A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada 2nd edition
A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada 2nd edition
Mark A. Noll
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 1992, 2019 Mark A. Noll All rights reserved Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7490-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
This book incorporates in rewritten form a much briefer account of Christianity in North America that appears in Christianity: A Social and Cultural History (New York: Macmillan, 1991). It includes rewritten material from Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001). Portions of chapters 15 and 16 are abridged and rewritten from Mark A. Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Lines from “of course I prayed” on page 548 are used with permission from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright© 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright© 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright© renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright© 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright© 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
To George Rawlyk (in memoriam, 1935–1996) and Grant Wacker
Contents
Tables
xvii
Preface to the Second Edition
xix
Acknowledgments (Second Edition)
xxi
Acknowledgments (First Edition) Introduction
xxiii 1
PART I: BEGINNINGS
1. European Expansion and Catholic Settlement
9
Roman Catholicism in New Spain
14
Catholic Missions in New France
17
The Emergence of a French-ÂCatholic Society
19
Roman Catholics in Maryland
23
2. The English Reformation and the Puritans
27
Puritanism in England
29
New World Settlements
32
Virginia
32
Plymouth
33
Puritan Life and Faith in America
35
The Puritan Way
36
Troubles
42
Massachusetts and Virginia: A Comparison
45
vii
Contents 3. Other Beginnings Alternatives to the Puritans
48 49
Baptists in Early America
49
Roger Williams
51
Anne Hutchinson
53
The Mosaic Takes Shape: Protestants outside of New England
55
The Church of England
55
The Quakers and Pennsylvania
57
Presbyterians
59
The Reformed and Continental Pietists
60
Early Protestants in Canada
63
Native Americans and Slaves
64
Native Americans
65
Slaves
66
PART II: AMERICANIZATION
4. A Renewal of Piety, 1700–1750 The Early Eighteenth Century
76
Solomon Stoddard and Cotton Mather
76
Regional Developments
78
The Great Awakening
81
George Whitefield
81
Jonathan Edwards
86
Sarah Osborn
88
In the Wake of Revivals
89
Regional Effects
89
The Great Awakening and the Baptists
92
From English Puritanism to American Evangelicalism
95
Preaching to the Marginalized
96
The Awakening and America viii
75
100
Contents
5. The Churches in the Revolution
105
The Christian Patriots
106
Republicanism
106
Contributions to the Cause
109
Loyalists 111 Canadian Loyalism: Quebec
112
Canadian Loyalism: The Maritimes
115
Canadian Loyalism: Upper Canada
117
Pacifists 118 The Faith of the Founders
119
The Religious Problem of Slavery in the American Revolution
122
6. The Revolution in the Churches The Separation of Church and State
129 130
The Emergence of the First Amendment
130
Interpreting the First Amendment
132
A New Era of Populist Democracy
134
No Creed but the Bible
136
The Effects of Populist Democracy
137
Theology in an American Key
138
The American Christian Enlightenment
139
Theological Developments
143
Countervailing Trends
144
PART III: THE “PROTESTANT CENTURY�
7. Evangelical Mobilization
151
National Christianization
152
The West
153
The East
154
Revivals Compared
155
Exemplary Leaders
156 ix
Contents Francis Asbury and the Rise of Methodism
156
Charles Finney and Modern Revivalism
159
Mobilization of the Baptists
162
A New Visibility for Women
164
Phoebe Palmer and the Appeal of Holiness
165
Public Life
167
A Missionary Vision
169
Mission Work at Home and Abroad
169
The Ambiguous Mission to the Cherokee
170
Interpretations 173
8. “Outsiders” Millerites and Mormons
176 177
The Adventism of William Miller
177
The New Religion of Joseph Smith
178
Alternative Communities
180
African Americans Organize Their Own Churches
181
Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church
183
Organization North, Perseverance South
185
Roman Catholics
188
John Carroll and an American Catholic Church
188
Protestant Opposition
191
Catholic Women
192
Immigrant Protestants
193
Lutherans 194
9. “Evangelical America,” 1800–1865
200
In Foreign Eyes
201
Protestant Life in “Christian America”
203
The Deist Challenge
203
Converting the West and the South
205
Mass Communications and Popular Thought
210
Education 212 x
Contents A Flourishing of Protestant Theology
215
The Heirs of Calvinism
215
Mediating Theologies
220
Politics 224
10. His Dominion: “Christian Canada”
229
The Canadian Political Context
231
The Catholic Story
234
The Triumph of Conservatism in Quebec
234
Catholicism beyond Quebec and Protestant-Catholic Hostility
239
The Meaning of Catholic-Protestant Tension
243
The Protestant Story in the Atlantic Provinces
244
The Protestant Story in Ontario and the West
247
A Confluence of Opposites
247
Between Britain and America
253
Adjustments after 1867
254
The Rise and Limits of Protestant Ecclesiastical Nationalism
259
11. The American Civil War The Civil War as a Religious War
266 267
Christian Activity during the Conflict
271
Abraham Lincoln
273
The Civil War as Turning Point
275
Abolition
275
Opening the West
277
Republican Virtue
280
Civil Religion
281
12. White Protestants Carry On, 1865–circa 1900 Evangelists at Home and Abroad
287 288
Dwight L. Moody
289
Missionary Entrepreneurs
291
American Protestants to the Ends of the Earth
292 xi
Contents The Moral Reform of Society—and the Temperance Crusade
294
The Cities and the Social Gospel
298
Intellectual Challenges
301
The New University
301
Historical Criticism of Scripture
304
Moderates, Mediators, and the Unexpected
306
13. Non-White, Non-Protestant African Americans in Control of Their Destinies
311 312
Denominational Initiatives
312
Other Institutions
314
Church and Society
316
The Orthodox in America
320
Catholics 323 An Immigrant Church
323
Journey to Rome: Isaac Hecker
327
“Americanism”
329
Growing Maturity
332
A Changing Landscape
334
PART IV: TUMULTUOUS TIMES, 1900–2018
14. Protestant Uncertainty, 1900–1918 The Disruption of Protestant Theology
xii
341 342
Modernism
343
Fundamentalism and the Rise of Dispensational Theology
345
Holiness
346
Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy
349
The Culmination of Protestant Politics
353
William Jennings Bryan
353
Woodrow Wilson
355
The Ecumenical Movement and World War I
357
Pentecostalism: A New Departure
359
Contents
15. The World in the Churches, the Churches in the World, 1918–1960 364 From World War to the Great Depression
365
The Christian Map in the 1920s
367
Black Churches beneath the Radar
369
Pentecostals Take Center Stage: Aimee Semple McPherson
373
Hard Times, 1929–1941
374
Catholics as a Growing American Presence
378
Dorothy Day
381
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
382
State in Church
384
World War II and Its Aftermath, 1939–1960
386
Billy Graham
389
Postwar Seriousness about “Original Sin”
392
A Public Theology for African Americans
393
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001
399
One after Another
400
Catholic Revolutions: The Second Vatican Council and Beyond
406
The Council
407
And After
410
Civil Rights Revolution, New Christian Right Counterrevolution
414
The Civil Rights Movement
415
Martin Luther King Jr.
419
From Revolution to Counterrevolution
421
The New Christian Right
424
Canada: Revolution All Around
431
Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution”
432
Protestants and “the Rest of Canada”
435
Explanations, by Comparison with the United States
439
17. “Church History,” 1960–2018 Worship for a New Era The Charismatic and Jesus People Movements
445 446 447 xiii
Contents Megachurches
450
Vineyard Spirituality
454
Shifting Denominational Demography
457
Lutherans
461
Southern Baptists
463
Recognition of New Voices
466
A Public Role for Women
466
Hispanic Christianity
472
18. The Recent Past, 2001–2018 In Society: Storm and Stress
481 482
9/11/2001
482
Politics/Polarization
485
The Courts
490
In the Churches: Some Old, Some New
493
Ecumenism
494
Missions
498
Fund-Raising
502
Sex
504
Health and Wealth
507
Preachers
509
Urban and Ethnic Renewal
515
PART V: REFLECTIONS
19. Legacies of “Christian America” and “Christian Canada” An Inescapable Geography
524
A Puritan-Evangelical Politics, with Alternatives
526
Alternative: Anabaptists
529
Alternative: Catholicism
531
Alternative: Canada
533
America’s Book, America’s Icon: The Bible xiv
523
534
Contents Printing, Translating, and Distributing
535
A Cultural Force
537
A Literature Preoccupied with God
541
Literature of Christian Moral Purpose
543
Christianity in the Literary Canon
545
20. American Christianity, Christianity in America
556
Black and White
558
The United States and Canada
562
The Varying Pace (and Diverse Meanings) of Secularization
565
Wilderness Once Again?
568
Bibliography of General Works
573
Index
579
xv
Tables
6.1 Denominational Shares of Religious Adherents: The United States, 1776 and 1850
138
13.1 Proportions of Religious Adherents in the United States, 1860–1926 334 15.1 Proportions of Church Adherents, 1920s: United States and Canada
368
xvii
Preface to the Second Edition
I
n the more than twenty-five years that have elapsed between ending research for the first edition of this book and beginning preparation of this second edition, much—very much—has changed. Then there was no Internet, no websites for individuals and organizations, and no Wikipedia. Then there was only one “President Bush,” Hillary Clinton was mostly known as the wife of a presidential aspirant, and Canadians had experienced only one “Prime Minister Trudeau.” Then almost no one had heard of Al Qaeda, no one communicated on Facebook, white evangelicals were known as the friends of Billy Graham rather than the friends of Donald Trump, church sex scandals were more rumors than disorienting facts, and almost no missionaries had arrived on this continent to evangelize North Americans. Clearly the time had come to bring this book’s narrative up to the present. The time has also arrived to recognize the remarkable ongoing surge of outstanding scholarship on all aspects of Christian history in Canada and the United States. In fact, one of the main reasons for attempting this revision has been the desire to update the lists of “Further Reading” provided for each chapter and at the end of the book. In some instances, this updating acknowledges newer historical work by putting it to use in this revision; in other instances, it indicates books whose insights I wish there had been space to include. In addition, readers now can draw on many more books, articles, and web posts treating important subjects in North American Christian history than I either know about or could put to use if I did. Whatever the contemporary state of Christianity in churches, for congregations, among families, and with individuals, relevant scholarship has never been more abundant. This edition maintains much of the focus on denominations, theology, hymnody, intellectual life, and national politics contained in the first edition. But I have also tried to strengthen treatment of women and ethnic minorities, expand attention to social history, and provide more coverage of “lived religion.” The introduction, chapters 1 through 11, along with chapters 13, 19, and 20 contain some new material drawn from recent scholarship along with many stylistic corrections of the sort I have long urged on student writers. Of several interpretive alterations in these chapters, the most important has been elimination of “the xix
Preface to the Second Edition Second Great Awakening,” an amorphously imprecise designation, in favor of “national Christianization” to describe a key transition in the half century after the formation of the United States. Chapters 12 and 14 have been rearranged, with some new additions, in order to provide a clearer chronological picture. Chapters 15 through 18 have been thoroughly rewritten, or written from scratch, in order to provide a coherent chronological narrative from the end of the First World War to the present. (Throughout the book, chronology is sometimes bent to allow for more sustained attention to individual subjects—as an example, treatment of Catholic developments in chapter 16 carries that particular story well past the periodization specified for the chapter.) These latter chapters include a great deal of new material, some portions from the first edition recast and repositioned to fit the new narrative, and a few sections adapted from The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Eerdmans, 2002). The slightly revised introduction that follows explains my purpose in writing a “history of Christianity” instead of an “American religious history.” I would like to emphasize, however, that scholars who focus more generically on “religion” have immeasurably enriched what I have tried to do. Finally, my sincerest thanks are extended to those who read (or assigned) the first edition of this book. It is now my hope that this expanded, revised, and rewritten attempt may provide improved information while provoking more of the right kind of questions for both history and faith.
xx
Acknowledgments (Second Edition)
F
or pointing out factual errors or questionable interpretations in the first edition of this book, I am very grateful for the many messages I received personally and from helpful criticism in reviews. Special thanks are due to Robert Burkinshaw for a thorough vetting of the Canadian sections and to Justus Doenecke for the same service respecting American political-religious matters. Needless to say, remaining errors of fact and interpretation are my responsibility alone. For their patience, intellectual savoir faire, and ever-so-gentle prodding, I owe a debt to the editorial staff at William B. Eerdmans, especially to Jon Pott, David Bratt, Tom Raabe, and Linda Bieze, that even as many words as found in this book could not adequately repay. The first edition was dedicated to two individuals for whom, as I indicated then, my appreciation for what they had taught me was exceeded only by my gratitude for their friendship. The appreciation and the gratitude remain, now in memoriam for George Rawlyk, but very much as a present-day reality for Grant Wacker.
xxi
Acknowledgments (First Edition)
T
his book would not have been possible without the many scholars who have contributed so magnificently to the wealth of outstanding writing on North American religious history of recent decades. It is invidious to single out any in that number for special mention, but I cannot forgo a word of thanks to David Wills for holding up the ideal of making African American Christian history an integral part of general Christian history and to Robert Handy for pioneering efforts at writing the story of the churches in Canada and the United States as one story. For specific help in the preparation of this volume, it is a privilege to thank David Malone and Maggie Noll for reducing the quantity of mistakes, infelicities, and inanities; John Clark, Roger Finke, Beatrice Horne, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Charles Middlebrook, Sara Miles, Todd Nichol, Alvaro Nieves, Bob Patterson, Jon Pott, Tim Straayer, and Ina Vondiziano for much-appreciated assistance along the way; and Hans-Peter Caulien, Paul Heidebrecht, Michael de Ridder, Ann Coleman, Don Lewis, Neil MacLean, John Stackhouse, Marguerite Van Die, and especially George Rawlyk for being such patient mentors concerning things Canadian. The book is dedicated to two historians whose expertise has illuminated subjects that were unfamiliar to me, but who are valued even more as friends than as experts.
xxiii
Introduction
T
his book offers a history of Christianity in the United States and Canada. As a history, its primary intent is to provide certain basic information about some of the most important themes, events, leaders, and changes in the Christian churches that have populated the upper two-thirds of the North American continent for more than the last four centuries. Historical studies, however, are always more than just sources of information. Authors must select what to include and not to include, they must decide how to slant what is written, and they must highlight certain themes at the expense of others. Even textbooks constitute arguments, embody prejudices, and sometimes even preach sermons. These implicit arguments, prejudices, and sermons usually communicate what the author considers to be some kind of current consensus about the subject of the text, but they also express the author’s personal point of view. This book is no different. Its presentation is self-consciously influenced by important recent currents in the study of American religious history. In particular, the fresh attention paid to the experiences of women, nonwhites, and “ordinary” people who did not leave extensive written records has shaped the pages that follow. Debate continues over how to integrate such groups fully into larger chronological narratives, which until recently have been dominated by leaders of elite groups who did leave extensive published records. But this text is written under the conviction that it is important to strive toward broader inclusion. In addition, although the book deals extensively with what might be called “high culture”—public ecclesiastical, political, or intellectual aspects of religious history—it also attempts to recover the experiences of common people. It benefits especially from recent studies of the hymns ordinary people sing, what it has meant for them to go to church, and how private individuals have pursued personal or family nurture in the faith. At the start of almost every chapter, a hymn is presented in order to suggest something about how people were worshiping during the period under consideration. A wealth of recent scholarship has strikingly illuminated the great variety of Christian experience that has prevailed throughout all of North American history. While New England Puritans may have left the best records from the seventeenth 1
Introduction century, the Christian story of that era also included significant developments among Catholics in New France, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Episcopalians in Virginia. And these developments often anticipated later patterns of American church history more directly than those of the Puritans. In the same way, the white Protestant churches of British heritage dominated the public perception of Christian life in the nineteenth century, but it is increasingly clear that black Protestants, German and Scandinavian Lutherans, Roman Catholics of several ethnic varieties, and even Orthodox from eastern Europe were adding diversity, complexity, and unexpected dynamism to the Christian story of the period. History does require a narrative thread, and the activities of Protestants of British background supply that thread for this text. But the overall structure of the book’s chapters also reflects other important threads and a more complicated, more varied fabric that both contemporary interests and recent scholarship make it easier to see. Another helpful emphasis of recent historical study is the importance of comparison. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, historians are discovering what students of language have always known. “Who really knows English?” they ask, “Who knows only English?” For the historian of Christianity, the question becomes, “Who really knows the experience of believers in the United States who does not take seriously regional differences within the country, and—even more— the history of Christianity in parallel societies?” In this text, the chief sustained comparison is between the churches of the United States and the churches of Canada. Much is similar between these two countries that trace their political histories from a common British source and whose borders have always been wide open to the exchange of cultural influences, including religion. But much is also different. An examination of these similarities and differences over several centuries has several advantages. It allows us, first, to outline main developments in Canadian church history. These developments constitute by themselves a most intriguing story that is all too often neglected by citizens of the United States. But they also present a fascinating counterpoint to what has happened in the churches on the “American” side of the border. A sociologist, Seymour Martin Lipset, once made the case for social comparison that I hope to carry out for the history of Christianity when he said, “Knowledge of Canada or the United States is the best way to gain insight into the other North American country. . . . The more similar the units being compared, the more possible it should be to isolate the factors responsible for differences between them. Looking intensively at Canada and the United States sheds light on both of them.” In one way, however, this volume swims deliberately against the tide of recent scholarship. It is a history of Christianity, not a history of religion. Recent advances in the theoretical study of “religion”—considered as a general human phenomenon—have greatly enriched the study of particular faiths, whether Christianity, 2
Introduction Judaism, Islam, or others. A number of pathbreaking books on American subjects (many of them mentioned in the lists of “Further Reading” following each chapter) have shown how useful it can be to study Christianity from the perspective of universal religious experience. The result has been a flourishing over the past decades of outstanding books devoted to “religion in America.” A history of Christianity, however, is not the same as a history of religion. It does not disrespect common religious experience to say that the Christian churches have nurtured a distinct set of convictions, practices, and institutions. While it is a noble enterprise to blend the history of distinctions into a common religious story, it is also a valuable enterprise to study the history of Christianity on its own particular terms. Several advantages come from maintaining a specifically Christian focus. First, by concentrating on Christian experience we avoid the assumption that the story of Christianity in America is primarily a story about America. We are, in other words, provided with a focus that includes citizens of the United States and Canada in the worldwide story that had its origins in the era of the New Testament. I hope that this can be a text more concerned with how the Christian religion has fared in America than with how Christians have added their bit to the story of America. Second, concentrating on Christian experience permits a more natural interpretation of events from standards of Christian faith than would an objective account of generically religious life. Since the evaluations I care about most depend on specifically Christian standards, and since the “lessons” with which I am most concerned are lessons pertinent to the churches, a concentration on the story of Christians makes it possible for those interpretations and lessons to be expressed openly. My readings may all be wrong, but at least it should be clear where they are coming from: they are coming from the perspective of a Christian believer who happens to live in the United States. One of the convictions that shapes the material in this book might be called a charitable benefit of the doubt. It is the assumption that if historical figures and groups called themselves “Christian” and if they are recognized by others as “Christians,” they should be treated that way in a textbook history of Christianity. This judgment, too, reflects sentiments that are stronger in the early twenty-first century than they were in earlier eras. During former ages, Catholics and Protestants regularly read each other out of the kingdom, as did mutually antagonistic Protestants and even sometimes factions within the Catholic Church. In a book of this sort, to write sympathetically about those who called themselves “Christian” is not to endorse every belief, institution, practice, or opinion reported. It does, however, reflect a theological conviction—namely, that the church consists of all who name the name of Jesus Christ. Christians, whether theologians and historians or laypeople and ministers, should be concerned about quality control, about 3
Introduction the application of ideal Christian norms to their own lives. Those who are not Christians also have every right to challenge the churches on their understanding of the truth, their integrity of action, and their insight into the human condition. But on the question of who counts as a “real Christian,” a historian may be excused for exercising a judgment of charity. The “plot” of this text centers on the rise and decline of Protestant dominance in the United States. Along the way, full consideration is paid to Canadian contrasts, both Catholic and Protestant. I have also tried to be as sensitive as possible to the many polarities that inform the history of Christianity in North America— especially the polarity between blacks and whites but also between Catholics and Protestants and between the American North and South. The book also includes a great deal of denominational history. Yet in order to provide coherence and an orderly sequence, I have organized things to show how an “evangelical America” arose out of colonial pluralism and the tumults of the Revolutionary era, how the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism began to erode with the Civil War, and how it came to an obvious end by the 1920s. A stress on the Christian, as opposed to the North American, elements in the story will, I hope, make this plot an occasion for edification rather than nostalgia. Finally, at several points along the way we pause to hear what foreign visitors have said about the churches in North America. Claude-Jean Bertrand of the University of Paris provides a good example in comments from the 1970s. Bertrand saw, first, much to criticize: “It seems undeniable that, collectively, the American churches have encouraged puritanism, philistinism, manicheanism, and racism. They have encouraged the cult of individual material success growing out of raw capitalism and the imperialism of a good conscience (the two fundamental ingredients of Americanism in the eyes of its internal and external adversaries).” But he also saw much to commend: At the same time, the inculcation of individualism, nonconformity, and Protestant freedom have combined to preserve the country in its whole history from the worst horrors of totalitarianism. Religion has nourished the dynamism, egalitarianism, tolerance, generosity, humanity, and idealism of this great people—the only one in history which has mixed all the major ethnic groups and built a great world power without ever falling under the heel of a tyrant or a military oligarchy. Religion has helped this immense continent, filled with all sorts of people, to acquire a soul, to forge itself into a nation, and to anchor itself in its diverse past without ceasing to look toward the future. To grasp the whys and wherefores of such apparent contradictions is a central goal of this book. If it fulfills that purpose, we may learn not just about Christianity in America but also about Christianity itself, as it has come to expression in the United States and Canada. 4
Introduction Further Reading At the end of each chapter, books and occasionally articles are listed that speak directly to the concerns of that chapter. A bibliography at the end of the book includes more general studies and collections of documents, many of which contain material covering the whole sweep of the story. Bertrand, Claude-Jean. Les Eglises aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Brekus, Catherine A., ed. The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Handy, Robert T. “Dominant Patterns of Christian Life in Canada and the United States: Similarities and Differences.” In Religion/Culture: Comparative Canadian Studies. Toronto: Association for Canadian Studies, 1985. Lipset, Seymour Martin. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1990. Martin, David. “Canada in Comparative Perspective.” In Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, edited by David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Marty, Martin. “The American Religious History Canon.” Social Research 53 (Autumn 1956): 513–28. McGreevy, John T. American Religion. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2012. Noll, Mark A. “American Religious History, 1907–2007.” In A Century of American Historiography, edited by James M. Banner Jr. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. Stein, Stephen J., ed. The Cambridge History of Religions in America. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Tweed, Thomas A. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. William Westfall. “Voices from the Attic: The Canadian Border and the Writing of American Religious History.” In Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Wills, David W. “The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism, Puritanism and the Encounter of Black and White.” Religion and Intellectual Life 5 (Fall 1987): 30–41.
5
Part IV
TUMULTUOUS TIMES, 1900–2018
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or the century and more since 1900, it becomes exceedingly difficult to relate the history of Christianity in North America as a unified story. For one thing, we are simply so close to so many recent events that important patterns of development are hard to separate from more ephemeral circumstances. But the very nature of recent history also contributes to the difficulty. The United States and Canada have become more pluralistic in their religions, and that pluralism extends to varieties of the Christian faith. In an American setting where there are now more black Baptists than white Methodists; where there are more Orthodox of Greek, Russian, and other eastern European stock than either of the colonial period’s leading denominations (Episcopalians and Congregationalists); where families of denominations that did not exist in 1900 (e.g., the Pentecostals) are now much larger than a historic American body such as the Presbyterians; where almost all growth among Catholics since the 1970s has come from Hispanic and other non-European communities; and where in Canada the leading Protestant denominations of the early twentieth century have all faded—the story must indeed be complex. Diversity also reaches far beyond denominational allegiance. In modern North America the profusion of Christian lifestyles stretches as broad as the landmass from sea to sea. Modern believers have applied the faith in hot tubs and picket lines. Their artistic tastes range from Bach to Bill Gaither and the Newsboys, from Simone Weil to Marjorie Holmes and Marilynne Robinson, from Rembrandt to Charles Schulz and Thomas Kinkade. Theologically, on one pole are intense Christian conservatives and on the other are radical Christian progressives, with countless variations in between. Old standoffs, such as those between Protestants and Catholics, still count in some venues, but new ones have been added, such as conflicts between pro-life and pro-choice forces on the question of abortion or other sharp divisions on questions of marriage and sexual identity. No longer will it do, in other words, to talk as if there were simply one main plot for Christianity in North America. In addition, the history of the churches must also account for the great influence of national events and broad cultural changes. World wars, the Depression, 337
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, loomed as large in the history of Christianity as in other spheres of society. The advent of radio, then television, then the Internet and social media likewise affected the churches profoundly. Complexity, especially when viewed from a near point in time, has been the order of the day. Fresh sources of information about the churches have also served both to help see the picture more clearly and to make it more difficult to say what has been going on. Since World War II, systematic surveys of public opinion and practice have added a fresh dimension to analyses of Christian experience. Polls often provide information on how many people attended church in the previous week and what sorts of churches they were. They also provide a great deal of information about attitudes, personal religious practices, and connections between religion and other spheres of life. Although the results of these surveys by Gallup and other reputable organizations are not infallible, their general reliability has been well demonstrated. But adding polling information to the other kinds of records that historians have always used can make it harder to pick out patterns rather than easier. How important are changes and continuities that the pollsters miss? How should national attention to one individual or one crisis be related to broader, underlying trends? What weight should be given the statements of acknowledged leaders over against mass data from the people as a whole? Such questions indicate some of the potential, but also some of the problems, afforded by the new surfeit of information. But complexity notwithstanding, the kaleidoscopic permutations of modern America do reveal what seem to be observable patterns for the history of Christianity. For one, a relative rise in the number of Catholics dating from the mid-nineteenth century has continued, though with a dramatic decline in the number of vowed religious since the 1960s. For another, a decades-long process of consensus in the United States, which involved Jews as well as Catholics and Protestants, seemed to culminate in the 1950s, only to give way to “culture wars” among Christians and between certain groups of Christians and some nonreligious elements. In the United States, Christian influences helped spur the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, but liberationist forces unleashed by that movement have also challenged the churches on questions of gender, marriage, sexuality, and more. Definite changes have also been visible in patterns of church adherence: previously marginal groups have become larger and more important, while previously central groups have moved to the margins. In Canada, the postwar years first brought a greater boom for the churches than was experienced in the United States, but then a more precipitate falling away than took place in the States. In the twenty-first century throughout all of North America, churches serv338
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 ing immigrant populations have become much more important for both Catholics and Protestants. At the same time, chapters dealing with twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments also inevitably raise questions of interpretation. The major events of the era have presented an ongoing array of new challenges to the churches. They include five major wars (the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan/Iraq) alongside US military involvement and Canadian-UN peacekeeping in many world regions; the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the early 2000s highlighting a consistent series of economic booms and busts; terrorism ever present, though shifting from white-on-black lynchings to assaults by Muslim extremists, especially the spectacular destruction of 9/11/2001; life-altering possibilities for transport (in 1900 there were all of sixty automobiles in Chicago); several revolutions in communications from the radio and television to the Internet; the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s followed by continuing contention over lifestyle choices. These events, and more, have restructured patterns of ordinary existence to such a degree that they bear little resemblance to life at the time of the Civil War. Every one of them has implicated religious life. Debates about secularization have been inevitable in the wake of these rapid social changes—that is, whether, and in what ways, the focus of North American life has shifted away from the sacred toward a greater concentration on this world. On closer inspection, however, the notion of secularization itself turns out to be complicated. Part of the problem has to do with facts that seem to move in opposite directions. For example, since the 1920s, the percentage of North Americans claiming to be members of churches has risen. But over the same period, the preoccupation of major public media with matters concerning religion has declined. Another part of the problem is interpretive. “Secularization” often implies that the power or reality of religion is fading in a society. But from other angles, “secularization” might be a good thing for the churches, as, for example, when the disestablishment of state religions allows many kinds of Christian groups more freedom for their activities. To raise such issues is to approach what is perhaps the single most important question for the recent history of Christianity in North America. The question is sharpest for Protestant descendants of the denominations that were prominent in early periods, but it also affects all Christians who care about the integrity of their faith. The question is whether a North American culture that seems to have less interest in religious matters has become a moral wilderness like the physical wilderness that European settlers first encountered four centuries ago. Put a different way, how should the health of Christianity itself be evaluated? Has it become 339
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 better off or worse off as a result of its passage through the recent past? Or maybe it is both better off and worse off at the same time. Such interpretive questions are much more difficult than questions about personalities, the growth or decline of denominations, and interactions between the faith and politics or between the faith and intellectual life. But they are questions that must be kept in mind as the next chapters attempt a survey of Christian life from 1900 to the present.
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As the darkness draweth nigh, Daylight fadeth from the sky: Father, unto Thee we call, Thou Who rulest over all. Light that cannot know decline, Come within our souls to shine! All our hearts to Thee are known; Come, possess them as Thine own. Thou alone these hearts can fill, And their deepest yearning still. Love that never groweth old, In Thy love our lives enfold! . . . Thou Whose eye doth never sleep O’er our slumber vigil keep, That our hearts may wakeful be While we take our rest in Thee, And the darkness of earth’s night Fade in everlasting light. Despite the large number of Roman Catholics in the United States from early in the nineteenth century, Catholic hymn writing did not flourish so long as congregations were bound to the liturgies of Europe. After the Second Vatican Council, however, the number of hymns being written by American Catholics increased dramatically. Among the leaders were the Dominican nuns of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, New Jersey, who published these stanzas of an evening hymn in 1982.
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eligious upheaval—interwoven with social, cultural, and political upheaval— marked the decades between the election in 1960 of the nation’s first Catholic president and the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists on September 11, 2001. A quick survey of “Christianity in the news” for this period could leave the impression that all was violence, sex, war, and conflict. Move deeper, and it becomes obvious that the major institutional strands of organized Christianity underwent changes of historical significance. Accompanying these earthquakes, forms of worship and spiritual practice, as well as the shape of weekly church life, witnessed dramatic changes like those that had occurred in the first generation after the American Revolution. In that earlier era, the democratization of European-origin Protestantism propelled by populist Methodists and Baptists had created forms of American Christian life distinctly different from patterns in the Old World. Beginning with “the 1960s,” as shorthand for upheavals from 1954 when the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools to 1974 and the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and continuing thereafter, Christian movements in the United States and Canada experienced changes on a comparable scale. Making sense of these changes requires a strategy of “divide and conquer,” that is, examining individual pieces of the whole—like the Second Vatican Council, the civil rights movement, the New Christian Right, Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution,” and more—as if they could be separated out from broader cultural changes. If such an approach obscures the big picture, it gains by simplifying complexity. (The next chapter treats equally momentous changes within the churches, like the effects of the Jesus movement, the rise of megachurches, the prominence of prosperity gospels, and the like.) One after Another Whatever may have been happening beneath the surface in the immediate postwar era, the upsetting developments of the following decades stood right out front for everyone to see. Prominent public images signaled the rapid shift from an apparently settled order in the 1950s to the tumults that followed—from the grandfatherly President Eisenhower in the United States and the beneficent “Uncle Louis” St. Laurent in Canada to the assassination of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. and a rising separatist tide in Quebec. The decade of the 1960s began with volatile contentions front and center. Black Americans, long frustrated by painfully slow progress in realizing the nation’s vaunted freedom, agitated for civil rights in a movement guided by clergymen like Martin Luther King Jr. Violence of all sorts broke in upon the public with unprecedented force. The war in Vietnam, with American involvement beginning under 400
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and then ramping up spectacularly under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, would result in nearly sixty thousand American fatalities, Vietnamese deaths in the millions, and public controversy that raged in the United States (and also in Canada, as an intensely interested bystander). The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and of both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, followed by destructive rioting in several American cities after King’s death and police-versus-protester violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August of the same year, bludgeoned the entire population through nonstop television coverage. While many religious figures supported the war in Vietnam, those who opposed it—such as William Sloane Coffin of New York’s Riverside Church and the Catholics Philip and Daniel Berrigan—made a larger public impact. Richard John Neuhaus created a different sort of impact when this Lutheran opponent of the war later became a Catholic and a conservative spokesman in both politics and religion. The Vietnam conflict also stimulated a questioning of national military policy and fed directly into a pacifistic trend. For the first time since the interwar period, representatives of mainline Protestant churches and some Catholics campaigned against the military, and others joined such traditional pacifists as the Mennonites and Quakers in arguing against warfare of any sort. Socially progressive denominations and transdenominational movements generally took the lead in supporting appeals for resistance to oppression based on gender, race, and class. Disorder in public life seemed also to be matched by disorder in private. Whether an actual sexual revolution occurred in this era or there was simply a new frankness about practices already habitual in private, the public became ineluctably aware of shifting values. More and more people talked about a relaxation of sexual standards; less and less restraint hindered public discussion of sexual issues. The feminist movement, the increased participation of women in the job market, the rising divorce rate, the rapid increase of births out of wedlock, the widespread availability of pornography, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the public advocacy of homosexuality testified to upheavals in family and sexual ethics. The 1973 decision of the American Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade, that established a woman’s right for abortion eventually became an enduring source of contention. Concern for unborn children, “the least of these,” had long been high on the Catholic social agenda. For a short while after 1973, conservative Protestants, Mormons, and conservative Jews regarded debate over abortion rights as a narrowly Catholic issue. But soon these others joined Catholics in campaigning for less deference to individual choice and more concern for life. Spin-off results were dramatic. Along with significant repositioning after the Second Vatican Council, the pro-life cause drew together many Catholics and conservative Protestants into partnerships unimaginable during the centuries of 401
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Each January on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, thousands have gathered in Washington, DC, to demonstrate their support for life from womb to tomb. Library of Congress
historical Catholic-Protestant antagonism. Debate over abortion rights also stimulated concern about the overreach of federal power. This concern had existed in one form or another since before 1776, but partly because of the Roe decision it became an ideological flashpoint that changed voting patterns, fueled what Southern Baptist leader Timothy George called “ecumenism of the trenches,” and kept religious convictions at the forefront of political debate. Beyond debates over abortion rights, spectacular revelations about the sexual indiscretions of television evangelists in the United States confirmed some minds about the hypocrisy of evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal religion as a whole. By the end of the century, fresh reports of predatory sexual behavior by Catholic priests in the United States and Canada sparked longer, wider, and deeper controversy. When the hierarchy in both countries hesitated to clean house, Catholic credibility suffered further erosion. While some Protestant denominations offered formal judgments on abortion and other issues of family, sex, and gender, many were split down the middle. Most Christian bodies agreed on the undesirability of abortion, but they remained deeply divided on what to do about it. Some—generally the more theologically liberal—considered free access to abortion a lesser evil than the social cost of un402
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 desired pregnancies or any restriction of women’s right to control reproduction. Others—generally the more theologically conservative—considered abortion on demand an affront to moral law and the fabric of civilization itself. Advocates of the latter view, however, had considerable difficulty agreeing on tactics to halt legal abortions. Constitutional amendments, normal legislation, a judicial reversal of Roe v. Wade, and (very occasionally) violence against abortion providers all were tried. Issues that once hid in discreet silence were private no more. The resulting clamor both mobilized and divided the churches. Everywhere controversy relating to public policy, elections and elected leaders, legislation, judicial decisions, and partisan battles confronted churches with an excruciating choice. Should they join the culture wars as combatants, sustain religious life by shunning public debates, or seek a precarious balance between congregational nurture and public responsibility? Important books of the era looked with alarm at modern trends while holding out at least some hope that Christian resources might provide an answer. In 1961, Peter Berger took his theme and his title, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, from the book of Amos (“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”). According to Berger, a German-born sociologist, the churches were sacrificing their essential message of encounter with God for fascination with bureaucratic machinery. A few years later the Anglican Church of Canada asked journalist Pierre Berton, who had been raised in a Yukon parish of that denomination, to critique the church from which he had dropped out. The result was Berton’s The Comfortable Pew (1965), a book that chastised the churches for their complacency, their lack of connection to contemporary concerns, and their inattention to the struggles of modern individuals. Both books, and several others of the same stripe, became best sellers. In 1987 Reginald Bibby, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, published Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada. A sociologist who grew up in Nazarene and Baptist churches, Bibby contended that religion had become just another commodity for Canadians fixated on the choices of the market—a prospect that dismayed him: “when religion becomes nothing more than a consumer item, the customer is in charge. The gods, relegated to an a la carte role, have little to say about everyday life. In Canada, the stability of religious affiliation is matched by the poverty of religious significance.” Bibby’s book generated unusual attention, but it did not match the debate touched off two years before by the publication of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. This volume, authored by Episcopalian Robert Bellah and a team of cooperating sociologists, tracked the increasing tendency of Americans to define themselves and their values as simple expressions of personal choice. Against this evil fruit of modernity, Bellah and his colleagues 403
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 proposed a recommitment to covenanted forms of life. The authors argued that commitment to covenant ideals would draw on America’s republican tradition as well as virtues described a century and a half before by Alexis de Tocqueville (who first used the phrase “habits of the heart”). The language of covenant also echoed Judeo-Christian notions of divine transcendence and the sacredness of life under God. Books such as Fragmented Gods and Habits of the Heart offered encouraging, but also ironic, evidence of how the objective, detached methods of the modern social sciences—which once systematically neglected the spiritual dimensions of existence—could themselves be used for spiritual renewal. In the churches, efforts to respond to the crises of the times led to deep internal divisions. An important study by Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II, argued in 1988 that these divisions had become the defining norms in the nation’s religious life. While the relative importance of the denominations had been declining throughout the century, they were moved further to the sidelines by the controversies of the 1960s and following years. Within most large denominations, caucuses emerged to promote individual reforms. Outside the denominations, voluntary religious organizations for almost every imaginable purpose—from motorcycle evangelism, support for the divorced, and ecological awareness to open housing, ethical Wall Street investing, and hospitality for immigrants—multiplied beyond counting. What historian John Webster Grant wrote about the Canadian churches pertained as well for those in the United States: “Among all the churches there appeared a new line of fissure that bore little relation to traditional denominational and party differences. . . . Demands quickly followed for the more effective representation of groups that felt themselves to be deprived of power in the church—the laity generally, but especially women, youth, and ethnic minorities. Even those who showed no great desire for radical change seemed reluctant to trust decisions to boards or committees on which their peers were not strongly represented. Hierarchical and conciliar churches alike were pressed to institute participatory democracy.” Theology occasionally intruded into public consciousness, but once again with controversial themes of conflict as the provocation. On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine asked in bold letters, “IS GOD DEAD?” Its editors had taken note of liberal theology professors who creatively combined modern secularism with remnants of traditional Christian thinking—but whose ideas rarely moved beyond academic circles. More relevant to the United States’ lived experience was James Cone’s 1968 book Black Theology and Black Power. It contended that because of Jesus’s identification with the poor and downtrodden, “Christ is black, baby, with all the features which are so detestable to white society.” Soon thereafter, but from an entirely different angle, Francis Schaeffer’s 1976 book and 404
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 film series, How Should We Then Live?, energized white evangelicals with a sweeping analysis of Western history. To Schaeffer, first the Enlightenment and then secular humanism had undercut the Bible-centered beliefs of the Reformation and so imperiled the rule of law, made art degenerate, cheapened human life, and threatened the very foundations of civilization. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, gained an incredibly wide readership; its dispensational premillennial vision of the end times showed once again, as William Miller had done over a century earlier, how popular it could be to confidently identify current events with the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Toward the end of the century, Virgilio Elizondo, a Catholic priest in San Antonio, gained considerable attention for depicting Jesus in terms of mestizaje, or the in-betweenness that characterized Mexican American life in both the United States and Mexico. Increasingly in these decades women took their place among theologians whose opinions mattered. The Nazarene Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, who stressed the importance of love for the Wesleyans’ theology of sanctification, and the Methodist Georgia Harkness, who advocated for a liberal evangelicalism keyed to social justice, had pioneered as seminary professors for their denominations. Later a series of Catholic voices like Monika Hellweg and Rosemary Radford Ruether, post-Catholics like Mary Daly, liberal Protestants like Sallie McFague, and Reformed Protestants like Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen also received respectful notice. Yet instances when theological voices—whether popular, academic, or middlebrow—made a public impression remained the exception. Throughout the entire second half of the twentieth century, intense theological debates did take place within the denominations and among movements that transcended denominational lines. Some of those took up classical Christian issues like the authority of Scripture, the person of Christ, and the exact roles of divine sovereignty and human free will in redemption. But those that seemed to generate most intense controversy among church people, while occasionally being noticed by the public at large, concerned issues of public policy to which the churches felt compelled to respond. These issues included the war in Vietnam, the ordination of women, the legitimacy of nuclear war, attitudes toward homosexuals, the HIV/AIDS crisis, (in Canada) residential schools for First Nations children, and eventually Islamic terrorism. A multiyear effort by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to craft a statement of faith supplementing the denomination’s seventeenth-century Westminster Confession illustrated the difficulty of theological formulation in fractured times. Its Confession of 1967 included a neoorthodox emphasis on the power of “the Word of God,” a social concern to address the United States’ racist discrimination against black citizens, and an overarching emphasis on “reconciliation” as a goal for all aspects of Christian life. Predictably, it proved dangerously liberal to con405
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Georgia Harkness, a Methodist and advocate of ecumenicity, was one of the first North American women to gain wide recognition as a publishing theologian. Wikimedia Commons
servatives, some of whom joined the Presbyterian Church in America when that new denomination came out of the southern Presbyterian Church (US) in 1973. Moreover, with racial tensions continuing and other liberationist movements like feminism gaining strength, progressives found the confession too tame. Despite much conscientious deliberation, the new confession showed again how difficult it could be to adjust historical Christian teaching for the tumultuous demands of contemporary American life. Catholic Revolutions: The Second Vatican Council and Beyond Among Catholics, the great event of the 1960s was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), convened by Pope John XXIII during his brief tenure (1958–1963), completed under his successor Pope Paul VI (1963–1978)—and the source of endless analysis, exegesis, and argument ever since. Most obviously, the council functioned as a powerful impetus for change throughout worldwide Catholicism. Yet, from a narrowly American angle, it represented only one more step in the Americanization of the strand of Christianity that had remained 406
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 closest to Old World practices, presuppositions, and authority. Even before the council, postwar prosperity and the movement of middle-class Catholics to the suburbs had undercut what even Catholics often called the ethnic “ghettos” that had flourished for more than a century in American cities. The GI Bill exposed millions of returning Catholic servicemen and women to broader worlds of American education. Catholic-sponsored schools, from elementary grades through graduate education, remained strong into the 1960s, but soon thereafter they suffered increasing strain, especially when the recruitment of teaching nuns fell off and growing numbers of religious sisters left their orders. With such developments in mind, the historian R. Scott Appleby has offered a provocative assessment: “developments in U.S. society and culture, much more so than developments in world Catholicism, constituted the framework within which most American priests and religious, and the vast majority of Catholic laity, interpreted and assimilated the changes in Roman Catholicism that are commonly associated with the Second Vatican Council. . . . ‘Society’ provided the filter through which ecclesial reform and changes in practice were perceived, advanced, embraced, implemented, or ignored.” Yet even if Appleby is entirely correct, the impact of the council itself was dramatic; this section explores its effects on the United States, with attention to Canada later in the chapter.
The Council The council’s decisions precipitated a host of changes affecting weekly parish life. Its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (council documents were titled by the first words in their Latin originals), sparked the most obvious alterations. Reforms drawn directly from this constitution or prompted by it included, in historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s summary, “communion under both kinds [bread and wine] for the laity, lay ministers of the Eucharist, communion in the hand [instead of on the tongue].” Even more dramatic, the council authorized local churches to use local languages in the Mass and instructed priests to face the congregation when they led the service. In many parishes, the new order began on the first Sunday of Advent in 1964, when besides hearing the Mass for the first time in English, many American Catholics were urged to participate heartily in congregational singing, and often of hymns composed by Protestants! These liturgical changes inspired many lay Catholics and especially younger priests, but just as many experienced disillusionment when liturgies sanctified through the centuries, along with devotional practices developed over many decades, suddenly disappeared. 407
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Pope John XXIII’s convening of the Second Vatican Council gave new direction to Catholics throughout the world, including the United States. Art Resource
The council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church prompted equally momentous conceptual change. Instead of seeing the laity silent in the face of a speaking hierarchy, Lumen Gentium spoke of the church as the entire “people of God.” This significant redefinition stimulated many new forms of service by laymen and laywomen. It also created considerable confusion for a Christian tradition that had emphasized its own stable, hierarchical order in contrast to what Catholics had always perceived as Protestant disorder. Dei Verbum, the council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, clarified the church’s teaching on Scripture and tradition, depicted not as two separate strands of revelation but as complementary authorities with more emphasis on how tradition simply expanded upon the scriptural basis. Reforming attitudes toward the Bible encouraged a contrasting pair of developments. Catholic biblical scholars, who had already begun to practice aspects of the historical-critical method, in some instances came to look more like liberal Protestants as they put to use conventionally academic approaches. But some lay Catholics also began to look more like evangelical Protestants as they promoted daily Bible reading and took part in a mushrooming spread of parish and small-group Bible study. In fueling this lay investment in Scripture, the Catholic charismatic movement also played a large role. 408
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 The council’s major decisions affected the church’s relationship to the wider world almost as much as they reshaped internal life. Nostra Aetate, its Declaration on the Relationship to Non-Christian Religions, overturned the usage of centuries by directly repudiating anti-Semitism and calling for mutually respectful discussions with Jews. The council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, addressed “the whole of humanity” in order to explain how the church “conceives of the presence and activity of the church in the world of today.” That explanation featured affirmations of the dignity of all persons and the potential value of all human societies. In 1864, Pope Pius IX had announced that it was an error to think that the pope, and by implication all Catholics, should “come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” In 1965, Gaudium et Spes put the church on record as desiring a mutually productive engagement with the modern world. For formal theology, the council’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, proved nearly revolutionary. It called first for fresh conversations with Eastern Orthodox churches but then had even greater impact in urging formal dialogues with Protestant bodies, which began within a year of the council’s close. Some of the dialogues with specific Protestant traditions lasted for decades, usually with several rounds of discussion leading to carefully constructed statements—often specifying remarkably wide areas of broad Christian agreement but also with carefully specified differences on questions like the nature of the church, the authority of the pope, and the place of the Virgin Mary. Official dialogues with Lutherans in various parts of the world led eventually to a landmark Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which was signed by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation on October 31, 1999 (Reformation Day and the eve of All Saints’ Day). Preliminary dialogues among US Catholics and Lutherans had prepared the way for the 1999 declaration, including a statement from 1985 when the American dialogue partners affirmed “it is not through our own initiative that we respond to this call” of the gospel, “but only through an undeserved gift which is granted and made known in faith, and which comes to fruition in our love of God and neighbor.” For American history, the council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, enjoys a special status. The labors of the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, which propelled the deliberations on this subject at Vatican II, had two significant consequences. First, in historian John McGreevy’s summary, “instead of the traditional notion that Catholicism should eventually become an established church—error, in other words, had no rights—Murray persuaded the bishops that the American experiment of religious freedom provided a worthy model.” The church, according to this declaration, no longer aspired to the close 409
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 cooperation of ecclesiastical and governmental authority that had long prevailed in some parts of Europe and especially in Latin America. The way that American Catholics had adjusted to, and then prospered, in the United States became a guide for Catholic life throughout the world. In the second instance, Dignitatis Humanae signified the church’s acceptance of at least some measure of historical change. What once had been official church teaching supporting the union of church and state as an ideal was no longer the church’s official teaching. But then what? If the church could adjust its stand on political freedom, could it, should it, and might it change on other historical positions too? How the church as a formal body—and how its many members as individuals and groups—responded to these questions has shaped the course of American Catholic experience ever since. In reviewing a new biography of Martin Luther close to the turn of the century, Newsweek’s veteran religion reporter, Kenneth Woodward, may have exaggerated, but not by much: Luther, he opined, “could not, of course, have foreseen that the Church of Rome would some four centuries later, at Vatican Council II, adopt many of the reforms that he championed.”
And After If the Second Vatican Council reoriented official Catholic doctrine and church practice, a dizzying pace of social and political development also reshaped Catholic life in American parishes and the place of Catholics in the nation. The most visible public signal of a dramatic shift was the election in 1960 of a Catholic, John F. Kennedy, as president. His election signaled the culmination of a long process begun during the Revolutionary era with the participation of the Maryland Catholic Charles Carroll in the Continental Congress as well as by George Washington’s proclamation suppressing traditional antipapal demonstrations on November 5 (Guy Fawkes Day or Pope’s Day). Kennedy’s election was also the culmination of more than a century and a half of intensive Catholic involvement in grassroots politics, especially in northern cities. The circumstances of the 1960 campaign underscored its significance. Against the prospect of electing the Catholic Kennedy as the nation’s chief executive, a group of evangelical Protestants and liberal Protestants, who agreed on almost nothing else, issued a joint public declaration that asked rhetorically, “Is it reasonable to assume that a Roman Catholic President would be able to withstand altogether the determined efforts of the hierarchy of his church to gain further funds and favors for its schools and institutions, and otherwise breach the wall of separation of church and state?” For his part, Kennedy made a widely reported 410
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 speech before Protestant ministers in Houston that convinced them, and many others, that a Catholic president would not imperil the nation’s safety. As president, his scrupulous record on church-state matters, particularly his opposition to government aid for parochial schools, silenced Protestant critics who feared that Catholics did not have proper national priorities. On this issue Billy Graham spoke for others by bestowing on Kennedy the indelicate praise that he had “turned out to be a Baptist President.” The apotheosis that occurred after Kennedy’s assassination left him, a Catholic, one of the most popular American presidents among the public at large. The “religious issue” in American politics, though not yet dead, had suffered a grievous blow. Kennedy’s election delayed but did not stop another significant change in American political life. Catholics of European descent, who made up the vast majority into the 1970s and 1980s, were moving from a reliable voting bloc for the Democrats to a constituency that mirrored the electorate as a whole. Overwhelming Catholic support for Democratic presidential candidates had begun to weaken in the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, only to roar back with over 80 percent backing for Kennedy in 1960. Yet in 1972, Catholic votes mirrored the national electorate in the reelection of Richard Nixon. That result anticipated the trend that prevailed to the end of the century and beyond—but with two significant qualifications. Among Hispanic Catholics, who became an increasingly important part of the national church in the latter part of this period, loyalty to the Democratic Party remained almost as high as it had been for all Catholics in the elections before World War II. For white Catholics, an opposite trend took place among those who regularly attended Mass. This constituency— reflecting stronger Catholic advocacy for the pro-life cause versus abortion rights combined with opposition to Democratic insistence on those rights—became more Republican in its voting for president than the national average. One other way of charting this change in political partisanship is striking: in 1940, American Catholics were two and one-half times more likely to self-identify as Democrats than as Republicans; in 2000, these self-identifications were equal. For all the attention that this shift in Catholic voting patterns drew from national media, deeper changes in Catholic life and culture meant even more. Again to quote historian John McGreevy: “The logics of the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council were . . . anti-authoritarian. The key term was ‘freedom.’ ” Catholics had long continued the approach of the early American Puritans—freedom meant the privilege of doing what was right. Increasingly in the postwar period, Catholics joined most other Americans in treating freedom as the privilege of deciding what was right. Manifestations of the new attitude appeared on every side, especially in relations between lay Catholics and their ecclesiastical superiors. As an important 411
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 example, church leaders—the hierarchy, reforming priests, many academics— became strong supporters of the civil rights movement. Yet many lay Catholics in northern cities protested vigorously against these leaders when desegregation threatened the churches, schools, and clubs they had built with great sacrifice in urban neighborhoods. Catholic higher education also entered a new phase. In response to Vatican II’s appeal for fresh approaches, US college and university presidents leapt to innovate. A landmark conference in July 1967 at Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, issued a statement asserting that Catholic colleges and universities should be self-directed, free from “authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Father Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, of the University of Notre Dame, led this move, which resulted in difficulties for many smaller colleges supported by individual orders but also heightened the academic reputations of research universities like Georgetown, Boston College, and Hesburgh’s Notre Dame. Another result was enduring arguments among Catholics debating how to maintain the Catholic character of Catholic education once it moved closer to prevailing academic norms of the nation at large. In 1990, Pope John Paul II issued an “apostolic constitution,” Ex corde Ecclesiae, which sought to give guidance to theologians at Catholic institutions from local bishops. This plan too generated more debate over academic freedom and theological integrity than it succeeded in quieting the educational landscape. A particularly thorny development after the council was the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, which forbade any form of artificial birth control. For perhaps the first time in American history, legions of Catholics chose to deliberately ignore a major teaching of the church and continue (or begin) to use artificial forms of family planning. Some observers have viewed this disconnect between formal teaching and lay practice as the single greatest cause of priests leaving the ministry and laity leaving the church. The sex abuse scandals that received much publicity toward the end of the century eventually became another major source of disillusionment among the faithful. Some of that disillusionment came in response to the incidents themselves, much from the failure of church officials to deal promptly and publicly with the abuses. For all its efforts to support the spiritual and liturgical life of the church, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops received greatest attention when it issued pastoral letters on nuclear arms (1983) and the economy (1986). The specific conclusions of the papers were important (verging close to nuclear pacifism in the first and seeking significant curbs on capitalistic excesses in the second), but just as significant was the way the letters prompted highly visible and emotional debate within the church. No longer did leaders speak and followers simply listen. In later decades, the bishops’ conservative positions on pro-life issues replaced 412
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 the progressive stance of these pastoral letters in the public’s awareness of their national presence. However one evaluates the positions taken on the various issues, Catholics stood out in the hurly-burly of American public life with the bishops’ effort to present carefully reasoned and theologically articulate responses to major questions of national debate. Because of Vatican II’s pronouncements, as well as economic, political, and social developments in America, Catholic laymen and laywomen became increasingly prominent in the church and for the church’s relationship to the world at large. This fact could be regarded as a positive outcome of the council’s wisdom, but it could also be seen as a sign of crisis for the priesthood and among religious orders. One of the important results of the increasing lay presence was the weakening of the geographical parish. Except for the church’s newer ethnic communions, Catholic families looked more and more like Protestants as they “shopped” for a church that met their particular felt needs for aesthetic, social-economic, political, or theological reasons. Interest groups with active lay involvement also displayed considerable vigor, though in this regard life after the council meant only a re arrangement of the many devotional, service, and fraternal groups that had long been active in local parishes. Catholic Worker houses maintained Dorothy Day’s commitment to the needs of the homeless and indigent; Opus Dei organized devotional gatherings, schools, and other means to promote disciplined spiritual life; the Cursillo Movement sponsored weekend retreats to strengthen families and inspire deeper personal commitment; many, many more interest groups were also active. The growing number of nonordained ecclesiastical workers and permanent deacons also reflected the church’s fuller use of its lay resources. Before the council, ordination as a deacon was a routine step toward priestly ordination; after the council the practice spread of ordaining laymen specifically for the permanent diaconate, which allowed married individuals to perform all sacramental functions except presiding at the Eucharist. In 1960 there had been no permanent deacons and few lay professional or ecclesial ministers; in 2000 about forty-seven thousand such leaders were active in the American church. The need for increased lay involvement came not only from doors opened by the council but also from falling numbers in the ranks of the religious (ordained priests, along with brothers and nuns in religious orders). From 1965 to 2000, while the nation’s Catholic population increased from slightly more than 46 million to nearly 60 million, the number of priests declined from almost 60,000 to about 45,000; the number of religious brothers from about 12,000 to less than 6,000; and the number of nuns from almost 180,000 to less than 80,000. This situation could be viewed positively, as a sign of the church’s deeper commitment to lay activity. Negatively, it reflected a decline in traditional ideals of personal 413
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 dedication, as well as growing uncertainty about traditions like the mandate for celibacy. The decline in women’s orders posed special difficulties for Catholic hospitals, where nuns had supplied much of the nursing staff, and for Catholic schools that had relied on sisters for most of the teaching. Consolidation of Catholic hospitals allowed for efficiency but also invited potential conflict with government regulations over issues like abortion. Dioceses were often forced to close their schools, with enrollment at Catholic primary and secondary levels falling from over 5 million in 1965 to about 2.5 million in 2000. That decline took place despite repeated evidence, from church sources and outside observers, that Catholic schools excelled in moral education as well as academic preparation. An enduring feature of Catholic life after Vatican II has been debate over how its “spirit” should be understood and implemented. These debates brought into the open intra-Catholic divisions that had not been as noticeable before. As the dust from the council settled, parties within the church grew more sharply defined: social justice Catholics, natural law Catholics, doctrinally traditional Catholics, militant traditionalists, Catholic feminists, charismatic/evangelical Catholics. Reactions for and against successive popes led to self-styled “John Paul II Catholics” and “Benedict XVI Catholics” (usually favoring tighter control of doctrine and practice) and eventually also “Pope Francis Catholics” (usually favoring more and faster reform). The face of the church was complicated even more by the growth of thriving ethnic parishes for Asian Americans and, increasingly, Hispanics. Because of events from the 1960s, Roman Catholics have become more oriented to lay ministry, more internally pluralistic, more socially conscious, more attuned to the larger academic community, more active politically, and more self- consciously ideological than ever before in American history. It is a fact welcomed by some Catholics and deplored by others that the Catholic Church now seems to contain within itself many of the differences and much of the energy (both creative and fragmenting) that are evident in the many Protestant denominations. Civil Rights Revolution, New Christian Right Counterrevolution As the Second Vatican Council represented a crucial landmark for American Catholicism, so the civil rights movement marked a major turning point for American political and religious history as a whole. When the spark of African American faith, which had been hidden under a bushel, finally burned bright, the nation was transformed. Several reasons explain why the civil rights movement gained at least some of its goals, but arguably the most important factors were religious: Christian support for the movement was unusually strong, Christian 414
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 opposition was relatively weak. The civil rights movement also precipitated a general realignment in the relationship between politics and religion, and it dramatically altered the ethos of national public life. The alteration in public life came about when some of the nation’s white evangelicals reacted, not so much against desegregation as such, but against the broader upheavals associated with civil rights. The particular concern was the expansion of central government authority, which had been the only path by which meaningful civil rights reform was possible, but which came to be viewed as a secularizing force. In addition, when other groups followed the path of civil rights activists and campaigned for their rights, conflict multiplied. Since the beginning of the civil rights era, change in American public life has been driven by a bewildering welter of social, demographic, media, foreign policy, and economic forces. Yet directly related to many of these forces, and indirectly connected to all, has been the combination of race and religion.
The Civil Rights Movement In 1954, the Supreme Court’s judgment in Brown v. Board of Education overturned an 1896 decision that had allowed “separate but equal” segregated schools based on race. The Court mandated the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed.” White reaction to the 1954 decision was mixed. Some applauded, some resisted, more found themselves nervous about the speed, means, and agents of judicially mandated integration. Yet as a reflection of contemporary sentiment, Brown showed that an increasing number of Americans questioned whether morality or religion could any longer support the persistent racist divisions of American society. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, change occurred slowly, with flashes of violence in the South and almost no attention to the de facto segregation that prevailed in much of the North. Into the tense situation created by Brown came the well-publicized events of late 1955 that transformed judicial evolution into political revolution. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a black forty-two-year-old seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a public bus when asked to do so by a white man. When she was arrested and then found guilty of violating Alabama’s law that prohibited racially integrated seating in public transportation, Montgomery’s black community mounted a boycott of the local bus system. A leader of the boycott was a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. What followed, through a complicated and often ironic series of events, was not only the achievement of civil rights reform but also the political mobilization of white evangelical America, the expansion of a much more aggressively secular nation, the reshaping 415
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 of political and religious demography, the intensification of religious rhetoric in presidential orations, and a whole lot more. Campaigners for an end to Jim Crow segregation in the South confronted daunting challenges: rioting to protest the integration of schools and universities; police brutality to halt peaceful demonstrations for voting registration; beatings, imprisonment, and even murder of civil rights workers. Throughout, the Christian faith of the South’s African Americans played a crucial role. Convictions of movement leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the heritage of pacifism, personalism, and Christian principles that the previous generation of Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, and other educated black leaders had cultivated. Yet formal religious thought from elites was always complemented by a less cerebral, more visceral version of Christianity that remained closer to the ardent supernaturalism and straightforward biblicism of the black denominations that had emerged from slave religion. Historians have extensively documented how this faith made an essential contribution in transforming the theoretical imperative of civil rights reform into a prophetic power able to move events. To David Chappell it was a “stone of hope” (with echoes of Psalm 61, Daniel 2, Matthew 7) that provided the foundation. Charles Payne has highlighted “the strength of social ties” created by life in black churches where believers read the Bible straightforwardly, looked for immediate consolation from an active God, and held precritical views of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as acting directly in the everyday world for redemptive purposes. Once such ones had been galvanized into social action, they brought the same force to bear in the public sphere that they had experienced in their private religious lives. Examples abound. Annell Ponder in 1963 was jailed in Winona, Mississippi, with other black reformers and then beaten by guards when she refused to address them as “sir.” As reported by a friend who was waiting for her own attention from the guards, “But anyway, she kept screamin’, and they kept beating on her, and finally she started prayin’ for ’em, and she asked God to have mercy on ’em, because they didn’t know what they was doin’.” The friend was Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, who the next year became the leader of Mississippi’s Freedom Democratic Party. After she was beaten in the Winona jail, she had a chance to speak with the jailer’s wife and daughter, who brought water and ice to the prisoners: And I told them, “Y’all is nice. You must be Christian people.” The jailer’s wife told me she tried to live a Christian life. And I told her I would like her to read two scriptures in the Bible, and I tol’ her to read the 26th Chapter of Proverbs and the 26th Verse [“Whose hatred is covered by deceit, his wickedness shall be showed before the whole congregation”]. She taken it down 416
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 on a paper. And then I told her to read the [17th] Chapter of Acts and the 26th Verse [“Hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth”]. And she taken that down. And she never did come back after then. Indispensable support for the freedom struggle came from local black churches that had been knit together in vital denominations during the years immediately after the Civil War. These churches, mostly Methodist and Baptist and with Bible- resonant names (Antioch, Bethel, Ebenezer, Hope, Liberty, Mount Carmel, St. James, St. Paul, Zion), volunteered space for meetings, housed out-of-town reformers, mobilized congregations for meals and other support, occasionally served as makeshift hospitals, and provided in general the indispensable infrastructure of the movement. These houses of God gave notable leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. the pulpit from which they transfixed the nation. Black leaders, organizers, and followers displayed in the civil rights movement traits considerably at odds with white Protestant faith. These characteristics included a capacity for cooperation between theological liberals (who tended to picture the work of God in mythic terms) and theological conservatives (who saw the work of God in intensely realistic terms) for the purpose of advancing social goals. After the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, such cooperation all but vanished among white Christians. Again, during a period when only exotic margins of white Christianity had any interest in the Hindu pacifism of Gandhi or the democratic socialism of A. Philip Randolph, these disparate teachings were easily folded into the generally Christian framework of civil rights reform. The religion of the civil rights movement also displayed a capacity that had been mostly absent among whites—especially after William Jennings Bryan passed from the scene—of linking traditional conservative theology and progressive social action. For practical purposes, that capacity imparted a force quite different from either the otherworldliness of white conservative religion or the liberal aversion to the supernatural. Mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics for the most part either accepted or actively promoted civil rights. The South’s two most powerful regional denominations, for example, went on record as early as the mid-1950s to support national moves toward desegregation and urge peaceful compliance with them. The Presbyterian Church in the United States, which had been formed in the early years of the Civil War by uniting different Presbyterian subgroups in the Confederacy, took this step even before the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The Southern Baptist Convention, established even earlier in 1844 when churches south of the Mason-Dixon Line insisted that missionaries could own slaves, made its statement shortly after Brown. 417
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 Northern Protestant denominations and leading voices in the Catholic Church were even more consistently forthright than these strongly evangelical southern denominations. While significant religious resistance did arise to oppose civil rights, that resistance was populist, unsupported by elite authority, and, therefore, limited in its effect. Comparisons with the religious situation during the Civil War and the subsequent white supremacist “redemption” of the South highlight the contrast. Whatever the religious support arrayed against the modern civil rights movement, such support was demonstrably weaker than the religious convictions that had defended the legitimacy of slavery and backed the reimposition of white rule. On the use of the Bible, arguments in the antebellum period had been evenly matched, or even titled toward those who defended slavery on the basis of Scripture. By contrast, the context was definitely one-sided during the civil rights era. Popular belief in the so-called curse of Ham from Genesis, chapter 9, did enjoy considerable currency among those who held out for segregation. But no recognized public spokesperson gained any traction from that ancient text, in large part because all recognized Bible scholars, including some defenders of segregation, acknowledged that the Genesis passage had nothing to do with modern racial groups. A few segregationists did make use of a phrase from Acts 17:26 (God “determined . . . the bounds of their habitation”), but they were easily trumped when Fannie Lou Hamer and others quoted the first part of that verse (God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth”). If a few spokesmen did resist civil rights reform with religious arguments, none had the cultural authority that proslavery figures like James Henley Thornwell and Robert Louis Dabney enjoyed before the Civil War. The influential Southern Baptist pastor W. A. Criswell of Dallas represented quite a few others. In 1956, he defended segregation in a speech before the South Carolina legislature, even though the speech contained no references to the Bible. Yet twelve years later, Criswell endorsed a statement by the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention that, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., committed the denomination to end segregation in churches and housing and to support full civil rights for all American citizens. Criswell also repudiated the use of the Bible to defend segregation. One of the great presidential speeches in American history was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress and the nation on March 15, 1965. He gave it in the immediate wake of a violent outrage in Selma, Alabama, when state troopers and a large deputized mob attacked mostly local blacks who were demonstrating peacefully for the right to register to vote. When Johnson closed his memorable address setting forth the compelling need for a voting rights bill by intoning “and we shall overcome,” he probably did not realize the depth of African American 418
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 history he was invoking by quoting the hymn originally written by Charles Tind ley. But along with much else, he was testifying to the power of one strand in American Christianity that, however much it had looked like an opiate, was now revealed as an elixir of superlative power.
Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was America’s most visible civil rights leader from 1955 until his assassination in April 1968. The son of a prominent black Baptist pastor in Atlanta, King studied at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University (where he received his doctorate) before becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. After he vaulted into national prominence in 1955–1956 as leader of the successful bus boycott, in 1957 he helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It rapidly became one of the foremost civil rights groups in the country, with its leaders, including King and his successor, Ralph David Abernathy, being mostly black Baptist ministers. Dr. King’s own personal prestige was at its height in the early and mid-1960s. He keynoted the massive march on Washington in August 1963 with his moving “I Have a Dream” speech. And he helped organize the well-publicized Selma- to-Montgomery march in the spring of 1965. The first of these events marshaled major support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the second for the federal Voter Registration Act of 1965. During the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, King was consulted by the White House. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. Yet even as he gained an international reputation, the struggle went on. On Good Friday 1963, King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, and imprisoned for eight days. While in jail he read printed criticism of his work from white ministers in the Birmingham News. In response, King penned a “Letter from Birmingham Jail—April 16, 1963,” one of his most effective brief statements. He first justified coming from his church in Atlanta to Alabama: “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century b.c. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.” King then answered charges leveled against his movement by church leaders who feared instability or disorder. He defended his methods, which, “through the influence of the Negro 419
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The more than a quarter million Americans who participated in the Washington March for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” which he delivered on that day. Religion News Service
church,” had always been “the way of nonviolence.” He closed by saying that he had never written a letter of such length before, “but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?” Toward the end of his life, King’s influence was contested. Excursions into the North (Chicago, 1966, for example) cost him the support of those who viewed civil rights as a strictly southern problem. His criticism of the Vietnam War angered other Americans. He was also caught in the ideological crossfire resulting from the rioting that occurred in American cities during the middle and late 1960s. Some whites held King responsible for these outbursts because of his promotion of black civil rights. Some African Americans felt that King betrayed their cause by continuing to repudiate the use of violence to attain racial justice. During the 1950s and 1960s King was a living example of black preaching at its best. Later revelations of plagiarism while a student and infidelities as an adult only slightly tarnished the enduring power of his message. King’s speeches and writings drew heavily on the rich reservoirs of black Christian history. His ideology included a potent realism concerning the nature of human evil and a 420
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 scriptural defense of nonviolence (“love your enemies”). As was customary in African American Christianity, however, King made little distinction between spiritual and social problems involved in the civil rights struggle. Other influences also shaped his thinking—the pacifism of Gandhi, the civil disobedience of Thoreau, the philosophical idealism that he had studied at Boston University, and the American faith in democratic equality. In the moving rhetoric of Dr. King, it was often hard to tell where, if at all, the Christian substratum of his thought left off and the superstructure of his social theory began. In any case, he was beyond question the most important Christian voice in the most important movement of social protest after World War II.
From Revolution to Counterrevolution The civil rights movement cast a long shadow over all that followed in American history. By overturning the legal basis for segregation but not uprooting racial consciousness, racial discrimination, and racial resentments, it left race as a constant feature of public life. To change metaphors, race continued to simmer in the background and could boil over with the slightest spark. Such sparks would come later with the election of an African American president (Barack Obama), from well-publicized attacks on peaceful black groups (as at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015), and in protests against police violence against black and brown citizens (which sparked the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013). More generally, agitation over civil rights and resistance to civil rights contributed to the rapid expansion of identity politics, or the instinctive reference in public disputes to the interests of my specific ethnic group, or other identity marker, perceived as an aggrieved minority under assault. Connections between the civil rights movement and the New Christian Right were indirect but still powerful. They emerged in the midst of heightened protest, saturated media coverage, vigorous reform activism, persistent counterreform activism, and explosive political partisanship. Because the years of civil rights reform were accompanied by an ever-expanding series of challenges to what once had seemed fixed American certainties, some citizens mobilized to protect what they saw as slipping away. In particular, large numbers of white Protestant evangelicals, located especially in the South, Midwest, and Southwest, sensed that “one nation under God” was being stolen away right in front of their eyes. Soon many white evangelicals, along with increasing numbers of Roman Catholics, thought they had figured out who was responsible for the theft. The federal government itself, along with additional clamor for “rights,” seemed to be the answer. 421
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 In 1964 the new Civil Rights Act that President Johnson wrestled into being banned all discrimination in public accommodations and in hiring; it also authorized the withholding of federal funds from public programs that discriminated. That same year witnessed final passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that banned poll taxes, which had been one of the chief devices keeping black people unregistered. In 1965 followed the Voting Rights Act that stipulated federal monitors and, if necessary, direct federal intervention, to ensure the right to vote for all American citizens. In 1968 Congress passed legislation forbidding discrimination in selling or renting homes, which resulted in easier minority access to previously all-white neighborhoods as well as considerable white apprehension about rapid changes in the character of local neighborhoods. Never in the nation’s history did government act so fast to remedy so many wrongs. A barrage of outrage greeted this unprecedented burst of civil rights legislation and the serious efforts to enforce it. Leaders of the chorus were die-hard segregationists. Yet they expressed their outrage in a republican rhetoric emphasizing traditional American fears about centralized power. Their aim was defense of “states’ rights” and the “restoration of local government.” The fear was of “federal dictatorship,” “the trend of socialism,” “big government,” and, endlessly, “communism.” Such rhetoric was not as absurd as it now sounds, because in those years the federal government was in fact expanding its outreach into daily life on matters well beyond protection of rights for African Americans. Most intrusive was the draft for military service that affected more and more young men (and their families) even as public sentiment turned decisively against the war in Vietnam that draftees were being asked to fight. More obviously well-meaning in intent was the greatly expanded federal aid to education. Not until the Soviet launch of the first Sputnik space satellite in 1957 did the federal government begin to fund, encourage, and also regulate teaching and learning in the nation’s countless public schools. But then came the National Defense Education Act of 1964, the Elementary and Secondary Education and the Higher Education Acts of 1965, and a number of other programs in following years. These were also the years of greatly expanded federal health assistance (and management) through Medicare and Medicaid, greatly expanded numbers of new arrivals because of the Immigration Reform Bill of 1965, greatly expanded attention to the environment, and greatly expanded efforts to help the poor (the War on Poverty). Quite apart from the history of civil rights, in other words, the Kennedy- Johnson-Nixon years (1961–1974) witnessed an extraordinary increase in the range of federal programs, all predicated on the belief in the effectiveness of federal power. Charges of rampant big government, which from segregationists were a smoke screen for white supremacy, became more honestly debatable for a larger population when they responded to other federal initiatives. 422
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 Additional controversy arose when some citizens feared that agitation for civil rights, which might be legitimate, fueled agitation for a whole catalogue of new “rights” that were not. These citizens worried when civil rights leaders joined the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and when that opposition spilled over into the student movements for free speech that appeared first in California but then spread to the East Coast and several campuses in between. Protesters against the protesters condemned anti-Vietnam, pro–free speech, and pro–civil rights agitations as parts of one whole. Women’s rights were inserted into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a segregationist ploy. Southern senators felt that they would have a stronger chance of filibustering the bill to death if it contained prohibitions against discrimination for reasons of gender as well as of race. The ploy did not work. Instead, it boomeranged when alert advocates of the rising feminist movement parlayed moral revulsion against racial discrimination into a broadly effective promotion of equal rights for women. This cultural development led later to controversy about “gender-neutral” Bible translations. On this question, it is striking that civil rights leaders used highly gendered language (as did virtually everyone else in that period). The fact that today it has become conventional to write and speak with gender-neutral terms testifies to the spin-off force from the civil rights movement. Feminists recognized the movement as opening a door for them, which they walked through aggressively, even though this development was not anticipated even by the few female participants in civil rights leadership. Even later, leaders of gay rights movements would make explicit use of the methods, principles, and vocabulary of the civil rights movement as they made their own claim on the American public. As expert journalist Taylor Branch put this connection, “within decades, human energies founded on the civil rights movement would obliterate much of this lethal stigma [of homosexuality] and lift nearly all the closeted silence.” It is worth repeating for emphasis that public developments in this era received unprecedented media coverage. Without television beaming images of police dogs and water cannon into the nation’s living rooms, the civil rights movement may not have succeeded. The broader point is not just that television contributed directly to that success. Rather, communications provided another instance where national perceptions, featuring highly charged electronic images, replaced local relationships featuring face-to-face contact. There can be no doubt that in the religious sphere mastery of the airwaves provided some leaders—like Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Dr. James Dobson—unusual national visibility and, in some cases, substantial political clout. Even more, fully functioning national media, with the ability to transmit images in real time from anywhere to anywhere, not only impressed the nation with the extent of 423
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 civil rights abuses but also opened the doorway to faster, broader, and deeper influences on the national psyche. In a word, the civil rights movement transformed the shape of American culture in the process that brought long-delayed rights to African American citizens. Some Americans viewed the circles expanding from the civil rights center as a natural consequence, others as a perversion. Whichever was the case, it is indisputable that civil rights reform, though rooted securely in opposition to racial discrimination, came to involve much more. If ingredients contributing to the many political explosions that began in the 1960s had been stored up over a very long period by national failure to deal with racial inequality, those explosions later affected every aspect of the nation’s life. Such powerful actions were bound to stimulate reactions. When reaction came, its vocabulary echoed what had been heard in the civil rights movement. Biblical phrases, traditional Christian verities reworked for contemporary problems, energetic organization on the model of religious voluntary associations, and, not least, selective use of religious imperatives—all became tactics for Christian conservatives that followed the path of civil rights reform.
The New Christian Right In the presidential election of 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter split the votes of American white evangelical Protestants almost evenly with Republican Gerald Ford. With a clear plurality of at least ten percentage points, Carter did even better among the nation’s white Baptists. Four years earlier, white conservative Protestants, mostly from the North, had organized the first postwar evangelical group to campaign for a presidential candidate; it was called Evangelicals for McGovern. In that 1972 campaign, no Republican was as outspoken against abortion as Sargent Shriver, George McGovern’s Democratic running mate. In those same years the nation’s best-known self-identified evangelical politician was Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Hatfield was a fiscal conservative, but in Oregon he had led efforts to pass civil rights legislation, in 1970 he cosponsored a measure calling for the complete withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, and somewhat later he teamed with Senator Ted Kennedy to seek a permanent freeze for nuclear arms. In the early 1970s, the press was making much of Billy Graham’s friendship with Republican Richard Nixon, but in fact, Graham was never as close to Nixon as he was to his fellow southerner, Nixon’s predecessor, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson. Observers at the time, in other words, had to look hard to discover the links between conservative Republicans and white evangelicals that would soon emerge as the New Christian Right. 424
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 Almost immediately in the wake of Jimmy Carter’s election the evangelical tide turned with a vengeance. In 1980, the white evangelical vote for Ronald Reagan exceeded the national count by nine percentage points, and four years later by sixteen points. The turn of the tide has been enduring. In the 2004 presidential election, the evangelical vote exceeded the national vote for Republican George W. Bush by twenty-four percentage points, in 2016 the margin for Republican Donald Trump exceeded the national vote by thirty-five percentage points. This voting record represented only one indication of how national developments politicized religion in the entire nation, and especially its white evangelical population. Yet it did not come out of nowhere. As described by historian Darren Dochuk, an earlier story of migration—“from Bible belt to Sunbelt”—explains how the alliance between white evangelical Protestants and conservative Protestants began first in California and then spread to the rest of the country. Things began with the massive migrations of the 1930s as Okies, Arkies, and their fellow sufferers from the Depression streamed out of the South and Southwest to California. In 1920 the population of Oklahoma and Arkansas was larger than the population of California by about 400,000 souls. In 1950, California’s 10.6 million dwarfed the 4.2 million left in those two states. The magnet for this great internal migration was jobs, many of which flowed from the economic cornucopia created by World War II, the surge of oil and gas industries, and a massive infusion of defense contracts. To an unusual degree, workers from the Southwest and South filled the demand for labor. In turn, well-compensated workers settled, raised families, built churches, entered local politics, and otherwise made themselves at home. Religion became entangled with politics in the 1940s when liberal labor and political organizations clashed with the southern migrants who wanted to preserve aspects of the culture they carried along to the Far West. Housing and labor were the flashpoints. The newcomers wanted jobs but not what they considered heavy- handed unions. They wanted the freedom to build new towns, businesses, and shopping malls, but not laws compelling racial integration. Crucially, many southern migrants belonged to the lower- and middle-class Protestant movements that had long flourished in their part of the country. Representatives of this “southern plain-folk religion” attended independent Baptist churches, the Christian Churches arising from the nineteenth-century Restorationist movements, various Holiness churches, and (from early in the twentieth century) Pentecostal churches. As migrants established their churches in the sprawling new suburbs of southern California, they were led by an energetic cadre of persuasive pastor-entrepreneurs. Many of these pastors also proved remarkably successful in attracting large numbers of the state’s older residents and migrants from other parts of the United States. 425
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 Their religion stressed God’s grace active in Christ to redeem individuals, restrain personal moral waywardness, and build strong families. Culturally considered, southern plain-folk religion was instinctively congregational, fiercely independent, usually preacher-centered, and largely self-taught. At least in its early days, it was also characterized by a strong defense of racial segregation. This transplanted religious culture took root in California at the very time that this state led the nation’s postwar economic boom. A theology stressing individual redemption and local church independence, while wary about integration, also viewed outside interference from Yankee do-gooders and intrusive big government with real concern. As adherents of this religious culture purchased homes, built businesses, sent their children to school, looked for recreational opportunities, and helped their entrepreneurial pastors build first large churches and then megachurches, their southern plain-folk religion soon led to political mobilization. Immediately after the Second World War, a perfect storm of conflict sparked that mobilization. In 1946 a major labor union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, campaigned for Proposition 11 on the California ballot to outlaw racial discrimination in hiring, even as it mounted a program, Operation Dixie, to unionize workers in the South. In the same year new laws were proposed to ban restrictive housing covenants, reforms that received strong support from leaders of the liberal Federal Council of Churches and key members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. To opponents it looked as if these moves were coordinated by the same forces that had supported world government at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco only short years before. These concerns originated what later became the New Christian Right. Leadership in opposing these moves came overwhelmingly from the residents who had been enjoying California’s economic opportunities long enough to have a real stake in local development but not long enough to have cut ties with family, church, and friends in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. For their opposition to flourish, California’s distinctive political climate was crucial. That climate favored grassroots organizations that could put individual propositions on the ballot for statewide vote, it encouraged suburban centers of power, and it was geared to the rapidly shifting dynamics of postwar population and economic growth. The key organizers of conservative Christian politics included pastors like Tennessee-born Bob Shuler, who from early in the century had made Los Angeles’ Trinity Methodist Church a beacon of Christian evangelism and right-wing populism, and Texas-born J. Vernon McGee, who carried on with the same at Los Angeles’ Church of the Open Door. Christian businessmen also played key roles, like George Pepperdine, the Kansas-born founder of the Western Auto franchise, who devoted his wealth, strong Church of Christ religious convictions, and deep 426
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 commitment to a hands-off free enterprise system to founding a Los Angeles university that bears his name. Somewhat later the same networks came to include Bill Bright, the Oklahoma- born founder of Campus Crusade for Christ who often, but not always, kept his religious and political activities separate. The singer Pat Boone, Tennessee-born and a dedicated member of Church of Christ congregations, was the best-known representative of California’s entertainment industry, before Ronald Reagan, to evangelize for conservative politics. A still different role was played by Demos Shakarian, whose family had come to Los Angeles from Armenia and then became wealthy as dairy farmers. In 1951 Shakarian organized the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship that began as a vehicle for camaraderie among Pentecostal and charismatic businessmen, but then broadened to take in a wider variety of believers who sometimes blurred the line between Christian fellowship and political networking. In their California voter-registration drives, fund-raising for the purposes of lobbying, targeting incumbents for defeat, interest-group advocacy on statewide referenda, and many other practical political strategies were a taken-for-granted fact of life decades before Jerry Falwell had even thought about Christian political action. California, of course, was never the whole story. Billy Graham’s famous evangelistic crusade in 1949, as one instance, barely touched political matters (except for his strong anticommunism), but Graham’s presence strengthened ties between California’s conservative Protestants and evangelicals elsewhere in the country. Neither did the originating patterns of the 1930s and ’40s continue without alteration. In particular, explicit racism gradually faded as a first-order component of California’s white evangelicals. Some African Americans like Pastor E. V. Hill of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles also came to support conservative causes. Yet the antigovernment ideology and pro–local entrepreneurialism that had accompanied southern white racism did not fade away. The California story helps explain why Ronald Reagan became such an important figure for politically conservative white evangelicals. In the wake of the destructive Watts riots of the 1960s and then the Berkeley free speech movement, Reagan spoke out effectively in response to modern social, economic, and cultural challenges. Publicity in these controversies propelled his two successful campaigns for governor. During his gubernatorial tenure, from 1967 to 1975, and despite approving pro-choice measures, Reagan strengthened his support among Christian conservatives. By the time Reagan became a national figure, political disquiet had begun to spread among several strands of conservative Protestants. The founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and the inauguration of the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953 marked new efforts at countrywide organization by fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals for whom this kind of national 427
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 cooperation was a new thing. Evangelical constituencies also maintained a strong emphasis on personal conversion, strong aversion to liberal Protestantism and even stronger antagonism toward Roman Catholicism, profound attachment to the family as a fortress against spiritual decline, passionate commitment to the Bible as interpreted by popular preachers, and an apocalyptic fear of communism. At least initially, the election of Catholic John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 also heightened concerns. Worry about the Supreme Court remained constant, especially after its decisions that ended prayer in public schools (Engel v. Vitale, 1962) and devotional reading of the Bible (though not academic study; Abington v. Schempp, 1963). In creating what historian Daniel K. Williams has called “God’s Own Party,” the success of the civil rights movement also played a crucial background role. From the mid-nineteenth century, the nation was populated by a near majority of conservative Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin, but for political and many other purposes that population had been divided in two by the American Civil War. Southern evangelicals were white racists, who lived and died by upholding Jim Crow; they were irrevocably Democratic. Northern evangelicals, while rarely active on behalf of African Americans, accepted the Civil War amendments and did not insist on racial segregation; they voted Republican. Until the schism of the Civil War could be overcome, there could be no national evangelical movement. Such a movement became possible when the civil rights legislation of the 1960s alienated white southerners, including southern evangelicals, from the Democratic Party. Only then could the interests of evangelicals North and South come together as a political force within the Republican Party. A number of events from the early 1970s set the stage for broader political mobilization. When Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and sent it to state legislatures for confirmation, opposition came from conservatives worried about the influence of modern feminists, who used the model of civil rights reform to argue for a broad array of new rights. Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic from Missouri, drew considerable evangelical support for her STOP-ERA organization that raised money and recruited volunteers to oppose what Schlafly described as feminism run amuck. A 1974 dispute over school textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia, likewise prompted a nationwide coalition to protest “secular humanism” in school curricula. Although the 1973 Roe v. Wade pro-choice decision of the Supreme Court did not at first galvanize evangelical opposition, it soon became a prime factor in stimulating the New Christian Right. The 1976 political year, with first a close contest for the Republican presidential nomination between incumbent Gerald Ford and challenger Ronald Reagan, and then a suspenseful battle between Ford and the Democratic standard-bearer, Jimmy Carter, was transformative. During his run for the GOP nomination, Rea428
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 gan told a radio interviewer that he had had “an experience that could be described as ‘born again,’ ” and so positioned himself to enlist the nation’s white evangelical voters four years later after he took the 1980 Republican nomination. In the same electoral season, Jerry Falwell, the pastor of a large independent Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, reversed his early stance against political involvement in order to critique candidate Jimmy Carter for granting an interview to Playboy magazine. Also in 1976, the conservative Presbyterian evangelist and apologist Francis Schaeffer returned from a decades-long stay in Europe with his book and film How Should We Then Live? that urged Bible-believing Christians to take their convictions actively into the public square. One of Schaeffer’s key injunctions was that when the fate of Western civilization was at stake, conservative Protestants should work as “co-belligerents” with others who saw the same decline but who might not share evangelical theology. For a mostly northern evangelical constituency, Schaeffer’s advocacy paralleled what Falwell was proclaiming to a mostly southern, more fundamentalist constituency: organized political action in society was not a contradiction to the gospel but an expression of it. Also in 1976, stances on Roe v. Wade evolved. For the first time, the parties divided systematically, with the Democratic national platform including a pro-choice affirmation and the Republican national platform responding with a pro-life plank. For one of the first times since the days of promoting prohibition, evangelical operatives among Republicans were exerting an influence on a national party’s platform. Once begun, the movement advanced with a rush. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists were disillusioned when, as they saw it, Jimmy Carter left his personal evangelical convictions in the Sunday school classes he taught without letting them influence the policies of his administration. In 1977, Anita Bryant drew nationwide support for her successful campaign to repeal a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. When the IRS threatened to strip South Carolina’s Bob Jones University of its tax exemption for maintaining a policy of racial segregation, mass protests came from several directions. Some of that support rallied for the principle of segregation; more was generated to protest aggressive federal regulations. During the 1978 congressional elections, evangelical activists joined or mounted movements in several states to defeat liberal candidates and elect conservatives. During 1979, in very rapid order, Beverly LaHaye established the Concerned Women of America as a counterforce to what she saw as aberrant feminism, Randall Terry (inspired by another book and movie from Francis Schaeffer that raised the possibility of civil disobedience to defend the unborn) began militantly pro-life rescue activity, and Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing. When he proclaimed to this evangelical 429
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Jerry Falwell, pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, came to national prominence as the leader of the New Christian Right in the mid-1970s. Panthera/ Alamy Stock Photo
body, “I know you can’t endorse me. But I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing,” he was greeted with rapturous applause. Meanwhile, the years following evangelical disillusionment with Jimmy Carter witnessed a burst of cooperation between politically energized evangelicals and conservative Republican activists. The result was full evangelical support for a number of right-wing organizations, including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Heritage Foundation, and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. The mobilization of white evangelical Protestants in the 1970s transformed well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist religion into a political instrument. As religion, the primary elements were individual redemption as the overriding spiritual concern, family nurture as the critical means for preserving the faith, sexual immorality perceived as a particularly potent enemy of the family, biblical interpretation stressing the perennial clash between good and evil, and opposition to communism considered as the most dangerous world threat to Christianity. Christian evaluation of the movement must be complicated. Supporters of the New Christian Right tried to protect the lives of unborn children, but they expended scant energy on behalf of other weak and marginalized members of 430
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 society like those trapped in urban ghettos. The New Christian Right mobilized to protect families from the ravages of modern sexual and gender revolutions, but its leaders rarely focused on the stress placed on modern families by postwar economic growth, 24/7 advertising, and runaway consumer consumption. It stood firm against atheistic communism, but leading spokesmen often treated the complex realities of international and domestic politics as a simplistic struggle between All-Good Guys and All-Evil Guys. It insisted on personal responsibility over against Big Labor and Big Government but did not exercise the same vigilance against Big Finance, Big Insurance, and Big Business. Whatever the interpretive judgment, this alliance between white evangelicals and the conservative wing of the Republican Party became—after the civil rights movement—the United States’ major religious-political story in the second half of the twentieth century. Like the civil rights movement, its effects have continued to the present. Canada: Revolution All Around Canada from the 1960s witnessed even more change, agitation, and disruption in the churches than occurred in the United States. Because, however, the history leading up to this period had taken a different shape, so too did the changes of the era look different. In the 1960s, conflict defined the religious history of Quebec; thereafter, the Canadian Christian story involved not so much grand public disputes as the systematic recession of the nation’s once pervasively Christian ethos. These developments come into sharper focus by comparison with the United States. After World War II, when the Gallup poll first asked Canadians whether they had been in church or synagogue sometime during the previous seven days, a full 67 percent of Canadians responded positively. Among all Canadian Catholics, the number was a robust 83 percent, and in Quebec a stratospheric 90 percent. By 1990, positive response to the Gallup question had fallen to 23 percent throughout Canada; ever since, it has hovered a little below that figure. Survey researchers differ in their count of US churchgoers, but for the country as a whole the figure, while much lower than Canada into the 1960s, since then has probably remained at least half again as high. An extensive cross-border survey of three thousand Canadians and three thousand Americans conducted by the Angus Reid Group in 1996 expands the comparisons. It found, for example, that 61 percent of Americans responded positively to the question, “I have committed my life to Christ and consider myself a converted Christian,” against only 38 percent of Canadians. In response to a question about reading the Bible or other religious literature, 42 percent of Americans responded that they did so at least once a week, against 22 percent of Canadians. Whether such polls say more about what US citizens 431
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 thought they were supposed to tell researchers, or register a meaningful difference in fact, is of course open to discussion. Similarly, how accurately church attendance and other measures of piety reveal the moral character of a nation remains a separate question. The historical division between Quebec and the rest of Canada continued to be definitive for the second half of the twentieth century. In an era filled with religious revolutions, Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s may have been the most dramatic. If not so sudden, change for the rest of the nation was almost as comprehensive.
Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” The secularization of Catholic Quebec remains the most astonishing religious episode in postwar North American history. For at least two centuries, Quebec had stood out as the most thoroughly Catholic region in North America and also the region with the highest rate of participation in weekly church activities. Harbingers of a new situation appeared, however, during and after the Second World War. In 1943, the province for the first time made education compulsory for all children, and during the war more and more people moved to the cities. Shortly thereafter, key church leaders supported striking asbestos workers in their push for better working conditions, a move that signaled a sharp break from earlier cooperation between elites in church and industry. Historian Michael Gauvreau has focused on “the Catholic origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution” as crucial for explaining the changes that took place. For Catholic culture in the province, a new chapter began in the 1930s when an aggressive cadre of young Québécois adopted the personalist Catholicism being promoted by influential French reformers. In a version of what Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin embodied in their Catholic Worker Movement, Quebec personalism defined the ideal Catholic in terms of personal engagement, devotional integrity, individual self-fulfillment, and a selective embrace of modernity. Through a multitude of youth organizations, study groups, publications, labor committees, and marriage preparation seminars, Catholic Action tried to breathe new life into Quebec’s traditional Catholic society. As it did so, it also sharply criticized older forms of Quebec Catholicism that had viewed the family as an intergenerational collective, spoke of sexuality almost exclusively in terms of reproduction, and meekly followed the church’s hierarchy. Politically, the reformers deplored how the church supported the heavy-handed Union Nationale government of Premier Maurice Duplessis; in exchange for that support, the Duplessis regime allowed continued Catholic control of schools, hospitals, and social organizations. Leaders of the 432
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During the eventful tenure of Pierre Eliot Trudeau as prime minister of Canada, the nation experienced an unprecedented degree of cultural pluralization and a serious decline in Christian adherence. National Archives of the Netherlands
rising younger Catholic movement included Claude Ryan (later the leader of the Liberal Party in Quebec), Gérard Pelletier (later a federal cabinet member), and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Canadian prime minister for most of the years from 1968 to 1984). They expected that Catholicism would remain the heart of Quebec society, but as a more humane, more personal faith. Opposition to these reforms came first from self-serving conservatives who propped up the backward-looking Union Nationale. They were joined by a principled group of ecclesiastical conservatives who, even as they approved many specific reforms, worried that the pace of rapid change undermined the traditional family, traditional clerical authority, and traditional public support for the church. For their part, Catholic Action advocates increasingly turned to the state as the key agent for reforming family, marriage, education, and society. In 1960 they gave hearty approval when the province’s labor unions, which had always been Catholic organizations, broke their ties with the church. In that same year, they rejoiced even more when the Liberal Party defeated the Union Nationale in a decisive provincial election. That election turned a corner politically, even as it indicated that the outward-looking cultural style associated with Pierre Elliott Trudeau was taking hold on the national level. 433
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 What followed in the 1960s may have been a “Quiet Revolution,” but it was definitely a revolution. A signal instance was the support by Catholic liberals for legislation in 1964 that for the first time created a system of state-run comprehensive coeducational high schools. They hoped that a partnership between reforming Catholicism and an active government would renovate the church as well as preserve its influence in society. That hope soon faded. Intra-Catholic conflict helped do it in when modernist Catholics accused the personalist liberals of themselves becoming too traditional. Led by Fernand Dumont, a socialist and ardent nationalist, this faction looked to radical educational and gender politics to empower individuals; it also extended the earlier reformers’ criticism by claiming that traditional Quebec Catholicism represented an entirely dysfunctional form of Christianity. Many other voices joined in calling for greater Quebec autonomy over against Canada as a whole, but now they stressed economic and linguistic distinctives rather than Quebec’s Catholic heritage. A well-publicized visit in 1967 by Charles de Gaulle, the president of France and a revered hero for his opposition to the Nazis in the Second World War, added fuel to the nationalist fire. At an outdoor rally in Montreal on July 24, 1967, the crowd responded rapturously when he ended a passionate speech by proclaiming, “Vive Montréal, vive le Québec. Vive le Québec libre!” (Long live Montreal, long live Quebec. Long live free Quebec!). Urban terrorists in the late 1960s and politicians appealing for a separate Quebec propounded Marxist, socialist, capitalist, and several other ideologies, but rarely did they mention the church. By this time, the Catholic exodus was fully under way. Between 1961 and 1971, regular church attendance in Montreal fell from 61 percent of the population to 30 percent, while in rural areas the rate of decline was even steeper. Vocations to the priesthood and women’s religious orders collapsed. Criticism of Catholic institutions once rarely heard now became routine. Negative reaction to Humanae Vitae, the 1968 birth control encyclical from Pope Paul VI, represented another blow since many Quebec Catholics were using various forms of family planning in line with Catholic Action’s promotion of self-fulfillment as a prime goal of sexuality. Almost overnight, it seemed, a stable synthesis of Catholic, French, rural, conservative, pro-Canadian, and precapitalist values disappeared. In May 1980 Quebec voters rejected a move toward secession from Canada, but the former Catholic- cultural synthesis was nonetheless almost completely gone. A few hints did remain; in 1995 when another vote for Quebec independence failed, this time very narrowly, researchers found that citizens who remained actively Catholic were less likely to vote for secession than secular nationalists. Yet, overwhelmingly Quebec nationalism had become a matter of language and political independence instead of religion. Earlier weaknesses in the church’s response to modern intellectual and social arrangements as well as the powerful inroad after World War II of market forces 434
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 help to account for Quebec’s rapid change. But contentions within the church meant just as much. Not the least of significant markers in the 1960s was the bishops’ decision to dismantle Catholic Action itself. The entire process resulted in a de-Christianization that Michael Gauvreau has carefully defined as “not so much . . . the decline of private belief, but as the rapid loss of a Catholic public identity.”
Protestants and “the Rest of Canada” Polling data also illustrate major movements among Protestants and the rest of Canada. From 1961 to 2001, the proportion of Canadians telling census personnel that they were part of the Catholic Church declined slightly from 46 to 43 percent of the population. By contrast, the proportion claiming a connection to the Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United churches—the four largest Protestant denominations that long dominated religious life in English-speaking Canada— fell precipitously from 41 to 20 percent. That decline spoke of broader alterations among Canadian Protestants. In the early 1970s Lutherans surpassed Presbyterians to become Canada’s third-largest Protestant denomination; more generally, churches coming from the European continent gained some of the public notice that had once been monopolized by Protestants of British background. Ecumenical dialogue did increase noticeably in this period, especially after the Second Vatican Council. While controversy continued in Ontario over the funding of Catholic schools, worship services began in 1965 under joint Catholic- Protestant auspices, a development inconceivable only a few short years before. Catholic, United Church, and Anglican spokespeople led the way in promoting advanced social reform, criticizing the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, and warning about cultural imperialism from Canada’s aggressive southern neighbor. The remarkable work of L’Arche (“The Shelter”) showed how traditional faith could inspire a creative response to genuine human need. Founded in France in 1964 by Jean Vanier (b. 1928), a devout Catholic and the son of a former Canadian governor-general, L’Arche has offered housing, support, and personal friendships to developmentally disabled adults—first in France and Canada, and now with communities throughout the world. By the 1960s, historically sectarian groups, with some aid from evangelicals in the traditionally central denominations, were also beginning to organize nationally. Yet all the churches were facing a situation with sharply reduced cultural impact. General shifts in public sentiment as well as specific events marked that path. As in the United States, the “sixties” spelled cultural turmoil, with new forms of political expression, sexual expression, and self-expression more generally. In this milieu, the decade witnessed an end to efforts at defining Canada by its Chris435
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 tian heritage (mingled Protestant and Catholic). Correspondingly, the search went on for secular means, as historian Gary Miedema has written, to “foster unity, stability, and a common vision in a country perpetually challenged by division, political instability, and multiple and conflicting dreams for the future.” In 1963 the Liberal Party, led by diplomat Lester Pearson, defeated the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker, one of the few national leaders up to that time from the prairies (in his case, Saskatchewan). Pearson’s introduction of universal health care, opposition to the Vietnam War, and replacement of the colonial-era flag with a maple leaf banner pointed to new ways culturally as well as politically. The Liberals’ victory in the 1968 federal election made their new leader, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s fifteenth prime minister. Trudeau’s earlier willingness to challenge Quebec’s conservative heritage along with his efforts as federal justice minister under Lester Pearson to decriminalize homosexual acts indicated the direction he sought for the country. A personal style that combined resolution in responding to Quebec terrorists with a much-publicized love life (and later marriage) added to the sense of a buoyant cultural era. Among Protestants a new era also dawned for the United Church of Canada, which historian Phyllis Airhart has aptly described as “the church with the soul of a nation.” Since its founding in 1925, the United Church had enjoyed the support of proportionately more adherents than any other Protestant denomination in the United States or Canada. Into the 1960s, it had maintained the twin aspirations of its founding: to advance a liberal evangelical theology combining evangelism alongside social service and to fill a guiding role for the country as a whole, as set out clearly in the church’s 1925 Basis of Union: “It shall be the policy of the United Church to foster the spirit of unity in the hope that this sentiment of unity may in due time, so far as Canada is concerned, take shape in a Church which may fittingly be described as national.” For a generation or more after that founding, most of the church’s leaders sustained traditional evangelical commitments like the need for personal conversion, the imperatives of personal morality (especially temperance), a supernatural understanding of Christ’s life, and an undifferentiated denunciation of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, they also displayed liberal traits: they were comfortable with moderate biblical criticism, deeply committed to broad ecumenicity among Protestants, and, above all, firm in believing that Canada needed the Christian faith applied to every aspect of its life. J. R. Mutchmor, head of the denomination’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service (BESS) from 1936 to 1962, exemplified that combination. To him, it only seemed natural to combine these two ministries in one department. As head of the BESS, Mutchmor campaigned hard against the liquor trade, he attacked big business for callousness to workers, he lamented the rising tide of divorce, he 436
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James Mutchmor served for over twenty-five years as the head of the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service. Fisherman Publishing Society Collection, University of British Columbia
criticized local congregations for favoring wealthy local elites instead of ordinary working people, he thought Christian women should mostly tend to domestic duties, and he remained extremely critical of Catholic power in Quebec. In the 1940s he also organized national evangelistic programs and in following years supported Billy Graham’s Canadian campaigns even after other United Church leaders turned away from crusade evangelism. Shortly after Mutchmor retired, the early combination of commitments fell apart. Particularly telling was consternation greeting the rollout of new manuals for the church’s educational ministries. This “New Curriculum” mostly reflected modernist Protestant positions: a description of biblical supernaturalism as myth, rejection of the Virgin Birth of Christ, waffling on the resurrection, and reinterpretation of “decisions for Christ” in social or communal terms. When upset local members responded with anguished outcries and when Sunday school attendance experienced the steepest decline in the denomination’s history, it was clear that the denomination had entered a phase called by historian Kevin Flatt “after evangelicalism.” While a modernistic social gospel succeeded in winning the mind of United Church leaders, that victory left it with little to offer by way of specific Christian content in the radically transformed conditions that followed the 1960s. 437
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 For the nation as a whole, change continued as the order of the day. In 1969, Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government engineered a declaration that made all of Canada officially bilingual. To some observers, this declaration accelerated the process whereby an ideology of pluralism replaced the traditional Christian ideologies of both French and English Canada. Then in 1971 the government began to promote multiculturalism as a national policy, including promotion of self-consciousness among ethnic minorities. Principles of equal access and mutual respect now assumed the public place that had once been occupied by recognition of the deity. Even before the 1980 Quebec vote on separation, economic and political preoccupations almost completely eclipsed all other contenders, including religious considerations, for Canadian public space. Traditional Canadian tensions between Quebec and the rest of Canada did continue, but they were now expressed almost entirely in terms of cultural self-expression or political and economic power. Then in 1982 the British Parliament acceded to Canada’s request for its own written constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedom. This goal, long sought by Prime Minister Trudeau and his allies, led to perpetual constitutional strife over the relative authority of Quebec, the other provinces, and the federal government. These controversies led in 1995 to the second Quebec vote on separation, which this time failed by only a hair-thin margin. By making courts the agents for asserting an ever-widening circle of personal rights, the new constitutional standards pushed the country in an increasingly American direction, though with considerable irony. On the one hand, the new charter fostered what Reginald Bibby, Canada’s premier chronicler of religion in public life, described as “excessive individualism” and “excessive relativism.” That stance led to Canada’s swift and more complete acceptance of new sexual freedoms, including same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the charter guaranteed specific rights to First Nations people and so allowed for judicial redress of past abuses of indigenous populations unlike anything ever seen in the United States. Also unlike any statement in the American national constitution, its preface asserted that “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” Meanwhile, as Canadian Catholics and historically strong Protestant denominations lost much of their public standing, Canada’s evangelicals began to mobilize. Earlier, sectarian movements had remained isolated, while doctrinally conservative Protestants devoted most of their energies to their own denominations. From the 1960s, evangelicals within the larger denominations and a whole host of smaller conservative bodies (e.g., the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Christian or Plymouth Brethren, the Christian Reformed Church, the Mennonite Brethren, the Salvation Army) gradu438
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 ally increased in numbers, sought new alliances, and looked outward in new ways. Following the United States’ National Association of Evangelicals, an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada was formed in the early 1960s. But only in 1967, when the Evangelical Fellowship sponsored an exhibition at Montreal’s world fair in competition with the ecumenical pavilion planned by Catholics, Orthodox, and the Canadian Council of Churches, did the lineaments of a trans-Canadian evangelical network come into view. The commitments that drew them together have been identified by theologian-historian John Stackhouse as “doctrinal orthodoxy, personal piety, and evangelism.” Their connecting ligaments grew from Bible school constituencies like Prairie (Three Hills, Alberta) and Briercrest (Caronport, Saskatchewan); refashioned institutions like Ontario Bible College and Ontario Theological Seminary in Toronto (which later became Tyndale University College and Seminary); new foundations like Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, and Regent College, a graduate school in Vancouver with an emphasis on lay training; and the countrywide programs of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Yet although evangelicals gained considerable ground, they did not affect the broader society as Catholics and the older Protestants had once done. Brian Stiller, who served as head of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and then president of Tyndale University College and Seminary, recognized those distinctions. In his words, “While maintaining their growth patterns and surprising many by their ability to attract Baby Boomers, [Evangelical Protestants’] lack of involvement in the cultural mainstream has served to keep them from making a great deal of difference in the culture. Trapped for much of this century in a sectarian mode—a withdrawal from mainstream considerations and activities—evangelicals have only recently become concerned with what is going on in the public sphere. But, in terms of cultural influence, they are all very much outsiders.”
Explanations, by Comparison with the United States As so often happens, efforts to interpret Canada’s history also shed light on the parallel history of the United States. Diverging historical patterns, in other words, help explain the dramatic reversal that Canada’s greatest religious historian, John Webster Grant, once put into a single sentence: “Realization that Christendom was dead, even in Canada, dawned with surprising suddenness in the 1960s—at some time during 1965, for many people.” Or what an aging priest in Denys Arcand’s film The Barbarian Invasions plaintively said about the situation in Quebec: “In 1966 all the churches emptied out in a few weeks. No one can figure out why.” 439
Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 Figuring out why must certainly involve denominational demography. Unlike the United States, where freewheeling competition among a variety of Protestants eventually gave way to freewheeling competition among Protestants, Catholics, and many more religious groups, Canada was long divided between a strong corporate Catholicism and corporate forms of Protestantism that were almost as strong. Catholic corporatism, varieties of Protestant Loyalism, and later national Protestant institutions like the United Church of Canada encouraged two influential developments: a much more relaxed attitude toward the separation of church and state than existed in the United States and a much stronger concentration of cultural power in the hands of elite leaders. Cultural and political competition between national Catholic and national Protestant forces blurred what the American principle of separation distinguished. The Catholic Church’s control of school systems, hospitals, labor organizations, and social groups into the middle of the twentieth century in Quebec was unimaginable in the United States. American differences with Canadian Protestant history are not as dramatic, but almost. The way Protestant denominational colleges were folded into several major Canadian universities, while retaining considerable freedom to preserve doctrinal and behavioral distinctives, as well as the various forms of government aid provided to at least some church-organized primary and secondary schools in every Canadian province, illustrate those differences. The recent history of evangelical Protestants in the two countries can be read as another feature of different national histories. From one angle, Canadian evangelicals closely resemble their American peers in doctrinal professions and attitudes toward society. But from another angle, the strikingly different size and impact of evangelical constituencies in the two nations speak of sharp contrasts. American evangelicals constitute a much larger portion of the nation’s population and have exerted a much stronger impact at least in part because the loose, tradition-light, and entrepreneurial style characteristic of evangelical faith has comported well with the United States’ looser, less traditional, more republican, and more entrepreneurial culture. North of the border, no form of sectarian or voluntaristic Christianity has ever had the kind of influence exerted by American sectarian and voluntaristic evangelicals. By comparison, the sectarian and voluntaristic characteristics of Canadian evangelicals have found less scope for development in Canada’s more corporate, conformist, cooperative, and monarchical culture. Canada’s early rejection of revolution laid the foundation for a national spirit that many observers have described as the critical element in Canadian public life. The individualism, free-market advocacy, and democratic ideals that grew in the United States from the soil of its Revolutionary War have not been absent in Canada. Rather, in Canada these liberal principles have always been balanced by corporate visions of the Left and the Right supported by the churches. An 440
16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 example on the right is the fundamentalist preacher William “Bible Bill” Aberhart of Alberta whose Social Credit Party embodied populist and communitarian ideals. On the left, Tommy Douglas drew on the Social Gospel in organizing the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in the prairies during the same Great Depression years. Another rejection of aggressive individualism (and American aggression more generally) came in 1965 with a book from the redoubtable Christian philosopher George Parkin Grant, Lament for a Nation. It spoke out for a kind of statist conservatism even as it excoriated Canada’s drift into American economic, political, and intellectual orbits. In broad historical perspective, Canadians used forces of cohesion to bind a widely scattered people—indeed, two peoples—into a prosperous, well-ordered, and reasonably stable nation-state. Christian faith and practice were critical in building this nation-state. In the United States, active Christianity also contributed materially to the construction of American culture, but it was a religion expressed more in voluntary and individualistic terms, more at home with the operations of a free market, than in Canada, where voluntary exertions were always balanced by a reliance upon government, and where free-market initiative was matched by respect for received authority and inherited traditions. In the recent past, liberal-communal political ideals stimulated by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms replaced the conservative-communal ideals of Canada’s past. Because Christianity had been expressed consistently in the ideals of a conservative-communal social order, when that conservative-communal social order was given up, traditional Christianity faded. Rupture with the past, however, did not mean abandonment of a relatively more communal social order as such; it meant, rather, a serious weakening of the Christian presence that did so much to build that social order and also provided so much of its substance.
1 The era of the Second Vatican Council redirected the place of Catholics in both the United States and Canada. At about the same time, the civil rights movement transformed the United States’ dynamic complex of race, politics, and religion. Then the New Christian Right emerged in that transformed national context. Canadian church life avoided the violence and religiously inspired political partisanship of the United States but underwent revolutions just as far-reaching. Among and within the churches, change proved just as memorable.
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Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 Further Reading For recent and contemporary history, the websites of specific groups and individuals contain a great deal of useful information. Airhart, Phyllis D. A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Allitt, Patrick. Religion in American since 1945: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Appleby, R. Scott. “Decline or Relocation? The Catholic Presence in Church and Society, 1950–2000.” In The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec, edited by Leslie Woodcock Tentler. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2007. Balmer, Randall. Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Bibby, Reginald Wayne. Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada. Toronto: Irwin, 1987. Branch, Taylor. America in the King Years. 3 vols.: Parting the Waters, 1954–1963; Pillar of Fire, 1963–1965; At Canaan’s Edge, 1965–1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988, 1998, 2006. Casey, Shaun A. The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. https://cara.georgetown.edu. Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Clarke, Brian, and Stuart Macdonald. Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Cummings, Kathleen Sprows, Timothy Matovina, and Robert A. Orsi, eds. Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: Norton, 2012. Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Post modernity, 1950–2005. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006. Flatt, Kevin N. After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Gauvreau, Michael. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
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16. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1960–2001 Grant, John Webster. The Church in the Canadian Era. Rev. ed. Burlington, ON: Welch, 1988. Kellstedt, Lyman, John Green, Corwin Smidt, and James Guth. “Faith Transformed: Religion and American Politics from FDR to George W. Bush.” In Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, edited by Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Konieczny, Mary Ellen. The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lyon, David, and Marguerite Van Die, eds. Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Marsh, Charles. God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. McDannell, Colleen. The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America. New York: Basic Books, 2011. McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom. New York: Norton, 2003. . Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth- Century Urban North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Miedema, Gary. For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Remaking of Canada in the 1960s. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Newman, Mark. Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945– 1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 2008. . “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75 (June 2006): 245–73. Reprinted as a pamphlet by Regent College Publishing, 2007. Noll, Mark A., and Carolyn Nystrom. Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005. Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Reimer, Sam. Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States. Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2003. Stackhouse, John G., Jr. Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Stein, Stephen J., ed. The Cambridge History of Religions in America. Vol. 3, 1945 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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Tumultuous Times, 1900–2018 Steinfels, Peter. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Stiller, Brian. From the Tower of Babel to Parliament Hill: How to Be a Christian in Canada Today. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1998. Swartz, David R. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception: An American History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Van Die, Marguerite, ed. Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Woodward, Kenneth L. Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama. New York: Convergent, 2016. . “Martin Marty’s Martin Luther.” Books & Culture: A Christian Review, May/June 2004. Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
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