From the Preeminence of Evangelicals to Liberals and Back Again

This is a raw excerpt from my next book (coming out in 2020) on negotiating religion and science in America.

An insight into America from Alexis de Tocqueville

In American history, the evangelical voice of the Puritans (i.e., evangelicalism in its original form, not the desiccated version we see today) had lost its preeminence in the late 19th century through the early 20th half century. Partly this was due to a retreat by fundamentalists after their inability to take over denominational leadership in the 1920s and the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," which for many Americans, demonstrated conservative evangelical recalcitrant resistance to science (and in this case, evolution).

A side note for the purposes of this blog: The Puritan leaders, like Jonathan Edwards, were skilled commentators on integrating a robust biblical faith with emerging science, as I elaborated in a post for the Faraday Institute blog, "Doing Faith and Since Like it's 1718."

You could say this: The 1900s, or the “Christian Century” (embodied in the periodical of the same name), was substantially the liberal Protestant century until the rise of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. 

You could say this, but the story of a simple shift from the ascendency of the evangelicals to liberals and then back is somewhat distorting. As A. N. Whitehead once commented, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

In some ways, as we look back to these rises and falls of traditionalist and modernist religious ideas in light of the prominence in today of the evangelical voice (which now includes fundamentalism), we need to remember New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s comments on liberal mainline churches, 

Some of what those congregations offer is already embodied in liberal politics and culture. As the sociologist N. J. Demerath argued in the 1990s, liberal churches have suffered institutional decline, but also enjoy a sort of cultural triumph, losing members even as their most distinctive commitments — ecumenical spirituality and a progressive social Gospel — permeate academia, the media, pop culture, the Democratic Party.

The victory of mainline Protestants meant their disappearance because their values became the wider culture’s. For this reason, in the ears of many Christians today, liberal Protestants sound too much like the world around us, and that leads some to resist both liberal theology and the science it embraces.

I'm afraid that strategy is both unnecessarily reactive and unhelpfully detrimental to a confident Christian faith. And so I ask: Do we need to listen to both evangelicals and mainliners to truly hear the Gospel again today? Could that strategy bring with it an effective way to bring our faith to mainstream science?