Liberal Christianity Research Paper

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‘Liberal’ is the designation given to a broad trajectory in Christianity by sympathisers and critics alike. In some of its manifestations it is also referred to as ‘modernism.’ Both terms draw attention to a defining characteristic: a dissatisfaction with earlier forms of religion and a concern to replace them with less restrictive alternatives more open to the spirit of the age. Whilst it has rarely led to the establishment of new churches, liberalism has had a significant impact within all the mainline Christian denominations in the West.

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Understood in this broad sense, liberal Christianity can be seen to date back even before the Renaissance to the fifteenth century, when the term ‘modern’ was first invoked in relation to reforming movements in theology and spirituality like the ‘Via Moderna’ and the ‘Devotio Moderna.’ Since then Western Christianity has been challenged repeatedly by individuals and movements who have championed the freedom of the individual Christian over against the authority of institutional religion. Yet it is in the modern period that liberal Christianity has become most prominent and has played its most important role in shaping modernity itself.

By the end of the twentieth century something of a consensus had developed amongst sociologists of religion that liberal Christianity was in inexorable decline. This consensus coincided with a period when theological liberalism had fallen out of fashion. It will be challenged in what follows on three grounds: (a) it overlooks the internal variety of liberal Christianity, (b) it ignores evidence of its continuing vitality on the ground, and (c) it fails to recognize that liberal Christianity remains well adapted to many of the socio-economic formations and cultural trends of the modern world.




1. Varieties Of Liberalism

1.1 Rationalist

One of the most important ways in which liberal Christianity is implicated with the rise of modernity is through its central role in the Enlightenment of the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. In their different ways such figures as the Deists, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant were all concerned with the liberal reform of religion. They helped shape a liberal Christianity which was characterized by (a) hostility to ‘traditional’ religion, conceived as superstitious, heteronomous, and divisive, (b) confidence in human reason and the primacy of the sovereign individual, (c) activist optimism about the possibilities of human and social improvement, (d) belief in the harmonious unity of all true (‘natural’) religion, and (e) high valuation of freedom. Rationalist liberalism tended to be primarily an intellectual movement, though it was often related closely to political radicalism. At the institutional level it gave rise to the Unitarian and Universalist churches.

1.2 Romantic

Whilst many sociologists identify liberal Christianity with its rationalist forms, there are other important varieties. By the late eighteenth century, for example, a Romantic liberalism had begun to exercise an important cultural and religious influence. In America this was best represented by Transcendentalism, and in Germany by the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Romantic liberalism inherited rationalist liberalism’s belief that the individual rather than the institution was the locus of true religion (‘my mind is my church,’ as Tom Paine had put it), but stressed the authority of feeling, imagination, experience, and self-consciousness rather than reason. This stress on the importance of individual experience of God has been carried through into the twentieth century in the work of theologians like Rudolph Bultmann and Paul Tillich.

1.3 Ethical And Social

Kant had located religious authority in moral reason. This ‘ethicisation’ of the Christian religion was taken further in Germany by theologians like Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, and Adolf von Harnack, and in America by theologians like Horace Bushnell and Walter Rauschenbusch. The latter, the leader of the Social Gospel movement, was responsible for interpreting Christianity as a force for social reform in industrial society.

1.4 Liberation And Feminist

In the twentieth century the influence of liberal Christianity continues to be felt in new reform movements within the churches and theology, most notably in some important varieties of Liberation theology (a product of Latin America) and Feminist Theology (a product of North America and Western Europe). In both we find a characteristic emphasis on human liberation and the authority of experience, combined with a thoroughgoing criticism of existing structures of power and domination in both the churches and wider society, and a bias towards the oppressed and marginal.

2. The Development Of Modern Liberalism

Liberalism has had the greatest impact within mainline Protestant churches, and has been particularly influential in countries where Protestantism has been dominant. Most commentators consider its heyday to have been from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s. Liberalism flourished because it was able to meet the new challenges posed by the forces of modernisation. Its critical stance towards Christian tradition enabled it to assimilate the rise of historical method and its application to the Bible. Equally, its long-held belief in progress and the capacity of human reason to fathom the mysteries of God and the world helped it embrace the discoveries of modern science, including evolution. What is more, its libertarianism and individualism enabled it to support the interests of the new middle classes and to play a legitimating role in relation to democracy and the modern state. Far from being threatened by rapid modernisation in the nineteenth century, liberal Christianity tended to view itself as the religious and moral engine of social progress. Nowhere was this truer than in the USA. In Catholic countries the picture was very different. There, led by an increasingly defensive Rome, the church explicitly repudiated the errors of ‘modernism’ (which included political and religious liberalism), and allied itself with the forces of reaction. In 1907 Pope Pius X condemned those Catholic ‘modernists’ who had embraced aspects of theological liberalism, and introduced an anti-Modernist oath for the clergy which effectively brought to an end all attempts to develop a liberal Catholicism. It was not until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5 that a moderate liberalism gained official sanction. Since then there has been an explosion of liberal thought in the Catholic church, despite Pope John Paul II’s attempts to curb its influence. The work of theologians like Hans Kung, as well as the rise of Liberation Theology and Feminist Theology has been particularly notable.

The twentieth century has brought unprecedented challenges for Liberal Christianity. These include the rise of conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and, at the theological level, the rise of Neo-orthodoxy. At the same time many elements of the liberal creed—including belief in progress, reason, ‘humanity,’ and the ideal of religious unity—have been shaken both inside and outside the churches. This together with shrinking attendance in the mainline Protestant churches most influenced by liberalism has led many commentators to conclude that it is in terminal decline. What this conclusion overlooks, however, is that the mainline denominations still account for the vast majority of Christians (especially if one includes the Catholic church), and that many within these denominations (including the Catholic churches) continue to embrace some version of liberal Christianity (see below). What is more, liberalism remains extremely well adapted to societies that show no real sign of diminishing their commitment to freedom, equality, democracy, and a liberal individualism reinforced by the institutions of a free-market economy.

3. Liberalism On The Ground

Dean Kelley’s book Why the Conservative Churches are Growing (1972) captured a new mood in the sociology of religion. Where secularisation theory had previously encouraged the conclusion that the more traditional and anti-modern forms of religion would be those which would decline most rapidly, the growth of conservative and sectarian bodies alongside evidence of the decline of more liberal denominations led to a change of mind after the 1960s. As noted below, sociological theory was quickly mobilized to explain this change, and to reinforce the prediction of further liberal decline.

Much of the case for liberal decline focuses on the American example. It is clear from census data in the US, like the General Social Survey (GSS), that the three denominations it classifies as ‘liberal’ (Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ) did indeed decline after 1970. So too did the three denominations it labels as ‘moderate’ (United Methodist, Lutheran, and Disciples of Christ), together with the Roman Catholic church. By contrast more conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Seventh-day Adventists grew in numbers. There is some evidence, however, that numbers in the liberal denominations may now be stabilising (Roof and McKinney 1987), and it may therefore be premature to pronounce on the relative success or failure of liberal and conservative Christianity in modern times.

It is also necessary to exercise caution when relying on data relating to levels of denominational attendance and affiliation alone in assessing the state of liberal Christianity in the churches. The main problem with this method is that it is blind to complex patterns of belief and commitment within churches and denominations. For example, most mainline churches today—both Catholic and Protestant—contain both liberals and conservatives within their congregations, and it is increasingly hard to label whole denominations ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ What is more, there is some important evidence that even more conservative forms of Catholic and evangelical Christianity are increasingly permeable to the influence of liberalism. Thus James Davison Hunter’s extensive research among college-age Evangelicals in American uncovered evidence of an increasing liberalisation of their belief, values, and practice (Hunter 1987).

The best way to assess the relative strength of liberalism in the contemporary churches would seem to be through intensive and widespread congregational study. The most important work of this kind is that undertaken by Ammerman (1997) who studied 23 representative congregations across the USA and surveyed almost 2,000 individuals. Her discovery was that respondents fell into three categories: liberal or ‘Golden Rule’ Christians (51 percent), evangelicals (29 percent), and social activists (19 percent). On the basis of her research Ammerman challenges the assumption that religious liberalism is a spent force, and that liberal religiosity is a paler reflection of conservative Christianity. The Golden Rule Christianity she describes is characterized by an emphasis on the primacy of good deeds motivated by love, care, and compassion, and by a belief in the importance of religious tolerance.

It may be that Ammerman has discovered a fifth variety of Christian liberalism—one which might be labelled ‘relational,’ and whose significance on the ground in the second part of the twentieth century has been largely overlooked.

4. Sociological Interpretations

At least three clusters of explanations have been offered by sociologists of religion to account for the rise of liberal Christianity in modern times. It has been explained as (a) an accommodation or even a capitulation to modernity (Peter Berger), (b) a natural outgrowth of Protestantism and, in particular, of the latter’s emphasis on personal subjective conviction (Ernst Troeltsch), and (c) a means by which the clergy, their social status undermined by modernity, have attempted to protest and regain a social role (Jeffrey Hadden). Woodhead and Heelas (2000) have also drawn attention to liberal Christianity’s compatibility with modern socio-economic formations and wider cultural trends such as the turn to the self.

Sociologists have also developed theories to account for liberal Christianity’s apparent decline. Kelley explained this by drawing a contrast with conservative religion. Where the latter was ‘strict’ and ‘challenging,’ the latter was the opposite. As such, he argued, it was unable to generate or sustain commitment, consensus or strong community. Peter Berger offered a more rigorous version of this explanation by arguing that plausibility is a function of unanimity. The strong, unified communities that characterize conservative religion are better able to sustain plausibility than are the more diffuse and less disciplined communities of liberalism. Meanwhile sociologists like Talcott Parsons and David Martin have also argued that liberalism is a victim of its own success: because its beliefs and values are so close to those of the wider culture it is no longer able to sustain a distinctive identity nor to hold or attract adherents.

Much of this theoretical work depends on a contrast drawn between liberal and conservative Christianity. It is also important to note another boundary: that be- tween liberal Christianity and radical or ‘alternative’ forms of spirituality. For whilst the fate of liberal Christianity is bound up with that of conservative Christianity, it is also bound up with that of new forms of religiosity like the New Age. In some ways the latter seems to represent an intensification of key liberal themes like individualism and freedom, but without liberal Christianity’s continuing commitment to some form of institutional church. It remains to be seen whether the apparent growth of such religiosity will in the end have the effect of strengthening or of weakening liberalism.

Bibliography:

  1. Ammerman N T 1997 Congregation and Community. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
  2. Hunter J D 1987 Evangelicalism. The Coming Generation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
  3. Hutchison W R (ed.) 1968 American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era. University Press of America, Lanham, MD
  4. Hutchison W R 1976 The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
  5. Kelley D M 1972 Why Conservative Churches are Growing. Harper & Row, New York
  6. Michaelsen R S, Roof W C (eds.) 1986 Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities. Pilgrim Press, New York
  7. Miller D E 1981 The Case for Liberal Christianity, 1st edn. Harper & Row, San Francisco
  8. Reardon B M (ed.) 1968 Liberal Protestantism. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
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  10. Roof W C, McKinney W 1987 American Mainline Religion. Its Changing Shape and Future. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
  11. Woodhead L J P, Heelas P L 2000 Religion in Modern Times. Blackwell, Malden, MA
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