Religion: Protestant Half-Century

It is the vocation of Chicago’s Paul Hutchinson to follow and analyze the course of U.S. Protestantism. Longtime journalist, ordained minister and author (The New Leviathan), he is editor of the Christian Century, has been a member of the Century’s staff for over 26 years. In the current issue of the quarterly Religion in Life, 60-year-old Methodist Hutchinson takes a sharp look at the course of U.S. Protestantism during the past half-century. What he finds may point to the future as significantly as it does to the past.

Hutchinson first notes a loss of Protestant influence on American life, and connects it with the fact that the country has become urbanized and industrialized. “In most centers of population today, the ‘strong’ Protestant churches are typically in the suburbs, where they have about the same influence on the city’s morals as the commuter has on its politics.” Meanwhile, as the cities have come to sway the life of the rest of the country, the Roman Catholic Church has grown rapidly in influence. “One might almost write the story of that communion during the half-century in terms of the transformation of its state of mind from that of a minority to that of a majority church.”‘

Editor Hutchinson sees another reason for the decline of Protestant influence in “the failure of certain church-sponsored reforms to produce the social miracles promised. This has been the period, it must be remembered, of the rise and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment. Even women’s rights, secured largely with church help, have brought no striking improvement in public morality.”

The Evil I Do. A second trend of the 20th Century has been toward greater formality in Protestant worship. ” ‘Churchmanship’ is no longer a monopoly of Episcopalians and Lutherans. Stately liturgy has grown commonplace in communions which, five decades ago, were vigorous in their opposition to anything which smacked of ‘Romish’ tendencies. I worship in a Methodist church where the service today opens with the entrance of an acolyte to light the altar candles and closes when he reappears to snuff them. There is a Unitarian church in Chicago in which a sanctuary light burns constantly . . .”

Hutchinson finds a similar tendency in church architecture. “Such congregations as have not pulled down their auditoriums (the word is used advisedly) of the Grover Cleveland period to make way for Gothic structures have often felt compelled at least to remodel the chancel so that lectern balances pulpit.”

The word that issues from that pulpit has changed drastically, too. Except in the South, evangelical fervor is on the discard in most of the “leading” Protestant denominations. Methodist Hutchinson is not happy about what has replaced it: “A kind of preaching which, at its best, is in direct descent from the ethical insights of the Old Testament prophets, but which too often is diluted from that into something perilously akin to that careful moralism against which the Evangelical Revival revolted.”

In some pulpits, thanks to the 20th Century’s fresh experiences of war and human depravity, there has developed a new emphasis on “man’s innate sinfulness, his inability to escape from the dilemma of doing evil when he would do good.” Hutchinson is impressed by the spiritual concern of this “neo-orthodoxy” and the truth of many of its insights. “Yet one wonders how long the Protestant pulpit can hold the attention of contemporary man in his appalling predicament, if it continues to preach only on Romans 7:19,* and never gets beyond that to at least an occasional sermon on John 3:16† or the parable of the Prodigal Son.”

An Increasing Hunger. At the turn of the century, U.S. Protestantism was surgingly enthusiastic about the great crusade of foreign missions. “Huge congregations thrilled to the singing of such hymns as:

From all the dark places

Of earth’s heathen races,

0 see how the thick shadows fly!

Facing great maps, on which the world was shown as a mottled pattern in black and white, those who were sure they lived in the white spots acknowledged their responsibility to see that the black spots were turned white.”

What has happened to the missionary enthusiasm with which the century opened? Hutchinson believes that the study of comparative religions, now standard “in practically all theological seminaries and most church colleges,” has played a big part in forcing the old black-and-white maps of the world into storage. Moreover, “the revelation of the paganism, the brutality, the downright wickedness of the ‘Christian’ West has undermined the confidence essential to missionary success.” And the end of colonialism has vastly altered the conditions under whichthe missionary must work.

Most important single development of the half-century, Hutchinson finds, has been the ecumenical movement, and he looks beyond the formation of the World Council and National Council of Churches to the growth of organic union between the divided denominations of Protestantism.

The problems which the churches are facing are momentous ones. Hutchinson cites “the growing power of organized labor and the difficulty which a predominantly middle-class Protestantism is experiencing in coming to terms with it.” He notes the growing importance of the racial issue and the challenge of war. But he finds “the real promise for the churches as the second half of the century opens [lies] in the assurance, coming from too many quarters to be shrugged off, of a spiritual hunger felt by increasing numbers of all sorts and conditions of men.”

* “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

† “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”