The movie was less than classic, and I’m a little embarrassed to refer to it. But in Father of the Bride Martin Short told Steve Martin that “every party has a pooper, and that’s you, George Banks.”  Poor George, he was just trying to bring sanity to a family going berzerko. Likewise, amongst other concerns, Darryl Hart wonders aloud if the latest bout of declarative statements has more to do with thanking the Most High for not being born a Gentile than beating one’s chest and begging for mercy:

I do not mean to question the motives of anyone who signed, but isn’t it possible that a measure of moral grandstanding goes into these statements, along with very little policy or legislative reform, because these statements are so far removed from the legislatures, courts, and chambers of elected officials? Meanwhile, such statements do function to throw down yet another gauntlet in the culture wars, thus inviting as much opposition as support and cementing the stalemate that already exists between the parties of morality and license.

Many conservative evangelicals and emerging “post-evangelicals” display their common heritage in an American revivalist tradition that Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as “Protestantism without the Reformation.” In a recent issue of TIME on Pope Benedict’s critical relationship with Islam, conservative Catholic scholar Michael Novak was quoted as saying concerning the pontiff, “His role is to represent Western civilization.” There are a lot of evangelical leaders who seem to think that this is their job, too. The mission of the church is to drive out the Romans (i.e., Democrats) and make the world safe for democracy. The Emergent movement’s politics are different: they lean left rather than right. For many reared on the “Christian America” hype of the religious right, this may seem like a major shift, but it’s just a change in parties rather than a deeper shift from moralism to evangelical mission. The Emergent sociology is different, too: Starbucks and acoustic guitars in dark rooms with candles rather than Wal-Mart and praise bands in bright-lighted theaters. Yet in either case, moralism continues to push “Christ crucified” to the margins.

A friend passes along a quote from The Soul of the Indian by Charles Eastman. Written in 1911, Eastman, a Sioux Indian and grandson of Chief Cloudman, tries to present true Indian religion. He points out disagreements with Christianity, and why some Indians had problems with the Christianity to which the White Man tried to convert them:

[The Indian] might in time come to recognize that the drunkards and the licentious among white men, with whom he too frequently came in contact, were condemned by the white man’s religion as well, and must not be held to discredit it. But it was not so easy to overlook or to excuse the national bad faith. When distinguished emissaries from the Father at Washington, some of them ministers of the gospel and even bishops, came to the Indian nations, and pledged to them in solemn treaty the national honor, with prayer and mention of their God; and when such treaties, so made, were promptly and shamelessly broken, is it strange that the action should arouse not only anger, but contempt? The historians of the white race admit the Indian was never the first to repudiate his oath. It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years’ experience of it, that there is no such thing as ‘Christian civilization.’ I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.

Clearly, while there is such a thing as Christians doing civilization, there can be no such thing as a “Christian civilization.”

But what might lead Eastman to the curious view that Christianity and paganism are essentially the same? One explanation is that, like most who generally confuse true religion with false religion, it’s all about law. From Mormonism to Bahá’í, the system really is one of natural religion whereby human creatures work themselves to whatever degrees back to the garden. Whatever diversity might distinguish something like Sikhism from Scientology from Islam from Hinduism, paganism may be said to basically revolve around natural law and knows nothing of super-natural gospel. Another related explanation, the one that seems to be Eastman’s point (however unintended), might concern the legacy of Constantinianism. It seems clear that what Eastman has his finger on is the sort of cultural Christianity that developed in the west ever since Constantine ascended to power and reconciled the two kingdoms. The WASP-y cultural Christianity in which I was reared—as well as the evangelical subculture into which I married— would have found the notion of opposing kingdoms at best obscure and at worst a signal of hostility to the peace of earth. That is because Western religionists across various traditions who want to see the kingdoms stay on friendly terms boil true religion down to something that is useful for nurturing good citizens, otherwise known as false religion. Like Eisenhower said, “ I believe every American should have a religious faith and I don’t care what it is.”  Despite Jesus saying things like he came to divide households, both wine-and-cheese WASPs and tee-totaling evangelicals like that sentiment.

But while Eastman may rightly want to reject the premise of a Christian civilization, he does so for what appears to be the wrong reason, namely, that those who would foist  true religion onto the heathen-pagan-savages did so with all the hypocrisy that universal religion opposes. In other words, the law was broken and undermined the credibility of their claims. But not only is this to miss the simple teaching of Calvinism that sinners sin because they are sinners and not because they are them and not us, it also implies that should the Constantinians have exported cultural Christianity with less duplicity the project would have been more successful. And pagans and Christians would’ve lived in harmony ever after. But the better reason to reject the alleged notion of Christian civilization is that to confuse the kingdoms is tantamount to confusing law and gospel, that to seek to reconcile the left hand kingdom with the right is actually that age-old impulse to make law out of gospel and gospel out of law. After all, if the left hand is ruled by law and the right by grace, wouldn’t it seem that any effort to harmonize the kingdoms one iota is at least in the same ballpark sneaking sanctification into justification?

It has been noted before that many Reformed, along with the general population of religionists and non-religionists, seem to have the idea that legalism is about substance use and worldly amusement. But in the same way, Reformed also seem to assume that the so-called “prosperity gospel” ever only has something to do with mansions, moola and bling. But to the extent that prosperity-ism, like legalism, is really just a set of principles, this means it is highly mobile and rather easily applied to just about any set of felt needs.

So while there is most assuredly a crass and sweaty version of prosperity gospel, there are also versions for the more staid suburbanite as well as those in the upper crust regions of human society. Thus, for example, in the sober mid-western suburban world I inhabit, where cash is carried in wallets and “wearing it on one’s sleeve” is reckoned, well, let’s be honest, sinful, true religion helps nice white folks invoke biblical principles to manage their money, children and relationships. And, where the new trinity is “happiness, healthiness and wholeness,” if there is enough left over, inner peace and happiness goes to him who can survey his private kingdom existing in shalom.

But there is also a version of prosperity for those whose felt needs are issues involving statecraft, cultural institution and political enterprise. A good example is, once again, the wrong reverend Bret McAtee, who currently wants to deconstruct R. Scott Clark for suggesting that, while it has no social agenda, the gospel can and does have a social consequence. But what he ends up really revealing is a social version of the more individually oriented prosperity gospel. In the social prosperity gospel it is the institution instead of the individual that becomes the object of disdain for not having invoked the right biblical principles for victory.  When it is asked why, after two thousand years, the world is still what it always was when humanity was sent packing east of Eden, rife with all manner of miseries of the flesh, the social prosperity gospelizer will answer in a classic “blame the victim” answer.

Prosperity of any variety is marked by many things. But it seems most recognizable by its rather impatient impatience for having to actually live in a world or skin that is as subject to frailty and failure as it has always been. It seems to have no category for loss or weakness. It cannot explain these things but elects instead to rail against them as proof that indwelling sin is not just the fault of the sinner but also his sole duty to rectify. This is a far cry from the injunction to mortify the flesh and fight against the world, the flesh and the devil. It is a glorified moralism, a theistic pulling up of one’s boots straps. It isn’t a complete mystery, as the imago Dei was originally created with a deeply ingrained impulse to inaugurate paradise. But this is actually the very point of Christianity. To embrace prosperity is to miss that true religion is to confront our original and glorious mandate turned criminal, whether it’s by way of bling, inner happiness or a Christian nation.

To the relative neglect of heeding the gospel call by the Host of heaven on his terms, there are all sorts of felt needs to be met on man’s terms. They range from the trivial and petty to the evolved and sophisticated.  One of the dangers for Presbyterians who tend to easily recognize the former in popular expressions of religion is to miss it when it comes to questions of statecraft, holding out that holy writ really does have something directly to say about how we order public life.  Yes, Joel Osteen is a problem.  But how often are other names named or otherwise identified? When do we raise our hands when certain political ideologies, if yet popularized and closer to trivial than sophisticated, stand to bask in the soft glow of heavenly sanction? At least one Presbyterian is appropriately skeptical:

Publication of The American Patriot’s Bible ought to provoke a much needed debate in the United States about the church’s right relationship to civil society. This Bible may become a landmark in that debate, clarifying the issues as never before, forcing people to recognize the degree to which Americanism has penetrated Christianity. An Augustinian perspective may help frame that conversation. In Book XIX of The City of God, the Bishop of Hippo explained in which areas there can be peace and in which there must be conflict between the earthly and the heavenly cities. Christian and non-Christian have a common interest in earthly peace, good order, and the “necessaries of life.” But in matters of worship, Augustine wrote, the Christian was forced to “dissent” from the earthly city. The limits of the common life had been reached. The Christian was forced “to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions…” Praising piety and faith in general alongside remnants of the historic Christian faith, The American Patriot’s Bible combines the things of God and the things of Caesar at the very point where they most vigilantly need to be kept apart. When the City of Man sets up Americanism as its faith, the Christian is forced to dissent.

Read the whole review here.

Although he advanced a simple explanation—some would call it no explanation at all—Machen’s analysis did not lack historical awareness. In addition to questioning the dominant position in New Testament studies, Machen thought that a study of Paul would resolve several problems surrounding Christianity’s emergence as a world religion. One concerned the Bible’s enormous influence on Western society. How could a “thoroughly Semitic book,” Machen wondered, come to a place of prominence even greater “than the glories of Greek literature” in a civilization shaped by the language, literature, and philosophy of Greece and Rome? The intrinsic value of the Bible could not explain this phenomenon since “the race from which the Bible came” had been despised throughout Western history. Christianity’s influence upon the West was also worthy of historical investigation because this religion originated among a “very peculiar people.” In A.D. 35 Christianity appeared to be nothing more than “a Jewish sect” but within thirty years was “plainly a world religion.” Such questions gave The Origin of Paul’s Religion a tone that clearly separated his criticisms of liberal scholars from fundamentalist diatribes against higher criticism.

D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America

Machen was indeed concerned about the dangers that “cultural modernism” posed to traditional faith. But he was even more worried about the “modernism” of American Protestantism and the cultural outlook upon which Protestantism reconstructions rested. For Machen, the moves by Protestants to “modernize” the faith—and not the efforts of “cultural modernists” to move beyond Christianity—comprised the greatest danger to Christianity. For by refashioning Christianity mainline Protestants hoped to maintain the churches’ role as cultural guardian. But in the process, Machen believed, they had confused influence with faithfulness. In fact, he held that theological integrity and cultural authority were inversely related: a theology eager for public influence invariably compromised the Christian faith, while a principled theology could at best benefit society indirectly.

Machen’s cultural concerns, thus, made him in the 1920s a reluctant ally of secular intellectuals but in the 1930s would cost him the support of the fundamentalists. Like Machen, though for different reasons, cultural modernists also bristled under mainstream Protestantism’s moral code, rejected its cheery estimate of human nature and the universe, and opposed its bid to Christianize American society. The subtext of Machen’s theological critique of Protestant modernism—that the churches had no business meddling in society—was good news to the secularists who thought that America’s Protestant ethos impeded intellectual and cultural life. Fundamentalists, in contrast, were virtually deaf to Machen’s ideas about the relationship between Christianity and culture. To most conservatives throughout the 1920s, Machen was a champion of orthodoxy who had reestablished the theological foundations for Christian civilization in America. By the 1930s, however, his understanding of the church’s limited role in public life began to alienate fundamentalists. When Machen’s efforts to reform the Presbyterian Church were finally thwarted and he withdrew in 1936 to form a new denomination, his new church attracted few fundamentalists. They stayed away at least in part because they, unlike Machen, shared with modernizing Protestants the belief that Christian values constituted the bedrock of American society.

D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America

In other words, while natural religion is important to make the world go ‘round, Christianity serves another, more counter-intuitive purpose, namely the reconciliation of sinners to God. Arguably, this really was the supreme contribution Machen made: true religion has no obvious implication for or direct bearing on the cares of this world; it is irrelevant to the traditions of men no matter how he conceives of them and no matter how important they may be to this present life; it does not make bad people (or their cultures) good or good people (or their cultures) better; while it certainly has one resident within it, Christianity is certainly not a way of life.

Not everyone seems convinced that Machen was onto something though. Contra Machen, the suggestion here is that Christianity creates culture and that good culture is dependent upon an unadulterated Christianity.

If this isn’t an example of “alienated fundamentalism” I’m hard-pressed to know what is.

“Tradition. The prayer breakfast got started in mid-1930s Seattle, where traveling preacher Abraham Vereide held morning meetings for politicians and businessmen to pray about—and try to combat—poverty and the spread of communism. He decided on breakfast due to the Christian tradition of morning prayers and, it’s said, as a nod to John 21—wherein Jesus appears to his disciples in the early morning by the Sea of Tiberias and helps them catch fish. Breakfast was also practical, since 7 or 7:30 a.m. meetings didn’t interfere with the workday or with family obligations in the evening.”

That seems to go well with the notion that true religion is useful. After all, like my mother always said, breakfast is brain food.  She was a school-teacher. She was supposed to say that.

But does confessional Protestantism really think that true religion is good for everything from wiping out poverty to Pinko’s? It seems to me that things like National Prayer Breakfasts are good for wiping out Protestant ecclesiology specifically and doing serious damage to true religion generally.