath given invention but to the heathen; and that they only have invaded nature, and found the strength and bottom thereof; the same nature having consumed all her store, and left nothing of price to after ages.
Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (1614)
A recent roundtable discussion put out by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute as part of their Project Cosmos highlights a clear difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic attitudes toward technology and the future of America. The discussants included Ross Douthat, Michael Miller, Frank Hanna, Matthew Walther, and Aaron Renn with Johnn Burtka moderating. Renn was the only Protestant present which, in a way, emphasized the differences even more.
The Catholics opened by voicing their general concerns over current technology trends and the speed of development ranging from timidity to downright pessimism. Walther was predictably the gloomiest, declaring that the west already occupies a dystopian future because people don’t use pen and paper, rely on GPS to navigate, and resort to iPads in the classroom. There was much talk of the “technological society,” many citations to Augusto Del Noce and Joseph Ratzinger, etc. Everything was following the typical script for these types of discussions which are, to their credit, I suppose, usually dominated by Catholics. Douthat was less dour than Walther, noting that western civilization is wrapped up in constant technological innovation. What all the Catholic panelists seemed to be bothered by is simply the pace of change and integration of new technology into daily life at scale. Of course, every generation feels this way: the press, the car, the television, same effect. Maybe digital is different; it mediates life in a new way. But all panelists agreed that human agency hasn’t evaporated, except Walther who was really talking about class dynamics the whole time.
And so, as Renn finally pointed out, the discussion was actually about moral and political problems, not technology. As Jon Askonas has said, technology isn’t good or bad, it just has effects. The question of whether kindergarteners should be on screens six hours a day is a moral and political question, not really a technological one. That the cycle of technology use flows from the upper to the lower classes is nothing new. It was interesting to see the rest of the panelists agree and pivot at that point to political considerations, departing from the first half hour of dystopian talk.
Returning to our point about differences in Protestant and Catholic attitudes (in general) on technology, Renn first interjected,
“This stuff doesn’t compute for me at all, frankly… If you look at America, we are great at inventing technologies but we didn’t invent all the technologies… development application at scale and that is why the United States created the modern world we are the protean nation right? that conquered a continent… that’s the nature of our country is the kind of country that we are and yes I’ve written like lots of what we’ve lost with industrial society more so than technology, you know, and it’s destruction of the house. I’ve written that there are trade-offs in any system…”
Walther objected that Renn’s vision is dystopian because there are obese school kids on iPads. I won’t get into the back and forth here wherein Walther was evidently exercised, questioning the volition involved with working class people sending their kids to half-rate public schools. Fair enough.
But Renn’s observation that “This is the classic, frankly, Catholic discussion… Catholicism has always been more techno-skeptic than Protestantism,” seems accurate to me. Renn adds that America is a Protestant country, obviously, and wondered aloud how popular the domination of society by a Catholic coded ethic for technology would be. This was all followed by more talk from others in the group of the collateral damage to urban slums, which allegedly offer “thick” community, by highway development and the like, The Great Society programs are a warning to AI developers that you can’t reengineer human nature or society. Again, fair enough insofar as it goes.
Here’s where Renn turned the conversation. The problem isn’t the ambition or innovation or technology itself. Its that the Christian ethos and Protestant ethic of America has been lost and so the guardrails on the use of technology have shifted or perhaps evaporated entirely. The answer isn’t limitation on innovation but moral constraints on use which, at bottom, is a question of political will. But in Silicon Valley, no “religious vision of society” restrains adoption of technology. Pragmatic political decisions about what is good and bad adaptation are governed by new ethics—”effective altruism” and the like. The Protestant work ethic and bourgeois values of industriousness, thrift, and public spirit are gone. (As Renn has rightly observed before, Evangelicals don’t have an historically Protestant ethic either.)
To these latter points, I’d add that what has been lost, along with the Protestant ethic, is a kind of Protestant providentialism regarding technology, and this, in part, is due to eschatological shifts of the 20th century. The result is that American Protestants who actually talk about technology and ethics—there are few—increasingly sound more like their Catholic counterparts than Protestants or prior eras. I am wont to dismiss eschatology as irrelevant to political theory, but in this case it is relevant.
Eschatological Optimism
Thomas Beard, friend and mentor of Oliver Cromwell, wrote in 1625 that the emergence of Martin Luther, as God’s instrument to propagate true doctrine again to the Christian world, was a sign that the Antichrist was in retreat. The veil of “popish tyranny” and “monkish barbarisms” had been lifted. But God is a God of means. Providence prepared the way for reformation with fitting human ingenuity. And here we see the Protestant eschatological import of technology.
“And to help forward this great work, not long before this time, the famous art of printing was by God’s providence found out, as it were of purpose to divulge and spread abroad the most excellent writings of famous men then living, which peradventure otherwise had never come to light.”
By these means, millions of people “but also whole states” embraced the reformation. (I wrote earlier this week about Luther’s mastery of, and improvement on, new print technology.)
Of course, Beard’s reading of providence requires a certain eschatological optimism that used to run through Protestantism almost to a man. Whatever differences in parsing certain passages of the Apocalypse and their fulfillment in history might exist from one theologian to another, postmillennial optimism ran through all of them, and before the 19th century, Protestants were what we’d call postmillennial by default. Dispensationalism and premillennialism, as late additions to the Protestant world, have not simply confused Old Testament hermeneutics and the relation of the covenants. Dispensationalism has sucked confidence and optimism out of Protestantism. Liberal Protestants, a dying breed, do not worry too much about eschatology, at least not consciously. But functionally, they maintain the postmillennial mood, as Joseph Bottum has shown. Doctrinally unmoored, this impulse runs amok to deleterious ends. There are externalities, good and bad, to every development like this. Perhaps, a tempering of Protestant optimism was needed. The millenarian of 20th century progressives facilitated world conquest. We don’t have to explain here the externalities of the accomplishment of that great feat.
But one effect of this shift in eschatology that occurred in 20th century among conservative Protestants is that Protestants have become vulnerable to the more pessimistic about the future in ways more associated with Roman Catholics. This includes views of technological innovation. The kneejerk reaction to new technology, that a given gadget is somehow a harbinger of the rise of the antichrist, is probably dying out along with the Boomer generation—the dispensationalist generation insofar as Protestants are concerned.
Protestants of Beard’s era would have seen innovations in just the opposite way: as signs of a coming golden age. Or at least, they would have considered how new technologies could be employed to hasten the golden age and return of Christ thereafter through greater dissemination of the gospel and expansion of Protestant dominance.
Culture Warriors, Again
I noted earlier that dispensationalism is mostly associated with the Boomer generation and will likely die out with them. I see no signs that Millennials (my own cohort) and Zoomers share similar interest in that mode and interpretation of eschatology with their parents and grandparents.
It is interesting to note, as Culture War 2.0 unfolds, that the warriors of Culture War 1.0 were, generally speaking, dispensationalist or premillennial. This fact may have contributed to their failure. More significant, in my opinion, is simply that the culture warriors of the 1980s and 1990s were correct about most things—prophetic even—but ill-equipped, too marginal, too anti-intellectual, and, most importantly, too early to market. I’ll be writing on this more in the future.
The point here is that, in addition to this lack of preparedness, their message and mood were inflected with a dispensationalist outlook. Which is to say, it is hard to wage a war when morale is low because defeat is certain. If things must get worse before they get better, if the end result (this side of the rapture) is persecution, then it is hard not to lapse into an accelerationist posture, or at least an indifferent one. The dispensationalist culture warrior always had a contradiction within him: America must turn back to God to be saved from communism, secularism, and et cetera. At the same time, the scriptural guarantee was that the great tribulation was afoot, the rapture imminent. Indeed, any improvement in material or political conditions only signaled a delay in the arrival of the eschaton. Most dispensationalists would admit that, based on their reading of the apostle John, America had no place in the final, great battle between world powers. Dispensationalist preachers would often issue this warning, urging their audience to repentance and to redouble their efforts. Such warnings, however, fall flat when the decline of America would mean greater proximity to the rapture of the saints, tribulation, and the defeat of the antichrist, or when America’s success and future are attached to the fate of other nations.
It makes more sense, then, for the dispensational bent to be not necessarily defeatist, but at bottom more quietist and indifferent. Boomer culture warriors, however, were anything but politically quietist and indifferent. For them, the contradictions did not need to be reconciled. For their children, it did. That later Boomers, and especially Gen-Xers and Millennials, moved in a different direction for their cultural engagement makes perfect sense in this regard. The sojourner, exile ethic fits a premillennial posture better, and, in turn, an amillennial eschatology suited those generations even better. Emphases then shifted. Eventually, the children of dispensationalists welcomed American decline less as eschatological fulfillment and more confirmation of their reactionary ethic, an ethic fueled as much by generational tensions as theological reassessment. That Protestants, at least the intellectuals, have increasingly since the 1990s looked outside their own tradition for social and political insight is a symptom of this shift.
The Protestant Future
All this to say, dispensationalism has skewed the American Protestant mood toward cultural and political pessimism. On the one hand, dispensationalism still captivates American Protestants, a fact very evident recently. On the other hand, a later generation of Protestants, embarrassed by the culture warriors and enamored with the intellectual and institutional prowess of Roman Catholics, have adopted a more identifiably Roman Catholic attitude toward the future and America itself. The starting point and motivation of dispensationalists and their children are distinct, but the end result is basically the same. It is not the historic Protestant providentialism that moves them or guides their analysis of present and future events.
Enthusiasm for innovation, optimism for the future, and harsh self-examination unto self-improvement, the combination attitudes found in Newton, Mather, and Franklin, are not awkward or contradictory. Rather, it describes a Protestant providentialism, bygone but in need of recovery. Indeed, pessimistic soteriology and optimistic eschatology are entirely congruent. Max Weber was onto something there.
At least a certain kind of millenarian excitement is needed for America to retain its vitality. It’s the optimism, providential confidence, and even cosmological consciousness that led Protestant adventurers across the Atlantic and then the continent, carving a civilization out of untamed wilderness, evangelizing along the way. Every great sea battle, scientific breakthrough, pestilence, or earthquake was a sign of providence: either a confirmation of divine favor or a prompt to repentance. The loss of a forward looking, providentialist and cultural confidence—a Protestant posture—explains more than the adoption of a typically Roman Catholic attitude about technology and America’s future, it explains national confusion over immigration and foreign policy too. Bottum was right, the fall of the mainline is the most significant cultural and political event in America of the past 150 years. Especially the past 75 years can be understood as the country grappling with that fact, the loss of Protestant leadership, cultural confidence, and an ethical center. It’s still a Protestant country, warts and all. How Protestants respond will dictate how America enters the future.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.