Religion: Is Protestantism Slipping?

Have statistics got anything to do with religion? Not much, concludes Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. U.S. Protestantism may not be losing ground numerically, but its religious vitality is slipping.

Protestantism, says Niebuhr, began to wane after 1850. "It was the affinity between Evangelical Christianity and frontier democracy which made churches of sectarian origin, notably the Methodist and Baptist, the most powerful churches of our nation. . . . But the Evangelical antidote against secularism was not to prove permanently effective."

In the South, says Niebuhr, the evangelical churches could not cope with the moral issue of slavery and therefore channeled their energies into "a scrupulous legalism, expressed in extravagant rules of Sabbath observance and a prurient attitude toward sex problems." In the North, evangelicalism "degenerated into that mixture of religious sentiment and the worship of prosperity, success and comfort which inevitably . . . obscures, rather than clarifies, the real issues of life."

Disillusion & Despair. Meanwhile, secularism was on the rise. The Protestant reaction to this challenge, says Niebuhr, took two forms. "One section of the church, usually identified as 'fundamentalist,' has sought to preserve the Christian heritage by denying every achievement of science . . . and by wrapping the essential truths of the Christian faith in obscurantism. . . . The other section of the church, usually defined as 'liberal'. . . has been pathetically eager to relate itself creatively to the achievements of a secular age—so eager, in fact, that it . . . has been inclined to sacrifice every characteristic Christian insight if only it could thereby prove itself intellectually respectable. . . . Modern man's faith in progress is at such complete variance with a history which presents him with ever more perplexing issues . . . that the faith is becoming discredited, and disillusion and despair follow in its wake. Liberal Christianity is involved in this disillusionment. Having sought to make a success story of the biblical history of a Crucified Savior . . . it finds itself unable to cope with the tragic experiences of our day."

The other great failure of Protestantism, says Niebuhr, lies in its "inability to preserve the allegiance of the industrial workers of modern civilization. . . . Protestantism was the religion of the common man in the days of the American frontier. But as frontiersmen graduated into the middle class, the Protestant Church tended to move up one rung in the social ladder and to step down one rung from prophetic vitality to the complacency of the established order. Catholicism, on the other hand, has never lost sight of the social character of man's existence. . . ."