Theology Today - Vol 28, No. 4 - January 1972 - BOOK REVIEW - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

523 - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America
By Martin E. Marty
295 pp. New York, Dial Press, 1970. $8.95.

Marty, who teaches modern church history at the University of Chicago, indicates in the title that his primary interest is in Protestant concern for the whole of American society. Dealing with the past two hundred years, he tries a new periodization by employing 1877, the

524 - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

year after the centennial celebration and when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South, as the date which marks an end to one era and a new beginning for Protestantism. In the first part of this history a white, English-speaking, Protestant majority had a "common vision of a single destiny for America and its churches" and shaped the ethos, mores, manners, and the laws of the nation. This Protestantism modified its theology in such a way as to interpret the American environment, in a fusion with evangelicalism, as "revelatory and redemptive." It invented or adapted the denomination, the local church system, and the Sunday School as strategies and organized reforming societies to exercise for the evangelical custodianship of public weal.

The common vision was disturbed in this period along sectional and racial lines, and then along religious lines with the coming of Roman Catholics and Jews, who broke the hegemony of Protestantism in American life. While they continued to aspire toward empire, Protestants were unable to provide leadership in the new industrial and urban society which emerged after 1877. Protestantism was acted upon and so accommodated itself that it became better at baptizing than exorcising. Marty claims that old dreams of empire have received deathblows and that the ecumenism of the present age has allowed Protestants to get rid of imperial claims and enjoy the fresh pluralistic experience.

Although Marty has drawn upon his many other monographs, this interpretative volume is brisk and bright with refreshing insights into our history. On the basis of these ideas I would like to challenge certain aspects of this interpretation with the intention of illustrating how Marty's overriding theses need fuller examination and expansion. If we are going to assess Protestant dreams and dominance properly throughout these years, we are going to have to deal with the full breadth and complexity of the subject and not narrow the focus.

Marty's work suggests two broader possibilities. The first suggestion has to do with his reference to the "charter for empire." Here he deals primarily with the First Amendment to the Constitution and the creation of a legal non-establishment. As important as this amendment may be for our self-understanding, I believe that it may not be as important as the constitutional system of which it was only a part. Marty mentions the Constitution. But he does not allow the Constitution to provide, as it did for many Protestants, the keystone of his analysis of the "Righteous Empire." The First Amendment may have provided the ground rules for the interaction between the civil and religious institutions, but the charter of which it was a part provided the ground rules for the interaction among all of the many Protestant experiences--and the religious

525 - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

experiences of others--as the meaning of the "Righteous Empire" was defined and redefined.

Marty's second reference is closely connected to this first point about the charter. If we are going to discuss the "Righteous Empire," we are going to have to find ways of dealing with the religious experiences of those who controlled its development to a certain degree and not simply the clergymen who often led the evangelizing, educational, and reforming societies. Marty gives us a clue by mentioning from time to time American presidents; he likes two in particular, Jefferson and Lincoln. But why should Marty neglect the experiences of all of the garden-variety Presidents-Protestants all, until the election of John F. Kennedy-in dealing with the development of the "Righteous Empire." Why mention, for example, Episcopal Bishop Leonidas K. Polk and not even name James K. Polk, whose Presbyterian wife would not serve liquor in the White House, who himself was strangely warmed by Methodist preaching. James Polk, in working under the larger constitutional charter for empire, had to do political battle with legislative and judicial branches full of laymen who were also Protestants and who had their ideas of what the empire should be. This is no small matter for Marty's thesis. At one point Marty suggests that Protestants became boxed-in, gradually excluded from "major areas of public and ethical decision"; that statement will not hold up unless he excludes from the Protestant experience all of those who governed the nation.

Once again Marty supplies the clues, here with regard to the matter of changes after 1877. On the one hand, a great many Protestants presided over the development of America's industrial and urbanized society. Many of these men were pious, teachers of Sunday schools, founders of seminaries, contributors of charity. It is one thing to say that these Protestants were fakes and frauds. It is quite another thing to suggest that Protestants somehow found themselves excluded from major areas of public and ethical decision, when these Protestants were presiding over the formation of the new shape of the American empire. Or, on the other hand, starting at the bottom, Protestants helped to provide a countervailing power in the development of the American labor unions, a voluntary reforming society invariably neglected by religious historians. To be sure, a good many Protestant clergy attacked the formation and methodology of unions in the gilded age, but there were many Protestants, often Methodists and Baptists, who took a vital part in the formation of labor movements and interpreted their interests in terms of righteousness and a righteous empire. They were not "mainliners," of course, but they were Protestants whose experience must be explored

526 - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

and given full discussion, as, for example, in the stimulating treatment of labor newspapers and journals by Herbert G. Gutman, "Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age" (American Historical Review, 72 [1966] 74-101).

There is another aspect of Protestant life growing out of the conflict of robber barons and unionists which needs fuller evaluation. Marty speaks about the progressives, the reformers, and the social gospel movement of the post-1877 period. He maintains that persons involved in attacking unrighteousness and injustices and advocating new directions for the society were protestants with a small "p" and that reform movement which unified most Protestants was the campaign for prohibition. Marty maintains that energies "diverted to prohibition were directed away from other social concerns." This case has to be reexamined. Why should the author focus attention on Prohibition and the Volstead Act and not deal with amendments to the Constitution regarding the income tax and the women's franchise, both of which were advocated by such national political leaders as "Fundamentalist Pope" William Jennings Bryan and signed into law by "Mr. Presbyterian," Woodrow Wilson. And what would the author say about social legislation urged in the "Social Creed" of the Federal Council of Churches, which gradually became law under the larger Constitutional charter? It may be that Protestants were not united with regard to this legislation, but Protestants have never been united about the nature of the "Righteous Empire," as the Civil War suggests.

On the basis of this kind of activity it is difficult for me to accept the judgment of historian Henry May, cited with favor by Marty, that in 1876 Protestantism presented a massive, "almost unbroken front in its defense of the social status quo." At least it is difficult to accept without a reexamination of what May and Marty mean by this. Moreover, Protestantism gave birth to all kinds of fresh strategies to deal with new challenges and difficult situations. Even the ecumenical movement, particularly in the federation movement of the early part of the twentieth century, as H. Paul Douglass suggests, was an attempt by Protestants to adapt to and help influence the new industrial and urban American community. Part of Marty's difficulty is his use of a two party system in American Protestantism, the public and the private Protestants, which keeps him from analyzing during this latter period the very complex phenomenon which Protestantism always has been and still is.

Inevitably in dealing with a subject like this, an author has to treat the problem of Providence. Marty suggests that Protestants came to believe that the American environment was revelatory and redemptive and gradually that the conception of God's providential destiny for America

527 - Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience In America

was wedded to the optimistic concepts of progress. Protestants have blurred the distinction between the nation and the body of Christ. But God is the Lord of history and of nations; since that includes the United States, we still have to ask ourselves what God expects us to contribute to our national existence and in international affairs.

Here Marty helps us through two of his other books, Varieties of Unbelief (1964) and The Modern Schism (1969). In the former volume he speaks of integral and non-integral aspects of faith, arguing that the non-integral confessions keep life open and creative. In the second book he suggests that America has moved in the direction of a "controlled secularity" rather than in the direction of an "utter secularity" or a "mere secularity" as found in Europe. Now I would like to have Marty explore in the "Righteous Empire" and in the Protestant experience the implications of these insights. In assessing the past for our usable future, what is it that we can learn from this past in order to fulfill God's purposes for this part of his creation now? There is something on this in the last section of this volume, but Marty needs to correlate in a better way the history through which he has moved in this present volume and some of the insights he has given to us in his past works.

James H. Smylie
Union Theological Seminary
Richmond, Virginia