A Church Divided Part 2

This is the second column about the historic divisions afflicting the church. Last week I mentioned four of the most significant. While each focused on important theological questions, underlying were political and economic dynamics.

This week I turn to the contemporary division plaguing American Protestantism. On the surface, and substantial to the debate, is the question that revolves around how Jesus is seen. A significant number of Christians see religious faith as the belief in facts about Jesus, namely his virgin birth, his miracles and his bodily resurrection. Others hold that following Jesus’ footsteps is the essence of faith. The division centers on the religion about Jesus, or the religion of Jesus.

This is not a new debate. It began with “the missionary movement” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. One Protestant group saw missions as taking Christ to unbelievers, offering them eternal life in heaven, and calling them to believe in Christ’s supernatural being. Other Christians saw their mission as meeting the needs of those to whom they were sent. So, they went as medical, agricultural, and educational workers, following Christ’s ministry, and responding to the world’s cry for help.

The last decades of the 19th century witnessed the ascendancy of Christian liberalism. Instead of seeing the Bible as the perfect inerrant word of God, through what became known as “higher criticism,” religious scholars described how the Bible was produced over an extended period by a variety of authors and editors. At heart the conflict centered on Darwinian evolution, and its challenge to the Bibles’ seven-day creation narrative.

Conservative Christians rebelled at what they believed to be liberals’ godless heresy, and by 1920 there was published a series of pamphlets on the Christian fundamentals dealing with the Bible as the inspired word of God, and featuring a supernatural Jesus. The argument came to a head in the “Monkey Trial” in 1925 over evolution being taught in Tennessee’s public schools. Progressive Christians countered with “The Social Gospel,” calling the faithful to replicate on earth God’s heavenly reign. “Bring in the day of brotherhood, and end the night of wrong.” (from the hymn Rise up O Men of God, by William P. Merrill)

Apart from theological arguments, Christians, both liberals and conservatives, began to focus on the political and social issues dominating American life. While not totally forgotten, theological issues gave way to secular ones, with the US landscape increasingly dominated by conservative Christians now calling themselves “evangelicals.” The term was borrowed from European Protestants, while in the United States it took on other images beginning with the rise of “mega churches,”the “prosperity gospel” and Ronald Reagan’s clear identification of faith with conservative politics.

By 2016 the evangelical movement was swallowed piecemeal by the Republican Party. In the election of 2016 over 80 percent of self-identified evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. That electoral dynamic continued in Trump’s failed 2020 campaign.

This social reality had a devastating impact on non-evangelical Christians who were abandoning the church in massive numbers, and who were now calling themselves “nones” or “no-longers” Typical of this withdrawal from the church, one young man said to me, “If that is what Christianity is, count me out!” Progressives and other liberals seemed hesitant to equate their political perspectives with their religious faith.

While evangelicals continued to focus on conservative sexual and gender issues such as abortion and gay marriage, under Trump they bought into the larger political package. This included a walled-off southern border, a disdain of non-white or non-Christian immigrants, “America first,” “MAGA,” a rejection of environmental concerns, dependence on a more robust military, a withdrawal of support for the United Nations and other international alliances, tax breaks for the already wealthy, the shredding of the social safety net-- and much more!

How any of these conservative social and political issues became identified with the Christian faith remains unanswered. But having swallowed the whole Trump package, these issues came with that identification.

This dynamic has taken a hundred years to take shape, perhaps going back to the question as to whether the Christian faith is focused on supernatural facts about Jesus, or is a call to take up Jesus’ ministry centering on “good news to the poor, release of the captives, sight to the blind and liberty to the oppressed.”

Whether or not progressive Christian will recover from this conservative political takeover remains an unanswered question.