The Once and Future Movement

Protestantism is a movement. Neither the stature of Luther nor the political power of Protestant princes could hold the reformers together in a single church. ‘Twas ever thus. Nowhere is this view of Protestantism more apparent than in the American experiment, in which protest and reform remained at the center. 

One of the challenges of American Protestantism is to see the whole movement all at once. And yet that is the point of this newsletter. Growing up Pentecostal, my entrance into the big tent of Protestantism was through reading Louis Berkhof, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr in college. Little did I realize that these thinkers opened the door to the neo-Calvinism that dominated the evangelical world, as well as the neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism in the mainline. My seminary training took me further down the neo-Calvinism road, while my doctoral work opened the Barthian world of England and Europe. It was an introduction to the Protestant mind that informed Protestantism in the mid-twentieth century. I hope to capture that mind—particularly its distinctive American hue—in this newsletter. 

Christianity as a whole, “but particularly in Protestantism and in America, must be understood as a movement rather than as an institution or series of institutions,” wrote H. Richard Niebuhr. He went on in The Kingdom of God in America (1938) to claim that the church is an organic movement, not an organization. Just two decades earlier, the founders of the Assemblies of God had enshrined the claim that “the church is an organism” in the first iteration of their Statement of Fundamental Truths. Two decades after Niebuhr, Harold Ockenga reiterated the same point that the church is an “organism formed of spiritually quickened individuals united to Jesus Christ.” 

If Protestantism is a movement, then the church must be a dynamic and living organism rather than an institution.

The European compromise of “whose region, his/her religion” created, in the American Protestant telling, Protestant state churches at the expense of protest and reform. No monarch or parliamentary body should be able to determine the religion of the people. In one irony of American history, the people refused to allow Congress to establish religion, and they then went about establishing religion in the life and culture of the nation. In this important sense, Americans rejected the “magisterial” reformers. 

Even the attempt to maintain forms of establishment Christianity in the early republic could not overcome the protesting instinct. American heroes have always been reformers who protested America for the sake of America. Frederick Douglass preferred the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” over “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” The current mistrust of institutions stems from this deeper part of the American psyche. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the principle of protest reflected the more fundamental right to freedom of religion in opposition to political authority.

Yet, this principle governing American Protestantism never stopped the drive to create a “righteous empire,” as Martin Marty titled his history of the Protestant experience in America. Written at the end of the turbulent sixties, Marty divided his history into two parts. The first part examines the attempt to create an empire rooted in the spirituality of the Reformation. He ended his first part in 1877, not only because of the massive influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe but also because of the failure of Protestants to heal the land after the Civil War, creating what Marty called the “two-party” system: public Christianity represented by the mainline and private Christianity represented by evangelicalism. 

In a 2007 lecture, Marty noted that the most enduring claim of Righteous Empire was that American Protestantism had fractured into these public and private forms. Public Protestantism engaged the political and social order of the republic, leaning into the gospel’s social teachings in an attempt to make America into God’s kingdom on earth. Seizing the name evangelical, private Protestantism focused on individual salvation and personal morality. 

Marty acknowledged that his division of American Protestantism into two parties was no longer tenable in the early twenty-first century. But it was resilient as a model for interpreting American Protestantism after the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. One could find it lurking behind historical accounts such as George Marsden’s examination of fundamentalism and sociological analyses like James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars.

Writing in the wake of Trump’s first election, Frances FitzGerald freely borrowed Marty’s two-party system to explain white evangelicalism. Like others before her, she explains the rise of the Christian Right in terms of how evangelicals went from private Protestantism focused on the soul, to the public Protestantism of political engagement. The plot seems smooth until FitzGerald puts Southern Baptists into the same chapter as Pentecostals. Addressing both groups in the same chapter suggests that FitzGerald doesn’t know how they fit the narrative, but fit they must.

As illuminating as Marty’s two-party description was, it is less tenable today. The landscape of American Protestantism was upended when evangelicalism entered the political sphere in the 1970s. But was this a genuine shift or a continuation of empire-building from the nineteenth century? In their commitment to building a new righteous culture (if not empire), evangelicals wanted to recover G. K. Chesterton’s observation that America was a nation with the soul of a church.

Mainline Protestantism in the post-Niebuhr era has reluctantly traded places with evangelicalism as the strand of Christianity most present in American politics. In an ironic twist, mainliners express outrage at the evangelical attempt to serve as “chaplains” to a new political establishment, which they never had a problem with when it came to ministering to their WASP politicos. 

In the 2007 lecture, Marty suggested that the primary public role the mainline plays is as a critic of the American experiment—in other words, a “prophet” against the social order. In the late twentieth-century, many mainliners borrowed the black church tradition of the prophet as protesting the nation, which ran from Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King Jr., to James Cone and Cornel West. These days, however, the mainline use of the African-American tradition of prophetic protest must contend with the apostles and prophets of the new charismatics, who see prophecy not simply as critique but also as national guidance. The entire landscape has changed.

Mainline institutions and scholars have been outflanked in their prophetic protest by a different appeal to prophecy to establish a new version of the American experiment. The new charismatic prophets are men and women of different ethnicities who embody the very racial and gender diversity the old prophets called for. Coming from the margins, these new prophets assault the center. The old mainline prophets, conversely, tend to be a predominantly white, educated elite who occupy the very positions and institutions of cultural and political power they decry. 

Nowhere was this contrast between the old and the new more apparent than when Bishop Mariann Budde confronted Trump during the inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. From her perch of Episcopalian cultural and political power, she lodged a prophetic protest without the slightest irony, saying, “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now," specifically citing LGBT people and immigrants. For the new charismatic prophets, she was and is the establishment that must now be overthrown. 

This observation yields yet another reason why Marty’s two-party system must be finally abandoned. American Protestantism has in its bosom a capacity to remake itself over and over in the name of protest and reform. We are in the midst of such a time of remaking. The advance of secularism has not taken this capacity away. The end of Protestantism in the American experiment is always the beginning of Protestantism. Protest and reform simply take on new ways of being the church in America.

Back in 2013—which seems like another lifetime—my Evangelicals and Catholics Together colleague Peter Leithart wrote on the end of Protestantism in First Things. It was an intriguing call for the end of the theology of protest so ingrained in American Protestantism. He argued that to lodge identity in protest was a negative enterprise (“I am not Catholic”) that must be abandoned. 

More particularly, Leithart was trying to exorcise the anti-Catholic spirit still inhabiting some sectors of evangelicalism. What he wanted was a more robust form of Reformation theology that acknowledged its own catholicity alongside the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church. 

The article garnered enough response that Biola University hosted a debate, also partly sponsored by First Things, on the topic. Fred Sanders, Peter Leithart, and Carl Trueman all gave speeches and then engaged in an extended discussion of the topic. In a follow-up article to the debate, Brad Littlejohn suggested that the differences between the three came down to a “difference over the nature of history.” What Littlejohn meant was whether there was a historical (positive) essence to Protestantism. 

I wonder if any of the four would see this essence as a movement of protest and reform calling Christianity to embody its true self, however that may be defined. Religious freedom is the flip side of the principle of protest. Not only did Luther appeal to conscience, but the Protestant princes assembled before Emperor Charles V grounded their protestatio partly in the decision of the individual, who alone stood before the judgment seat of God. 

Captured by the Reformation motto semper reformanda, the end of Protestantism is always the beginning of Protestantism. Leithart’s article and the subsequent debate occurred between 2013 and 2014. Leithart followed up this initial round with a longer argument he published as a book, The End of Protestantism, in the year Donald Trump won the presidency. One might say that in that year, the end of “the old” Protestantism had already come in the form of the independent networks of non-denominational charismatics, some of whom formed the New Apostolic Reformation. Wedded to Marty’s two-party system, Frances FitzGerald never saw these new Protestant charismatics even after the so-called Trump prophecies.

Few observers of American politics noticed the emergence of apostolic networks of charismatic Protestant Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century until they publicly prophesied about Trump as a kind of Cyrus figure. Looking back on the Biola debate over the end of Protestantism, Leithart and Trueman represented that tiny yet potent world of Reformed orthodoxy. From this Reformed vantage point, the debate is over how to maintain the magisterial European forms of Protestantism over and against American Protestantism. 

Protestantism is a movement of protest and reform within Christianity. Rooted in the idea of reforming the image of God through Christ in the Spirit, Protestantism advances toward a catholicity glimpsed partially in this form or that but awaiting the eschaton for its final emergence.

It is the once and future movement.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Peter J. Leithart, The End of Protestantism

Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America