After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History - Rilegato

Hollinger, David A.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691158428 ISBN 13: 9780691158426

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

The important role of liberal ecumenical Protestantism in American history

The role of liberalized, ecumenical Protestantism in American history has too often been obscured by the more flamboyant and orthodox versions of the faith that oppose evolution, embrace narrow conceptions of family values, and continue to insist that the United States should be understood as a Christian nation. In this book, one of our preeminent scholars of American intellectual history examines how liberal Protestant thinkers struggled to embrace modernity, even at the cost of yielding much of the symbolic capital of Christianity to more conservative, evangelical communities of faith.

If religion is not simply a private concern, but a potential basis for public policy and a national culture, does this mean that religious ideas can be subject to the same kind of robust public debate normally given to ideas about race, gender, and the economy? Or is there something special about religious ideas that invites a suspension of critical discussion? These essays, collected here for the first time, demonstrate that the critical discussion of religious ideas has been central to the process by which Protestantism has been liberalized throughout the history of the United States, and shed light on the complex relationship between religion and politics in contemporary American life.

After Cloven Tongues of Fire brings together in one volume David Hollinger's most influential writings on ecumenical Protestantism. The book features an informative general introduction as well as concise introductions to each essay.

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Informazioni sugli autori

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former president of the Organization of American Historians. His books include Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton) and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former president of the Organization of American Historians

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"Liberal Protestantism is not appreciated enough, not studied enough, and keeps getting written off as a movement destined to fade away. David Hollinger, one of our finest and most provocative intellectual historians, reminds us how important liberal Protestant ideas have been in advancing movements for social reform and in shaping our current self-understandings. And his account of the struggle of Christians with the Enlightenment is hugely instructive at a moment when all our faith traditions continue to confront the effects of the acids of modernity. In bringing together some of Hollinger's most important work,After Cloven Tongues of Fire is an exciting book that challenges many of the assumptions lurking behind our debates over religion's role in American public life."--E. J. Dionne Jr., author ofOur Divided Political Heart and Souled Out

"This book by America's leading intellectual historian is essential reading for anyone who cares to understand the rise, decline, and enduring legacy of what was once our dominant religious tradition. David Hollinger's essays, always empathetic but never uncritical, treat the 'worldly' Protestants with the moral rigor they deserve."--Michael Kazin, author ofAmerican Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

"Hollinger's book will take its place as one of the most important works in modern American intellectual history published in recent decades. It shows this exemplary scholar practicing his craft at the highest level of scholarly excellence and deliberately and self-critically reflecting on his practice."--James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University

"A splendid book. Hollinger's trenchant, sweeping, and at times jolting essays pose critical questions about central issues in American religion, philosophy, and history with depth, insight, and understanding.After Cloven Tongues of Fire will attract a wide spectrum of readers."--Jon Butler, Yale University

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After Cloven Tongues of Fire

PROTESTANT LIBERALISM IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY

By David A. Hollinger

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 David A. Hollinger
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15842-6

Contents

Preface....................................................................
ix
1. The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An 
Old Drama Still Being Enacted..............................................
1
2. After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern 
American Encounter with Diversity..........................................
18
3. The Realist–Pacifist Summit Meeting of March 1942 and the Political 
Reorientation of Ecumenical Protestantism in the United States.............
56
4. Justification by Verification: The Scientific Challenge to the Moral 
Authority of Christianity in Modern America................................
82
5. James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience..........................
103
6. Damned for God's Glory: William James and the Scientific Vindication of 
Protestant Culture.........................................................
117
7. Communalist and Dispersionist Approaches to American Jewish History in 
an Increasingly Post-Jewish Era............................................
138
8. Church People and Others................................................
170
9. Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity..............
190
10. Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?....
199
Epilogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and Protestant Liberalism.......................
211
Index......................................................................
227

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Accommodation of Protestant Christianitywith the Enlightenment: An Old DramaStill Being Enacted

Commissioned for a special issue of Daedalus on "American Narratives," thisessay outlines a theme in American history so grand that it has sometimes beenforgotten while scholars diligently pursue narrowly defined research topics. A commoncomplaint about historians of the late twentieth century was that in their professionalcaution they were reluctant to address "big ideas," even ideas that framedebates about the basic character of the nation and the principles that shouldguide its public affairs. The accommodation of Protestant Christianity with theEnlightenment is certainly one of the biggest and oldest of all such ideas and is onethat, I remind us here, continues to structure the culture and politics of the nationeven as visible in presidential campaigns well into the twenty-first century. Manyhistorians have addressed this idea, including Henry F. May, whose influence onmy thinking about the history of the United States I am glad to have here anotheropportunity to acknowledge.

I identify two closely related dynamics that propelled and gave structure to theprocess of accommodation. A succession of scientific developments, including theDarwinian revolution in natural history and the archaeological and linguisticstudy of how the Bible came to be written, caused Protestant intellectuals to reformulatethe inherited faith in terms better able to meet modern standards of cognitiveplausibility. In the meantime, the demographic transformation of a society oflargely British and Protestant stock into one that included many Catholics, Jews,and other non-Protestants from throughout Europe and beyond brought pressureupon inherited assumptions. Proximity to other orthodoxies raised doubts aboutone's own and produced a greater willingness to entertain new ideas consistentwith the ostensibly global community of secular inquiry. I invoke the writings ofphilosopher Charles Peirce to illustrate how the dynamic of demographic diversificationworked in tandem with the advancement of science to generate liberalizedversions of Christianity.

Protestant liberalism is the central presence in this entire, sprawling drama.Sometimes neglected in our own era's preoccupation with the political prominenceof culturally and theologically conservative evangelicals, Protestant liberalismis in fact a huge reality in American history, and is indeed a creationof the accommodation with the Enlightenment. In the jagged, stuttering courseof this accommodation, one generation after another of the most educated ofProtestant intellectuals struggled not only to define and proclaim their religionbut also to mobilize national, secular institutions as well as denominationalfellowships in the service of that revised, ostensibly cosmopolitan faith. Alongthe way these liberals were routinely accused by their orthodox rivals of havingbecome essentially secular. Hence they and their critics enacted yet again theclassic contention within religious communities over what is "authentic" andwhat is a "corruption." Do the orthodox cling to doctrines that had been pastedonto the essential faith at a particular historical moment, and now mistake theseanachronisms for the substance rather than surface of the faith? Do the liberalschase after the worldly fashions of the moment, untrue to the still-valid faith ofthe fathers? Such charges and countercharges are the standard stuff of Christianhistory and also of the history of the United States, the population of which remainstoday the most Christianity-affirming of any national population in theNorth Atlantic West.

This essay invokes as a truism the idea that Christianity itself was a prominentinfluence upon the Enlightenment as the latter developed in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries. I now wish I had underscored the point more vividly, whichI hereby do. Some readers, properly concerned that the Enlightenment is sometimestreated as autochthonous rather than a historic product of many classical andChristian discourses, worry that secular scholars rush too quickly past the religiousmatrices out of which Locke, Gibbon, Franklin and other Enlightenment thinkersdeveloped their ideas.

This essay was originally published in Daedalus CXLI (Winter 2012), 76–88.Its last few pages overlap with the essay that follows it in the pages of this volume,focusing on the period since World War II.

In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. invokedthe Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and Jefferson writing the Declarationof Independence. In that 1963 meditation on American nationaldestiny, fashioned as a weapon in the black struggle for civil rights, Kingrepeatedly mobilized the sanctions of both Protestant Christianity andthe Enlightenment. Like the great majority of Americans of his andevery generation, King believed that these two massive inventories ofideals and practices work together well enough. But not everyone whohas shared this basic conviction understands the relation between thetwo in quite the same terms. And there are others who have depicted therelation as one of deep tension, even hostility. Protestant Christianity,the Enlightenment, and a host of claims and counterclaims about howthe two interact with one another are deeply constitutive of Americanhistory. We often speak about "the religious" and "the secular," or about"the heart" and "the head," but American life as actually lived beneaththese abstractions has been much more particular and demands scrutinyin its historical density.

The United States, whatever else it may have been in its entire historyas a subject of narration, has been a major site for the engagement of ProtestantChristianity with the Enlightenment. This engagement was—andcontinues to be—a world-historical event, or at least one of the definingexperiences of the North Atlantic West and its global cultural extensionsfrom the eighteenth century to the present. Still, the United States hasbeen a uniquely conspicuous arena for this engagement in part becauseof the sheer demographic preponderance of Protestants, especially dissentingProtestants from Great Britain, during the formative years of thesociety and long thereafter. Relatively recent social transformations caneasily blind contemporaries to how overwhelmingly Northern EuropeanProtestant in origin the educated and empowered classes of the UnitedStates have traditionally been. The upward mobility of Catholic and Jewishpopulations since World War II and the massive immigration followingthe Hart-Cellar Act of 1965—producing millions of non-ProtestantAmericans from Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet lands—havegiven the leadership of American society a novel look. To be sure, therehave long been large numbers of non-Protestants in the population atlarge, but before 1960, if you held a major leadership position and hadreal opportunities to influence the direction of society, you most likelygrew up in a white Protestant milieu. The example of King is a reminder,moreover, that the substantial population of African Americans has longbeen, and remains, largely Protestant.

In the United States, the engagement of Protestant Christianity withthe Enlightenment most often took the form of "accommodation."The bulk of the men and women in control of American institutions—educational,political, and social—have sought to retain the culturalcapital of the Reformation while diversifying their investments in avariety of opportunities and challenges, many of which came to themunder the sign of the Enlightenment. The legacy of the Enlightenmentin much of Europe, by contrast, played out in the rejection of, or indifferenceto, the Christianity to which the Enlightenment was largelya dialectical response, even while state churches remained fixtures ofthe established order. In the United States, too, there were people whorejected Protestant Christianity. But here the legacy of the Enlightenmentmost often appeared in the liberalization of doctrine and biblicalinterpretation and in the denominational system's functioning asan expanse of voluntary associations providing vital solidarities midwaybetween the nation, on the one hand, and the family and local community,on the other.

The sharper church-state separation in the United States liberated religiouslydefined affiliations to serve as intermediate solidarities, a rolesuch affiliations could less easily perform in settings where religious authoritywas associated with state power. Hence in addition to orthodox,evangelical Protestants who have been more suspicious of the criticalspirit of the Enlightenment, American life has included a formidablepopulation of "liberal" or "ecumenical" Protestants building and maintainingreligiously defined communities even as they absorbed and participatedin many aspects of modern civilization that more conservativeProtestants held at a distance. As late as the mid-1960s, membership inthe classic "mainstream liberal" denominations—Methodist,Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and so on—reached an all-timehigh. Because educated, middle-class Americans maintained Protestant affiliations wellinto the twentieth century, the Enlightenment was extensively engagedwithin, rather than merely beyond, the churches. Had the educated middleclass moved further from Protestantism, the cultural capital of theReformation would not have been preserved and renewed to the degreethat made it an object of struggle for so long.

The intensity of the Enlightenment-Protestant relationship in Americaresulted also from the discomforts created by the very church-stateseparation that encouraged the flourishing of religious affiliations. TheUnited States is the only major nation in the world that still operatesunder an eighteenth-century constitution, one that, anomalously in thegovernance cultures of even that century, makes no mention of God.The U.S. federal government is a peculiarly Enlightenment-groundedentity, and for that reason has inspired many attempts to inject Christianityinto it, or to insist that God has been there, unacknowledged,all along.

The role of liberal religion in American history is too often missedby observers who consider the consequences of the Enlightenment onlyoutside religion and recognize religion only when found in its most obscurantistforms. The fundamentalists who rejected evolution and thehistorical study of the Bible and have lobbied for God to be written intothe Constitution receive extensive attention in our textbooks, but thebanner of Protestant Christianity has also been flown by defenders ofDarwin and the Higher Criticism and by critics of the idea of a "ChristianAmerica." Quarrels within American Protestantism revolve aroundthe feeling among more orthodox, evangelical parties that mainstreamliberals are actually secularists in disguise, as well as the feeling amongecumenical parties that their evangelical co-religionists are sinking thetrue Christian faith with an albatross of anachronistic dogmas and alliancesforged with reactionary political forces. These quarrels, shapedin part by the campaign for a "reasonable Christianity" waged by Unitariansearly in the nineteenth century, continue to the present day,sharply distinguishing the United States from the historically Protestantcountries of Europe. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and theScandinavian nations have long been among the most de-Christianizedin the world. The United States really is different. Accordingly, the copiousliterature on "secularization" often treats the United States as aspecial case.

Never was the United States a more special case than it is today. Indeed,contemporary American conditions invite renewed attention to the historicaccommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment.An increasingly prominent feature of public life is the affirmation of religionin general and of Protestant Christianity in particular. Republicancandidates for office especially have been loquacious in expressing theirfaith and firm in declaring its relevance to secular governance. MicheleBachmann, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Richard Perry, Mitt Romney,and Rick Santorum are among the most visible examples. Leaders ofthe Democratic Party, too, including President Barack Obama, have proclaimedtheir faith and have contributed to an atmosphere in which theconstitutional principle of church-state separation is widely held to havebeen interpreted too strictly.

The Enlightenment-derived arguments of John Rawls and JürgenHabermas, which maintain that debates over public policy shouldbe confined to the sphere of "public reason," are routinely criticizedas naïve and doctrinaire. We are awash with confident denunciationsof "the secularization thesis" (usually construed as the claim that theworld becomes less religious as it becomes industrialized) and with earnestpleas to listen empathically to the testimonies—heavily Protestantin orientation—of religious yearning and experience now prevalent inpopular culture. The writings of the "new atheists" revive the rationalist-naturalistcritiques of religion that had largely gone into remission duringthe decades when religion was widely understood to have been privatizedand hence less in need of refutation by skeptics. Affirmations of asecular orientation less strident than those of the new atheists provokeextensive attention, moreover, because debates about the nation and itsfuture are so much more religion-saturated that at any time since the1950s. In a country that has now elected a president from a member of anotoriously stigmatized ethnoracial group, atheism remains more anathemathan blackness: almost half of all voters are still comfortable tellingpollsters that they would never support an atheist for president. Observersdisagree whether American piety has religious depth or is a largelysymbolic structure controlled by worldly interests; either way, religiousformations are indisputably part of the life of the United States today.

In this contemporary setting, it is all the more important to understandhow the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenmenthas taken place and how the dynamics of this accommodation continueto affect the public culture of the United States. Two processeshave driven the accommodation, growing increasingly interconnectedover time. One is "cognitive demystification," or the critical assessmentof truth claims in light of scientific knowledge. In this classic dynamic of"science and religion" discourse, the specific content of religious beliefis reformulated to take account of what geologists, biologists, physicists,astronomers, historians, and other naturalistically grounded communitiespersuade religious leaders is true about the world. Normally, the religiousdoctrines rejected in this process are said to have been inessentialto begin with. They are cast aside as mere projections of historically particularaspects of past cultures, which can be replaced by formulationsthat reflect the true essentials of the faith and vindicate yet again thecompatibility of faith with knowledge. Sometimes, however, cognitive demystificationpushes people toward nonbelief.

The second process, "demographic diversification," involves intimatecontact with people of different backgrounds who display contrastingopinions and assumptions and thereby stimulate doubt that the ways ofone's own tribe are indeed authorized by divine authority and viable, ifnot imperative, for other tribes, too. The dynamic here is also classical:cosmopolitanism—a great Enlightenment ideal—challenging provincialfaiths. Wider experiences, either through foreign travel or, more often,through contact with immigrants, change the context for deciding whatis good and true. Living in proximity to people who do not take ProtestantChristianity for granted could be unsettling. Here again, the standardresponse is to liberalize, to treat inherited doctrines as sufficientlyflexible to enable one to abide by them while coexisting "pluralistically,"or even cooperating, with people who do not accept those doctrines.Sometimes, however, awareness of the range of human possibilities resultsin abandoning the faith of the natal community altogether.

Philosopher Charles Peirce understood how easily the two processescan be linked. In "The Fixation of Belief," Peirce argued that all efforts tostabilize belief will ultimately fail unless you adopt beliefs that can withstandexposure to the world at large. When you encounter other peoplewho hold very different opinions from your own, and who can presentstriking evidence to support those opinions, it is harder to be sure thatyou are right. Your own experience and that of those around you mayyield a particular set of certainties, but if another group of people movesinto the neighborhood and obliges you to confront their foreign experienceand the truth claims apparently vindicated by that experience, yourold certainties become less so. Can you keep the rest of the world awayfrom your own tribe? Perhaps, but it is not easy. Peirce made this argumentin 1877, while defending the superiority of science in the specificcontext of the Darwinian controversy. He understood science to entailthe taking of all relevant evidence into account, wherever it came from,and truth to be what all the world's inquirers could agree on if all theirtestimonies could be assimilated. He perceived modernity as an experienceof difference in which hiding out with one's own kind was not likelyto work. In this way, he integrated the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanismwith its critical spirit.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from After Cloven Tongues of Fire by David A. Hollinger. Copyright © 2013 by David A. Hollinger. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0691158428
• ISBN 13: 9780691158426
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 228
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile