The Great Divide

This week, in addition to enjoying summer break (personally, with my family as well as professionally, by getting some work done) I have been doing some various blog/article reading on what some might consider to be the Great Divide in American Protestant Religious History of the twentieth century:  that between the Religious Left and Religious Right.

Now, this topic is one that I talk a good deal about in The Mainline, so I won't go over what I say there here.  Rather, I want to say a few things about what I've been reading as well as touch on something else that this great divide has gotten me thinking about while I soak up the summer sun.  First, there are the articles announcing the decline of the Religious Right/resurgence of the Religious Left (which is something I mentioned in the book might happen, and more likely would be something that scholars claimed following the election of President Obama in 2008).  There is little doubt that there has been an out pouring of scholarship of late on the Religious Left/Liberal evangelicals (here is a New York Times article about it), and that this is important in its own right, as well as something (from an academic stand point) to be welcomed.  Liberal Protestantism does need more study, and doing so might also add more nuance to the discussion of Mainline decline as well as better appreciate the complexities of American Protestantism and how it has related to American culture and politics in the last 50 to 60 years.

That being said, should it be triumphant?  Some of this scholarship seems to imply that liberal Protestantism is responsible for the civil rights movement, the Great Society, indeed of "liberalism" in the American political and cultural senses.  And at least some recent polls seem to argue that Religious Progressives/Religious Left are growing in the United States and that decline has (at last, some of them say) set into the Religious Right.

It sounds nice, but it falls flat I think.  As some of these scholars point out, what they really need to study (and is also perhaps a large flaw in the above argument) is why liberalism continued in American life/culture, but liberal Protestantism did not.  But there are other problems with this hypothesis as well, chiefly that it discounts Roman Catholics and their contributions to these projects, it assumes that denominational pronouncements reflect congregational realities, and assumes that religious conservatives did not have a hand in shaping some of these trends as well (not just in terms of opposition, but also in offering different courses to travel the same journey).  And as for the triumphant talk based on polls, I will allow others who have read the data do the dissection, here and here.  Needless to say, I am not ready to pronounce either the Religious Left triumphant, nor declare the Religious Right dead.  Indeed, one of the other articles I have read this week reminded me (and other readers) that the Religious Right has a much longer history than it is sometimes given credit for (and as such, not only is there more study to be done on it, but it probably is stronger than a it is currently being credited for).  That complexity, I hope, is something else I touched on in the pages of The Mainline.

So, if none of these articles, as good and as informative as they were -- and whether I agreed with them entirely or not -- was not the sum of my ruminations, then what was?  Well, dear reader, like any good inquiry, such reading got me thinking.  And what I got to thinking about was whether or not this Great Divide (Left and Right) was worth more ink (at least from me, at least right now), or if there was something else -- right under the surface of these articles/arguments, that demands more attention.  If I had limitless time, I might just be pondering if we needed to study a great divide that was greater still than Left and Right in American Religious History, one that as I have thought about it deserves much more attention than either just in passing within larger works or that is largely ignored by focusing on groups/denominational leadership.   And that Great Divide is the one between rural, suburban, and urban congregations in the progress of American Religious History, past, present, and future.

Perhaps it is because my son (the younger of my children) asked this week if we lived in a rural place or in the city and my daughter, the older, more experienced one in the ways of the world and social study terminology, was quick to offer (correct) textbook answers.  Maybe it was because I read a really great article about American Religious History and Indiana (kudos Elesha Coffman).  Perhaps it is because I grew up in a rural community, moved to an urban one, and now reside in a rapidly suburban one.  Or maybe it is just because I think increasingly that place matters.  Where you are shapes who you are (in both good ways and bad), and shapes what you do while you are there (as my First Year Seminar students learn when I subject them to a professor led campus tour each Fall).  The long and the short of it is that I think we might understand the rise/fall/rise (and dare I even argue formulation) of both the Religious Left and the Religious Right better IF we started looking at how rural, suburban, urban impacted the congregations that made up the denominations that came to make up both.  It would lead to some interesting questions, like did/do rural Catholics and rural Protestants share the same values/beliefs more so than there urban co-denominationalists?  Where are we more apt to find non-denominationalism (and why)?  Does having a denominational headquarters (and its location) matter to how representative its pronouncements on issues are?

Those are some of the questions that came to mind as I have dwelt on the topic this week.  I think that studying this Great Divide could prove interesting.   It might even be more important, in the long run, to understanding what has driven the Mainline of the Seven Sisters, as well as the new one I believe has emerged within American Christianity.