Carl Trueman: Protestant Futures and Friendships

In addressing this issue, there is the further complication that the term “Protestant” has no positive content and can be applied to any group that claims to be Christian while not being either Catholic or Orthodox. For the sake of argument here, I will use the term to refer to those groups that are broadly orthodox in their commitment to the notion of God as triune, Christ as God incarnate, and scripture (unmediated by a formal ecclesiastical magisterium) as the supreme authority of faith and life.

One option can be swiftly dismissed. If the mainstream media is taken at face value, many Protestants are apparently defaulting to “Christian nationalism” as the way to respond to society’s moral malaise. The term “Christian nationalism” has become a canard used by secular progressives (and some Christians) as a rhetorically pejorative catchall for anyone who holds to any number of traditional conservative views.

This is part of a larger narrative that seeks to present Christian nationalism as a serious threat to democracy. Yet while there are some true Christian nationalists, they are (as Mark David Hall has shown) very few in number and of little intellectual or cultural significance. They operate mainly via social media, tiny conferences, and fringe publishing houses where self-referentiality and noise can easily be mistaken for numbers and influence. They do not offer a serious path forward for the Protestant churches in future public engagement.

In the vast majority of local churches, the challenge of preparing people to live as faithful Protestants in the emerging indifferent-to-hostile culture requires much deeper theological reflection and action at the congregational level than that offered by tweets and online ministries. Of course, generalization is difficult with regard to Protestantism because of its fragmented nature. Even among orthodox Protestants, the theological, institutional, and cultural differences between Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Evangelicals can be significant. But there are things that the variety of Protestant traditions share in common. One of them is the desire to allow the teaching of the Bible to shape the Christian mind, and that does not simply mean the intellect, but also the character.

Character is key because of the underlying problem we face. I have argued elsewhere that this is most helpfully characterized as the desecration of man. This concept points to two fundamental issues: that the big questions in our current culture track back to debates over anthropology or what it means to be human; and that our culture takes a peculiar delight in transgressing the sacred as a means of validating its own freedom and authenticity. Only the church can address the issue in a definitive sense: if desecration is the problem, then consecration is the answer. And consecration (for Protestants at least) takes place within the community that is called to existence by God, into which one enters via baptism, and which is sustained by the proclamation of God’s Word and the administration of the Lord’s Supper. The church is where the true nature of humanity and human life are to be realized.

This is not a call for retreat and isolation. Christians do not simply live in bubbles. They have jobs, student loans, mortgages. They have non-Christian neighbors, friends, and co-workers. They have to live in the earthly city even as their ultimate citizenship is in heaven. And they have an obligation to live and speak in a manner that shows the dehumanized world what it really means to be made in God’s image.

This has obvious implications for how the church speaks to the wider world on the issue of anthropology. If the problem is anthropology, we cannot, as Christians, address the world on this matter in ways that essentially dehumanize ourselves in the process. As ancient Israel was called to be a light to the nations by reflecting God’s character, the church today is to do the same. That has numerous implications, but the most foundational is surely that of Christian character. This is as important in the earthly city today as it was under Nero.

We face peculiar pressures that make this a challenging concept. The rules of the modern political game consider such things as slander and lying to be normative tools of the trade. It is true that reformed theories of just rebellion did sanction the use of deception in highly exceptional and very rare circumstances where no other legitimate avenues of action were available, using such biblical examples as the Hebrew midwives in Exodus and Rahab in Joshua as precedent. But the exceptional nature of such needs to be underscored in an age when the rejection of authority is considered by many to be a normative virtue and rebellion is, strange to tell, a culturally conformist mindset.

Protestants must resist succumbing to this culture and eschew the temptation to bracket out the importance of Christian character in political engagement. That is vital if they are to be faithful to New Testament teaching on appropriate Christian conduct in public. Yet it is proving increasingly difficult, not simply because modern politics rewards vice but also because social media, a primary means of public interaction, incentivizes bad behavior. Nevertheless, such practical realities do not mitigate, far less cancel, New Testament imperatives regarding Christian character any more than the brutality of the Caesars did for our ancestors in the early church.

Politics is not a special realm where the normal rules of Christian character and conduct do not apply. And we cannot oppose the desecration of humanity by using the very instruments that are a constituent part of that desecration. Christ himself understood this and warned against it, as his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount indicates. And so did his apostles: the life and testimony of Paul and Peter are two obvious examples. Indeed, Peter’s letters are particularly clear on this point.

If the problem is anthropology, we cannot, as Christians, address the world on this matter in ways that essentially dehumanize ourselves in the process.

Protestants also need to look beyond their own communities both for common ground in the issues that press in on them and for resources to think through current challenges. On the latter, there is much that conservative Protestants can learn from Catholics and Jews. Catholics have a strong tradition of moral and social teaching that is rooted in a deep and comprehensive view of what it means to be human. American Influential strands of Protestantism have tended to default to forms of proof-texting on moral matters. This is certainly true of Evangelicalism forms and of those reformed streams that are rooted in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century rejection of natural law. This worked well when the broader moral imagination of society was largely consistent with the traditional Christian vision and careful moral reasoning was not needed to address typical challenges coming from the culture. Even the early stages of the sexual revolution presented little difficulty: the defense of chastity, monogamy, and fidelity, for example, required no profound countercultural insight because the intuitions of the older generation were still broadly aligned with Christian attitudes. In retrospect, abortion was a sign of the underlying superficiality in moral teaching, with conservative Protestantism not enjoying a unified consensus in the initial stages of the public debate in the 1960s. But on the whole, America’s morality was WASPish in its instincts and presented no major challenge to the WASP churches in the area of ethics.

But that is no longer the case. In fact, on all of the key anthropological issues that define the modern world, from abortion and IVF to gender and sexuality, the intuitions of wider society are increasingly antithetical to those of Christianity. Moreover, if the default approach to ethics is proof-texting, then the further the ethical problem is from a straightforward biblical text, the more it will appear as a matter of Christian indifference. Yet that is not the case: IVF, for example, is beyond the ken of any of the biblical writers, and yet it has clear and decisive implications for how a society thinks of children and thus, by implication, of what it means to be human. And that is central to Christian teaching. This means that Protestants need to develop better habits of thinking when it comes to ethics. They also need to adopt better arguments and cannier means of persuasion within their own churches before they can aspire to make any headway in persuading politicians to think clearly on these issues and others to vote appropriately.

In this context, Protestants would do well to engage–or, more correctly, reengage–with the natural law tradition (or traditions, given that they are pluriform). Natural law arguments in themselves, of course, will not work in the public square, at least not in our current climate of emotivism and irrationality. But they will hopefully clarify and solidify the thinking of ordinary Protestants on key matters, helping them to understand how to move from biblical text to concept to contemporary application. And that will help Protestants think more clearly and competently about public policy and about what they can and should do in the spheres where they have the most influence: their families, their churches, their neighborhoods, their workplaces. Reformation, like charity, begins at home.

Protestants can also learn from Catholics how to encourage and train the next generation. Organizations such as the Napa Institute, the Leonine Forum, the Augustine Institute, the Morningside Institute, and the Collegium Institute have developed programs, funded by the generosity of Catholic philanthropists, that encourage networks of rising intellectuals to think deeply about key cultural issues and to develop friendships that may well last a lifetime and have outsized influence in both their elite callings and their local churches and communities. Protestantism has no real equivalents and is perhaps hindered in developing such both by its fragmented nature and the tendency of Protestant philanthropy to focus more on missions, evangelism, and charitable organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse. The formation of an intellectual class that remains faithful to Protestant orthodoxy while also having an impact on elite institutions has proved elusive. The Catholic organizations mentioned above offer models as to how this might be done.

From Jewish communities, Protestants can learn something about what it means to retain a strong identity when pushed to the cultural margins. The speed with which America has changed and displaced the old cultural Christian norms, often with something entirely opposite, has been disorienting and painful. The temptation in such circumstances is to respond with anger, despair, or both. Such cultural changes are as nothing, however, compared to the various persecutions experienced by the Jews over many centuries. And merely to lament our marginal status is to miss the opportunity to build strong communities. The book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is an excellent place to start. Again, the fragmented nature of Protestantism means that there is no unified history or memory that we can recover. But our individual congregations, denominations, and traditions all have such. We would do well to “remember” the histories that we do have if we are to be faithful stewards of what we have received from our forebears in the faith.

The challenges Protestants face are serious. And Protestantism’s fissiparous culture makes these even harder than they might otherwise be. But if we have the humility to learn from others, we will find that there are models and resources readily available to help us think through how we might respond to our cultural moment.

Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University.

Carl Trueman: Protestant Futures and Friendships

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/11/96499/
November 24, 2024

One thing remains true about twenty-first-century America, regardless of recent election results: the USA is a post-Christian culture and that is not going to change in the near future. Indeed, all the signs are that it will only become less sympathetic to Christianity and its adherents.

In a nation that was deeply shaped by Protestantism, the speed at which this happened is especially disorienting for Protestants. As society’s moral imagination tilts not only away from traditional attitudes to issues of sexual morality and of life (especially on abortion and euthanasia) but comes to define itself in opposition to them, the question of how Protestants should respond–indeed, of how to live–becomes pressing.