Protestantism and American Values

Bishop T.D. Jakes, once my favorite TV evangelist, recently traded up to a new home with a 5 million dollar price tag. Max Weber is still ringing in my ears. You may recall Weber’s classic attempt to demolish Protestantism by defining its core in terms of extolling wealth as a sign of divine election and favor. The good bishop does Weber’s work for him by insisting that Jesus didn’t want anybody to miss out on life’s goodies, and that he even accumulated some of them himself. And I thought we were finally rid of Robert Tilton.

Recent literature on what’s wrong with Western Protestantism shoves the Weberian thesis to the background. Now, the focus is on how the Protestant establishment in America has deformed the Christian faith into a religion of individualism, contract-defined free markets, and constitutional democracy, all to be imposed forcibly upon the world as the will of God. According to this critique, what has allowed Protestantism to stray in this direction is its emphasis on God’s direct salvation of humankind individual by individual, requiring in the process nothing by way of good works, before or after his intervention on our sin-sick behalf through Christ and the Holy Spirit. 

The social and cultural harvest of this theology is a metaphysics of freedom. Freedom from constraints and restraints, from the oppressiveness of customs, traditions, and authorities of every kind, is now the only thing that matters, the argument goes. It is the only thing that will cure every debilitating condition of humankind in this world, and the only thing worth having in the next. Except, of course, for the regulative force of our customs, traditions, and authority. And with this caveat, liberal and conservative Protestants can be seen hoisting themselves on their own petards with equal vehemence.

What interests me especially in these critiques of Protestant culture, from Weber to Robert Bellah to James Kurth, is how deliberately they seem to ignore the single most important point that the sixteenth-century Reformers constantly hammered home about what the true church of Jesus Christ must be like: a church reformed and always to be reformed (ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda). Just as forgiven sinners will fall into sinning again, reformed churches will need reforming again, precisely because the people who once reformed them are the very kind of people who are now sinning in them.

The genius of Protestantism, if we may call it that without letting pride run us into a ditch, is the linking of a reforming spirit with an apostolic one. Moving forward in faith always must involve a certain kind of looking backward, to a time when Christian communities were missing the mark less frequently than subsequent generations found it easier to do. How did the early church manage it? Primarily by being far less hung up than we are on freedom from, and far more focused on freedom for: on what God wants people to do for and with others than on what they demand to do for and by themselves. And by being far less hung up than we are on doctrines, hierarchies, and programs, and far more focused on spending ourselves and our resources for others, to see to it that the hungry are fed, the sick healed, the downhearted comforted, and that no one lives or dies without being noticed, respected, served, loved, and afforded the freedom to give himself or herself for others as well.

What Protestantism’s critics don’t get, partly because a lot of Protestants don’t get it either, is that the experience of being personally saved from sin and death by a gracious and loving God is at its very core an experience of being liberated for and not just from something. The freedom worth celebrating in the experience is not human beings’ freedom, but God’s. The God who is in no way constrained to be gracious freely chooses to be gracious to the whole of creation, and to ask only graciousness in return.

The Protestant Reformation has never been about worldly success, free markets, or spreading liberal democracy to every nation and peoples, whether they want it or not. It is about recovering and being reformed yet again by the spirit of a man who did not count his own privileged status before God something to be clung to for dear life, but rather something to be emptied out, so that others might be freed from oppression, fear, and hopelessness, for pouring into others’ strained and faltering hearts not economic and political ideology, but that love which is “all love’s excelling.”