The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (23 page)

1. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell,
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 87, citing George Gallup and D. Michael Lindsay,
Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in US. Beliefs
(Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999), 7, 19; Sidney E. Ahlstrom,
A Religious History of the American People
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 952.

2. John K. Jessup, ed.,
The Ideas of Henry Luce
(New York: Atheneum, 1969), 282. Luce sometimes did make a distinction, but he also often lapsed into conflation, as in “God of Our Fathers,” a centennial speech at Lake Forest College in which he spoke of the specifically Presbyterian heritage, but ended by saying, “We Americans, in relation to the future, stand about where Joshua stood,” essentially equating America's mission with that of ancient Israel. Jessup, ed.,
Ideas of Henry Luce
, 324.

3. David Sarnoff, “The Fabulous Future,” and John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” in
The Fabulous Future:
America in 1980
, by the Editors of Fortune (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 18, 37. In Sarnoff's view, moreover, “the interdependence of people in a world shrunk by science inevitably requires broader mental concepts, which would lead to great ethical and moral stature—which in turn stimulate man's spiritual growth” (p. 26).

4. Henry R. Luce, “A Speculation About 1980,” in
The Fabulous Future: America in 1980
, by the Editors of Fortune
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 183–184; “the public philosophy” quotation is from a speech at St. Louis University, November 16, 1955, quoted in Jessup, ed.,
Ideas of Henry Luce
, 166–167.

5. Luce, “A Speculation About 1980,” 195, 198–199 (emphasis in original). Luce
later discovered Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who also enunciated ideas about the
evolving collaboration between people and God; Luce even used the pages of
Life
in 1964 to promote the complex views of the scientist-theologian to the general public. See Jessup, ed.,
Ideas of Henry Luce
, 324–335.

6. Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society
(New York: Knopf, 1964), xxv.

7. Paul Blanshard,
American Freedom and Catholic Power
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); John Courtney Murray,
We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960).

8. See William Inboden,
Religion and American Foreign Policy: The Soul of Containment
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jason W. Stevens,
God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

9. Martin Marty,
The New Shape of American Religion
(New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 39, 74.

10. Will Herberg,
Protestant-Catholic-Jew
(New York: Doubleday, 1955).

11. Blake is quoted in Marty,
New Shape
, 77.

12. Marty,
New Shape
, 10, 31–44, 77, 79, 83, 110.

13. Morton White, “Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics” (1956), in
Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning: A Collection of Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 117–118.

14. Reinhold Niebuhr,
The Irony of American History
(New York: Scribner's, 1952), 138.

15. Andrew S. Finstuen,
Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); White, “Original Sin, 117–118. Finstuen makes the point that the doctrine of original sin enjoyed considerable popularity.

16. Niebuhr,
Irony
, 110, 7, 1–16.

17. Ibid., 80. Niebuhr also quoted psychologist Gordon Allport as using a similar analogy (p. 81n). Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr,
Moral Man and Immoral Society
(New York: Scribner's, 1932), xiii, where he quotes Dewey. In discussing Niebuhr's critique of Dewey in
Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992),
Ronald H. Stone cites Dewey as recognizing, by 1936 at least, that the obstacles to creating a scientifically based society could be insuperable (p. 230; cf. 210–214).

18. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Ideology and the Scientific Method” (1953), in
The
Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
, Robert McAfee Brown, ed.
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 210, 215.

19. Reinhold Niebuhr,
Christian Realism and Political Problems
(New York: Scribner's, 1953), 175, quoted in Ronald H. Stone,
Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 207–208. On Niebuhr's relationship to pragmatism and to James and Dewey, see Stone,
Professor Reinhold Niebuhr
, 205–215, and Martin Halliwell,
The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 19–78.

20. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Coherence, Incoherence, and Christian Faith” (1951),
in
The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
, Robert McAfee Brown, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 232–233. As usual, Niebuhr saw his view regarding faith and reason as standing between two extremes: Roman Catholic
neo-Thomism,
which put too much trust in reason, and the radical neo-orthodoxy
of Karl Barth, which put no trust at all in natural human wisdom or natural theology. Ibid., 226–231.

21. Morton White himself made this point in offering a scathing attack on Protestant attempts to retain their privilege in higher education. All of these attempts, he said, tried “to avoid identifying religion with any claim to knowledge that might have to run the gauntlet of scientific test.” Morton White, “Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning” (1954), in
Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 89.

22. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Pious and Secular America” (1957), in
Pious and Secular America
(New York: Scribner's, 1958), 1, 2, 4, 13.

23. David A. Hollinger provides some insightful reflections on this point in “Epilogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and Protestant Liberalism,” in
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History
(Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2013), 211–225.

24. The term is borrowed from Peter L. Berger,
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).

Chapter Six: Sequel: Consensus Becomes a Fighting Word

1. The terminology can sometimes be confusing. Much of the conservative side of American Protestantism has been shaped by
the revivalist tradition. Emphasizing the authority of the Bible, and
the necessity of personal conversion made possible by the redemptive work of Christ on the cross, this revivalist tradition was also known as “evangelical.” In the early twentieth century, in reaction to modernism in theology and changes in cultural mores, many of these evangelical revivalists were involved in the “fundamentalist” movement, which was characterized by particularly militant opposition to those trends. By the 1950s, some of the heirs to fundamentalism were adopting a somewhat more moderate tone and calling themselves “neo-evangelical” or just “evangelical.” Billy Graham, who began his career as a fundamentalist, became
associated with this new evangelicalism. The revivalist heritage, or evangelicalism, includes many separate denominations and
submovements, so it is sometimes necessary to use a variety of these terms to cover all who are involved. For a more complete analysis, see George Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1980]), and especially the chart regarding terminology, 234–235.

2. For examples, see the bibliographies offered at the website of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at www .wheaton.edu/isae.

3. Tim LaHaye,
The Spirit-Controlled Temperament
(Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1966); James C. Dobson,
Dare to Discipline
(Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970). Randall J. Stephen and Karl W. Giberson,
The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 97–138, provides a helpful introduction, on which I am drawing here. On the background of evangelical alternative psychologies I am indebted to Daniel DuBois Gottwig, “Before the Culture Wars: Conservative Protestants and the Family, 1920–1980,” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2011.

4. Alan Ehrenhalt points this out in
The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 21. Ehrenhalt also explains that in fact the sense of community was more widespread in America in the 1950s than it was in later decades.

5. For a biography of Francis Schaeffer, see Barry Hankins,
Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). For more information about Francis Schaeffer's son Frank, see Frank Schaeffer,
Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007); on the making of the films, I drew from p. 266 of this work. The book versions were Francis A. Schaeffer,
How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
(Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976), and Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop,
Whatever Happened to the
Human Race? Exposing Our Rapid Yet Subtle Loss of Human Rights
(Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1979).

6. Francis A. Schaeffer,
How Should We Then Live?
(1976), in
The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer
, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 226. Schaeffer had just cited both Daniel Bell and economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the increasing role of elites in modern technological society (pp. 223–224). Tim LaHaye,
The Battle for the Mind: A Subtle Warfare
(Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1980).

7. Falwell is quoted in Ronald A. Wells, “Schaeffer in America,” in Ronald W. Ruegsegger, ed.,
Reflections on Francis Schaeffer
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1980), 234. The quotations by Schaeffer are in Francis A. Schaeffer,
A Christian Manifesto
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1981), 424, 482. Schaeffer often used the term “humanism” to refer to “secular humanism,” a human-centered philosophy based on the belief in an impersonal, chance universe.

8. Francis A. Schaeffer,
The Great Evangelical Disaster
(1984), in
The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer
, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 416n. Schaeffer said there was never a
“golden age” and allowed that there had been flaws at the time of
consensus, including racism and earlier slavery, the wrong use of wealth, and identification of America as God's “chosen nation” (pp. 416–417). Darren Dochuk, in
From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plainfolk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), provides an insightful account of the sense of longing for more Christian-friendly times and places during this era, especially among those who had migrated to Southern California. The mid-1930s was when, according to Schaeffer, his former denomination, the mainline northern Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), had become apostate, so that he believed it necessary to separate from that prestigious institution. He was part of the fundamentalist Bible Presbyterian Church, led by Carl McIntire, from 1937 to 1956. Thus Schaeffer usually dated the American turning point as in the 1930s.

9. Francis A. Schaeffer, “Special Note to Christians,” in
How Should We Then Live?
(1976), in
The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer
, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 255 (emphasis in original).

10. Francis A. Schaeffer, “Foreword,” in John W. Whitehead,
The Second American Revolution
(Elgin, IL: David C. Cook, 1982).

11. Quite a few authors have suggested that the religious right is more pervasively shaped by a movement, often called “Reconstructionism,” dedicated to reinstituting “theonomy,” or Old Testament law. For example, see Kevin Phillips,
American Theocracy
(New York: Viking, 2006). Sometimes Francis Schaeffer is represented as promoting such views because he borrowed some historical analysis from Reconstructionist founder Rousas J. Rushdoony. However, according to Frank Schaeffer,
Sex, Mom, and God
(Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 2011), 110, Francis Schaeffer often referred to Rushdoony's full-blown Reconstructionist scheme as “insanity.” See also Hankins,
Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America
, 193–194. Accusations that Reconstructionism is widespread in the movement fail to take into account the extent to which most conservative evangelicals are committed to the American political heritage.

12. David Barton,
The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012). The book's many inaccuracies were exposed by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter in
Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President
(Grove City, PA: Salem Grove Press, 2012).