Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 14
American Catholicism became internally polarized. After Vatican II was announced in 1959, progressive elements in the American Church hoped that the institution would become a more genuinely democratic, inclusive, egalitarian, modernized institution. After the promulgation of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, however, and especially once the pontificate of Pope John Paul II began in 1978, many of the hopes of progressives and liberals were dashed. The practical reforms instituted following Vatican II were substantial but nothing like what liberal Catholics had anticipated and desired. Many in this generation of young, visionary, reformist, progressive Catholics soured or grew cynical.27 Conservatives, for their part, fought with progressives about the changes afoot in the Church, which contributed to an increasingly polarized atmosphere.28 These conflicts introduced a negative, acrimonious, divided element to the culture of the American Church that has lasted well into the twenty-first century.
The decades leading up to the 1990s, despite some positive developments, were hard times for the American Catholic Church. In the early 2000s, things would become unspeakably harder. But, even before then, American Catholics had become “a people adrift,” and the Church as an institution had become seriously weakened and internally polarized compared to the pre-1960s era.29 Like mainline Protestantism, American Catholicism had little capacity to comprehend and respond effectively to the cultural shifts that were to take place in the 1990s and after.
Moralizing of Religion, Downplaying Transcendence
At some time well before the 1990s, most Americans and some if not many religious institutions, too, it seems, came to view religion as essentially about making people morally good. Religion, in this view, is not primarily about divine worship, timeless truths, sacred historical traditions, eternal salvation, theological doctrines, or the like—except as they might inspire morality.30 Rather, religion is an institution that exists to foster good behavior and life choices. This is why Americans approve of religion when it makes people good: it is doing its job well. The other stuff—prayer, worship, the sacred, salvation, rituals—are secondary trappings of religious particularities. Everybody’s got some, but it’s not what religion is most importantly about.31
This conception of religion would prove monumentally important in religion’s obsolescence. But specifically how, when, why, and by whom religion became moralized in America has not been as directly and systematically researched as most of the other trends in this book. Nor is explaining that my purpose here. The social and intellectual sources of the American moralization of religion are surely many and complex. But one of its theological sources is clear. That is a certain stream of nineteenth-century Protestant theological liberalism.
The modernist and liberal theological project was to make Christianity compatible with modern assumptions and outlooks so that the “updated” religious faith could be plausible and reasonable to modern people. That usually required a “demythologizing” of traditional Christianity, reinterpreting the meanings of religious ideas in terms palatable to modern people. Miracles and demons, for example, had to be reinterpreted for scientific minds. One of the common moves that many liberal Protestants made was to reduce the Christian gospel to ethics. An illuminating example of this was the German Lutheran theologian and church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930).
Harnack taught that Hellenistic philosophy and the distortions of early Christian writings had corrupted the original kernel of the Christian gospel. Enlightened moderns like himself and his audiences, he believed, however, could look back, strip away history’s encrustations and myths, and rediscover the essence of the gospel.32 What one discovers, Harnack said, is divinely inspired moral living. The modern gospel, he wrote, “has become spiritualised, and in the course of history it has learnt how to make a surer application of its ethical principles.” Christianity, Harnack taught, is simply about the person Jesus Christ proclaiming the kingdom of God the Father, the “infinite value of the human soul,” and the “higher righteousness” of the commandment to love. Creeds, councils, rituals, metaphysics, scholastic speculation, systematic theologies, ecclesiastical structures, rationalistic apologetics—all of those are confused historical accretions. They obscure the timeless heart of Christian truth.
Jesus Christ, Harnack said, revealed “the presence of the Eternal in time,” raising up humanity’s unlimited value from the indifferent order of nature. By experiencing and trusting God as a loving Father, humans learn they have an infinite value, a realization that enables them to live ethical lives intent on doing good by humbly loving their neighbors. Enacting this “supreme good” leads humans to a blessed and orderly life on earth. “Gentlemen, it is religion, the love of God and neighbor, which gives life a meaning,” Harnack concluded. Religion as the morality of love represents “the forces and the standards which on the summits of our inner life shine out as our highest good, nay, as our real self.” Consequently, humans need to be “earnest and courageous enough to accept them as the great Reality and direct our lives by them.” In sum, Harnack declared, “Jesus combined religion and morality, and in this sense religion may be called the soul of morality, and morality the body of religion.” In short, “the Gospel is a matter of ordinary morality.”33
I am not suggesting that Harnack’s reinterpretation of Christianity single-handedly moralized American religion. The liberal Protestantism he represented, however, contributed. Harnack was a key leader of the modernist movement in Western Christianity, which had an enormous influence on American liberal Protestantism. In my research interviews over decades, large swaths of Americans, both religious and not, talk as if they have read and absorbed Harnack and his colleagues: religion at heart is simple and has the ultimate practical aim of making people moral. Harnack’s focus on the kingdom of God and the revelation of Jesus Christ has since mostly been subtracted, and the “supreme good” of humble love of neighbor has been moderated to the easier obligations to be kind, nice, and fair. But the underlying logic is otherwise the same. And it set religion up so that, when the larger cultural environment changed, it lost much of the “territory” over which it had once laid claim legitimately to control.
Which is to say: many, if not most, religious Americans would be comfortable with the brand of liberal faith described by Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr as being about “a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”34 They simply would have no idea about the genealogy of their taken-for-granted ideas. Still, when most Americans today talk about religion in interviews, they might just as well be paraphrasing liberal Protestant theologians from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, and Harry Emerson Fosdick would be proud. People today need not study liberal Protestant theology to be inducted into its worldview since it has become particulate matter in the cultural air that most Americans breathe.
This interpretation restates Jay Demerath’s argument above. One-hundred-year-old liberal theologians have few explicit followers today. They are quaint and dated. Yet liberal theology does not need card-carrying disciples. The influence of these ideas has diffused so widely that they can disappear as intellectual figures and still claim triumph in their broader influence. The idea that religion is essentially morality can hardly be debated as a position since it is so routinely taken for granted as obvious reality. Only, today the message is not “Love because of the Kingdom of God the Father as Revealed in Jesus Christ” (Harnack)—not to mention “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Jonathan Edwards)—but “Life Is Hard but Try Your Best to Be Patient and Kind.”
One way that liberals refashioned traditional religion to be palatable to modern minds was by downplaying if not eliminating from its discourse uncomfortable biblical ideas, such as divine judgment and hell. They also turned the focus of religion from eternity to life here and now. We can empirically, if imperfectly, observe this process in published religious discourse over time. The three largest Christian traditions in the United States—mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism—have all published important periodicals over long periods. The Christian Century, published since the late nineteenth century, has been mainline Protestantism’s flagship magazine for more than a century.35 Evangelical Protestantism’s version of the same is Christianity Today, published since 1956. Catholicism has not produced one leading national publication but numerous newspapers and magazines, both national and diocesan. One simply needs systematically to search such publications for keywords and phrases to see if they change in frequency of use or in meaning. I counted all of the times that certain keywords and phrases appeared in an article, review, or advertisement: heaven, hell, purgatory, eternity, eternal, afterlife, Judgment Day, paradise, transcendent, damnation, damned, soul saving, and saved or saving my/your/their/his/her soul or souls.36 Here is what I found.
An initial examination of the Christian Century, first, made clear there simply was no need for an exhaustive search since there existed little variance to measure. A first and informal but close reading of the uses of my keywords revealed fairly frequent references to them in ways consistently suggesting the same meanings and attitudes across the decades. The Christian Century did reference ideas of transcendence and eternity often enough but nearly always to dismiss, denigrate, or otherwise marginalize serious belief in such matters. At times, the tone of such dismissals was respectful, but usually it was scoffing. “How could anyone anymore use the fear of hell to motivate faith?” “Rather than living for paradise, we should be working now to make the earth more like heaven.” “Fundamentalists out to save souls ignore everything in the Bible that does not fit their hidebound doctrines.” This attitude was consistent not only since 1945 but also from the publication’s first years in the nineteenth century.
That is not surprising, given the fact that modernist-liberal American Protestantism has been battling fundamentalists for the soul of Christianity for more than a century. Well before the modernist-fundamentalist split, the mainline had abandoned its commitment to many of these eternal and transcendent concepts. Yet discourse in the Christian Century continued to employ these words and phrases in order to oppose them. The data from the key publication of this branch of American Protestantism thus revealed no significant change in the presence or meaning of references to transcendence and eternity. Because their meanings are consistently negative, precise counts of frequencies are not especially important for present purposes.
Christianity Today offers a different story. All issues of the magazine are archived, although only some in digitally searchable form; the rest were PDFs that had to be transformed into a searchable format. Figure 5.2 shows the number of occurrences of the keywords listed above for every issue from 1957 to 2022. The length of issues of Christianity Today changed significantly over time, so the numbers in Figure 5.2 are references per published page. Table 5.1 lists the total frequencies of all the terms (except purgatory) across all years, from most to least, those with a more obvious positive valence in italics and with a more negative in bold.
Table 5.1 Total Counts of Eternal and Transcendent Theme Keywords in Christianity Today (1957–2022)
Soul 3,918
Heaven 3,858
Judgment 2,856
Eternal 2,369
Hell 1,440
Eternity 919
Transcendent 461
Paradise 319
Afterlife 121
Damned 101
Judgment day 19
Findings presented in Figure 5.2 show a decrease in its use of language referencing eternal and transcendent themes between the mid-1960s and early 1980s. From the 1980s to 2022, the use of these terms remained fairly steady, with a modest decrease after 2014. The most striking way to read the figure is comparing start to finish, which shows a nontrivial decrease—dropping from one transcendent keyword per page to one every five pages, which is an 80% overall decline. Specific words matter, however. The biggest keyword losers here were “eternal,” “heaven,” “soul,” and “judgment.” “Eternity” declined in use as well, but less dramatically. The other keywords remained more stable in use—although their frequency in these pages is massively lower than the top six keywords, so they did not have much room to decline. Terms with a more negative valence (e.g., judgment) were not, however, more likely to be trimmed out than more positive terms (e.g., heaven). “Hell,” for instance, was used not infrequently, and its usage did not change significantly over the decades. Altogether, this evidence indicates some downplaying of transcendent themes in Christianity Today over time—1968 through the 1970s being the most significant years.37
Figure 5.2 References to transcendent and eternity keywords in Christianity Today, 1957–2022.
Source: Christianity Today archives.
That leaves the discourse of American Catholics. I noted above that American Catholicism is not represented by one flagship publication but rather by a variety of Catholic magazines and newspapers published on and off over decades. Fortunately, many American Catholic publications have been digitized in the Catholic News Archives and are systematically searchable online by year.38 Unfortunately, however, most publications are digitized for only some of the years of their publication. Eight different Catholic publications, however, offered enough archived years to attempt an analysis.
Figure 5.3 shows the frequency of distinct references to my keywords and phrases for each publication, where digitized data exist, since 1945. A lot of data were missing. The thick lines represent counts for years with complete data. The thin, dotted curves are exponential trend lines statistically estimated from the data that do exist to the most likely projection of the observed trend for those years missing data. The evidence here is incomplete and so our conclusions must be tentative. Even so, Figure 5.3 does appear to reveal a general trend across the publications—namely, declines in the number of references to transcendent and eternal themes over the years at different periods of time. Projecting from available data, at least, it appears that American Catholics since 1945 talked and read less about transcendent and eternal themes as time passed. Stated differently, in the postwar era—especially the 1960s—American Catholicism downplayed one of the few things that, for better or worse, makes religion unique in the larger field of institutions and culture.
Figure 5.3 Counts of transcendent and eternity themes in articles, reviews, and advertisements of national and diocesan Catholic publications, 1945–2021.
Source: The Catholic News Archive Online. Note: Thematic keywords searched were “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Purgatory,” “Eternity,” “Eternal,” “Afterlife,” “Judgment Day,” “Paradise,” “Transcendent,” “Damnation,” “Damned,” “Saved or Saving My/Your/Their/His/Her Soul or Souls,” “Soul Saving.” Calculated exponential trend lines (dotted) are added.
There are some important caveats here. First, this conclusion derives from a convenience sample of Catholic publications. They are diverse in type and scope but not representative of all Catholic publications, much less all Catholic discourse. Furthermore, nearly all of the cases are obviously missing significant chunks of data. In some instances, the observed data lines are short enough that drawing longer-term conclusions from them might feel like paleontologists reconstructing the entire skeleton of a large animal based on just a few unearthed bones and teeth. The exponential trend curves help in that task, but they could be empirically off. What makes the tentative conclusion worth considering, however, are the similar decline trends across all but one of the publications. No one or two instances can prove anything, but most of the cases producing downward trend lines would seem to tell us something. Quite likely, the available data suggest a real trend that did occur even during those years lacking data. That interpretation also fits everything else we know about American Catholicism during these decades.
Second, however, the last two publications in Figure 5.3 do not seem to fit the downward trends just mentioned. About The Catholic Standard and Times, one can at least see that references to transcendent and eternal themes bumped up at the zenith of the postwar Cold War-era religious revival and then proceeded to decline across the 1960s. That is too little evidence to lean much upon, but it does fit the larger Catholic story and the Christianity Today data just analyzed. The case of The Pittsburgh Catholic is trickier. We do see a major drop in transcendent and eternal references from 1957 to the 1960s. Even simply starting from the first data point and ending with the last would give us a significant decrease between the late 1950s and 2018. But that decline is complicated by a single bump up between 2002 and 2005 (spotlighted with a dotted circle marked by an arrow). So the calculated trend line is flat.39 The Pittsburgh Catholic is thus an anomaly. One can still say that 6 or 7 out of 8 is not bad, and that American Catholicism is also too diverse for every case in a varied sample of publications to give the same results. I end with the same inference, then, hardly conclusive but at least highly suggestive: American Catholicism seems to have downplayed the transcendent and eternal in its discourse after 1945.
