Pluralism in Context

Christian nationalism is a key issue in today’s public discourse, but it’s a proxy conflict for another dispute. 

Behind the use and abuse of the phrase is a debate over American identity and the nature of pluralism. This debate results from the third “great wave” of immigration (1965-present), the secularization of public life, and the new model of multiculturalism, with its DEI offspring. 

The history of pluralism in America is bound up with Protestantism. Historically, pluralism meant the embrace of different Protestant denominations that expressed common biblical monotheism and pietistic spirituality. Deists, Unitarians, and other Enlightenment devotees found a place under this moral framework. 

The old social gospel liberal Charles Clayton Morrison represented the last gasp of this kind of pluralist position. From his perch as editor of the Christian Century, Morrison wrote a series of articles subsequently published as Can Protestantism Win America? (1948). Morrison wanted a mainline Protestant hegemony to continue as the establishment version of Christianity. Decrying the increased scope of pluralism, he called for national Protestant unity against the threats of Catholicism and secularization. 

As a member of the Disciples of Christ, Morrison was suspicious of Christian tradition and its institutional embodiments. He had a free-church commitment, like most social gospel liberals, which favored a congregational church structure that rejected the sectarianism of “lesser loyalties—the Bible, the creed, the sacraments, church order.” Grounding Protestantism in the dignity of the individual before God, he saw the Protestant view of the church as a “democracy of the Spirit” with every person following their conscience and voting accordingly. The authority of Christ was always through “the spiritual democracy of the Christian community” rather than external authorities such as the Bible or the magisterium.

The liberal Protestant project opposed the fundamentalists and evangelicals who turned the Bible into a paper pope, and the Catholic view of the pope as successor of Peter. Calling Protestants to finish the Reformation, Morrison proposed a mainline Protestant ecumenism that maintained Protestant America through its parallel “democracy of the Spirit.” His pluralism was a Protestant pluralism, intended as the antidote to authoritarianism and secularization.

Melting into Judeo-Christian Civilization

Morrison failed to appreciate how passé his position was after World War II. The second “great wave” of immigrants (1880-1924) had concluded with the Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1921 and 1924. The new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe included large numbers of Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews. After German fascist and racist ideology emerged, this second wave folded into a new pluralist American consensus centered on Judeo-Christian civilization (the “melting pot”).

Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot gave voice to these immigrants. Zangwill tells the story of David Quixano, a Jewish Russian composer who fled the Russian pogroms for refuge in New York City. Quixano writes a symphony about America, which he calls “The Crucible.” At one point, David calmly and forcefully confronts a prejudiced Russian Orthodox Christian named Vera. Vera had come to ask David to play for her community, thinking that David was Spanish, not Jewish. 

Even though Zangwill had immigrated to London, his play tackled the challenge of American immigration. At one point, David explains to Vera:

Becoming an American is a purgatorial fire in which the past and present are melted into a new future identity. Shortly after Zangwill’s play, Protestants, Jews, and Catholics began using “Judeo-Christian” to describe a tradition and a civilization in which Jews and Christians formed a partnership within a singular biblical inheritance. Privileging the religious heritage of the early American republic, this approach found common ground in the biblical story of covenant, with its monotheistic morality and religious view of human nature. 

K. Healan Gaston captures this usage in her book Imagining Judeo-Christian America. She argues that American Jewish rabbis first used the expression to combat the threat of antisemitism, but misses the important role of French Catholic essayist Henri Massis, who employed it in Défense de l'Occident (1927) to define the West’s distinctive features. Drawing on Massis, his close friend and collaborator, Jacques Maritain employed the term “Judeo-Christian” to describe Western humanism in the 1930s. 

“Judeo-Christian” became more popular in the 1930s. Reinhold Niebuhr used it to argue against totalitarianism. Government, in his view, is both ordained by God and subject to divine judgment through prophetic critique. Governments resist anarchy, while fear of God’s judgment prevents the totalitarian impulse to identify the nation with the good. Niebuhr grounded his argument in the “Hebrew-Christian” tradition, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) that a free society prospers when its architects balance an optimistic and pessimistic view of humanity. 

By the 1950s, an intellectual circle of Jewish and Protestant writers in New York were consistently referencing America’s Judeo-Christian heritage: from Abraham Heschel and Will Herberg to Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The final chapter of Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) offers a summary of this new view of pluralism, beginning with the claim that “Jewish-Christian faith is God-centered.” The Judeo-Christian framework allowed Herberg to expand the melting-pot metaphor under a religious framework, in which the crucible of the American experience purged older nativist and nationalist prejudices.

Martin Luther King Jr. effectively used the new language of a Judeo-Christian tradition to ground his arguments for desegregation and civil rights. From his letters and speeches, King routinely claimed that racism and racial discrimination were cancers that conflicted with “the noble principles of our Judeo-Christian heritage.” King’s perspective was part of a larger narrative  that centered on Ethiopia as a symbol of African Christian identity and continuity. After all, the Psalmist had declared that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God” (Ps. 68:31).

Evangelicals also quickly adopted the new language. From its founding in 1956, Christianity Today deployed Judeo-Christian to speak of a common American heritage belonging to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Typical was Harold Lindsell’s conclusion from an article celebrating twenty-five years of the magazine: “Unless the Judeo-Christian tradition regains its dominance over American life and culture, our country will further deteriorate into a vast moral and spiritual wasteland.” 

In some ways, the roots of the Institute for Religion and Public Life and First Things stem from the New York circle of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic intellectuals that Richard John Neuhaus entered when he arrived at St. John the Evangelist as a young Lutheran minister in 1961. Central to that circle was fellow Lutheran, Peter Berger, and Norman Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, who had edited the early books that Neuhaus and Berger wrote together. Decter and Podhoretz were central to the neoconservative movement, while Berger and Neuhaus represented Lutherans wanting a more confessionally-rooted Protestantism.

In The Naked Public Square, Neuhaus argued against “the doctrine that America is a secular society” in favor of a Judeo-Christian basis for moral discourse. For Neuhaus, pluralism was simply a secularization of the Christian concern for the marginalized, which is partly why he intoned that the political left abandoned him the moment it decided the unborn were not part of the marginalized. 

A pluralism centered in a Judeo-Christian moral view tempered the assimilationist metaphor of a melting pot. To become an American meant fusing cultural and religious identities with the tradition so central to American life as the basic framework for private and public discourse. 

Competing Accounts of Pluralism

Morrison argued that a secular vision had emerged in public education, the messianic pretensions of science, and commercialized entertainment, but he did not see how it would impact pluralism. 

Morrison wrote Can Protestantism Win America? at the beginning of what Steven K. Green has called the “third disestablishment.” Beginning in 1947, the Supreme Court established a new doctrine of strict separationism, by which the Establishment Clause was applied to state and local governments to remove religion from the public sphere. This meant that references to Christianity in local, state, and federal institutions were deemed to be de facto endorsements. The 1960s were the high-water mark of strict separationism, providing cover for the march of secularism and motivation for politically active evangelicalism. It resulted in two distinct accounts of pluralism.

Writing for First Things in 2016, Peter Berger described two pluralisms. The first centered on the co-existence of religions and worldviews, and the second on the co-existence of secular discourse and religious discourse. The former view is the ancient and common view of much of human history: It presumes that one cannot disentangle religion from morality, culture, or politics. They are all downstream from religion. One can see it in the Apostle Paul’s speech on Mars Hill (Acts 17) and his explicit acknowledgement of the temples that inhabited the landscape. 

The latter is the invention of Enlightenment modernism. It attempts to resolve the problem of religious co-existence through appeals to tolerance. As Richard John Neuhaus claimed, this view assumes that “the foundation of tolerance is skepticism rather than knowledge of the truth.” It is an appeal to an empirically driven view of rationality that then becomes a neutral arbiter for public reason. Neuhaus also noted that, for John Stuart Mill, the arguments for tolerance rested upon a moderate relativism, which turned into radical relativism in the mid-twentieth century. 

The crises of the last three decades have resulted in open combat between these two views of pluralism. On one side are those who combine secularism, privatized religion, and “limitless” pluralism. One example is the work of the historian David Hollinger. Educated in the 1960s, Hollinger has interpreted the history of American Protestantism as the tension between cosmopolitan elites and provincial masses, with the former being the liberals associated with the mainline, some of whom embraced the post-Protestant secular future. Hollinger’s scholarship was forged at a time when populism was under assault by historians like Richard Hofstadter. 

For Hollinger, the basic framework is John Rawls’s post-Protestant argument for public reason, in which the moral rules governing society must be justifiable from a common secular vocabulary and a particular view of rationality. In Hollinger’s telling of the story, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of an ecumenical Protestantism that paved the way for the post-Protestant secular future. As a member of the so-called “nones”—the religiously unaffiliated—it happens to be Hollinger’s own story writ large. Hollinger and Rawls are both lapsed Protestants who have advocated for a naked public square. 

For those who remained within the mainline, liberationism fused with post-colonialism. They came to believe that the path of democracy involved the freedom of all oppressed classes, defined in terms of the victims of Western colonialism. Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (1966) was an accelerant for these movements. In his view, ethical decisions were reducible to cost-benefit analyses, a rationale he called “the new morality.” He declared that an action must be viewed in terms of its effects, essentially a baptized version of consequentialism. A loving action produced good consequences, while its opposite had the reverse effect. This fertilized the soil from which the idea that words are violence sprang.

To borrow from sociologist Philip Gorski, one might call this approach the “multicultural creed.” It celebrates racial, gender, and sexual diversity over and against regional and religious diversity. America must remain a salad bowl rather than a melting pot, maximizing pluralism through identity politics and an appeal to public reason. (The maturing of postcolonial theory has grafted Islam into this family by describing Israel as a kind of colonial power, even though most forms of Islam oppose secularization.)

A challenge for those who favor the idea of a creedal nation is that it dismisses centuries of culture. Saying Americans must buy into a set of beliefs associated with America’s founding documents disregards subsequent additions to the American moral framework, without which the entire democratic experiment would collapse. The creedal view of America ultimately reinforces a traditionless, cultureless society. All that is required is that an immigrant embrace those beliefs, not the culture within which they are housed and from which they take their meaning.

One can trace the development of a distinctive American culture through the eyes of outside observers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to G. K. Chesterton to Jorge Castañeda—and, yes, to Israel Zangwill. The idea of an American creed is devoid of life and history, and purges even the anodyne project of building a civil religion. Those who espouse the creedal view of America privilege its Enlightenment roots, in which reason is shorn from tradition and culture. 

In “Is America a Creedal Nation?”, David Goldman diagnoses the problem: “Reducing America to a proposition implies that any nation can adopt this proposition, irrespective of its cultural heritage.” One cannot simply extract the set of beliefs connected to America’s founding document and export them into a different culture. Goldman’s claim also applies to those living in America who want economic freedom and prosperity, but not American history and culture, preferring instead to build a nation within a nation, a culture within a culture. 

On the other side are those who prefer the melting pot metaphor, representing assimilation, public religion, and a controlled (principled) pluralism. They see open borders as effectively destroying American identity through a multiculturalism that uses victimhood as the rationale for tearing down institutions and rewriting history. They also want to repeal the strict separationist doctrine that the Supreme Court enacted between 1947 and 1986. Finally, they wish to recover an earlier consensus on a Judeo-Christian heritage that grounded the new pluralism of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, as well as the Civil Rights movement.

Secular liberals label as “Christian nationalists” those who embrace a vision of America rooted in nineteenth-century Protestantism. Even though, at the time it became popular, the melting pot narrative opposed nativism, secular liberals have portrayed it as another form of white supremacy.

With some degree of prescience, Allan Mittleman wrote for First Things in 1996 that “Multiculturalism, if it were to succeed pluralism altogether, would be inimical to American Jews.” Mittleman argued that multiculturalism reduces the common good to a tribal good, and therefore denies the fundamental integrity of a common good. We see Mittleman’s warning playing out globally in the renewed antisemitism that the Judeo-Christian perspective sought to eliminate. Secularism’s emphasis on tradition-less tolerance is so anemic that it cannot even recognize the threat, let alone marshal the courage to face it. 

All the talk about Christian nationalism hides the real debate. Many traditional Protestants want the Judeo-Christian consensus that was forged in the conversations between mainline Protestants, Jewish, and Catholic thinkers. 

The question is which vision of pluralism will win the day.

Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality

Steven K. Green, Separating Church and State: A History

K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present

Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology

David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History

Henri Massis, Defence of the West

Charles Clayton Morrison, Can Protestantism Win America?

Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America