When the Secular is the Sacred – Patheos (blog)

In Kenneth Woodwards fantastic new book,Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama, we are treated to an accessible, insightful, and critical examination of Christianity in the 1960s, which Woodward knows can be extended five years either way, in which his thesis is ever-so-telling and right: the secular becomes the sacred.

That is, social activism became the fundamental core of Christian faith and discipleship during this period for a large segment of American Christianity. This is a really good chapter in Woodwards book and is worth the price of the book.

He opens with the theme of hope in the secular arising in the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Hope in the secular isnt just a play on semantics. Rather, it allows roomfor those aspirations that arise from within religious communities and that seek to be realized in a secular fashion. In the midSixties, that hope was embodied in the civil rights movement under the leadership of King (96).

Woodward, at the center ofNewsweeks news sources, watched up close the civil rights movement with an eye on how religion was at work. As a Catholic, Woodward had a sense of history, of liturgy, of institutional strength, of tradition and of theology. His approach to the Protestant liberals then was an outsider. Here is what he observed: a shift toward making the secular, the world, the center of what God was doing. Thus,

It was largely because of the civil rights movement, and the political response to it, that the nations liberal Protestant leadership came to embrace the secular as sacred: that is, to assume that if God is to be found anywhere, it is in the secular world, not the church (96).

Consistent with the time in which these things occurred, Woodward uses Negro throughout the book. It made me comfortable, and it reminded me of the reality of those days. His thoughts on ML King Jr?

A major question, much debated at the time, was whether the Negroes quest for civil rights was a secular or religious movement (96) That said, King always insisted that whatever else he was to othersthe list included agitator, troublemaker, and, to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, communistin his heart he remained fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher (97). In sum, Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded where other civil rights leaders fell short because he appealed to black religion more precisely, to what generations of American Negroes had made of the Christianity that was originally taught to them by white slave owners (98).

A summary that may be a bit blunt or un-nuanced, but generally helpful:

Black religion, in short, was the religion of the civil rights movement for as long as King was its prime spokesman (8).

This is where he gives some overall insights from King and what happened to the religion of Protestant liberals who had a hope in the secular:

After Selma King would call it a coalition of conscience, one that crossed old religious boundaries and created new forms of religious belief, behavior, and belonging. Thereafter, where one stood on the issue of public agitation on behalf of civil rights became for activist clergy the measure of authentic faith and commitment (102).

This last observation pierces to the heart of this approach to the Christian faith. I have friends for whom their participation in Selma, or at least their claim to have been there, became the core of their faith and was often the nostalgic touching point.

A one off that is more or less probably right on:

It seemed to me that one difference between Evangelical and mainline Protestants was this: when Evangelicals saw the churches going to hell they preached another revival, while mainliners in the same mood called for a reformation of church structures (105).

All of this emerges into nothing less than a secular theology. What happens? Clearly, the church is diminished and the world becomes central. I have been observing this, and at least fearing this, in the rise of social justice activism among so many of our young evangelical Christians. I dont see it as a slippery slope, I see it as a fundamental distortion of what the Christian faith is. Yes, what it was then is what is may well be now: hope in the secular. Heroes of the day? Harvey Cox and Bishop Pike.

In the middle Sixties, a small but influential group of Protestant thinkers sought to ratify the move from church to world by formulating various secular theologies. Matching the mood of the times, the were wildly optimistic about the world, considerably less so about the church (109).

Parsing Bonhoeffer, Cox defined secularization as the liberation of man from religious and metaphysical tutelage, the turning of his attention away from other worlds and towards this one (111).

Liberal mainline Protestants had nothing to fear from the secular city: as its prophetic avant-garde, they would still be custodians of its conscience (112).

What happens to theology? Woodward, a Catholic observer from a good perch, puts it this way:

But it wasnt just optimism about the secular world that distinguished the secular theologians from their more distinguished predecessors like Niebuhr, Barth, and Tillich. Even more pronounced was their dismissive approach to classic Christian doctrines and their blithe disregard of the historic Christian church (115).

Bishop James Albert Pike: Following his career was like watching a weathervane register every new breeze blowing from the Zeitgeist (115) In life, as in his religious views, Pike was tumbling tumbleweed, always moving on, always reinventing himself according to whats happening (116) In short, he was a church careerist without religious convictions or commitments (123). Pikes very public non-trial was the strongest signal yet that civil rights had emerged within the mainline churches as the index by which fidelity to Christs teachings was to be judged. There would be others, notably the war in Vietnam and womens liberation, and woe to those who did not properly discern what God was doing in His secular manifestations (120).

In one quick sentence Woodwards words summarize hope in the secular:

For the Presbyterians, as for the rest of the mainline churches, the problem was that the boundaries between themselves and the world in which they moved had effectively vanished (126).

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When the Secular is the Sacred - Patheos (blog)