The Twilight of the American Enlightenment by George Marsden

Author:George Marsden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

The story of religion in the 1950s has many dimensions, but at its center is the continuing heritage of cultural leadership of the mainline Protestant churches. These were the predominantly northern, white, Protestant denominations, such as Episcopal, Congregational (United Church of Christ), Presbyterian, American Baptist, United Methodist, Disciples of Christ, various sorts of Lutheran churches, and others, that were regarded as constituting an informal religious “establishment.” That is, even though America had not had “established” state churches supported by taxes since its early days, Protestant Christianity still held a privileged place in the culture as the predominant religion. Mainline Protestant leaders were part of the liberal-moderate cultural mainstream, and their leading spokespersons were respected participants in the national conversation.

Protestantism had played a complementary role to more secular outlooks in public life throughout US history, and many Protestants were, of course, eager for this role to continue. It was a role that was embodied, for example, in the US Constitution. Written with remarkably little religious language for the time, the Constitution defined the federal government in a practically secular way. At the same time, the framers took care in the religion clauses of the First Amendment (“congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) to guarantee that religion might flourish in many supplemental capacities—even in tax-supported established churches in some New England states. Although the early republic was not a “Christian nation” in the sense that some conservative Christians today claim, neither was it wholly secular. Protestant Christianity retained many public privileges. Some of these were ceremonial and others were substantial. Education, which in Christendom had always had a conspicuous religious component, continued to include Protestant teachings. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, even state universities had required chapel attendance and were likely to have clergymen as presidents. Protestants could also form voting blocs large enough to shape religiously based legislation, as in Sabbath laws, or in promoting various social and moral reforms. The last great manifestation of that public influence was in the movement for prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

By the 1950s, although Protestants retained disproportional influence, the question loomed as to how such influence might continue. Prohibition itself had brought strong reactions against allowing one religious group to impose its restrictive teachings on everyone else. Moreover, as it was increasingly recognized that the nation included various religious, secular, and simply profane outlooks, the prospects for specific religious teachings to continue to play a role in shaping a public national consensus were looking increasingly problematic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.