Evangelical Lacunae
June 07, 2005
Reading is most fascinating when one knows the communities that contain the author and his audiences well enough to read between the lines–especially if one is a comparative ‘outsider’ oneself. To be able to do this with old books and writings is the historian’s greatest skill, but sadly most people seem to lack it, even when dealing with their contemporaries. Yet for those who can see the gaps, the subtexts, the between-the-lines scribblings, there is much humor and insight to be had, and many profound questions to be discovered.
Take Timothy Larsen’s review essay on Orestes Brownson in Books & Culture. Larsen opens with the following statement:
Not unlike devout Christians, secularized members of our intellectual elite love to give personal testimonies and rehearse the lives of their saints. Their hagiographies are no less calculated to edify, their testimonies no less stereotyped than the stock in trade of evangelical piety. Imprinted deep in our cultural imagination is a life story in which an exceptionally gifted person is raised in a stifling, obscurantist Christian subculture. Through sheer intellectual honesty, this paragon struggles heroically and eventually breaks through into a broad place in which it is possible to be at peace with a post-Christian mental world. The moral of such stories is not subtle: faith is the province of those who are unwilling or unable to keep up with their reading.
Now this is not what Laresen has in mind, but immediately I think beyond the “secular intellectual elite” to Evangelicals like Philip Yancey or Brian McLaren. More appropriately I think of the “evangelical intellectual elite”–the readers and writers of B&C, a magazine to be explained in part as a compensatory reaction to “the scandal of the evangelical mind,” an effort to gentrify the evangelical ghetto and refashion it with an elite. B&C is a symbol for and perfomance of evangelicals with minds, those who “keep up with their reading” and thereby distinguish themselves (as they are prone to do in many ways) from the “fundamentalists” while charting a “third way” between extreme secularity and extreme religiosity and often between “political conservatism” and “liberalism,” those great tar-pits Larsen incidentally mentions but does not extensively engage. Bless them! It is a project toward which I am most sympathetic, but the obvious and only answer is an integral and catholic Christianity, which, sadly, the inner logic of Protestantism must perforce deny.
Larsen’s essay concerns and expresses much admiration for a man who was written out of the history of 19th century American intellectual life because he defied its march into liberal secularity and irreligion by becoming a Roman Catholic. The Evangelical knows this game very well and has been victimized by it. Again, B&C is one Evangelical response to the secularizing hegemony of American intellectual and cultural life. Yet, as Larsen notes, Brownson saw this process as belonging to the logic of Protestantism itself. He was not wrong.
Some time ago I became engrossed in historical scholarship on confessionalization in the 16th century and the problems faced by Protestants who claimed for themselves and their churches a one, true, holy, and catholic identity. “Romish” or “papist” survivals and legacies–dress, rituals, theology, people–then emerged as points of contention, usually things to be purged in favor of the new truth which was simultaneously claiming for itself a non-innovative, restorative, originary authenticity. Brownson was written out of American history because he did not fit in the 19th century iteration of this progressive purgation game, and as much as Evangelicals like Larsen might admire his better insights and general anti-secularist bravado, in the end he cannot be recuperated into the Evangelical narrative for the same reason he cannot be tolerated by secular elites:
One might be tempted to claim Brownson for orthodox Christianity generally, but then he went through a rather pronounced phase of virulent anti-Protestant polemics. Take it from someone who knows, he averred, godless Transcendentalism is just the logic of Protestantism worked out. Indeed, Brownson is an awkward ally for almost anyone.
That is the usual Evangelical assimilation gambit–to claim a useful and in some ways attractive Roman Catholic for a generally “orthodox” or “mere” Christianity, but to Larsen’s credit he backs off–it would be a fundamentally dishonest, obscurantist move. He concludes:
Perhaps the real wonder is that when we study the 19th century we still persist in imagining that Emerson and Channing represent the thought of the future, and that figures such as Brownson and John Henry Newman were making a futile grasp at the past, despite knowing that Transcendentalism rests in moss-covered tombs and the Catholic intellectual tradition is robust and thriving.
And the Evangelical intellectual tradition–what of it? It seems to lurch about, seeking a non-Catholic catholicity. The Brownsons and Newmans cannot be right–yet as they repell, they attract. Larsen, a professor at Wheaton College, knows his institution’s own complicity in an ongoing version of the anti-Catholic cultural revisionism and purges that befell Brownson. Wheaton is a “generally orthodox” college that does not have a “generous orthodoxy;” it continues to purge faculty who become, like Brownson, Roman Catholics and of course will not hire existing papists. I would say this indicates Evangelicalism’s fundamental unwillingness to make a true and clean break with what it purports to see, with Brownson, as its main enemy and portends Evangelicalism’s semi-conscious, semi-intentional assimilation to secular modernity.
This is Evangelical Lacunae in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: On Democracy and Forms | Next: Boyagoda on Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
Trackback Pings:
TrackBack URL for this entry: