In 2004 Thomas Frank, a liberal journalist and writer, published a book entitled What’s the Matter with Kansas? He was trying to explain why some people, notably in Kansas, voted Republican in obvious defiance of reason and morality. In this exercise, of course, he reflected the worldview of a cultural elite confident of its superior intellect and virtue. Actually, Frank himself grew up in Kansas. But he corrected this unfortunate accident of birth by moving to Washington. I imagine that, after having accomplished this move, he could breathe a sigh of relief and say to himself what Dorothy said in “The Wizard of Oz”: “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”—in her case, of course, this was said with anxiety rather than relief.
I spent the better part of last week in Kansas. Apart from enjoying the warm hospitality of my friend David Kiersznowski, a businessman and Evangelical layman, I came up with a very different question: What’s the matter with folks on the East Coast? I discovered a denomination and a college, neither of which I had ever heard of before. The discovery led me to reflect anew about the advantages of religious and educational pluralism.
The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) is of recent origin. It was founded in 1950 through a merger of two ethnically based denominations, the one Swedish, the other Norwegian-Danish. Both were rooted in Scandinavian Pietism, most of whose adherents stayed within the Lutheran state churches of those countries. Others found these churches too uncomfortable theologically and seceded from them, creating, precisely, “free churches.” Many of them emigrated to America, notably to the Upper Midwest—so to speak, to Garrison Keeler territory (the only part of the country where the mere mention of “Lutheran” evokes mirth). Equally uncomfortable with the larger Lutheran bodies in America, they created replicas of their home churches here. The easiest way to characterize European Pietism, in both Scandinavia and Germany, is to say that it strongly resembles Methodism, but originating in a Lutheran rather than Anglican environment. I suppose that the adjective “Evangelical” changed its meaning in the move from Europe to America. In the former, it simply means Protestant (as it still does with the explicitly Lutheran church bodies here, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). With the transplanted Pietist groups, it has acquired the American meaning, designating a specific conservative version of Protestantism. [I knew what I was doing when I included the word “curiosities” in the title of this blog. Religion has always had curious features. American religion has enough of them to make any interested scholar salivate with excitement.]
The EFCA has a strongly Evangelical (in the American sense) statement of faith (as, for example, in its view of the authority of the Bible), but exhibiting a spirit of open-mindedness. The denomination has been steadily growing since its inception, most strongly in the Midwest, but also attracting people not of Scandinavian ancestry. At its formation the EFCA had about 20,000 members in less than 300 congregations. In 2003 (the last year for which I have seen figures) it reported about 300,000 members in over 1,400 congregations. Denominational statistics in America are notoriously unreliable (not, let me hasten to add, because their producers want to cheat—but because of the voluntary and ever-shifting nature of church membership in this country). EFCA clergy are mostly trained at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois (near Chicago). While not a big player on the Protestant scene, the EFCA (to paraphrase the Apostle Paul) is “no mean church.” I was somewhat embarrassed for never having heard of it. (In self-defense let me mention that I had heard of one of its major denominational ancestors in America, the Swedish Covenant.)
Christ Community Church, an EFCA congregation in Kansas City, Kansas (one other curiosity I learned on this trip is that there are two places called Kansas City, one in Kansas and one in its bigger cousin in Kansas City, Missouri, on the other side of the state line). This congregation has an innovative, highly original program—a fellowship program for recent Trinity graduates. These young preachers spend two years in the program, learning the practical realities of ministry, both in this church and in other nearby locations. The program is modeled on medical internships, and it appears to be well-funded. I spent the better part of the day with a group of current and former fellows. I have rarely encountered a group of young people as bright and open-minded as this one. A good test of their open-mindedness was that they were unfazed by my avowing that, while evangelisch in the European sense, I was not Evangelical in theirs.
I also spent a very agreeable evening with a group of faculty from William Jewell College, near Kansas City, Missouri—an institution which, as I mentioned earlier, I also had never heard of. It was a most pleasant evening. But what most impressed me was the sophistication and intellectual vitality of this group. For all I know, some of these people were silent fanatics (not very likely, since fanatics can rarely keep quiet about their beliefs). In the event, there was not a single eruption of the politically correct ideology which still hangs like a stifling miasma over so many academic gatherings in my part of the country.
William Jewell College was founded as a Baptist institution in 1849. In 2003 the Missouri Baptist Convention defunded the college, because the latter did not toe the Southern Baptist line on such issues as evolution and homosexuality. In the years since then the college seems to have managed financially quite well without the support of Darwinophobes and homophobes. The college is very proud of its Oxbridge Honors Program, under which students spend periods of study at these British elite institutions. In 2001 Time magazine nominated William Jewell College as “Liberal Arts College of the Year”. It now has about one thousand undergraduates (there are no graduate programs). I was struck by the number of questions about teaching that came up in the course of the discussion.
My excursion into the heart of Middle America confirmed once again a view that I have held for a long time: Pluralism is good for religion. It is also good for education. The state establishment of religion still influences the way Europeans look on the major churches—as what the British sociologist Grace Davie has called “public utilities”—they are there if one should need them, but one does not have to make an effort to keep them going. Pluralism and voluntarism have characterized religion in America from the beginning, and the results are all around for us to see. Of course there were dissenting groupings in Europe, such as the Pietist churches in Scandinavia. But just have a small bunch of Swedes come over to America—and a few generations later you have an EFCA with 300,000 members. The same goes for higher education. You can have a Harvard or a Princeton in Europe—precisely, in places like Oxford and Cambridge. But a William Jewell College would have a hard time emerging and surviving in Europe. There are similar places, small and large, all over this country. They too are the fruits of pluralism and voluntarism.
There is yet another lesson to be drawn from these two cases: The concept of “provincial” is badly in need of revision.