I recently watched a panel discussion hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) which discussed the book, The Democratization of American Christianity, along with its author, historian Nathan O. Hatch.1 The members of the panel included Rusty Reno from First Things Magazine, Joshua Mitchell from Georgetown University, and Hatch himself. The discussion revolved around the overall thesis of the book, that the Christianity of the Second Great Awakening in the United States was very different from the Christianity of previous generations. This new form of religion was promoted by populist preachers, largely devoid of any ecclesiastical authority or education. Populism was the dominant topic of the panel, as well as the relationship of the populism of the Second Great Awakening to contemporary American political culture.
The Democratization of American Christianity has personally enriched my own understanding of American religious history and American politics broadly. Hatch’s work is certainly worth the read for anyone interested in the state of American religion and culture. One comment by Hatch caught my attention. He stated that the problem of populist religion is a distinctively evangelical problem. He contrasted this evangelical problem with a Roman Catholic view of history and tradition that purports to preserve tradition in the midst of a changing intellectual landscape. The dynamic of this discussion was guided by the fact that the other panelists were Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican.
It is this notion I want to address and clarify. If by evangelical, Hatch means that broad coalition of predominantly Baptist figures devoid of any ecclesiastical structure, then yes, this would be an evangelical problem, broadly speaking. This is one of those areas, however, where confessional Protestants are completely sidestepped and not even considered in the conversation (of course confessional Anglicans count, but they usually are not included in discussions about evangelicals).
Confessional Protestantism, by contrast, is not populist. The Reformed tradition is a confessional, ecclesiastical, and institution-oriented tradition. It does not revolve around charismatic personalities or the latest gimmicks and trends to get people into the doors. Someone’s “talent” and ability to gain influence over a crowd has never substituted for the system of education, licensure, and ordination that the Reformed churches have always maintained within their communions. It is a tradition that has been preserved for centuries, and it is a tradition—along with the confessional Lutheran and Anglican churches—that seems absent from the conversations surrounding evangelicalism and Protestantism.
Clarity is important in this discussion because the term evangelical usually gets conflated with Protestantism broadly. Protestantism is usually defined, ironically, by Baptists who are not descendants of the Reformation, not confessional, and are low-church. In fact, part of the story Hatch tells in his wonderful book is the story of how the Baptists went from being one of the smallest religious groups in the early republic to being the dominant group in American religious life. I argue that there is something theological at work here. The Baptist rejection of the principle of subscription, the fact that they did not (and still do not) require education for their preachers, their belief in the autonomy of the local church—these as well as other ideas were factors which the established Anglican and Presbyterian communions could not compete with in the religious marketplace of America at the time. It is that move, Hatch argued, that has resulted in the anti-intellectualism and rampant individualism that is so dominant in American evangelical culture.
This should not be confused with traditional Protestant communions such as the Reformed, Lutheran, and confessional Anglican traditions. These communions have confessions of faith and connectional polities that are intended to guard against populist personalities that only serve themselves. In fact, some historians of American religion and politics have developed an alternative framework for analyzing different traditions within Christianity. This framework is the liturgical-pietist continuum, which Daryl G. Hart has modified as the confessionalist-pietist continuum.2 According to this analysis, the more accurate way to differentiate between different Christian traditions is along the line of liturgicals (or confessionalists), which includes the Lutherans, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Presbyterians (Old School that is), and the pietists, which includes the Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Quakers. The pietists have traditionally sought to transform society through personal conversion and social activism, and have tended to reduce the church to a mere voluntary association as John Williamson Nevin pointed out in the nineteenth century.3 The confessionalists on the other hand have viewed their religion as “otherworldly” and are intent to maintain their traditional liturgies, sacramental worship, and educational life, both through catechism and some through parochial schools. Since these groups see their tradition as “otherworldly,” they have desired to keep the state from encroaching upon their traditions and rituals.
In this regard, when it comes to the overthrow of institutions or going against the establishment, confessional Protestants are not going to offer much, largely because traditions like the Reformed tradition are not “revolutionary” or populist.
I myself am not a fan of political populism and especially religious populism. But I do agree with the panelists on the reasons why populism appeals to so many evangelicals. I do think, however, that the Reformed tradition has something better to offer in terms of political theology. We believe in the importance of systems and institutions, and we do not rely on individuals with the right personalities to serve as strong men for our cause.4 Anyone studying Hatch’s work should also remember the alternatives to the populist forms of Christianity; the Reformed tradition has an intellectual tradition that is thoughtful, helpful, and compelling in the world of Christian social thinking.
Notes
- Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). For the panel, see Intercollegiate Studies Institute “The Democratization of American Christianity | R.R. Reno, Nathan Hatch & Joshua Mitchell,” YouTube, October 17, 2024.
- Daryl G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004.
- John Williamson Nevin, “The Church,” in Sam Hamstra, Jr., ed., One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1: John Nevin’s Writings on Ecclesiology (1844–1849) (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers), 156.
- The work of Yuval Levin has been helpful on my thinking regarding the importance of institutions as places of formation. See Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
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David Mendoza
David Mendoza an educator at a classical academy in California and a contributor for Young Voices. He holds a B.A. from The Master’s University and an M.A. from Westminster Seminary California. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
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I’m curious to know if congregational voting on pastoral candidates, elders, church issues, etc. is a direct result of American democracy or if this was practiced historically in Reformed congregations?
Diane,
I don’t think it is. Pastors were elected for centuries in the church until the centralization of authority in the episcopate. The pastor of the Roman congregation was elected until the development of the college of cardinals.
In the 16th century, pastors were sometimes selected by city officials and sometimes by consistories/sessions. Congregational elections were a part of Reformed church life before America but just when this happened I can’t say. It’s an interesting question.
Dr. Clark — on when congregational voting became standard in the Dutch Reformed world, check K. de Gier’s commentary on the Church Order of Dordt, and ask if Dr. Godfrey may have some unpublished material.
The complication, of course, is that decisions of synods on what SHOULD be happening do not always reflect what ACTUALLY is happening in local churches, and may in fact indicate the existence of a problematic practice to which the synod was responding.
I am fairly sure that while there were Dutch churches in the earliest days that allowed a mere approbation by the membership (i.e., a “yes” or “no” vote, or allowing a decision by the elders to stand unless there were objections received) congregational voting for elders and pastors dates back at least to Dordt if not earlier.
Approval of SOME sort by the congregation, if only by their silence, has generally been regarded as a requirement for a person to legitimately hold office in the Reformed world, including the Dutch Reformed and Scots Presbyterian world. The question of patronage appointees, as you know, was a factor in several of the Scottish secessions in the 1700s and 1800s which the conservatives demanded the right of a congregational vote, but the “moderate” party wanted to affirm the ancient right of the family that had built a church building to appoint its pastor. I add that to make clear that it was usually conservatives who insisted on a congregational vote, but wealthy and powerful men who wanted a preacher who would not bother their consciences.
Thank you also for your reminder that there have been confessional Congregationalists holding to the 1658 Savoy Declaration and 1648 Cambridge Platform. I am very uncomfortable with the original author’s claim that “Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Quakers” have a shared approach to church life. That would certainly have been news to the Congregationalists who generally persecuted the Quakers, and who suffered greatly on the American frontier as the lack of trained ministers, a problem faced also by Presbyterians, led to huge numbers of Congregationalists moving west from New England, and Presbyterians moving west from Philadelphia and down the Cumberland Gap, becoming Baptists or Methodists, not because they liked those churches, but because there were no other churches in many frontier communities thanks to lack of trained ministers.
As I’ve said before, in my own community, Waynesville First United Methodist Church was founded in the early 1800s by a Presbyterian layman who had moved to Missouri from Tennessee. He gathered a church composed of most of the community leaders, arranged to meet in the county courthouse, apparently preached for them as a lay preacher, and rode hundreds of miles on horseback trying to get a Presbyterian to pastor the church he had started, but was completely unable to get any Presbyterian willing to come and the church had no choice but to call a Methodist preacher who, of course, made the church Methodist. It wasn’t until the arrival of the railroad nearly a half century later after the Civil War that a continuing Presbyterian church started, and by that time, the Baptists and Methodists had taken over most of the county with churches all over the place.
That story was repeated not just hundreds but thousands of times all over the “old frontier” of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, and later in Missouri and farther west after the Louisiana Purchase.
Like it or not, we have to look at the utter failure to provide pastors for people who wanted to be Reformed as our problem. The Baptists and Methodists simply took advantage of our failure or inability to provide pastors, and filled the gaps where we could not or did not.
Thank you for this wonderful article. I wonder where Reformed Baptists, those in history like Charles Spurgeon and those today who follow the 1689 London Baptist confession, would fit on the confessionalist/pietist continuum?
Adam,
May I push back on the nomenclature “Reformed Baptists”? Until the post-WWII period, and really not until the late 1990s were many people speaking about “Reformed Baptists.” From the perspective of the Reformed churches, it’s an oxymoron. The Reformed churches have never recognized any such thing. When the Particular Baptist movement was emerging in the 1630s and 40s, the Westminster Assembly assigned Daniel Featley (whom they had jailed for his Royalist sympathies!) to respond to the PB movement. He did by denouncing them as Anabaptists. He wasn’t alone. Check out this series To be sure, as I explain in the series, there are important ways in which the PBs were (and are) not Anabaptists but there are obvious ways in which they were and are.
To your question proper, the confessionalist PBs seem to be a little closer to populism because of their congregational roots and the Baptist ethos (which is profoundly democratic at least in America) but to the degree that the PBs have elders and a connectional polity, they offer some resistance to populism.
Historians haven’t included them to my knowledge, but also I think it would be tough to include them because in my view, confessionalism requires connectional polity which Particular Baptists don’t have. There’s no PB denomination for example, and PB churches are autonomous, which also means they’re not in communion with each other even though they may all put the 1689 confession on their websites. In a society with no established church, this leads churches to “compete” for congregants, and baptists (both general and particular) have historically relied on the charisma and “talent” of their preachers to “market” themselves in this way. This is because they don’t have a polity to rely on that requires education, licensure, ordination exams, etc.
David,
There have been some PB denominations. The ARBCA was a denomination of sorts, right? There is some successor denom/association, right?
The Savoy is a Reformed confession by congregationalists.
Some have accused the URCs of being quasi-congregationalist. I don’t think that’s fair but I understand why someone might say that because 1) we don’t say that connectionalism is of the essence of the church but of well being of the church. A church could be independent and still be a true church, i.e., have the marks of the true church.
I appreciate the distinctions here, and if I’m not clear, I don’t think connectionalism is the essence of the church, but it tends be to part of the conversation regarding confessions and polity. I understand there are nuances though and appreciate the feedback.
“[Hatch] stated that the problem of populist religion is a distinctively evangelical problem. He contrasted this evangelical problem with a Roman Catholic view of history and tradition that purports to preserve tradition in the midst of a changing intellectual landscape.”
As far as populism goes, I wonder if the RCC is particularly vulnerable actually. Maybe I’m too unfamiliar with RCC structure to understand, but the fruit of that institution has produced a ton of populists (on the right and left), in my experience.
Michael,
Rome is hierarchical. American evangelical religion since 1900 has been democratic/egalitarian and populist. The historic Romanist impulse has also been to form social hierarchies, which is one reason why Americans were worried about the great influx of Roman Catholics in the 19th century. To the degree Romanists have become populists they have become Americanized.