Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity
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Robertson would never consider Jefferson's Bible an authentic Bible; indeed, if this edition of the Gospels were the work of a committee of contemporary scholars and were introduced today by the United States Government, it would draw howls of outrage from the Religious Right. One can only imagine the fury with which legalistic Christians would react to a cut-and-paste job on what they consider the Word of God—especially a cut-and-paste job that unequivocally affirms the Church of Love and rejects the Church of Law.
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4
DARBY'S KINGDOM
"There is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian." Such was the prediction of Thomas Jefferson, who had confidence that Unitarianism— with its emphasis on reason and conscience and its denial of Jesus' divinity—would appeal more than any other church to the younger generation of his day. It was not a foolish supposition: Jefferson spoke at a time when the kind of irrational Christianity he deprecated appeared to be on the wane. Yet in fact it was on the upswing. As it turned out, nineteenth-century American religion would be dominated by evangelical Protestantism, with its tent-meeting revivals, extreme moralism, and bizarre apocalyptic theology. If educated urbanites were largely immune to this kind of religion—which grew out of the most legalistic, anti-intellectual strains of colonial Puritanism—the rural, semiliterate poor packed tents by the thousands and responded powerfully to the messages preached there, because those messages were tailored precisely to them. The evangelists, with their dramatic rhetoric about the threat of hellfire and the promise of heaven, played expertly on the miseries, anxieties, and resentments of the provincial poor, on their fears of the unknown in this world and the next, on their desperate desire for a paternal, authoritarian figure to give their lives a sense of order and direction, and on their eagerness to believe in the promise of a postmortem existence more worry-free than this one. Evangelists have always appealed to the isolated and desperate, to people living on the edge—and such people are generally not inclined to subject to penetrating critical analysis the rules, doctrines, and faith statements that are presented to them as the keys to the Kingdom. So it was with the tent-meeting crowds, who eagerly and unreflectingly affirmed the things they were told to affirm.
Throughout the nineteenth century, religion was a growth industry in America. Though Pat Robertson and others on the Religious Right today routinely insist that the early American republic was overwhelmingly Christian, this widespread notion has been put to rest by the sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, who conclude from a careful study of census figures and other documents that "on the eve of the Revolution only about 17 percent of Americans were churched" and that even "in the puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts religious adherence probably never exceeded 22 percent." By the time of the Civil War the nationwide churchgoing figure had climbed to 37 percent; from then on, the national rate of churchgoing rose steadily to about 62 percent in 1980. In the face of such statistics, to claim that eighteenth-century America was a "Christian nation" is absurd. Indeed, Finke and Stark describe America as having "shifted from a nation in which most people took no part in organized religion to a nation in which nearly two thirds of American adults do."
While Unitarianism failed to achieve a position of dominance in the nineteenth century, the mainline churches of Jefferson's day— Congregational, Episcopal, and Presbyterian—retained some degree of ascendancy, forming part of the American Protestant establishment and coming to be seen, toward the century's end, largely as props for Victorian respectability, middle-class conformism, and the socioeconomic status quo of unrestricted robber-baron capitalism. Yet the ascendancy of these churches was threatened to some degree by a wide range of new religious developments, above all the Baptist and Methodist movements. In theology as well as in manner of worship, these new groups, with their emphasis on Jesus as one's personal savior and on profound spiritual feeling, could hardly have differed more strikingly from Jefferson's Unitarians, who rejected Jesus' divinity and cultivated a sedate rationalism. Yet the Baptists and Methodists shared with the Unitarians an antagonism both to the strict mainline orthodoxies and to the clerical hierarchy and prescribed liturgy of the Episcopalians. They also shared an urgent devotion to Jesus' message of love. As Protestantism itself had been a revolt against papal authority and orthodoxy, so the Methodist, Baptist, and Unitarian movements all represented a further step away from the authority and orthodoxy of institutional Protestantism and toward an affirmation of individual mind and conscience and of the individual's authentic relationship to God. Or, as Tillich might say, away from the horizontal and toward the vertical.
Founded in eighteenth-century England by the Anglican cleric John Wesley, Methodism began as a movement to spiritually revitalize Anglicanism. Separating from the Anglican Church in 1784, Methodism developed in the nineteenth century into a major mainline church and the largest single component of the Protestant establishment. In the late nineteenth century, this process repeated itself when many Methodists who first sought to reinvigorate their church as part of the so-called Holiness movement eventually broke away to form such denominations as the Church of the Nazarene and the Salvation Army. It was in some of these Holiness sects, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that there first developed the movement known as Pentecostal-ism, whose adherents' intense experiences of the Holy Spirit (or so they claimed) were manifested in such phenomena as faith healing, prophecies, and speaking in tongues. Eventually many Pentecostals, in turn, broke off into their own denominations, the largest of them being the Assemblies of God.
The Baptist movement, which proved even more successful than Methodism, began in 1609 as a small fringe group in England and grew enormously in America during the 1800s. Today Baptists of various denominations form the single largest group of American Protestants, and the Southern Baptist Convention is the single largest Protestant denomination. Yet for anyone whose knowledge of Baptist belief is based only on familiarity with today's self-identified "traditional" Southern Baptists, the actual nature of historic Baptist doctrine can come as a shock. In an early twentieth-century high-school textbook about Baptist belief, W R. White noted that for Baptists, "the individual is primary. . . . No building, work of art, human or religious institution is to be valued above him." In a 1909 book, Philip L.Jones agreed: "The doctrine of the individual relationship of the soul to God has always and everywhere been insisted upon by Baptists. Indeed, no doctrine has been, nor is, more Baptistic than this."
Flowing from this emphasis on the individual is an insistence on total freedom of conscience: "The individual has a right to express his religious or antireligious convictions," writes Jones. This doctrine— known as soul competency—is strikingly antithetical to the theology of many so-called "traditional" Baptists today, who have been taught to distrust their consciences, which may be manipulated by Satan.
Historic Baptist faith is indeed biblically based, but White emphasizes that for Baptists, the New Testament—not the harsh edicts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy—is their "law and only law." Nor, White says, is it appropriate for Baptists to pluck verses out of context: "The method of throwing proof texts together, as we would the contents of a scrapbook, is very unsound. We must look to the whole revelation of God, reaching its completeness in Christ, for the truth on any major subject." Again, this recognition of the need to read the Bible as a whole is not greatly in evidence in today's Southern Baptist Convention. Nowadays most "traditional" Southern Baptists not only engage in vigorous proof-texting but reject any contextual reading of Bible verses as heresy and routinely privilege the harshest Old Testament pronouncements over verses from the Gospels.
Love is the most important element in traditional Baptist belief. "To the true Baptist," writes Jones, love "is the supreme controlling, governing force. ... It is love and not law that is supreme. . . . God is love and love is God." For this reason, Baptists don't believe in doing anything that might be seen as an attempt to le
gislate belief. The Baptist, Jones says,
does not much believe in legislation in order to advance the interests of the kingdom. . . . He would not write the name of God in the constitution of either the nation or the State. . . . He does not even contest very strenuously for the reading of the Bible in our public schools.
For Baptists, Jones adds, "it is the inner spirit and not the external letter that should control. . . . Everywhere and always they discount righteousness by edict, and seek to implant righteousness by love." In a time when the public rhetoric of "traditional" Southern Baptists emphasizes God's wrath far more than his love, and when Southern Baptists agitate for laws and constitutional amendments permitting organized school prayer, Jones's characterization of classical Baptist attitudes could hardly seem more at odds with contemporary reality.
Finally, Jones envisions God's kingdom coming about through a gradual increase of love in the hearts of men and women:
The kingdom of our Lord . . . cannot come by legal enactment; it cannot come by any coercion, whether applied to the individual or to men in the mass; it cannot come by the influence of any external act or rite or service. It can come only by the enthronement of this supreme love of God and Jesus Christ in the heart of the individual man. . . . Where abounds the love of God and the love of man, there his kingdom will be set up, and it is this kingdom in the supremacy of its dominating emotion, love, for which the true Baptist stands.
As we shall see, this conception of God's kingdom is dramatically at odds with the "End Times" theology subscribed to by most "traditional" Southern Baptists today.
To be sure, the Baptist churches were in practice never quite the Church of Love that White and Jones depict. (Which church ever was?) Yet Christine Leigh Heyrman's 1997 book, Southern Cross, a study of the diaries of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Baptist and Methodist clergy, shows that the teachings of pre-Revolutionary preachers in both of these churches were utterly at odds with that of today's self-styled "traditional" Baptists and Methodists. Far from making an idol of the family, upholding paternal authority, and reinforcing the Southern cult of masculinity and male honor, eighteenth-century Southern evangelicals prized "religious fellowship over family," affirmed female equality, and questioned the idea that youth should always defer to age. In contradistinction to the pro-slavery and then pro-segregation stance of their successors, moreover, white Baptist and Methodist clergy in the early South preached a radical message of racial equality. This is the true Baptist tradition—and it was betrayed in the early nineteenth century by preachers who, upholding "the superiority of white over black and of men over women," exchanged God's truth for the values of the secular society of their day.
So it was that Baptist churches in the antebellum South soon became identified with the defense of slavery. For American Baptists, the pivotal nineteenth-century event was the 1845 withdrawal of the Baptist churches in the South from the national Baptist body, then called the General Missionary Convention, whose Boston-based leaders had voted not to allow slaveholders to participate in foreign mission work. The Southern churches, which supported their members' right to own slaves, proceeded to form the Southern Baptist Convention. What followed in the decades after the Civil War was ironic: While the North's Baptist churches became, with the mainline churches, a part of the Protestant establishment—and also declined, along with the mainline churches, in membership and influence—the Southern Baptist Convention thrived as a bulwark of racism, an opponent of Reconstruction and evolution, and, in the mid-twentieth century, as a foe of integration, civil rights, and secular culture. Formerly devoted above all to the gospel, Southern Baptist preachers (with some honorable exceptions) came to be known for their devotion to harsh Old Testament law. In recent years, an ex-president of the Southern Baptist Convention declared that God does not hear the prayers of Jews, and the Convention itself issued a report that purported to indicate what proportion of the membership of various Christian communions would be saved. (Unsurprisingly, Southern Baptists came out in the number one position, bringing to mind Jesus' statement that the last shall be first.) So it was that a movement originally founded to establish a Church of Love devolved into America's most powerful Church of Law.
This shift in the orientation of the Baptist churches was only part of a broader development in American Protestantism that began in the early nineteenth century and that has continued to the present day.
I am referring to the remarkable reversal of the Protestant movement's progress toward a Church of Love and the almost total replacement of the gospel message with an emphasis on bizarre moralistic and apocalyptic doctrines.
The first major figure in this revolution was John Nelson Darby, an Englishman who was born in 1800, the year Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States. In 1824, after studying law at Trinity College, Dublin—a fact that seems not totally irrelevant to his role as the godfather of today's American Protestant legalism—Darby was ordained to the clergy of the Church of Ireland (the Anglican Communion's Irish branch). Yet he soon came to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ordination, later explaining that Saint Paul would not have been permitted to preach in his church because he hadn't been ordained. Accordingly, Darby resigned his curacy in 1827 and joined a denomination called the Brethren which rejected formal ordination. In the 1840s he founded a breakaway faction, the Plymouth Brethren (also known as Darbyites), the theology of which centered on a remarkable set of beliefs propounded by Darby and known as dispensational premillennialism.
Premillennialism—the origins of which are shrouded in the mists of time and which did not rise out of obscurity until the nineteenth century—is a belief that the cryptic apocalyptic visions found in the Book of Revelation and elsewhere signify that Christ will someday return personally to earth, will establish an earthly kingdom with its capital in Jerusalem, and will reign over the earth from that city for exacdy one thousand years. Dispensational premillennialism—without which Protestant fundamentalism as we know it today would not exist—adds to this belief the notion that human history has broken down into several periods, known as dispensations, during each of which human beings lived under a different set of divine laws and criteria for salvation. According to this scheme, the present period is the "church age," or sixth dispensation, which Darby described as an era marked by apostasy and the erosion of Christian morality. This period will be followed by an event called the Rapture, or Secret Rapture, when all saved Christians will ascend into the sky to meet Christ and to be safeguarded from the Great Tribulation, a time of violence and death that will eventually be succeeded by Christ's triumphant thousand-year reign on earth and his Last Judgment of humankind.
The utterly untraditional nature of dispensationalism can hardly be overstated. The religious historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom notes that although adherents of dispensationalism claim to be biblical literalists, "its extensive use of typology, its commitment to numerology, and its dependence on highly debatable (not to say fanciful) interpretations of some obscure apocalyptic passages have led many to insist that its interpretation is anything but literal." Indeed. Yet dispensationalism has thrived. Though the Plymouth Brethren remain a tiny sect, with a total membership in the United States of about forty thousand, the theology of Darby—who spent much of his later years spreading dispensationalism to North American clergy—has taken root far beyond the denomination he helped found.
This success owes much to a near contemporary of Darby's— namely Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution, set forth in Origin of Species (1859), was viewed by some Christians with alarm. The Bible said that God had made the world in six days and had finished the job by creating Adam and Eve; Darwin deduced from fossil evidence that human beings had evolved from other life forms over millions of years. While some Christians perceived readily enough that certain Bible stories need not be taken literally and thus didn't contradict Darwin's discoveries, others—for whom Christianity was essentially a matter of fixed, unyielding l
aw and doctrine—saw Darwinism as striking at the very core of their religion.
Also perceived as a threat was the so-called Higher Criticism. In 1835, a German biblical scholar named David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. In this meticulous study, Strauss sought to separate out the Bible's historical elements from the merely legendary. Strauss (whose work had been anticipated not only by Jefferson but also by an eighteenth-century German linguist, Hermann Samuel Reimarus) was the first of many nineteenth-century scholars to bring the objective methods of historical research and textual analysis to bear upon scripture. Along with various successors, who like him made use of archeological discoveries in the Holy Land, Strauss sought to determine the circumstances under which the scriptures had been written and to obtain as accurate as possible a picture of the historical context of the Bible and, especially, of the man called Jesus. What these scholars sought, quite simply, was the truth: What had Jesus really been like? What had he really preached, expected, stood for? In what ways had the Church, over the centuries, distorted his message? While many Christians welcomed this scholarly approach to the Bible, which they hoped would bring a clearer understanding of the truth of God, others felt that the Higher Criticism—which drew attention to biblical errors in science and history as well as to scores of internal contradictions that for centuries had been quietly ignored by preachers and seminaries—represented a potentially deadly threat to the Christian faith.