-Mark Noll
I recently finished Mark A. Noll's The Old Religion in a New World. This was a shorter abridgement of his textbook, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, written for a European (German) audience, and reworked for English speaking readers. It is a study of the rise of denominationalism in North America, with a look at movements (especially revivalism) and major figures from Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Smith, George Whitefield to Billy Sunday.
Noll attributed the American contribution to Christian history to the break from European conservativism, with its hereditary caste system and strong church-state connections. The other three contributors were space, race, and plurality. By far the most influential was space. The frontier, with an infinite wilderness, allowed for both break-away groups (Hutchinson, Williams), evangelistic churches with European roots (Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians), and later indigenous bodies (Campbellites, Mormons, Pentecostals), to form their own congregations. If they were faced with government interference (as in early Boston) or persecution (as was true of the Mormons in Illinois), there was always more room to find a place of rest.
The state followed this impulse for religious freedom in the Declaration’s statements about divine rights, and the Constitution’s First Amendment. Christianity in America was a new thing, with a new mind-set. The faith was, to be redundant, Americanized. And, even after the settlement of the country, this same sense of freedom and never-ending expansion is locked into the American religious psyche.
So, on a personal note: reading Noll’s book was a great review of the past. I could have wished for more interaction and even interpretation by the author, instead of the repetition of facts and numbers-- subjectivity would have been more fun than historical objectivity. I never felt bored reading this account, but I did find myself tired--worn out by the sheer volume of groups, sub-groups, splinters, imports from the old world, view-points, new indigenous movements, sects, theologies, revivals, renewals, para-church organizations, social movements, political entanglements, ethnic groups, and in some cases, just plain weirdness, all as a result of an incredible freedom never before experienced by a religious faith.
Noll pointed out that even the most stable and ancient churches are effected by Americanization. The Roman church has bent over backwards to prove that it is a patriotic member of the greater culture. It has insisted that the papacy binds the conscience of the believer in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters only; that it has no authority in political or civic issues. And we all know how seriously American Catholics take the Vatican's stance on birth control and other moral issues. Noll also predicted that, with its great influx of disenchanted evangelicals, Orthodoxy will follow the same cultural path over time.
Let me mention at least four drawbacks of the Americanization of Christianity:
1) It is almost impossible for the church to speak prophetically to the state or the general culture. This is both because it cannot agree on the prophetic word, and because the culture perceives the church as broken and inconsistent. A classic example was the defense of both abolition and slavery by Christians prior to the Civil War, using texts from the same Bible. Non-Christians witnessed literal bloodshed among members of the same faith. This attitude among unbelievers has not really changed.
2) There is no theological maturity or standard. One can join the Roman Church, a Protestant body, or the Fire Baptized Apostolic Church of God of Prophecy of the Two Seeds of Abraham. Freedom means that any Tom, Dick, or Harriett can open a storefront and proclaim whatever. Freedom remains, and mediocrity increases.
3) The Quest for the True Church is near to impossible. What new Christian can objectively find the most mature, biblical, traditional, in-step, relevant, loving, nearest-to-the-heart-of-God, Christ-centered fellowship in a potpourri of over 600 denominations, including at least 10 major varieties of Protestants (with sub-divisions), and approximately 8 Orthodox communions (most of them ethnic)?
4) Church discipline and commitment to a religious community will always be shallow, except in groups that have established closed geographic boundaries (such as the Amish in Pennsylvania). The same freedom that allowed Roger Williams to leave the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts allows me to move to the church down the street if my present church demands moral or theological accountability. It is easy to hide behind the trees in the garden and never deal with my nakedness.
These drawbacks are the fruit of freedom, and I am not sure that the antidote is old world structure or tyranny. While the price of (political) freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of religious freedom may be eternal trivialization. Or perhaps there is another, healthier, way to look at the American religious experiment.
There is a parallel between what happened in the Christian communities along the eastern coast of North America and the Big Bang. All the potential of future religious development was pressurized in those communities, and after a few preliminary probes, it erupted across a continent in a display of galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, hot fires and cooling metals--all originating from the same source. The explosion was fed over time by waves of immigrants fleeing poverty, political oppression, and in many cases, religious persecution.
Or to put it in terms of the faith: how could the truth of God’s coming among men, his word and story, his passion, new life, and presence in his people, be contained in one set of perceptions, without exploding and re-expressing itself in myriads of ways? I cannot help but think that all the variety points to something too glorious to contain, and the multiplicity began with a single Source. An amazing story can only be told through time in hundreds of different ways.
