A Response to The Ethic of Civility
In Timon Cline’s essay, “The Ethic of Civility,” he discusses the root of the recent wave of elite Evangelical apostasy in relation to sociologist James Davison Hunter’s “ethic of civility.” As he describes, this ethic prioritizes frictionless integration with non-Christians over the distinctives of Christian faith which cause social disruption. The article is excellent, and if you haven’t seen it, please go ahead and read it first.
What I want to add to Cline’s essay is a deeper dive into why, all of a sudden, this ethic is becoming salient. Cline points to the role of the Moral Majority in the 70’s and 80’s and the aggressive political posture of men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Certainly, there is always a generational effect that causes an oscillation in social norms, but there is more going on than a mere shift in emphasis. The Ethic of Civility is a signifier of a major social fissure in Evangelical culture along the lines of social class.
How does this Ethic of Civility relate to social class? In J.G.A. Pocock’s book, Virtue, Commerce, and History, Pocock describes the emergence of the middle class as a distinct social formation as well as the characteristics of middle-class identity. Middle class in Pocock’s sense is not the American middle class but the class immediately below the British aristocracy, whom Americans would refer to as Upper-Middle Class: degreed, wealthy, and embedded within the major institutions and corporations that dominate society. Among these people, manners are the replacement that middle-class cultures make for the loss of civic virtue. The “stockholders and officeholders” of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries had no use for the self-sacrificial virtues of republicanism and actively despised the equality it brought with the Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer. Manners were the appearance of virtue that sufficiently distinguished the man of money and university education from the bulk of the commons. Manners smoothed the flow of moneyed transactions but didn’t demand the obligations that come with patriotism and service to one’s countrymen. A virtuous citizen might demand the government serve all the people, but a mannerly gentleman could sell out his countrymen for the promise of a profit or for some silly ideology he read in a book and still look good doing it. The Ethic of Civility is one piece of the class-identifying markers that communicate status among those who know how to look for it.
Given this identification of manners with class identity, Cline’s causation needs to be pushed back a few years to make better sense of the behavior of elite Exvangelicals like Russell Moore and David French. Donald Trump is not the reason that this generation of upper-middle-class Evangelical leaders left the Republican Party or the Evangelical Movement at all, but a convenient excuse to give after the fact. Trump only came to power because of the social shift that began in 2010, when the “Negative World” emerged and Barack Obama cemented the power of the “McGovern Coalition” at the heart of the Democratic Party. The Democrats became the party of the urban credentialed class and the welfare class, while the middle and working classes shifted towards the Republicans. Christians now had to choose between losing their upper-middle-class, sophisticated, mannered friends or abandoning a church that looks more like the help and less like their own families.
As elite sentiment turns harder against Christians in our “Negative World,” upper-middle-class people find themselves in a position where they can no longer remain both a Protestant and well-mannered, in the Pocockian sense. It is uncouth on its face to believe that “no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” John 14:6. The liberal church, which remains nominally Christian and yet still well-mannered, has marginalized itself to such a degree that even left-of-center Christians have problems taking it seriously, as evidenced by the conversion rates over the last three decades. If David E. Campbell’s sorting hypothesis is true, and Christians are switching denominations on the basis of their political beliefs, where are the overflowing Episcopal or Methodist churches? As the upper-middle class shifts left, why aren’t we seeing the left-wing equivalent to the late-20th Century conservative boom? The revealed preferences of upper-middle-class actions show that they no longer believe it possible or even desirable to be coiffured and still Christian.
Prior to the 1980’s, there was a “pipeline” that permitted newly rising members of the upper-middle class to distance themselves from uncouth commoners without abandoning the faith. In Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s book, American Grace, the authors describe the way that class mobility expressed itself in the mid-20th Century. A rising young family would trade their country house for a townhouse, their Chevy for an Oldsmobile, and their Baptist or Pentecostal Church for the Episcopalian or Methodist one. This pipeline eventually broke down under the weight of the hypocrisies and failures of this era.
As Dean Kelley explains in Why Conservative Churches are Growing, the pressure to choose between being Christian and being politely upper-middle class is a consistent theme of the late 20th Century. He uses the example of the Civil Rights Movement, and how many mainline churches began to feel tension between being seen as responsive to fashionable upper-middle-class causes and doing justice to the Christian faith. Is the Church a place to worship God or a place to participate in acts of upper-middle-class political activism? Churches that leaned to the former would shed their activist members, but those that leaned to the latter would gradually decline. If the purpose of the church is social activism, of what use is the mortgage on a church building and the salaried minister? Why tithe to the church when you can just give more directly to a social justice organization? Once a church became fully identified with the politics of the McGovernites, Kelley tells us that many of its members began to wonder what waking up early on Sunday morning had to do with achieving racial reconciliation or health care for all. The result was the collapse of Mainline attendance in the 70’s and 80’s and the temporary growth of Evangelical and Centrist-to-Right-Wing Protestant churches due to the influx of orthodox Protestants.
This continuing process is the source of the distemper among the Evangelical elites. They no longer have any place left to go to maintain the illusion of their double identity. Stephen Bullivant’s book, Nonverts, describes the social pressures faced by non-Mainline Protestants when they feel pulled between their social class and their childhood faith, which frequently bursts out in loud, anti-Christian polemics. They are watching their neighbors, colleagues, and country-club compatriots turn further from the Church, while the Church becomes dominated by those working and lower-middle-class churls who are clearly, from their perspective, social inferiors.
When I taught at Louisiana Christian University, my pastor sought to feel me out by handing me a copy of Russell Moore’s autobiographic book, Onward. He told me to read the book before talking to him about it because he didn’t want to skew my perception or plant any prejudice against Moore. What struck me about that book was Moore’s account of his own youth. Moore writes in a deeply contemptuous tone about the simple, working-class Christians of rural Mississippi. He doesn’t even seem to hide his sense of superiority, his arrogance, or his classist projections. This was my first introduction to the “prophetic minority” theme of the 2010’s and led me to immediately Google as many of Moore’s sermons on the topic that I could find. I leave it to the reader to do their own research, but I found his work riddled with anti-working-class bigotry, aspersions against the salvation of blue-collar Christians, and the vilest upper-middle-class superiority complex that I have ever seen outside of a university graduate seminar classroom. Prophetic Minority was, and has always been, an attempt to purge the Church of working-class Christians. It was a wishful fantasy for a tiny, Evangelical Movement made up solely of people with higher education and who all possessed the manners of the “better” class of people.
To be an Evangelical among the upper-middle class today requires one to be a “class traitor,” to remain loyal and sociable with the political enemies, or rather the exploited victims, of the upper-middle class. This is a pivotal factor contributing to the absence of Evangelical Elites described by Aaron Renn. This is also why loyalty has become such a dirty word among the crowd that follows French. Mannered people, like Pocock’s stockholders and officeholders, aren’t loyal. They follow interests, and they do it with the cool, casual poise of their sophisticated social hypocrisies. French lambasts his enemies as being merely loyal while he has “principles,” or at least the manners that substitute for principles. Yet loyalty, or in the Latin fides, remains at the heart of what it means to be Christian. The medieval Fathers told us that Fides is one. The man who doesn’t hold faith has no faith, in God or man.
As Pocock so clearly points out, manners are not a virtue but are in fact a simulation of virtue. They’re an excuse to be disloyal, dishonorable, unvirtuous, untruthful, debased, and do all this without impairing the free flow of goods, services, and money among an oligarchic elite. The Ethic of Civility is a code among glad-handers, moneychangers, and mammonites to keep the good times going at the expense of the vast working and middle classes beneath them. As Musa al-Gharbi shows us in We Have Never Been Woke, the so-called principles of the upper-middle class, these “symbolic capitalists,” are empty and malleable forms. They are words that mean nothing yet can be twisted to fit any interest or goal. Like Pocock, the modern-day “stockholders and officeholders” use manners and their ever-changing buzzwords to organize themselves against a disorganized majority. What remains constant is power, and that power remains in the hands of the “right” people. Evangelicals are, needless to say, not the “right” people. This, at its root, is what David French is about. Nothing more.
