The fundamentalist-modernist split in American Protestantism is roughly one hundred years old. It has been an unmitigated disaster and the cost of this division is growing.
The problem is not so much with fundamentalists and fundamentalist-aligned Pentecostals. These churches and congregations are doing what they always have done: meeting the spiritual needs of the marginalized, the alienated, and others drawn by the combination of spiritual excitement, personal engagement and eschatological hope that their teaching provides. These churches are likely to flourish as long as they are needed, and they will be needed as long as the hard edges of our society and radical uncertainties of our times persist.
What worries me is the missing keystone of the arch of American religion: a vibrant Protestant witness that offers a spiritually compelling, ethically challenging and intellectually serious form of Christian faith and community life in the heart of American culture today.
I think of this missing church as ‘mainlinegelical’: a church that somehow unites the kind of faith and passion mostly found among evangelicals today with the historical and institutional sense of responsibility and stewardship that characterized the mainline churches at their best — and can still be found among them here and there today.
At their best, institutions like Wheaton College and religious figures like Rick Warren and Tim Keller (in their very different ways) are reaching out from the evangelical current in American religion to try to erect this kind of religious presence. To some degree the evangelical movement as a whole represents a realization by some of the heirs of the original fundamentalist movement that engagement with society is an essential element of real Christian witness.
I wish I could say I saw the same kind of outreach from the mainline side of the chasm. Unfortunately even as these churches shrink and decline there seems to be little interest in taking a hard look at what has gone wrong.
In a sense, the mainline churches today suffer because they never took stock of the costs of modernism in quite the same way that evangelicals came to terms with some of the shortcomings and one-sided characteristics of the fundamentalist movement. Beginning really with Billy Graham’s pilgrimage, for two generations evangelicals have been working to free themselves of cultural detritus (culturally determined views on race and on the place of women in society, for example) while holding on to the vital principles of the fundamentalist core — doctrines like original sin, the atonement, and a strong belief that God, however mysteriously, acts in history.
The heirs of the modernists, I fear, have not really had this ‘second stage’ movement. If anything, the most noticeable trend in many mainline denominations has been to go farther down the road of the modernists. Reinhold Niebuhr, a figure who in many ways came closer than any other to the kind of review and renewal that mainline Protestantism needs, would be politically and theologically isolated in the mainline churches today. His stance suggested a rigorous and critical approach to the limits of liberal theology, but that side of his legacy has been largely ignored.
Niebuhr in a sense has had no heirs. His effort to synthesize the core vision of historic Protestantism with a contemporary sensibility did not capture the imagination of subsequent generations of mainline church leaders. The mainline churches seemed to feel that little of value was really lost when the fundamentalists left. The modernists won the fight with the fundamentalists, after all. They ended up with the big buildings, the prestigious and academically well respected theological schools, the patronage of the social elite, the bully pulpits that commanded attention and respect, the control of the denominational machinery. Why look for anything more?
In truth, the split impoverished the mainline churches as much as it did the fundamentalists. Modernity in religion became progressively unglued from the foundations of Protestant faith; the mainline churches lacked the kind of compelling, burning message of faith that would have kept new generations of educated, thoughtful believers engaged in the church. For too many mainline congregations, faith faded into a habit, and the habit faded away.
While many people in the mainline churches continue to live rich and intense spiritual lives, the mainline churches as a group seem to have lost both the urge and the ability to communicate a message of urgency about the need to people to, as the old spirituals put it, “get right with God.” They have lost the ability to make the Christian life and a Christian commitment the vital center of community and family life — even for many of their own members.
Fundamentalists in their determination to keep hold of the ‘fundamentals’ of the faith as they understood them diminished their ability to speak to American society about faith or about anything else. Modernists, concerned to incorporate the insights of contemporary science and thought, seem to have lost the ability to inspire, to challenge and to transform that was always the hallmark of American Christianity.
The mainline churches need to do what evangelicals have done: that is, to consciously turn and seek a way to recover what was unnecessarily lost. I’m not going to attempt a prescription for the whole mainline church, but recovery probably means a return to the centrality of original sin, a renewed focus on the need for redemption through encounter with Christ, and a shift from an almost entirely bureaucratic and professional style of mission and organization to something that is more charismatic and intuitive. Church planting and congregational growth cannot be thought of as technical problems with professional solutions (although good technique is always a good thing). These are spiritual tasks that can only be accomplished by people who, as Francis Asbury and the Wesley brothers could say without embarrassment, are on fire for the Lord.
Sometimes mainline church leaders remind me of the Pope who showed St. Francis around the Vatican to see the many treasures of the church. “Peter can no longer say ‘silver and gold have I none’,” chuckled the pontiff.
“Neither can he say ‘rise up and walk’,” snapped St. Francis.
I can only imagine what Francis Asbury would say to a Methodist convention today.
The mainline churches do a lot of good, but the long inexorable decline both in numbers and in the influence of Christian ideas in modern American life show very plainly that something critical has gone wrong. In attempting to reconcile classic Christian ideas and standards with modernity, the mainline has somehow lost American Christianity’s characteristic and most vital strength: the ability to electrify generation after generation with the call to begin a transformational encounter with the person of Christ.
This ability can’t be regained by committee. There is no diocesan or denominational planning process that can knit the dry bones together.
But the mainline churches will dwindle and diminish if they don’t somehow reconnect with the enthusiasm and charisma that once made them great.
One hundred years ago the best and the brightest of America’s educated youth sought to serve God and humanity through lives of service in the church. Generations of missionaries brought not only the gospel but education, health and hope to people all over the world. In home missions — settlement houses, YMCA and YWCA associations and many other organizations and institutions — they opened doors at home to waves of immigrants and addressed the terrible social conditions of our industrial cities. On top of all that, the mainline churches were producing theologians and preachers who engaged with the great social and intellectual questions of the day in ways that compelled the attention of society as a whole and generations of young people who did not go into full time Christian service made their spiritual commitments and their lives in the church a center of their personal and family life and community.
Much, much less of this is happening today, and the mainline churches don’t seem to care very much. There is little sense of how far they have fallen, how little they done to unleash the power of Christian faith in modern life. As long as the decline is smooth and pleasant, nobody gets bent out of shape.
Sixty years ago the fundamentalists had no choice but to rethink their approach. They were becoming marginalized, a movement restricted geographically and socially, trapped by their uncritical acceptance of non-Christian ideas. If they were to ever engage American society, if they were to fulfill the mandate of the church and proclaim the good news in their day, they were going to have to change. Slowly and painfully, they did and the internal renewal led to an expansion of their numbers, their influence and their vision which continues to this day.
The mainline churches were in just as much need of renewal sixty years ago, but the need was harder to see. They had the buildings, the endowments, the social prestige. The forces that would hollow out the imposing structures of mainline church life were already at work in the Eisenhower years, but it was easier to look at the visible signs of influence and power and think that all was well. The seminaries were full, the pledges rolled in, and a generation that had gone through the Depression and World War Two craved a stable church home above all. The mainline grew smug.
Things are very different now. Without renewal the mainline churches are headed into a death spiral of contracting budgets, dwindling membership and declining influence. As I’ve written earlier, a large and growing proportion of the mainline congregations are now struggling to survive, with virtually all the congregation’s energy consumed by the struggle to survive. The energies of the mainline churches are turned inwards, as resources decline and congregations dwindle and age.
To play a constructive role in American life going forward, to do their part in the renewal of American Christianity in the 21st century, the mainline churches need to go back over their history and ask where did they lose that ability to inspire new generations with the Christian message. The modernists believed that the best way to keep Christianity vibrant and powerful in the twentieth century was to adapt to changing times. In part they were clearly right, so right that even the heirs of the fundamentalists borrowed from them. There are many ways in which a contemporary evangelical church looks more modernist than fundamentalist, and many areas in which contemporary evangelical scholars and preachers have clearly gained from their study of figures like Bonhoeffer and the Niebuhr brothers.
But if they were right in part, they were clearly wrong in part as well. For the sake of the mainline churches, for the sake of the place of religion in American life, and for the health of American society and the well being of the world, the mainline churches need to start thinking hard and deep about what they got wrong.