How the evangelicals won

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by U.C. Berkeley professor emeritus of history David A. Hollinger is one of the most intriguing books I've read in a long time. Hollinger's premise here is that

What counts as "Christian" is always achieved, never given. It all depends on who gets control of the local franchise.

He offers an explanation of how "evangelicalism" won out in U.S. society in the late 20th century. In ordinary speech, "Christian" has come to mean "evangelical."  But this strain of Christianity is itself losing out to cultural secularism which is strengthened by the winners' anti-science and right wing politics.

Once upon an American time, the United States was something like a "Christian nation," in the sense that early white settlers lived in reference to British and European Christianity, even if they belonged to separate tribes or, sometimes, no religious tribe at all. Christian denominations divided, as did the nation, over the continuation of Black slavery in the mid-19th century. Some of them reunited after the Civil War, some didn't. Hollinger uses "ecumenical"  to describe the once dominant northern Protestant denominations -- Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, United Church of Christ, etc. They were the public face of Christianity for much of the country, but, as has always been the case, not for everyone.

Hollinger contends that hegemonic ecumenical Protestant supremacy unraveled in the 20th century for many reasons. One was education:

Differences in education contributed to a division between two families of Protestants that persisted throughout the twentieth century and became even more in the twenty-first. In what historian Martin E. Marty called American Protestantism's informal "two-party system," one cluster of Protestants focused on individual salvation and morality, while another "lost faith in revivalism and worked instead for some transformation of the world." ... After World War II, the two-party system become the ecumenical-evangelical divide ...

He highlights two factors in the divide which I have not seen explicated elsewhere.

1) Educated Jewish migrants escaping European fascism brought world views of equivalent depth and moral seriousness from non-Christian roots. Ecumenical Protestantism recognized equals; pretty soon the culturally dominant parts of the United States came to talk and think in terms of "Judeo-Christian civilization."

2) Meanwhile, ecumenical Protestants who had followed the call to spread the gospel to all nations returned changed.

The rest of humanity was more than a needy expanse, awaiting the benevolence and supervision of American Protestants. ... Within the churches, the missionary witness to the scope of humankind and the integrity of many cultures threatened the old habit of speaking of non-Christians as "heathens."

In Hollinger's telling, just as ecumenical Protestantism achieved its zenith in the anti-Communist, culturally conservative 1950s, it was sowing seeds of its long popular decline.

[It undertook] a multidecade campaign to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. ... The liberalizers called on the faithful to renounce a number of inherited ideas and practices which the ecumenical elite decided were racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, unscientific, and chauvinistic, and thus inconsistent with the gospel as it should apply to American society. But these ideas and practices remained popular with much of the white population, within and beyond the churches ... Opposing these relatively cosmopolitan views -- and defined in large part by reaction against them -- were the fundamentalists. ..

... the more control white evangelicals achieved over the Christian franchise and the more they allowed it to weaken democracy and to discredit science, the more comfortable other Americans came to feel in one another's spirituality and and ethnoracially diverse company. ...The secular emerged less as a threat than the sectarians to an inclusive national community committed to democracy ...

Evangelicals seized the Christian franchise; Donald Trump grabbed up the evangelicals; organized Christianity continued on its course of discrediting itself.

Stating my own biases: it's not hard for me to believe that the kind of hegemonic, white, broad-minded, mainline Protestantism that I was raised in was not a Good Thing. It certainly was uninspiring. 

Hollinger lays out how it lost out. There's plenty missing from his account. Catholic religion is not well incorporated in this telling. Nor does he believably recount the attractiveness to many in this country of various other non-Christian spiritual paths.

But this is a very good, challenging book for those of us in a U.S. context who cling to a Christian understanding of the moral universe -- and also to those of us who just want to know where these crazy right wing evangelicals came from.