Revising Our Pledges of Allegiance
From “Christian America” to the Gospel of the Resurrection
by Ashley Woodiwiss
On June 26, 1996, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a major finding in its nationwide survey (a sampling of nearly 2,000 adults) on the issue of religion and politics. Most news stories that followed dwelt upon the data concerning the capture of white Evangelicals’ votes by the Republican Party. (It seems that no longer can only the Protestant Episcopal Church of America be dubbed the Republican Party at prayer; the Southern Baptists now have their knees on the pillow as well.) Some also commented on those findings that indicated that the Roman Catholic Church in America appears profoundly divided between progressives and traditionalists, who appear united only, and distressingly, by their shared support of pro-choice positions. Other signs of the tenacity of religious opinions, beliefs, and sensibilities were also documented in this report, which garnered headlines in all the major establishment media sources.
But for my own concern, the real story is found in Question No. 33. For with that question Pew discovered that fully 60 percent of its nearly 2,000 adult respondents consider the United States a Christian nation. (See Question No. 33 from the questionnaire, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, May 1996 Religion and Politics Survey.) This finding is just as central a challenge to embodying “the Gospel of the Resurrection in a Culture of Death” as are those other more familiar targets of Christian critique: secular culture, postmodernism, feminism, the homosexual agenda, etc. Hence my thesis: We confront not just the culture of death. Rather, the place and significance of this notion, “Christian America,” may well be the central problem inhibiting the full flowering of the Gospel of the Resurrection for American Christians.
I start then with two givens. First, “Christian America” will be with us for the foreseeable future as a marked characteristic that informs and shapes how American Christians understand and live out their faith commitments, individually and politically. We will continue to witness “Washington for Jesus” rallies and “God, guts and glory” bumper stickers, along with the continued and calculated political effort to mobilize a majority of these Christians to become political foot-soldiers in a rhetorically created “culture war.” And second, such a state of affairs is not good for the Church. My hidden assumption, which I bring out here, is that the Gospel of the Resurrection and the flourishing of the Church are inextricably bound together.
I take it as my task, then, to set out what it will take to change this state of affairs. I will trace out fault lines within conservative American Christianity, specifically evangelicalism, that indicate that at least some movements and ideas are beginning to emerge that might promise hope for a better state of affairs. Can the Gospel of the Resurrection be discerned even in and through the confusion that “Christian America” has produced? Indeed, there are promising signs that among a new generation of conservative American Christians, “Christian America” is losing its grip. So my largely prescriptive comments will be spiced with present-day signs of hope. In good scholarly fashion, however, let me set the context for the prescriptive comments that follow.
The Modern Republic and the Rise of Civil Religion
I view early modernity, the age that saw its greatest achievement in America’s founding, as the project to secure a new foundation for political society different from the orthodox Trinitarian Christian theology that had hitherto served as European civilization’s basis. This project had two main strategies: (1) the displacement of the public role of Christian theology and the Church by means of a new hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures, and (2) the insertion of a new religious narrative to keep the republic appropriately religious.
The former required what some scholars have dubbed the “capturing of the biblical text.” The latter produced what is known as civil religion. These twin developments were coincidental in time and intentional in design. The legislators of modernity had learned the ancient wisdom well: republics are inherently religious. The conclusion of the moderns (Machiavelli et al.) was that a new, modern republic was necessary, that it would have to be religious, but that it could not at its root and foundation be Christian.
Some of our best scholarship, though done under the black flag of postmodernism, has, beneficially for Christian critique, unmasked the rhetorical pretensions of the intellectual founders and apologists of modernity (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Spinoza, Bacon, Descartes, etc.), revealing these thinkers as “political theologians.” So, in his Not by Reason Alone, Joshua Mitchell treats Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in light of their specific political-theological project. They each employ what Mitchell calls a “politically authoritative history,” an argument that modern, scientific, political societies cannot be justified by reason alone, but are, for their public justification, in need of supplemental support from revelatory teachings. Their different descriptions of this fortuitous combination of reason and revelation we can glean from the pages of Leviathan, The Two Treatises, The Letter Concerning Toleration, and The Social Contract. Thus, the “capture of the biblical text.”
Given Locke’s pride of place in the American story, it is useful to dwell a moment on how his project was mediated to the American founding moment. A deep reading of Locke reveals a particular complex of theological and political commitments that enjoin a particular hermeneutic of the Christian narrative at once theological and political. Such a complex Steven Dworetz, in his book on Locke and the American Revolution, The Unvarnished Doctrine, calls “theistic liberalism.”
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