The Great Church of America

TimeWatch Editorial
March 22, 2016

On March 4, 2016 our original article entitled Protestant America, quoted from an article written by Joseph Bottum, an influential Catholic Neo-Conservative. A quick search on line for a Bio for Joseph Bottum reveals that he is an American author, best known for his writings about literature, American religion, and neoconservative politics. Noting references to his poems, short stories, scholarly work, literary criticism, and many other forms of public commentary, Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt, also an American author and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, wrote in National Review in 2014 that “Joseph Bottum’s name would be mandatory on any objective short list of public intellectuals” in America.

In the month of August, 2008 Joseph Bottum, who was Editor of the magazine First Things, wrote an article entitled, “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”

One important element that should be added to the information revealed in that article is an explanation of its source. The existence of the magazine First Things is in itself a testimony to the arguments made by Mr. Bottum.

First Things as was stated on its website, was founded in March 1990 by Richard John Neuhaus, a prominent intellectual, writer, activist and Lutheran minister (ordained in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and later affiliated to the American Lutheran Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), who converted to the Catholic Church and entered the priesthood shortly after the journal's founding. Fr. Neuhaus served as the journal's editor-in-chief until his death in January 2009 and wrote a regular column called, "The Public Square." He started the journal after his connection with the Rockford Institute was severed.

First Things Magazine then is a testimony of a transition, a reversal if you will from Protestantism to Catholicism. Its founder was Lutheran, who later converted to Catholicism. Not just becoming a member, but becoming a catholic priest.

Joseph Bottum starts his article this way:

America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets. The average American these days would have ­trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Joseph Bottum “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”

You can almost hear, from the very beginning of the article, where he is heading, it is clear that the title itself is not an opinion but as far as he and his new found faith is concerned, a foregone conclusion. He continues:

“In truth, all the talk, from the eighteenth century on, of the United States as a religious nation was really just a make-nice way of saying it was a Christian nation—and even to call it a Christian nation was usually just a soft and ecumenical attempt to gloss over the obvious fact that the United States was, at its root, a Protestant nation. Catholics and Jews were tolerated, off and on, but “the destiny of America,” as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835, was “embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the whole human race was represented by the first man.” Joseph Bottum “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”

You notice that he continues to describe what America WAS; he even describes why she was what she was:

“Even America’s much vaunted religious liberty was essentially a Protestant idea. However deistical and enlightened some of the Founding Fathers may have been, Deism and the Enlightenment provided little of the religious liberty they put in the Bill of Rights. The real cause was the rivalry of the Protestant churches: No denomination achieved victory as the nation’s legally established church, mostly because the Baptists fought it where they feared it would be the Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians fought it where they feared it would be the Congregationalists. The oddity of American religion produced the oddity of American religious ­freedom.” Joseph Bottum “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”

Then comes the clincher of Mr Bottum’s argument. All this is now history. All this is how things used to be. There are no more he boldly proclaims.

“Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.” Joseph Bottum “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”

If in year 2008 this was already a foregone conclusion, imagine where we are today. We will take a further look at this in the near future.

Cameron A. Bowen