Compromising Positions

At the WHI taping I attended, the topic was “Selling Jesus: Consumerism and Market Values in the Church,” and OHS Clark jumped in early with a quote from Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity:

Amidst this population boom [1775-1845], American Christianity became a mass enterprise. The eighteen hundred Christian ministers serving in 1775 swelled to nearly forty thousand by 1845. The number of preachers per capita more than tripled; the colonial legacy of one minister per fifteen hundred inhabitants became one per five hundred. … Twice the number of denominations competed for adherents, and insurgent groups enjoyed the upper hand.

This was only a few days after Echo sent me a fascinating article about a trend towards political moderation in the Religious Right. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, observed similar revivalism and denominational proliferation in the Britain of his day (1776):

Smith observed a relationship between these revivals and the process that we now call urbanization. Young people, arriving in cities in search of work, faced new opportunities and temptations without the structure that village life—with its communities of relatives and others that watched and guided young people—had provided. “A single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman forever,” wrote Smith about life in London. But the city’s small sectarian religious congregations gave rural immigrants a social-support network and a moral code that could keep them on the straight and narrow as they built new lives. These movements were a response to the dislocations of modernity; there was no reason to expect them to fade away.

Yet in the teeming religious marketplace of Britain’s cities, Smith also saw pressures that would limit the political impact of religious beliefs and prevent theocracy. With so many competing denominations, he noted, religious leaders could acquire political influence only by finding allies outside their own version of the faith—and the process of forming those alliances would drive them toward agendas that could appeal to a wider, multi-faith audience. To be politically significant, he wrote, religious extremists had to move toward broader and necessarily more-moderate coalitions. Their entry into politics would, itself, moderate them.

Indeed, what is politics, but compromise? (That is a small question, in the middle of a long post, but really it is the core of the post, so stop a second and let it sink in) If the Church’s mission is to “engage the culture” (or even yuckier: “redeem the culture”!) via politics, then success requires compromise, and an uncompromising Church will necessarily be a failure. This is the mentality that got us to our current infatuation with “deeds, not creeds.”

So that was then (18th century Britain, post-revolution U.S.); and this is now. Plus ça change… Yesterday, Clark posted on Heidelblog about the brouhaha currently raging at Westminster Philadelphia (WTSP). While am not intending to analyze WTSP’s situation in particular, this quote is applicable to the church as a whole:

The pressure is immense to conform to the theology, piety, and practice of the evangelicals. There is not a great “market” in North America for Reformed confessionalism. There are at least 60 million American evangelicals. There are probably no more than one half million confessional Reformed folk. Put another way, the evangelicals are at least 120 times larger than NAPARC. Implicitly it has been promised to confessional Reformed institutions that if they will only give a little on Reformed distinctives (e.g. the regulative principle, the sabbath, Word and sacrament) they will be allowed to retain what is “really important” (e.g. predestination) and we will be made “influential” and even wealthy with larger students bodies and more donations. Of course it’s a Faustian bargain. By making such a bargain Reformed folk have allowed others to define them.

I have some additional thoughts, but as this post is long and self-contained enough, I’ll stop here for now.