Covenantide

Tag: Reformation Sunday

  • The American Settlement

    The American Settlement

    A Reformation Sunday Lecture by Scott Hatch

    It is not hard to make the argument today that we need a new Reformation; the weakness of the Christian church and the evidence of overall moral decay and degradation is both self-evident and pervasive.  In the books of 1 and 2 Kings there is a leaden refrain that “The king did evil in the sight of the LORD and did not walk in the ways of his father David.”  This echoes the depressing refrain in the book of Judges that “There was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” In our own day, we see wars and crises abroad, violence and political dysfunction at home, and the moral bearings of our society dissolving.  First and Second Kings seem today all too apropos.

    Deep frustration at the dysfunctional situation we are in has led some Christians to pessimistically conclude that the liberal democracy which has characterized the United States for the past 236 years is no longer sustainable.  Roman Catholic writers like Patrick Dineen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari are flirting with a return to “integralism,” a Catholic social teaching that holds the Catholic faith should be the basis for public law and public policy.  On the Protestant side, similar ideas are being expounded by thinkers like Stephen Wolfe and Doug Wilson, who are debating the merits of some kind of Christian Nationalism.  What these two perspectives have in common is a view that the separation of church and state, which found its most first and most definitive expression in the founding of the American Republic, has at best failed and possibly should not even have been tried at all.  The solutions put forth by these thinkers, while varied and often inchoate, also share an advocacy for a much closer affiliation between church and state than currently exists.

    Others have made effective critiques of integralism and Christian Nationalism, and while I concur in the main with those critiques, my purpose here is not to add to them.  Rather, it is to remember how the Reformation laid the groundwork for the eighteenth-century separation of church and state in what I will call, the American Settlement.  There are good reasons why the American Founders separated the two that still hold wisdom for today.  In the contemporary debates of today, it seems that thinkers too often operate off of caricatures, cherry-pick from this history, or ignore it altogether.  If there is the possibly of revising the American Settlement, then it behooves us to know the tectonic factors that prompted it coming into being in the first place.  Admittedly, this is a vast topic, so my approach in what follows is to draw out four general themes that came out in the interactions between church and state in the Reformation, and then at the end to show how the American Settlement addresses these themes.

    Thomas Jefferson’s Memorial Highlighting His Authorship of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom

    1. As Christians, our foremost goal must in be promoting the purity of true worship in God’s church ahead of trying to reform the beliefs or behaviors of society generally.

    In discussions of reforming society, we tend not to think of worship as something that should be at the top of our agenda, but this was the focal point for the Protestant Reformers.  In 1544, on the eve of the Diet of Speyer, the Genevan reformer John Calvin wrote a treatise entitled, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, which was nominally was addressed to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V but in reality, was probably aimed at consolidating the Protestant Reform movement.  The Protestants had been divided between Germans in the north and Swiss in the south since 1529, when Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli disagreed at the Marburg Colloquy over their understanding of how Christ was present in the Eucharist.  The Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance of the German Protestant princes, was weak in the face of the powerful Charles V and needed encouragement to stand together and extract concessions from him.  Calvin’s treatise provided that encouragement by clearly and succinctly explaining that the heart of the Reformers’ demands was the reform and purification of the worship of God in the church.

    Given all the challenges that existed at the time it may seem odd to consider the issue of right worship to be paramount among them, but it does make sense in how it brings together everything.  Why, for example, do we worship God?  For His glory (soli deo gloria) and because of the grace He extended to us in salvation (sola gratia).  How was that salvation obtained?  Soley through the work of Christ (solus Christus) which we lay hold of through faith alone (sola fide).  What is the right way to worship God?  As He has instructed us in His Word (sola Scriptura).  Biblically, the first four Commandments in the Decalogue are focused on the proper worship and honoring of God.  The duty we owe to God precedes the duty we owe to our neighbors.  As can be seen in the books of 1 & 2 Kings, false worship, religious syncretism, and idolatry starts a people on the path of societal unraveling.  This is because corruption of the worship of God results in a corruption of our understanding of who God is, the requirement He has for holiness, and the need for and nature of our salvation in Christ Jesus.  To focus on beliefs and behaviors without considering worship central is sterile.  There is a practical and a pastoral aspect to this as well.  Worship involves our heart, not just our head or our actions.  This takes us beyond seeing the Reformation merely as an intellectual matter about justification by faith alone or the five solas and goes to the core of the Christian life.

    In our own day, for all the interest in changing the culture and for all the attention given to political or public theology, it seems that this view of the centrality of promoting pure worship seems to be conspicuously absent from the dialogue.  For many, worship is a matter of aesthetic taste—single style or mixed music selection, contemporary praise songs or traditional hymns, and so forth.  As such, those interested in a closer affiliation between the church and the state because of the moral degradation of our day see it as a sidebar issue.  Others—mostly confessionalists—who do see it as a central problem are often derided as being too wedded to mere traditionalism.  But if the Bible is right and worship really is central to the well-being of both God’s people and the societies that they live in—as the Reformers understood—then we need to reevaluate our priorities for reform in light of that.

    2. Political leaders do not always have the same interests or ends as the church, even when they support a religious agenda.

    In promoting reformation in the public sphere, wisdom requires Christians to realize there are limits to cooperation with magistrates.  In some cases, political leaders may support religious reform as part of a broader political game.  One can see this in the case of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Martin Luther’s protector.  Frederick consistently resisted appeals of the Pope and others to turn over Martin Luther to their custody, and, indeed, after the Diet of Worms in 1521 Frederick’s men kidnapped Luther and took him into protective custody in Warburg Castle.  In some ways, Frederick was a loyal son of the Catholic Church: he personally had one of the largest collections of holy relics in Europe, which gave him a pious reputation, and potentially money-making capacity.  So why did he support and protect Luther?  Some degree of sympathy for Luther’s ideas certainly has to be in the mix of motivations, but other reasons contributed as well.  Frederick had a principled interest in defending Luther as one of his subjects being treated unfairly by Roman Catholic hierarchy.  Luther also was the most prominent professor at Frederick’s newly established University of Wittenberg, which was drawing attention and scholars to the city, bolstering its—and Frederick’s—prominence.  Most importantly, Frederick, like other German nobles had political frictions with the Roman papacy and resented its interference in German affairs; supporting Luther provided a justification for resisting Rome’s political machinations.

    In other cases, the goal may be for the political leader to strengthen his or her own control.  One can see in the case of the English king Henry VIII and his successors.  Henry earned the title, “Defender of the Faith” from the Pope for his early criticism and opposition to Luther’s ideas, a title which English monarchs have retained to this day.  Henry, however, was only two generations away from a hard-fought civil war within England, and so his house risked becoming extinguished if he did not have a male heir.  When the Pope refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry declared himself the head of the English Church, thus beginning the English Reformation.  His sensibilities remained Catholic in practice.

    When Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I acceded to the throne after the disastrous reign of her half-sister Mary, who had brutally persecuted Protestants, Protestants felt hopeful that not only would Protestantism be restored but that reform would move forward.  Many of the Puritans had been in exile during Mary’s reign and saw how thorough the reforms were in Calvin’s Geneva; they wanted to emulate that.  Elizabeth had Parliament pass an Act of Supremacy (1559) to reaffirm her position as head of the Anglican Church, but her religious policy did not go further than that, much to the frustration of the nascent Puritan movement.  The Puritans were again frustrated when James I acceded to the throne after Elizabeth.  James had been raised Presbyterian in Scotland and English reformers felt he would be sympathetic to having the Anglican Church be more reformed like the Church of Scotland.  James, however, liked controlling the episcopacy and calculated that reforms which could depose the bishops could also depose the king; in light of the subsequent English Civil War, his view proved to be prescient.

    The fact that political leaders do not share the same interests or ends as the church is a truth worth being mindful of in our own day even though we do not have established churches.  Today, many politicians stoke populist outrage over the moral degradation that is around us, but once in office their willingness to resolve the issue prompting that outrage seems to dim considerably.  That is because fueling the outrage is good for fundraising and garnering votes; resolving those problems, however, would require expending potentially serious political capital which might impede their ability to get re-elected.  The incentives, then, work against actually addressing the problems.

    3. Political leaders and their allies in the church have often suppressed true religion for their own ends, even to the point of backing heresy.

    In 1 Kings, we see where Jeroboam I created a separate, idolatrous, religious system to enhance the separation between his northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.  His goal was basically to use religion as a means of social control or at least to keep it quiescent and politically under control.  Two examples from among many are illustrative that the misuse of religion for political end existed in the Reformation and post-Reformation period as well.

    In the mid-sixteenth century, Protestant ideas began making considerable headway France, especially among the nobility.  This created a political problem for the French crown, because it de facto challenged the king’s claims to absolute rule.  Rather than trying to find some accommodation with the Huguenots (the French Protestants), the crown instead initiated a harsh persecution.  The worst incident at the time was on August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, when a number of the Huguenot leaders were in Paris for the marriage of the Protestant, Henri of Navarre to the Catholic king’s daughter, Margarite de Valois.  Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother, along with other royalists, initiated a massacre of the Huguenots, purportedly in defense of the Catholic faith.  Within Paris alone, as many as 3,000 people were killed and estimates go as high as 70,000 for the number of Huguenots who died nationwide.  The massacre touched off 30 years of religious warfare in France.

    England, too, suffered because of the misuse of religion.  After James I’s death in 1625, his son Charles I ascended to the crown and Charles appointed one of his favorites, William Laud, to be archbishop of Canterbury, a position from which Laud oversaw the entire Anglican Church.  Both Charles and Laud were insistent on adding extra-biblical and unbiblical elements to worship over the objections of many Puritans.  Moreover, at the same time, they were willing to tolerate and accept Arminian clergy in the Church of England because such individuals supported their worship innovations.  Arminianism had been deemed heretical in 1618-19 at the Synod of Dort in Holland, an international Reformed synod to which James had sent legates and accepted its rulings.  Tensions broke in 1636 when the crown tried to impose a revised Book of Common Prayer on the Scots, who saw this as a deliberate affront on their understanding of true and acceptable worship of God.  The Scots went into revolt against the crown, followed a few years later by many English.  The result was the English Civil War (also known as the War of the Three Kingdoms [England, Scotland, and Ireland]), which would lead ultimately to the execution of Charles I and a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.  With the restoration of the king under Charles II in 1660, the gains of English and Scottish Presbyterianism were erased by a restored Anglican hierarchy that neither forgot nor forgave their earlier loss of stature.  Reformed pastors and teachers, now officially called Dissenters or Non-Conformists, would continue to be persecuted by the crown until 1689, when a measure of toleration was extended to them after the Glorious Revolution.

    Given the degree to which church and state were intertwined during the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, the question of what constituted the true religion rather than a false religion inevitably became a political question, often leading, as we have seen, to bitter armed conflict.  Among conservative Christians today who are flirting with ideas of integralism or Christian Nationalism there is a tendency to describe “Christian” in more generic terms, so as to be inclusive and not specifically sectarian, but it cannot really sidestep issues of sectarianism in practice.  The fundamental problem is determining where and on what basis to draw the line as to what is right and wrong, what is permissible and impermissible.  This cannot really be avoided and once one begins drawing lines, then some degree of sectarianism is inevitable.  This was a problem in the Reformation, and for us today as well.

    Reformed Christians do have an epistemological standard to address this question of drawing lines, namely Scripture.  This is not mere proof-texting, but they insisted on asking the question, “Is there a positive warrant in Scripture to claim that something is essential to faith or worship?”  Using this biblical standard, Reformed Christians rightly found much in Roman Catholic teaching and practice to be idolatrous.  For this reason, they could not in good conscience take a “big tent” approach and thereby overlook significant substantive differences for the sake of some nebulous sense of “Christendom” or “Christian unity.”

    The Reformed approach stands in contrast to that of other Protestants, who felt that the absence of a negative sanction was sufficient to justify deeming a matter to be essential to faith or worship.  The difference is subtle but important.  The former standard is narrower but sounder, whereas the latter opens the door to much subjectivity.  We see this problem even today as theological progressives have increasingly relativized doctrines of the historic Christian faith to accommodate worldly preferences, whether they be things like the atonement or like traditional Christian sexual morality.  In practice, without an objective standard subjectivity boils down essentially to a power issue more so than a doctrinal one.  One can see this in the examples just provided, but it is also true for the modern period as well.  This year, for example, we commemorate the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, and that brings to mind the account of how Machen was forced out of the Presbyterian Church USA in 1936.  In Machen’s case, PCUSA leaders railroaded his excommunication trial, denying him even the opportunity to testify in his own defense.  Their actions said in effect “We’re right because we are in power, and you are heretical because you disagree with us.” Many PCUSA leaders rationalized this by falsely claiming that Madchen was temperamentally argumentative, without any acknowledgement of the merits of the concerns he had been putting forth.

    4. From a political perspective, any sustained religious reform efforts have to navigate some real dangers.

    It would be easy to look back on the Reformation and assume and assume an air of inevitability, without appreciating the tenuousness facing the Reformers and their heirs.  It was inevitable in the sense that God in His Providence brought to pass what actually happened, but if we look at the circumstances the Reformers faced through their eyes, we realize that they could not and did not assume that everything would work out for them.  They understood the fragility of what they were undertaking.  Looking back with hindsight we can see that there are at least three dangers which the Reformers faced and which we need to be mindful of even in our own day.

    First, there is the topography of power.  In a more nuanced discussion than I can do justice to here, Roland Bainton, in his book, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, draws out how political centralization or decentralization either impeded or facilitated the spread of Reformation ideas.  In looking at Europe at the time, the region now constituting Germany was a collection of over 400 kingdoms, duchies, baronies, and free cities.  No one had any centralized control over this region, so it is not surprising—especially in light of the frictions that German leaders had with Rome—that there would be places where Protestant ideas could find safehaven.  To the east, the vast lands of Poland and Lithuania showed some interest in Protestant ideas, but the nascent level of national institutions meant that it would be difficult for such ideas to take root in a lasting way, as proved to be the case in how the Counter-Reformation was able to reclaim them back into the Catholic fold.  To the west—namely, Spain, France, and England—state power was becoming more consolidated, and those countries could legitimately claim to be the first modern nation states.  In Spain, the Reformation never took hold.  In 1492 the Spanish were finally able to expel the Muslims from Granada, their last stronghold in Iberia, marking the culmination of a 700-year Reconquista against the Muslims.  The Catholic Church supported Spain throughout the Reconquista, and Spain repaid the Church by being a loyal son well into the twentieth century.  In France, as already noted, Huguenot sentiment flourished for a time among the nobility.  As the most centralized state in Europe and given the intertwining of state and church, it also is not surprising that it would be in France where the Reformation would meet its most serious opposition.  As for England, it was less centralized than either France or Spain and its Reformation longer and messier than either of those states.  The lesson that this diversity suggests for us today is to be wary of a “one-size-fits-all” theory of church-state relations to guide our own efforts at religious reform.  America today is nearly the size of Europe, with a tremendous diversity of its own.  Religious reform will differ widely between states.  On the one hand, there are states centralized and left-leaning state governments like California and Massachusetts, and on the other hand, states with more limited governments or attitudes favorable to Christianity, such as Alabama or Texas, along with all sorts of variations in between.  As the COVID-19 pandemic showed a few years ago, churches will face different situations and will need to find their own way forward in their local circumstances.

    Second, there is the problem of identity politics intertwining with religion and the church.  Looking back on the Reformation there is little doubt that most of the warfare that characterized the period was due to the fusion of church, state, and national identity.  To cite but one example, English national identity in the early modern period sought unity in the crown, Parliament, and a Protestant Church of England.  Religiously, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible were icons of national identity, alongside John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which highlighted the depravations English Protestants experienced under Queen Mary.  In any predominantly Christian country such a mixture of religion, state, and national identity will be inevitable.  What makes the combination potentially toxic is when religion becomes the handmaiden to the other forms of identity.  This is not merely a patriotic sense among Christians of wanting the well-being of the nation they are part of; it would be the manifestation of the attitude that “God is on our side because of who we are.”  This ties the moral credibility of the church to the success or failure of the state, and that can seriously compromise the church’s witness.  Such a prideful sentiment is likely to trump the skepticism the Christian faith has towards tribalism, the injunctions against self-righteousness, and the commands which our Lord Jesus Christ gives to love our neighbors.  If the church remains faithful to Christ, it will necessarily and naturally feel tension between being faithful to Him and being good citizens in this country.  If it does not feel that, then that should trigger some self-examination.

    Lastly, there is the problem of disillusionment and exhaustion that people will have in times when the church has been caught up in the politicization of the age.  For the 172 years from the time that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg until the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, Europe had been convulsed with reformation, revolution, and war.  It is hard for us now to emotionally comprehend the degree of change and the level of psychological exhaustion which set in among the people.  Periods of warfare, especially warfare bound up with religion, typically open the door to greater secularization, and the period of warfare of the seventeenth century was no exception.  By the mid-seventeenth century, philosophers, scholars, and theologians were moving in directions to deemphasize the religious foundations of society.  That trend would continue throughout the eighteenth century, breaking into an outright rejection of religion after 1789 after the French Revolution.  This is the world that created our world of today and the church needs to be sensitive to the fact that the more politically active it is, the most likely that it will see the backlash directed against it.  Although the past two decades of counter-terrorism wars do not approach the scale of the religious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one can still sense an exhaustion with religion today.

    In bringing this discussion to a close, we need to circle back to the beginning, namely the disillusionment with the separation of church and state and the American Settlement.

    The American Founding Fathers were heirs to the Reformation.  Their views on the separation of church and state were not a theoretical secularist experiment, but the result of long historical experience.  The United States, indeed, was the first Western country to embark on a course of formally separating church and state when it ratified the US Constitution in 1787.  As the Founders understood it, the separation was intended to protect the church from the intrusions of the government, but in the twentieth century that has become increasingly interpreted as keeping religion and religious discussion out of the public sphere altogether.  This shift is indeed important, and in my opinion, wrong, but we do not fix it by throwing out the American Settlement altogether.  We fix it by going back to an originalist understanding of what it meant to begin with.

    The American Settlement in many ways addresses the lessons given here from the Reformation period.  By making church and formally separate, it allows the church the freedom to promote the purity of worship without (as many) complications posed by political leaders with alternative agendas or who are trying to manipulate religion to be a means of social or political control.  It allows for the church to adjust to the disparities power and culture across regions by refraining from a one-size-fits all approach.  It also allows the church room to speak prophetically to society and to stand apart from the political verities of the age.  This space can also be useful for the church for self-reflection and renewal.  The advantages of the American Settlement have made the United States a paradox in the Western world: although the United States does not have any established church or even a preferred church, yet at the same time the country has one of the highest rates of religious affiliation and participation anywhere in the developed world.

    That said, the American Settlement is by no means perfect.  The space that it gives to the church needs to be actually utilized by the church for the ends of promoting purity of worship and the expansion of the Gospel.  If the church instead seeks worldly influence and temporal goals, then it will squander these opportunities.  Moreover, as we have increasingly seen over the past few decades, the instinctive desire of political leaders to control or manipulate religion remains unabated and needs to be restrained.  Such control and manipulation can be manifested either in efforts to coopt Christianity or exhibit hostility toward it—and sometimes both simultaneously.  In the past few decades, the legal basis for religious liberty has become better enshrined in law today more so than at any point in the history of the Republic.  To throw out the American Settlement is likely to reopen the problems that existed prior to its creation, and which were extant during the Reformation.  A better course, in my opinion, would be to retain the American Settlement, all the while strengthening it and fixing it.

  • The Real Crisis Facing American Christianity

    The Real Crisis Facing American Christianity

    [Author’s Note – In previous years, I have used Reformation Sunday as an opportunity to talk about where the Christian church is at and tie that back in some way to the Reformation. This talk continues that practice and was delivered to the adult Sunday School class of Christ Presbyterian Church Burke on Sunday, October, 30, 2022.]

    We are bombarded daily with messages from the “outrage” machine of the regular and social media.  But what is the real crisis?  Is it the Far Right, looking to seize political control and curb immigrants and other minorities in support of some nostalgic vision of White Christian America?  Is it the expanding influence of the Woke-ist Left, fronting an LGBTQ agenda and Critical Race Theory?  The media tries to push people in either of those directions.  I think, however, that for us as Christians, however, the real problem is more subtle and long-term: we are losing our “saltiness.”  Here I am drawing on our Lord’s words in His Sermon on the Mount when He said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?  It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men” (Matt. 5:13 NKJV).  Salt is a preservative.  When it fails to be salty, it fails to preserve.  The American church today is becoming largely irrelevant, and the strife we see in our society today in no small measure because of this.  This is the real crisis of our day.

    The Church in Decline

    Demographic trendlines do not make popular headlines but are disturbing, nonetheless.  The Pew Research Center for Religion in America found in 2007 that about 78% of Americans self-identified as Christian; in a follow-up study in 2014 that number was down to about 70%, or roughly a 1% drop every year.  As of 2020, Pew assessed that only about 64% of Americans self-identified as Christian, continuing about the same rate of decline.  Those that are leaving the faith generally are not converting to another religion; rather, they are joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or what Pew calls the “nones.”  That grouping now makes up about one-third of American society.  For perspective, in the early 1990s, about 1 in 10 people would have said they were religiously unaffiliated; now it is about 1 in 3.  If current trends continue, by the mid-2030s less than half of all Americans will consider themselves Christian.  That will considerably change the social dynamics in the US. Indeed, it already has, as people look to activist politics, libertine sex, and social causes to fill the “God gap.”

    If current trends continue, by the mid-2030s less than half of all Americans will consider themselves Christian.  That will considerably change the social dynamics in the US. Indeed, it already has, as people look to activist politics, libertine sex, and social causes to fill the “God gap.” This decline almost certainly will accelerate in the next 15 years.

    This decline almost certainly will accelerate in the next 15 years, since the youngest generation, Generation Z, is also the least religious and the influence of secularism will strengthen as their grandparents and great-grandparents pass away.  Also, although the decline is hitting all Christian denominations, it is hitting the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestantism particularly hard.  Some mainline denominations will literally cease to exist within a couple of decades because they are not bringing into adherents to the faith through either births or conversion, while their congregants are aging and dying.  The median age in the Episcopal Church USA, for example, is about 69 and with no growth the church will largely die off within the next 25 years.  Although we as conservatives disagree with the mainline churches theologically, the implosion of the mainline churches will be negative for us as well; it means there will be culturally less of a moderating influence between us and secularists, especially since those leaving the faith are often leaving with an animus toward it.

    The decline also is geographic.  The 2018 General Social Survey found that 50% of all people in the United States who attend church at least once a month live in the South.  One might be tempted to think that Christians should just form a Christian redoubt in the South, but the problem with that is that Christianity in the South is in danger of becoming merely a cultural marker, a handmaiden to a social and cultural identity, rather than a deeply held set of beliefs.  The North went through this phase roughly a century ago and that manifested itself in efforts to publicly ally Protestantism and political power through such things as putting “In God We Trust” on our coinage or having mandatory prayer in schools.  Such, actions, however, failed to arrest the decline of the church in the North.  Years ago, a friend of mine from Texas once said, “We don’t care how y’all did it up North.”  I understand the sentiment, but the fact of the matter is that Christians in the South had better care how things happened up North because the South is heading in the same direction.  The destination is unbelief.

    Most worrisome, the decline of American Christianity is manifested in a hollowing out of belief even among those who profess to be Christian.  Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway have been doing their “State of Theology” survey since 2014 and this year’s results are particularly disheartening.  A majority of Christians—to include Evangelicals—believe that people are born innocent and basically good by nature.  This fundamentally contradicts the Bible’s characterization of people as being under a divine curse, lost in sin, and without hope except for salvation through the work of Christ.  In addition, a majority of Christians—again including Evangelicals—believe that God accepts the worship of all religions, and that He is not absolute but is learning and adapting to different circumstances.  Moreover, while they affirm the truthfulness of the Trinity, they also believe Jesus is a created being; that He is not necessarily God, and that the Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being.

    These things are not esoteric doctrines on which Christians may agree to disagree; they have been core tenets of the faith throughout the history of the church, the denial of which marked people as being definitively outside the faith.  This puts into perspective the conflicts we see around us:  why do we think God will somehow be pleased with our stance on social justice or traditional sexuality when we are both fundamentally misrepresenting who God has revealed Himself to be and denying the direness of our own condition?  God does not need us, and we are not doing Him any favors as if He ought to be grateful to us for even giving Him the pitiful amount of attention that we do.  That God is allowing American Christianity to decline as it has reflects His judgment on the church.  We must always remember His sovereignty in the circumstances; this is not happening outside His purview.  He is sifting the church and pruning it.  Cultural Christianity is dying off, just as God allowed the unbelieving generation of Israel to die off in the Wilderness.

    Why do we think God will somehow be pleased with our stance on social justice or traditional sexuality when we are both fundamentally misrepresenting who God has revealed Himself to be and denying the direness of our own condition?  God does not need us, and we are not doing Him any favors as if He ought to be grateful to us for even giving Him the pitiful amount of attention that we do.

    The Underlying Drivers

    I grew up in northern New England, as cultural Christianity there was fading, and the spiritual shadows were lengthening.  Within the United States, northern New England is now the most secular part of the country, surpassing even the Pacific northwest.  Church buildings that were the vestiges of the old Puritanism, were even then being repurposed to become performing arts centers, nightclubs, billiards halls, and sandwich shops as congregations died.  New England led the broader decline the nation more broadly is experiencing.  As a result of this decline and my own experiences with the mainline church and with evangelicalism, I have wrestled since the late 1980s with the question of how the Christian church in this country has gotten to such a bad place.  My own disillusionment led me at one point in the early 1990s to consider converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, but God in His providence showed me the problems with that tradition as well.  So, in reflecting on this, then how did we get here and how do we move forward?

    The answers to how we have gotten here are complex and books have literally been written on the matter.  I will not be able to do justice to all of that here.  After I turned away from thinking about converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, I read two books that in many ways still sets my thinking on these questions: Michael Horton’s Made in America; The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism and J. I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness; The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.  Horton enabled me to see the negative impact that the Second Great Awakening had on much of American Protestantism, and this theme has been laid out in a more scholarly manner by Daryl Hart and others.  Packer helped me to realize that the Protestantism that we see now is not reflective of the richness and depth of our Puritan forebears.  Incumbent upon us today is the need to take a hard look at our own shortcomings in American Protestantism and to recover the richness of the faith as articulated by the Reformers and the Puritans.

    As I have thought about it over the years, there were five key characteristics of American Protestantism that were crystalized in the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the nineteenth century and that underpin the problems that are coming to a head today: pragmatism; superficiality; sentimentalism; moralism; and a desire for social influence.  Let me discuss each of these in turn.

    There are five key characteristics of American Protestantism that were crystalized in the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the nineteenth century and that underpin the problems that are coming to a head today: pragmatism, superficiality, sentimentalism, moralism, and a desire for social influence.

    First, Americans are a pragmatic people.  Pragmatism has a connotation of “getting things done” but philosophically it means “whatever works in getting the desired results.”  As Americans our embrace of pragmatism stems from our frontier origins, and in many ways is not inherently bad: we have been able to build a large, stable, dynamic, and prosperous country through being pragmatic.

    Pragmatism, however, is not always a good thing, especially when applied to the church.  The revivalism of the Second Great Awakening put a great deal of emphasis on techniques that could be employed to manipulate people into “making a decision for Jesus,” and that mentality persists to this day.  If you use ABC techniques then you should get XYZ results.  Like the Revivalists of old, our pragmatic sensibilities are most visibly manifest in how we use worship to evangelistically “reach people” for Christ.  I remember talking to a Russian Baptist years ago who had translated for American evangelicals who came to the Soviet Union when it started opening up in the late 1980s.  He observed that the Americans would come in with a laundry list of things they would need for event, including a specific number of cards for people to indicate that they are making a commitment to Christ because they could expect X number of conversions.  At first this Russian wondered how Americans could know how many people would be converted; did the Americans have some special anointing of the Holy Spirit?  The more that he worked with the Americans, the more he came to see that this was simply American pragmatism in action.

    Second, such pragmatism leads to superficiality.  One can see this in the fixation on “decisions for Christ” over continuing discipleship, since the former is more easily measurable than the latter.  It is also manifested in pressure upon pastors and teachers to show specific tangible implications from whatever the preach or teach.  This encourages a superficial use of the Bible, either for atomized, biblicist proof-texting or for moralistic stories.  To be sure, our preaching and teaching should be something that we can apply to our lives but we as Americans love the multi-step plans toward self-improvement.  Biblical truth is not always easily reducible to such multi-step plans.  It will, however, over time reshape understanding of the reality in which we live and the ends for which we desire  Ironically, the superficiality of pragmatism can make us more open to bad theologies if it looks like these will provide a better payoff or be more “sophisticated” and “scientific.”  This is the route through which much modernist theology and philosophy has been absorbed into seemingly conservative and evangelical churches.

    Third, just as ironic, pragmatism can also led to a pietistic sentimentalism.  Historically, the Rationalism that came out of eighteenth-century Europe yielded to the Romantic era in Europe and the Transcendental movement in America.  It becomes appealing because it is perceived as a counterbalance to the calculating aspects of pragmatism.  In reality, however, it is spirituality without the constraints of doctrine.  Although the focus may start out on Christ, such spirituality is open to any number of influences, regardless of whether they are good or bad.  In our day, we ten to think of the counter cultural New Age movement of the 1960s, but when one looks the first half of the 1800s, while the Second Great Awakening was underway, there were a number of comparable aberrant spiritualist movements that sprung up.

    Fourth, and not surprisingly given the revivalist mentality that the came with the Second Great Awakening, there is a strongly moralistic strain in American Protestantism.  On a personal level, I have seen this on multiple occasions when people give their testimonies.  There is implicit pressure to show how Christ has made a dramatic difference in your life, just as one would in giving testimonials endorsing products: “I tried Jesus, and this is how radical a difference He made.”  Many Christians who did not have a dramatic conversion experience feel they have to apologize for growing up in a godly Christian family.  They should not have to feel that way; growing up in a Christian family should be preferred, rather than the exception.

    Such moralism exists on a corporate scale as well.  Because America was such a young nation, there were few real institutions early on.  Thus, after people became converted at revival meetings, there was not only reform in their own personal lives but a desire to build up their communities as well.  Going hand-in-hand with revivalism were reform movements for abolishing slavery, for fostering temperance regarding alcohol, and for improving the conditions of the poor and needy, among other things.  To be sure, personal and corporate moral reform are indeed good things, and they have made a positive difference for Americans and American society.  The danger has come in the continual temptation to make them ends in themselves.  Our moralism and pragmatism lead us to believe in the perfectibility of ourselves and society and that is a subtext in our social and political dialogue.

    Lastly, past successes have created an expectation that the church should have broad and high social influence in society, ostensibly in the name of the Gospel but really beyond propagating the Gospel.  That, in turn, creates pressure to accommodate the culture in varying ways, so as to gain influence or at least not lose social and political influence.  Even within our own denomination there are pressures of this type and that is proving corrosive of a faithful and orthodox witness to the truth.

    Returning to the Reformation

    Much more can be said, but I want to come back to how we move forward in light of all this, and especially, what difference the Reformation makes.  In light of these trends, conservative Christians are inclined toward three ways of dealing with the situation we now face: reconstruction, Romanism, or revival.

    By “reconstruction” I mean efforts to restore the prominence of Christianity in America, typically by leveraging the power of the Federal Government.  This sentiment explains the desperation and political activism of so many conservative Christians today.  Over the past 10-15 years, I have repeated, well-meaning calls for Christians to “wake up” before everything is lost and get the right politicians in office now.  I am frankly doubtful that this will work.  I lack confidence in any politician to know how to turn the clock back, let alone to do it competently, and moreover, the demographic trends are not going to be reversed by legislation.  In many ways, the situation we now face is akin to the failed last-ditch efforts one reads about in 2 Kings to stave the impending invasion of the Babylonians.  If the decline of the American church is a judgment of God, then it is already too late.  Rather, we need to repent of our desire for influence and replace it with a simple desire for faithfulness to the Lord.

    In terms of “Romanism,” there has been a trend over the last few decades of many Protestants thinking that the Roman Catholic Church is a bastion of conservatism that is withstanding the onslaught of secularism and the New Paganism.  Rome cultivates that image, and Catholic theologians like to charge that the secularism of our day is the result of the Reformation shattering a united Christendom.  I know of one an ordained pastor in the PCA church I used to attend who “crossed the Tiber” because he thought Protestantism lacked the theological and intellectual ability to deal with the challenges of public life.  I know of young people raised in conservative evangelical homes who have done likewise.

    This is wrong on multiple levels.  Roman Catholic theologians are as diverse in their views as those in Protestantism.  Among the laity, the State of Theology survey shows that attitudes among Roman Catholics are generally consistent with or more liberal than even mainline Protestants.  The decline of self-identified Christians in the Catholic Church is greater than that of mainline churches, according to the Pew Research.  Catholic nostalgia for “Christendom” is only sustainable by willful ignorance of actual history; when one looks at the real historical record, “Christendom” was never as united or spiritual as people would like to think of it as being.  Moreover, while the Reformation did contribute to the rise of secularism in Europe, a stronger argument can be made that Roman Catholic efforts to maintain political authority in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries did much more than Protestantism to engender an atheistic backlash, especially in the events surrounding the French Revolution.

    The default mode for many evangelical Protestants is that we need to “have a revival.”  No doubt, a revival of the Gospel would be most welcome these days.  But if, as I have outlined here, part of the problem underlying the decline of American Christianity stems from the pragmatism and associated effects of the Second Great Awakening, then doubling down on revivalism is not going to be an effective part of the solution.  Even insofar as revivalism worked in the past, it is clear that the marginal gains have been diminishing over time.  Techniques cannot bring about true revival; only God can.

    So, where does that leave us?  Actually, I think the time is propitious to reset the foundations of American Protestantism by returning to the richness of the truths recovered by the Reformers and their Puritan descendants.  This is what Packer pointed out in his book and his work on the Puritans.  What I mean by this is more than simply affirmation of the solas of the Reformation (sola Scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, soli Deo gloria).  Those are important, to be sure, but the Reformation is not reducible to the five solas.  Much more was going on in the Reformation that has lasting significance.

    The time is propitious to reset the foundations of American Protestantism by returning to the richness of the truths recovered by the Reformers and their Puritan descendants.

    Take, for example, the priority that the Reformers and their immediate successors placed on Scripture.  It would be wrong to think that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church did not use Scripture at all.  They did use it, but because of limitations of books at the time, much of their understanding of Scripture relied upon compilations of quotes from Scripture on specific topics.  In some respects, current biblicist approaches to Scripture are not that far removed from this pre-Reformation approach.  The revival of learning that came in with the Renaissance, however, prompted a drive to get back to the original sources in the original languages.  As church historian Richard A. Muller notes, this led in the Reformation to a revolution in how the Scriptures were interpreted, with far more extensive exegetical work, seeing the Scriptures as a unified whole rather than an atomized collection of verses and passages.  Such deep exegesis resulted in the Reformed understanding of what we now call covenant theology.

    Covenant theology is a distinctive of Reformed theology that captures the epic of God’s redemptive work.  There is a longing today for some kind of grand epic bigger than oneself, and that can be seen in the immense popularity of the Star Wars movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Middle Earth fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien and even the Narnia series of C. S. Lewis.  For too many people, Protestantism has simply been reduced to “getting saved” and “being a good moral person.”  For a people looking for how their lives have meaning in the broader sweep of the world, this reductionism is not enough.  Such meaning and purpose, however, can be found in God’s covenantal work.  Moreover, the covenantal nature of Scripture not only unifies the Old and New Testaments, but also brings into clear focus all aspects of theology and the Christian life.  And, unlike the popular epics of today, it has the added benefit of being true.  Reformation covenant theology runs counter to the superficiality of contemporary American Protestantism.

    Another example of the richness that can be recovered from the Reformation regards worship.  By focusing on just the solas of the Reformation it is easy to lose sight of how much energy, effort, and polemic was put in to reforming worship.  Today, people criticize Reformed worship as being too plain, yet its plainness is not a bug, but a feature.  Prior to the Reformation, Catholic worship exacerbated the distance between the laity and God.  The ornateness of the ritual, especially the serving of the Eucharist, was intended to overawe worshipers.  The distance between medieval Catholicism and modern megachurches is not as great as one might assume.  Both are motivated by a spirit of what man thinks should be offered up, rather than what God has asked for.  Worship is a production.  In Scripture, however, God spends much time specifying to His people how He is to be worshiped, but man’s sensibility is much like that of Cain’s—God gets what we want to offer, not what He has asked for.  Reformed worship not only reverses this, so as to be better pleasing to God, but its simplicity facilitates spiritual formation and communion, and draws us nearer to God.  For a people burned out on the constant pursuit of the “next big thing” such simplicity may well seem refreshing.

    A final example can be seen in the Reformed understanding of the nature of the church itself.  The Catholic Church asserted obedience to an ecclesiastical hierarchy that was accountable to no one but itself, and such power opened the door for abuse.  In our own day, we see individual celebrity pastors or ministries, while not operating on the scale that the Catholic Church did then or does now, nevertheless have engaged in spiritual abuse themselves, having no authority outside of the church to check their power.  The Reformers, however, worked out an understanding of church government that built in graduated courts to diffuse and limit such power and to provide necessary accountability.  The Reformers also envisioned a different role for the minister.  In the Catholic understanding, the priest was largely the dispenser of the sacrament.  For modern churches, the minister is supposed to be the charismatic master of ceremonies for the worship “event.”  In the Reformed understanding, the minister is the steward of God’s Word and the pastor of God’s people.  That is a far more significant role in the spiritual formation of God’s people.

    The current situation facing today’s church is undeniably bad and unlikely to be reversed quickly, but it is not beyond recovery.  A key lesson from the Reformation is that the situation the church faced prior to the Reformation was also bad, but through the Reformation God revitalized His church.  Recovering the truths of the Reformation is not going to be a simple multi-step solution that our reflexive pragmatism looks for.  It will take time and effort, and may seem “inefficient” by the world’s standards.  But returning to the model presented by our forebears in the Reformed tradition will provide a more secure, stable foundation than what we have been dealing with, and that is something to be pursued.  The Reformers embraced the motto, “Post Tenebras, Lux”—”After darkness, light.”  That is a motto worthy for our time as well.