Protestant Establishment Research Articles

“Monkeying with the Bible”: Edgar J. Goodspeed'sAmerican Translation

AbstractDevotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the history of the Bible in America: the public reception of University of Chicago professor Edgar J. Goodspeed'sAmerican Translation(1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization.

Presidential Appointments and Religious Stratification in the United States, 1789-2003

In America’s colonial period, the “Protestant Establishment” (Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians) had more access to political power than “Other Colonial Elites” (Quakers and Unitarians), “Other Protestants” (e.g., Baptists and Methodists), and “Others” (e.g., Catholics, Jews, and people with no religious affiliation). To what extent has this pattern of religious stratification persisted and/or changed over the course of U.S. history? New data on the religious affiliations of U.S. presidents, cabinet members, and justices on the Supreme Court indicate that the Protestant Establishment and Other Colonial Elites are not as dominant as they once were but continue to be overrepresented in the White House, in the cabinet, and on the Supreme Court. Other Protestants and Others have made noteworthy gains but continue to be underrepresented in most spheres of national political life. Presidents from all religious strata are more likely to appoint people who belong to the Protestant Establishment than any other religious stratum. Other Protestants and Others are most likely to appoint religious outsiders. Thus, political appointments are a means by which religious stratification both persists and changes.

The Political Marketplace of Religion

The law of the religion clauses is primarily a judicial exercise in mediating the inherent conflict between the clauses, for some accommodations of religion are required by the free exercise clause and other accommodations of religion are prohibited by the establishment clause. Judicial mediation of this tension will produce one of four distinctive patterns, each characterized by the relative degree of deference the judiciary displays toward legislative judgments of appropriate accommodation that are claimed to offend the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, or both. Judicial primacy is the pattern in which the Court displays the least deference toward legislative judgments of religious accommodation, by means of robust enforcement of both clauses. Legislative primacy is the polar opposite of judicial primacy. Under legislative primacy the Court defers to legislative judgments of religious accommodation by lax enforcement of both clauses. Judicial secularism is a pattern by which the Court vigorously enforces the establishment clause and loosely enforces the free exercise clause, thus restricting the ability of legislatures to decide when to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but leaving them with relatively greater freedom to decide whether or not to accommodate religious conduct. Judicial accommodation is a pattern by which the Court energetically enforces the free exercise clause to require many accommodations of religious conduct, but is less willing to strike down other types of accommodations that allegedly violate the establishment clause. The result of judicial accommodation is that legislatures are given considerable freedom to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but are required to accommodate religious conduct. When the law of the religion clauses began to develop in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century it developed toward the judicial primacy pattern, but as the century, waned and turned the millenial milepost the law of the religion clauses has begun to assume the shape of legislative primacy. This change has been influenced by political and cultural changes. The de facto Protestant establishment that persisted from the nation's beginning to the twentieth century collapsed by mid-century and in its wake a new coalition of religious and secular allies began to press for broader governmental assistance to religion. At the same time the age of modernity - the Enlightenment commitment to rationalism as the avenue to truth, which had replaced the medieval commitment to religious faith - began to be undermined by post-modernism, the belief that there are no universal truths. Modernity had posed a conflict between two competing explanations of truth; post-modernism accepts that no account can be known to be true. The paradoxical result is that religion has been freed from the margins to which modernity had consigned it. Moreover, much of traditional religion has been replaced by a distinctively post-modern spirituality, a preoccupation with self-understanding that borrows eclectically from many ways of apprehending transcendent reality, both religious and secular. The resulting religious pluralism has increased the pressure upon political actors to accommodate a variety of religions and, simultaneously, made imperative the need to avoid compelling governments to accommodate the limitless variety of conduct that may be the product of religious belief. Legislative primacy produces both behavioral and doctrinal effects. The principal behavioral effect is to encourage a political marketplace of religion, in which religious and secular actors engage in rent seeking in the form of government benefits to religion. Benefits, however, can come in the form of favors bestowed on any given rent seeker or burdens placed on rival rent seekers. By-products of religious rent seeking include increased proselytizing, because successful proselytizers will secure an advantage in religious rent seeking, and increased contentiousness concerning the proper role of religion in public life. The likely doctrinal effects of legislative primacy include the terminal irrelevance of Lemon, increased emphasis on non-discrimination between religious groups, a sharper conflict between the competing endorsement and coercion tests for detecting establishment clause violations, and a heightened judicial focus upon the legislative purpose underlying ostensibly neutral measures that deliver religious effects. While it is too soon to know whether legislative primacy will ameliorate or exacerbate religious conflict; it is not too soon to declare that we are entering a new era of the law of the religion clauses. Perhaps the metaphysics of post-modernism will produce sufficient religious toleration that the political dynamic of religious rent seeking will moderate, and the result will be an increase in aggregate preference satisfaction without destabilizing side effects. But it is also possible that the mixture of extreme religious pluralism, post-modern uncertainty, and religious rent seeking will prove to be a volatile mixture.

The Rise and Fall of Anglo‐America

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America Eric P. Kaufmann. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. The rise and fall of Anglo is a familiar theme in classic American letters. Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of Good (1682), a colonial best-seller, tells with religious trembling of captivity among Native Americans. Though distressed by terrifying Others, she retained enough spiritual discipline to wonder about worthiness of Puritan culture brought over to howling wilderness. Richard Henry Dana's narrative Two Years Before Mast (1840) expresses revulsion at ways of Spanish in California-and then comes to appreciate them, especially after he sees them being defrauded by crude, predatory Yankees. Recent decades have offered books like E. Digby Baltzell's class/caste-oriented The Protestant Establishment (1965), Michael Novak's eloquently irritated The Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), and Peter Schrag's journalistic meditation The Decline of Wasp (1973). In current year, we have seen Samuel Huntington's alarmist Who We Are (2004), which argues that the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. He believes that Latinos are refusing to assimilate and rejecting Anglo-Protestant values that built American dream. He calls for renewed vigor in Americanizing them to values he sees them rejecting. Victor Davis Hanson, another fearful voice, draws upon personal experience with farm laborers, ethnically mixed family members, and academy in his viscerally passionate Mexifornia (2003). He mourns California's cultural erosion, blaming illegal immigration, corporate greed that craves cheap labor, and academic race-manipulators who exploit young in pursuing separatist identity politics. A timely rebuff to such lamentations about American's browning culture came with satirical film A Day without a Mexican (2004), a gringos-left-behind exploration of sudden disappearance of California's Latinos (now one-third of state's population). Can a British observer calmly enlighten American readers on these contentious issues of ethnic dominance and assimilation? Eric P. Kaufmann, lecturer in politics and sociology at University of London, has earned distinction as an intensely analytic, theory-laden, and well-read commentator on issues of ethnic dominance. In this book, he helps us step back from turbulent present, offering a frame bounded by important ideological developments in period from 1920 to 1960. Countering common wisdom that today's multiculturalism and diversity industries merely extend 1960s civil rights agitation or retaliate against triumph of Reaganism, this book argues that cosmopolitan, universalist ideals first grew out of internecine conflict within Anglo-Protestant soul. They predate more visible response to pressures exerted by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movements inspired by death of Jim Crow. This book carefully shows us that by 1920, an assortment of ideological actors had begun to chip away at older WASP forms of ethnic dominance, formulating universahst arguments that reflected liberal Enlightenment ideals. They include figures like Horace M. Kallen, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, and Jane Adams as secular thinkers, in addition to a variety of ecumenical and social gospel church movements that bridged gaps between competing faith traditions linked to national and cultural ethnicities. These thinkers were also joined by modernist movements in arts, and clusters of literary artists like Greenwich Village Bohemians and west coast beats who reveled m their individualities and popularized notion of self-chosen cultural identity. The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, is an important watermark reflecting victory of liberal churches, secular reformers, and artistic movements. …

The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life

The Secular Revolution is an examination of the means by which the university as an institution enabled the secularization of America. From a dominant Protestant establishment in the mid‐1800s, science, psychology, law, journalism, medicine and biology authorized the secular revolution. A rising capitalism, a continuing immigrant population increasing the power of cities, also played important roles in this radical shift. Beyond analysis, the problem of this book is strategic, attempting virtually to undo the secular revolution, and to return America to its rightful scientific, political, and religious form.

Of borders and margins: Hispanic disciples in Texas, 1888-1945

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), like many other Protestant churches in the United States, lives in an uneasy and tension-filled relationship with its Hispanic constituency. In this engagingly written work, Daisy L. Machado locates the historical underpinnings of this relationship through an analysis of the Disciples' interaction with Hispanics in Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Machodo shows that, while there was a large Hispanic population in the state during this period, the Christian Church was not able to develop a significant presence in Hispanic communities. Much of this failure can be traced, she argues, to the notion of the frontier, which influenced and shaped both church policy and theology for Disciples ministering to the Hispanic community. The frontier ethos - with a focus on divine providence and election, ideas about a chosen race and virgin land, and an understanding of the church as a socializing and Americanizing agent - provided an Anglo-American prism through which Disciples saw themselves and others. The acceptance and implementation of these ideologies meant that while the Christian Church was taking its place as a member of the American Protestant establishment, it was simultaneously failing in its work among Hispanics. The missionary theology inspired by the frontier ideology led to the formation of a paternalistic relationship between the church and the Hispanic community, with a predominantly Anglo-American church overseeing dependant Hispanic congregations lacking indigenous leadership. The church mission in Texas, then, was at odds with the very people it sought to reach, and Hispanic Disciples saw their church as failing to repond to their needs and visions. The result was the creation of a small Hispanic church in Texas that is still struggling to be self-supporting, and has no Mexican-American ministers. It is a church that exists on both the geographical and denominational margins of the Christian Church. Written with both an engaging style and a crisp historical view, Of Borders and Margins offers a penetrating historical examination of a previously unexamined area of the history of American Protestantism.

Writing the History of the English Bible in the Early Eighteenth Century

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

Lasting Success for the Christian in Business

In the early 1990s I began interviewing evangelical CEOs for my book Believers in Business (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1994).1 This was the first time I had researched religion and business ethics, and my question then was simple: Is there a connection between evangelical belief and running a for-profit corporation? How does Christian faith influence busi ness leadership? I recall that most academicians thought my question to be either a radical criticism or a totally clueless inquiry, on the identical assumption that the answer was already obvious: not at all. The general thinking was that business had no ethics, or if it did, that modern economic life had secularized all that was once sacred in the business worldview and American culture. The latter view had, of course, been notably articulated by Harvey Cox in his book, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), an assertion that had caused Time magazine to declare God was dead. In 1967 my colleague Peter Berger made the famous observation that the sacred canopy once protecting and governing American public life had been torn in two. The dominant modern worldview of sheer rationality had led to a disenchantment of the world (The Sacred Canopy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). Many managers and business professors felt that this was as it should be. Presumably, there would be less possibility of irrationality (read, unprofitability) or intolerance (read, end of Protestant establishment) in decision-making, which would presumably result in better economics and better ethics in business.

The Secularization of the Academy, edited by George M. Marsden & Bradley J. Longfield. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, by George M. Marsden. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, by George M. Marsden

The Secularization of the Academy, edited by George M. Marsden & Bradley J. Longfield. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, by George M. Marsden. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, by George M. Marsden

Our Lady of Guadeloupe Visits the Confederate Memorial

Truisms are sometimes true. And if anything has seemed self-evident to interpreters of South, it's religious homogeneity of Bible Belt. With exception of Mormon cultural area in Utah and adjoining states, no U.S. region seems less diverse. Fervent revivalism, civil war, and minimal immigration allowed a southern evangelical Protestant establishment--mostly Baptist and Methodist--to form by nineteenth century. Free of challenges from immigrants, that evangelical alliance has shaped religious landscape. Some observers have trumpeted South as last stronghold of faithful Christian witness; others, like Baltimore-born iconoclast H. L. Mencken, have dismissed it as the bunghole of United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists. However assessments diverge--and they still do--almost all interpreters have agreed on one point: South looks more homogenous than rest of nation. (1) There is much truth to still standard interpretation: South seems more uniformly Protestant and more institutionally pious. Surveys indicate that southerners join churches and attend services more than Americans do in other regions. Even unchurched in South admit to a lingering piety: in one 1978 poll nearly three-fourths believed that Jesus was son of God and rose from dead, and another survey a decade later found that almost two-thirds of unaffiliated believed in life after death. Recent surveys reveal same pattern of attendance, membership, and belief. For example, spring 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that nearly a quarter of southerners (23 percent) attend services more than once a week, as compared to about 15 percent of nonsoutherners, and significantly more southerners than nonsoutherners (40 percent compared to 29 percent) say that religion is extremely important in their byes. According to fall 1999 Southern Focus Poll, more southerners than nonsoutherners claim Bible is their authority for daily life (31 percent compared with 19 percent), and more than six out of ten say they prefer biblical creation account to Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain universe's origins. And some geographers and sociologists have argued that this regional pattern of piety shows few signs of changing. (2) The South is not just more pious, either; it is also still predominantly Protestant. The 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that 65 percent of southerners claim Protestant affiliation, while rest of nation was only 43 percent Protestant. Two sociologists who have conducted most comprehensive telephone survey of last decade came to similar conclusions. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman have found that Baptists, both black and white, are concentrated south of Mason-Dixon Line. They are largest religious group in fourteen states, nearly all of which are in South, and Baptists comprise more than half residents of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Furthermore, Kosmin and Lachman suggest, a relatively stable southern Protestantism, evangelical and Pentecostal, persisted into 1990s. (3) Truisms, however, need nuancing. We need to qualify claims about continuing evangelical Protestant dominance in several ways. First of all, diversity has a long history in South. Among earliest settlers, West African religious practices mixed with Christian piety to produce new creole spiritual forms, and even Christian faiths Europeans transplanted bore varied fruits. Roman Catholics built first permanent settlement in South (and in North America) at St. Augustine in 1565. They have a long history in Texas and Louisiana, and Catholics built churches in small towns and larger cities. Jews also found a place in some southern cities--Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, and Miami Beach, for instance. …

The 'Lady of the farme': The Context of Lady Russell's Entertainment of Elizabeth at Bisham, 1592

Elizabeth Cooke, Lady Hoby and subsequently Lady Russell was one of the key women in the protestant establishment that surrounded Queen Elizabeth. She was also a mother who was anxious to establish her daughters at court. The paper suggests that entertainment for Elizabeth at the Hoby country house at Bisham, Berkshire, (1592) ascribed to Edward Hoby by conventional scholarship, was actually written by Lady Russell to bring her daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, to the queen’s attention as potential maids of honour.

The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (review)

Darryl Hart of Westminster Seminary reconstructs the Liberal Protestant establishment's efforts to gain a subdued presence on campuses in the United States. Conforming initially to the Enlightenment dogma that only empirical evidence verifies scientific (the only worthwhile) understanding, they were left with little to offer but morality and piety. And in the "First Age," 1870-1925, Liberal Protestants conceded that not even morality could be purveyed by a "sect" (church), which dealt only in private, unverifiable, claims. They saw no difficulty, however, in its being purveyed by a nation. Faith thus repressed became a [End Page 768] vague moral earnestness in service of "the Power in the Universe which makes for righteousness," or "whatever in human sensibility is of finer texture." Indeed.

The Religious Affiliations of American Elites, 1930S to 1990S: A Note on the Pace of Disestablishment

This paper tests the “disestablishment thesis” that America's Protestant Establishment has declined over the course of the century, especially in the last 30 years. Using Who's Who data from 1930, 1950, 1970, and 1992, we examine the religious affiliations of American elites, and the extent to which religious groups are over- or under-represented among elites relative to their numbers in the total U.S. population. Results support claims that the Protestant Establishment has lost prominence over the years. The data also indicate that there are more Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans among elites. However, other Protestant groups (e.g., Baptists) and Catholics remain under-represented in Who's Who. Establishment groups and other elite religions (Unitarian-Universalists and Quakers) remain over-represented. Jews have gained relative to their numbers in the total population and are over-represented. We use a neo-Weberian framework to interpret the findings.

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment. By Ralph E. Pyle. Praeger Publishers, 1996. 165 pp. Cloth, $55.00

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment. By Ralph E. Pyle. Praeger Publishers, 1996. 165 pp. Cloth, $55.00

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment.

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment.

Review Essay: Religion in American Academic Life Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism Conrad Cherry Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century Philip Gleason The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief George M. Marsden Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education Douglas Sloan

Review Essay: Religion in American Academic Life Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism Conrad Cherry Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century Philip Gleason The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief George M. Marsden Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education Douglas Sloan

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment. By Ralph E. Pyle. Religion in the Age of Transformation. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. x + 163 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment. By Ralph E. Pyle. Religion in the Age of Transformation. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. x + 163 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 by James T. Fisher

594BOOK REVIEWS Suzanne Rini is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer who was working on another book about Rice at the same time I was. Her manuscript focused exclusively on his role in expelling the left from the labor movement, and in her portrait Rice was a scoundrel. She has complained to me that Rice intervened to forestall her attempts to find a publisher. To my knowledge, her work remains unpublished today. Now McCollester's effort, the friendliest one so far, has emerged with a long list of financial contributors to the publication project. Thus scholarship on Rice's life seems to have succeeded in proportion as it tells the story in terms flattering to its subject. Television viewers may be reminded of the plight ofthe show "Nothing Sacred," which has created a firestorm of criticism from the Catholic hierarchy and some laity, by depicting life in an American Catholic parish in ways that are sometimes irreverent and unflattering. In biography, there will always be a tension between the search for heroes and the quest for accuracy. Where does scholarship on the life of Charles Owen Rice go from here? Deeper, I hope. None of us who has attempted so far to tell the story of Rice's life has been a professional historian (McCollester was trained as a philosopher, I as a political scientist). But Rice's importance to the history of his time and place merits the attentions of such a professional. I hope he receives them. Patrick J. McGeever Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley 1927-1961. By James T. Fisher. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 304. $25.95.) Thomas Anthony Dooley, III, interrupted studies at the University of Notre Dame to serve briefly as a Navy hospital corpsman and in 1953 graduated in medicine at Saint Louis University. After internship in Navy hospitals and "special duty" in southeastAsia, ostensibly to collect epidemiologic data, he resigned from the Navy in March, 1956, to avoid court martial for buggery. Immediately transfigured into a "Jungle Doctor," he was carefully packaged as ? celebrity hook into the Irish Catholic subculture. This book tells little about his medical practice, which approximated that of the medics who did the work during the five years when Dooley wrote three best-selling books, toured the United States to raise money, collected honorary degrees from Holy Cross and Notre Dame, and relaxed in homosexual purlieux from Bangkok to Manhattan. This jungle surgeon confined himself to emergency circumcisions although acute balanoposthitis has, at least since the Civil War, been treated by a simple incision through the dorsal foreskin and, anyhow,Asians typically have short foreskins. BOOK REVIEWS595 What little medical assistance he founded did not survive his well-publicized death from melanoma. The author misses an essential point: Dooley's flaw was not his tedious homosexual promiscuity. His lying, egocentricity, manipulativeness, and lack of close human relationships document a profound psychopathic character disorder . Charming, pretty, and sexually available, he simply had no sense ofright and wrong. Psychological rationalization of unacceptable behavior not very uncommonly assumes a super-righteous, sometimes super-patriotic, facade that can end in fantasy. Dooley's fair-haired status among parochial sectarians protected him from the less forgiving conservative Protestant establishment that he so much resented. Morally rootless, Dooley served a bizarre confederacy ranging from the messianic liberal left through public relations firms and the Vietnam lobby to Cardinal Spellman, all eager to involve the United States in Southeast Asia. He gladly proved useful to Diem's handlers. His stateside public persona—"Blessed Thomas of Laos"—precluded control and his role in getting at least Irish Catholics (and, therefore, Democrats) to support the American disaster in Vietnam remains murky. He certainly helped to focus Catholic hatred on Asian communists, but the State Department and CIA loathed and mistrusted him. The author hints at but does not document some vast gay network involving the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Catholic Church; nudges and winks are not scholarship. Balance required more attention to what other superpatriots contributed to anticommunist hatred, and why. This book required tighter editing than it got, and it is not clear what it...

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment

Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment

The Rich Man and the Kingdom: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment. Albert F. Schenkel

<i>The Rich Man and the Kingdom: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment</i>. Albert F. Schenkel