The Last Protestant is Leaving
4/9/2010 12:04:25 PM

The last Protestant is leaving, the Supreme Court, that is. Justice John Paul Stevens has announced he will retire this summer. Six of the nine current justices are Roman Catholic, two are Jewish. Nina Totenberg at NPR talks about whether religion is something that should be considered in appointing a replacement. Sarah Posner comments on the Totenberg piece. What does this mean for Protestants today?

First let's define who Protestants are. At this website we make the brash claim that the mainline Protestants should adopt the term "Protestant" for themselves. It's a general term, no denomination uses it in their name, but it clearly refers to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. So those who view their history and theology as clearly informed by the Reformation can claim the term for themselves, and that's primarily those who are referred to as "mainline" denominations today. What we call here the "religious right" are not Protestants, they are American inventions, the Pentecostals are clearly a religious innovation in the American conext and the Southern Baptists have turned themselves into a commercialized and Americanized denomination. This is how I read Mark Noll's book, America's God. Protestants today should claim the term for themselves and view it as over-against "evangelical," another good Reformation term but one that has been captured by the religious right in the public media.

So the last Protestant is leaving the court. Protestants today make up less than twenty percent of Americans claiming religious affiliation. In the nation's history Protestants have dominated the court, but no more. The age of "Protestant establishment" has long passed. It began to turn when Protestants decided to support the civil rights movement of the 1960s and were willing to criticize military adventures of the U.S. in places like Vietnam. Protestants became "critical" of the nation and thus began to lose their role as articulators of the moral public context of the nation. That role was taken over by the religious right, a development encouraged by neoconservatives who believed the nation needed a form of religion which would support military adventures abroad. Some conservatives, such as the late John Richard Neuhaus, actually gained funding from conservative foundations to mount media and organizational assaults on the mainline Protestants. The current editor of the Neuhaus journal "First Things" has recently written that the mainlines are dead. The power of the mainline churches as a Protestant establishment is certainly gone, and the leaving of Justice Stevens is a clear indication of that change.

What we Protestants have not acknowledged very well is that we have been systematically attacked again and again by conservative religious leaders and conservative politicians. When I sat down to systematically watch the emerging television preachers in the 1980s one of the constant themes was an attack on the mainline churches. And the whole thrust of the conservative backlash to the changes of the 1960s has been carried on by Republican politicians trying to get elected based on nativistic and racist appeals, the center of this being in the South where conservative religion comes from in the first place. In the face of a sustained, deliberate attack over several decades now the mainline churches have failed to mount any sort of response to this war against themselves. A sort of quietistic liberalism and mushy pluralism has led many pastors and leaders to sit back and basically ignore the fact that there are people out there kicking and slapping them and trying to destroy them. No wonder there are so few people now interested in becoming part of churches that don't seem to know what they believe anymore and let others kick them around.

That's part of what I mean to say that we Protestants need to remember our heritage of "protest" ourselves and the substance of our faith as articulated in those crucial years of the Reformation, which transcends the history of the United States as a nation. We need a new, compelling vision of a realistic global theology, a belief system necessary for the next stage of the future for which we accept responsibility as Protestants have historically done. Unless we do something like this the last Protestant will be leaving not only the Supreme Court but also our churches.
See This Blog

About the New Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
4/9/2009 3:35:13 PM

Here are some links about the faith-based initiative of Obama. We will comment on them later.

First announcement on February 5, 2009, with a list of appointed members. This includes text about the purpose of the office.

Second Announcement on April 6, 2009, with ten new members. This is a list of all the members of the advisory council. The "primary Protestants" (mainline churches) are not well represented. No Presbyterians. No Episcoplians. No Lutherans. There is one United Methodist but he, Harvey Knox, represents a gay advocacy group not the Methodist Church. Baptists have four members, Catholics three, Jewish three, seculars three.

Faith in Public Life has done some research on these appointments.

Time Magazine reviews a conference of the advisory council:

"While the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships has been around for eight years, the Obama White House is very keen to stress that their version of the office will have an entirely different mission. Whereas Bush established the office to "level the playing field" for faith-based service organizations that he argued were unable to compete for federal grants, Obama intends to use his faith office more for policy matters. It operates under the Domestic Policy Council and is charged with focusing on four issues: domestic poverty, responsible fatherhood, reducing the need for abortion and preventing unintended pregnancy, and interreligious dialogue and cooperation."
See This Blog