The End of Protestant America? Not so sure…

First Things has an excellent article describing the role of the Protestant in America.  I was particularly interested in this:

 Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.

Ouch! That is prickly, isn’t it? But it may just be true.

The premise of the article derives from this:

…..somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.

And it works itself towards this:

After you’ve read a few of these outraged complaints, however, the targets begin to blur together. The names may vary, but the topics remain the same: the uniformity of social class at the church head­quarters, the routine genuflections toward the latest political causes, the feminizing of the clergy, the unimportance of the ecclesial points that once defined the denomination, the substitution of leftist social action for Christian evangelizing, and the disappearance of biblical theology. All the Mainline churches have become essentially the same church: their histories, their theologies, and even much of their practice lost to a uniform vision of social progress. Only the names of the corporations that own their properties seem to differ.

Another prickly moment,eh?

While I am reading and agreeing with most of the article, I am less sure that Protestantism is at its end. My experience is that the major cities, corporations, and councils have traded beliefs in the power of principles for belief in the power of money.

In the small towns, integrity means more than money, truthfulness means more than assets, and your reputation means more than your station in life.   

I think that the decline in Protestant Church membership is the failure to be relevant. The perception of the world changed for all Americans with Sputnik, going to the moon, the Cold War, drugs, and permissiveness. The core of the Church was how to be a good Protestant  and what was needed by people were lessons in  how to choose what to become. With the world brought to America via television, people realized that they could be different personally and individually.

Like a child in a candy store, Americans tried all flavors of the world and now, after eating too much, experiencing too much,  America has a tummy ache. Groaning and moaning, rolling on the floor or the bed, Americans are sick of the things that make them ill. And now, change will begin. I don’t know if America will find its place in the the Mainline Protestant Churches but I suspect that it will. I do know that America is sick and tired of being sick and tired.

 Resolve is needed. Paths are needed that compare and contrast the benefits of modesty and lasciviousness, of pragmatism and indebtedness, of reality and deceiving yourself.

I would not throw out Protestantism just yet, but I would look for those that can make it meaningful.