In Search of a Religious Center

Over the weekend I wrote about the debate over religious revival in America, touching on the evidence for and against resurgence, the possibility of renewal and decline happening together, and the question of whether revival can reach beyond realms of concentrated social capital to reshape the country as whole.

In this newsletter I want to take up a related but somewhat different question: not whether Christianity can revive itself (it may or may not, but I’m sure that it can), but whether what you might call a Christian center can be restored in American life. By “center” I mean a set of religious beliefs and institutions that are embraced and respected in the broad middle of the country, cultivate a widely shared interpretation of the American story and operate effectively at the elite level, informing political conduct and intellectual arguments even among nonbelievers.

This kind of religious center is what America decisively lost somewhere between the 1960s and 1980s, when the institutions of mainline Protestantism went into steep and perhaps terminal decline. Much of the subsequent culture war can be understood as failed attempts by different forces — the religious right and the progressive left especially — to occupy the mainline’s stabilizing, consensus-establishing place.

I’ve written about our post-mainline situation many times before, but here I want to take as a text a recent essay by the political theorist Joshua Mitchell, entitled “Whither the Reformation in America?” Mitchell offers a number of sweeping observations about the splits dividing Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and the different forms of Protestant Christianity, but he circles around to a core claim about the relationship between the Protestant tradition and the American idea.

That relationship, Mitchell suggests, was founded on the “civilizational wager” that a modern society could be modeled on the narrative of biblical Israel, complete with an errand in the wilderness, a sense of divine mission and a covenantal relationship with God.

Exodus is the fundamental model for America, in this account, rather than ancient Greece and Rome. Our real founding doesn’t rest on careful philosophizing about the ideal polis, but on the quest to found a holy nation amid the exploration of a wild frontier, rooted in a “Hebraic Christianity” that believes with Abraham Lincoln that God has at least almost chosen America, and maybe chosen us in full.

This American religious quest, crucially, should be understood in terms not just of faith and morality but also of material progress and environmental stewardship. America is to be the place where God’s initial commandments in Genesis, for human beings to fill and subdue the earth but also tend it like a garden, are brought to as much fulfillment as possible under the conditions imposed by original sin. Thus it’s natural for America to be a land “of machines and of industry,” for its Christianity to have a more Promethean aspect than in Europe — even as its environmentalists step forward to “save” its Edenic natural landscape.

But it’s unnatural for American Christians to either seek to withdraw from the temptations of the world or to seek some kind of careful political-theological stability. Instead, to be truly American, they need to understand the national story as a missionary endeavor, with internal arcs of temptation and redemption woven into a larger, divinely guided quest.

Here is Mitchell, waxing eloquent:

America is the New Israel, the city on the hill, the light to enlighten the nations, a battleground on which Satan and his legion tirelessly seek to undermine the promise of God’s New Israel. Did not King’s speech on the steps of Lincoln’s temple in 1963 call on America to live up to that promise? … Errancy and return: This is the New Israel’s perennially erratic path through providential history. America is not Aristotle’s polis, nor is it the faint glimmer of Plato’s iridescent city set up in the heavens. America is the 40-year wandering of Exodus, searching for the American dreamland of milk and honey (Exodus 33:3). Is not the frontier — from its “westward” iteration in the 19th century to Musk’s expansive vision for Mars in the 21st century — an American recapitulation of Exodus for the New World, and for other worlds, without end?

So what does this account of “Hebraic Christianity” mean for the major expressions of American religion that we have today? Basically, Mitchell argues that they are all ill-equipped to fulfill the American civilizational wager. He regards evangelicalism, for all its intense political engagement, as fundamentally anti-worldly: “strong enough only to fortify the walls” against “a hostile external world,” and ill-equipped to govern and convert beyond its bastions. Meanwhile, Catholicism (and the intellectual conservatism that it has ended up powerfully influencing) still looks too much to the Old World’s hierarchies: “Failing to understand the soul of America, it can never capture its heart.”

This leaves a third category, the direct heir of the defunct Protestant establishment — the “awakened” progressivism operating inside the old institutions of the WASPs (universities and foundations and so on) and trying to fill them with moral fervor. Mitchell argues that this fervor is actually closer to the American Protestant inheritance than anything operating on the political right: It’s only in wokeness that you hear a call to national repentance and redemption, a promise that a reckoning with the sins of racism and patriarchy will make Americans “worthy of entering the promised land, worthy of being a city on a hill.” Unfortunately, wokeness is not actually Protestant or Christian anymore, making it a “ghastly apparition” of the American religious tradition rather than the real thing.

All these generalizations are sweeping and poetic and of course highly debatable, but let me do the pundit’s job and repurpose them into a simpler typology. One might say that to really lead and shape America, a religious tradition would need to be, first, worldly in the sense of relating in a serious way to a complex cultural and political and intellectual landscape where many people do not share its beliefs.

Second, it would need to be American in the sense of believing in a national mission and sacred destiny of the kind that Mitchell describes.

Third, it would need to be Christian in the sense of believing in God and Jesus Christ and not just some kind of secularized “arc of history” version of the Christian narrative — a version that gives way, under duress, to nihilism and despair. (Note that I am setting aside a scenario where a truly post-Christian religious consensus takes shape; that would require a re-founding or perhaps the Singularity.)

Given these parameters, the insufficiency of American evangelicalism is its unworldliness, its struggle to form and shape an intellectual elite and to engage politically outside of Manichaean categories. The insufficiency of American Catholicism is its still uncertain relationship to the American drama as a whole — not because most Catholics in the United States aren’t patriotic, but because a vision of America as a promised land and almost-chosen people still does not integrate easily with Catholic ideas and categories. And the insufficiency of woke post-Protestantism is that it believes in sin but not in God.

Of these three difficulties, it’s the Catholic relationship with America that I think most deserves some near-future newsletter discussion. But with Good Friday almost upon us, I’ll just end with an enumeration of faults, and leave resurrection scenarios to another day.