The ironic fate of liberal Christianity

Ross Douthat has an editorial which has sparked much discussion elsewhere in the liberal Christian (and specifically Episcopalian) world, not least in the Episcopal Cafe (see here and here for the news body’s responses), concerning whether or not liberal Christianity is ‘savable’ or salvageable. This is a valid question - or would be, rather, if it had not already prompted torrents of spilt liberal Christian ink. But it seems to me that Mr Douthat misses a critical aspect of the question he raises: he takes for granted the value and appeal that liberal Christianity has, and its distinguished place in American history (as Fr Gary Dorrien, cited in the article, has documented very well), without taking into account the cultural shifts which have given rise to the likes of Bp John Shelby Spong. There is an irony to liberal Christianity’s collapse which lies in how it approaches the role of faith in public life.

Mr Douthat is, to an extent, correct in dating the crisis in liberal Christianity back to the 1960’s (even though, like a good American conservative, he elides that this crisis extended itself into the ‘70’s and ‘80’s with the growing mania for ‘privatisation’ under Reagan in the United States and under Thatcher in Britain). The radical sexual and spiritual individualism of the ‘60’s hippies, followed up by the radical economic individualism and greed of the ‘80’s yuppies, eroded the assumption that faith must have a public dimension. This eroded assumption produced a tension within American liberal Christianity that, as far as I can see, still has yet to be resolved (though, indeed, we do have a number of people working on that problem). This tension, I believe, accounts for a significant part of the tendencies Mr Douthat is describing.

It is worth remembering that the progressive strains within American Protestantism that led to the crusades against slavery, against drunkenness, for women’s rights and for economic reforms, were all motivated by this assumption that being Christian entailed public service as well as private belief. As belief has grown increasingly ‘privatised’ along with a great many other things, the effects were twofold: the first was, unfortunately, a highly-politicised revival of religious fundamentalism. (It is worth noting that, though the political implications of this revival were both highly authoritarian and highly public, it was motivated by a reductively individualist theology that posited a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus as central and which denied that Christianity had any public duty to society’s distressed - that was a matter which should be left to individual ‘charity’, construed in entirely voluntary terms. It was a theology, in short, tailor-made to support fusionism.)

The second effect was the erosion of precisely those theological aspects of what in the past had been called liberal Christianity which had demanded public action: support of labour unions, of civil rights, of a more generous foreign policy. During and in the wake of the ‘60’s, liberal Christian theology (broadly) split down the middle. One side was pared down to fit a secular, capitalist mould: individualised, apolitical, bland and ‘consumer’-centric - a ‘God without wrath [bringing] people without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross’, as neo-orthodox theologian H Richard Niebuhr (himself a theological heir to liberal American Protestantism) once put it. The other side abandoned the confessional aspects of Christianity and took up an entirely political aspect - what ended up becoming liberation theology.

Of course, I probably am not the best person to address these issues; Dr John Milbank of the University of Nottingham has done it already, and far better than I have, in Theology and Social Theory. But the punchline is this: we Americans have to do better about addressing this question, of what exactly the role of faith in public life should be. Fundamentalism (with its reductively individualist theology) being precisely what we want to avoid, we can afford neither a reductively individualist theology of our own in moralistic therapeutic deism, nor the political flattenings of liberation theology (however much we should sympathise with the goals of the last). One of the things we should demand in addressing this question is a revisiting of the personalist turn in our theological thinking: a universe which is not centred upon the consumerist demands of potential church-goers, but upon the altar and upon the Cross toward which we want their attention to be ultimately drawn.