Saving Faith

Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age

David Mislin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501701429
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Saving Faith, David Mislin chronicles the transformative historical moment when Americans began to reimagine their nation as one strengthened by the diverse faiths of its peoples. Between 1875 and 1925, liberal Protestant leaders abandoned religious exclusivism and leveraged their considerable cultural influence to push others to do the same. This reorientation came about as an ever-growing group of Americans found their religious faith under attack on social, intellectual, and political fronts. A new generation of outspoken agnostics assailed the very foundation of belief, while noted intellectuals embraced novel spiritual practices and claimed that Protestant Christianity had outlived its usefulness.Faced with these grave challenges, Protestant clergy and their allies realized that the successful defense of religion against secularism required a defense of all religious traditions. They affirmed the social value—and ultimately the religious truth—of Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They also came to view doubt and uncertainty as expressions of faith. Ultimately, the reexamination of religious difference paved the way for Protestant elites to reconsider ethnic, racial, and cultural difference. Using the manuscript collections and correspondence of leading American Protestants, as well the institutional records of various churches and religious organizations, Mislin offers insight into the historical constructions of faith and doubt, the interconnected relationship of secularism and pluralism, and the enormous influence of liberal Protestant thought on the political, cultural, and spiritual values of the twentieth-century United States.

1

TWILIGHT FAITH

The Embrace of Doubt as the Embrace of Diversity

“There is a large class of honest inquirers,” noted the Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden, “who are troubled, more or less by certain aspects of revelation, but who are trying to find their way into the light.” At face value, this was hardly a remarkable observation. Protestant ministers and theologians had long stressed the importance of overcoming doubt and working from ambiguity to certainty in one’s religious convictions. But Gladden was not sure that believers would always find their way into the light and overcome their doubts. He thus thought it crucial that his congregants know how to sustain their faith commitments even amid profound spiritual uncertainty. The key, said Gladden, was for Protestant churchgoers to be—in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous distinction—“honest doubters” rather than cynical nonbelievers.

Gladden assured his congregants that doubt did not necessarily signal the beginning of an inevitable slide into unbelief. Questioning conducted in the right spirit would not prove detrimental to faith. Those who were “ready to welcome any ray that breaks into their darkness” and who retained a commitment to faith despite their uncertainty met with Gladden’s approval. Those “whose unbelief is willful or passionate or sullen” did not. The God Gladden worshipped welcomed doubt. The “honest scrutiny of the foundations of faith is far more pleasing to God than the blind and bigoted credulousness of many an orthodox confessor,” he declared.1

Washington Gladden is best known to history for his writings on labor and class issues, and for his role in popularizing the ideas that formed the core of the Social Gospel. But his influence went far beyond his leadership on social and economic concerns. Gladden was the voice of an entire generation of theologically liberal Protestants in the United States, and his musings about faith and doubt spoke to the experience of many other religious Americans. Those musings also reflected his personal religious journey. Gladden followed what was literally and figuratively an unorthodox path to ministry. He earned his degree from Williams College, and with the exception of a few courses at Union Theological Seminary, he had little in the way of formal theological education. Gladden also entered the ministry with relatively few commitments to any specific denomination or set of doctrines, the result of a childhood upbringing that took him from Methodism to Presbyterianism and finally to Congregationalism.2

As he approached his mid-forties, Gladden experienced considerable uncertainty about whether or not he had entered the right profession. After leaving his first pastorate in the wake of a nervous breakdown (“a more foolhardy undertaking it would have been difficult to imagine,” he later recalled of this job, noting that his naïveté was second only to the “fatuity of the people” who hired him), he bounced between work as a minister and as a writer.3 As he questioned his own career choices, he began to reflect openly on questions of faith and doubt. In one sermon, he affirmed the “the lack of absoluteness and finality in religious attainment and experience.” Christians, Gladden declared, should not “expect to get to the end of their thinking” about religious matters “in this world or in any world.” His solution was for Christians to “stand with their faces toward God” rather than “away from God.” In other words, Gladden insisted, doubt could never be overcome. But it could be tempered by a desire for faith. “We all believe somewhat and doubt somewhat. There is no doubter who has not his beliefs; there is no believer who has not his doubts,” he told his congregation, adding that the difference between the two rested in “which of these mental states predominates.”4

Shortly after he preached these sermons, Gladden became pastor of the First Congregational Church of Columbus, a move that inspired a greater sense of confidence. Gladden spent the rest of his career in Ohio and by all accounts found a greater sense of purpose in his ministry there. He routinely counseled younger clergy who sought his advice on how to convey contemporary religious ideas to their congregations, and the ideas he expressed—including those about doubt—gained popularity in the wider circles of the Protestant community. Theological liberals like Gladden came to represent the public face of Protestantism in the United States at the precise moment that large numbers of Americans experienced a profound crisis of faith.5

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a strident critique of religion rapidly gained popularity in the United States. Prominent skeptics drew on deep-seated cultural anxieties that resulted from the Civil War and the massive structural changes to American society during the Gilded Age, and they exploited popular scientific and philosophical ideas to attack the foundations of theistic religion. These critics did not merely assail specific Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Christ or the existence of the Trinity. Rather, they challenged the fundamental tenets of belief, including the existence of a divine being and the presence of a moral order in creation.

Astute Protestant observers quickly perceived that it would prove impossible to discredit skepticism. But if uncertainty could not be eliminated, it might be co-opted. During the late nineteenth century, liberal Protestants in the United States found a way to baptize skepticism and reinterpret doubt and uncertainty as normal elements of a healthy spiritual life. Christianity, they argued, did not resist doubt. It welcomed it.

In revising their perspective on faith, these Protestants transformed Americans’ understandings of the nature of religious community and the role of the clergy. Liberals abandoned their conception of the church as an exclusive club whose teachings prospective members needed to accept in order to join. Rather, they recast it as a community of faithful doubters, who worked through their questions and anxieties under the guidance of ministers who neither judged nor condemned uncertainty. Liberal Protestants buttressed these views with evidence from the emerging field of the psychology of religion, as university psychologists provided apparent scientific proof that religious commitments were rarely free of ambiguity.

This shift in attitudes about doubt marked the crucial first step in the process by which liberal American Protestants came to embrace religious diversity in the late nineteenth-century United States. Their willingness to countenance a permanent state of uncertainty signaled a newfound acceptance of people who held views about religion that diverged from the teachings of orthodox Christianity. It was the acceptance of doubt that prepared Protestants to find value in the beliefs of Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims.

In particular, two theological strategies that Protestant liberals adopted to support their newfound view of doubt—their emphasis on the “person of Jesus” as the central doctrine of Christian teaching and their assertion of the progressive nature of revelation—provided concrete methods by which they would later reinterpret their relationship with other faith traditions. Ultimately, an acceptance of doubters set many American Protestants on a course toward the affirmation of pluralism.

When late nineteenth-century Protestants proclaimed the permanence of doubt, they did so in response to the crisis of faith that pervaded society in the decades following the Civil War. Indeed, this widespread questioning of long-standing belief had its origin in the bloody conflict of the early 1860s. As recent scholars have observed, death was the defining feature of the war. In its wake, six hundred thousand young men who had served in uniform were dead, as were approximately fifty thousand civilians. Beyond the sheer magnitude of the loss of life, the Civil War abolished long-standing cultural assumptions about death. The conflict rendered obsolete the assumption that death would typically occur in the home—the bastion of Victorian piety—and in the presence of loved ones. Weapons of previously unknown power destroyed human bodies and shattered expectations about burial.6

Most Americans sought to make sense of the war’s human toll by imbuing the conflict with religious meaning. They insisted that the war either represented a righteous campaign against an unrighteous enemy (an argument employed by both sides for different reasons) or, in the case of the North, that it represented an opportunity for the nation to atone for the sin of slavery. But unpleasant recollections of the war persisted, and not just in the writings of the conflict’s few harsh critics. Among those troubled by the war was Hamilton Wright Mabie, a writer and purveyor of thoroughly respectable, middle-class opinion. Having participated in the college’s theological society while a student at Williams, Mabie remained devoted to the Episcopal Church for his entire life (so much so that the bishop of New York once reportedly remarked, “Mabie, if I ever catch you out after dark, I will ordain you right then and there”).7 In the late 1870s, Mabie joined Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott on the editorial staff of the Christian Union, a position that granted him enormous power to shape the religious views of the journal’s Protestant readership. He remained with the Christian Union (and later the Outlook) for the rest of his career, even as he published his own collections of stories and essays. One twentieth-century historian somewhat justifiably dismissed Mabie as “a dealer in the most saccharine morality and the most standard textbook opinions.” Yet for all his Victorian sentimentality, Mabie could not rationalize away the gruesomeness of the Civil War. Nearly four decades after the conflict, he wrote of it as a “storm of sorrow” in which “there were no homes which sorrow might not enter, no firesides where care and anxiety did not find a place.”8

For Hamilton Mabie and others, the fundamental change wrought by the war was that it made the realities of human suffering unavoidable. During the early nineteenth century, middle-class Americans had developed an increasingly humanitarian outlook and had grown more attuned to the dismal conditions in which many of their fellow citizens lived. Those people who did manage to maintain their obliviousness of human suffering before the conflict found it impossible to sustain in its aftermath. The late nineteenth century forced Americans to face discomforting questions about the nature of the world and the conditions of life. “Men have never been blind to the tragic facts of life; but they never before have known them so widely, so intimately; and out of this knowledge there has come, as was inevitable, a great depression,” Mabie observed. He surmised that increasing communication around the globe had made Americans more aware than ever before about suffering in foreign lands. In the face of ever-growing knowledge, he mused, “something like despair has overtaken many of the most sensitive men and women; and they cry out passionately, not against their own fates, but against the fate of the race.”9

In his diagnosis of the “despair” that characterized his fellow citizens, Hamilton Mabie acknowledged the depth of the perceived crisis in the nation’s life. It was not merely that people were troubled because they saw others suffering around them; huge numbers of Americans were themselves enduring considerable hardship. The final decades of the nineteenth century were, in the words of one historian, a “period of trauma.” The United States endured a series of severe economic recessions between 1873 and 1897; between 20 and 30 percent of Americans found themselves without work at some point during each year. Economic desperation led in turn to social dislocation, as people took up their roots in an often-fruitless search for better opportunities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this sense of gloom found an outlet in the nation’s cultural output. Writing in the 1890s, Mabie bemoaned the “wave of intense depression” that had characterized literature and art for the previous two decades. It sometimes appeared, he wrote, “as if all the old sanctions had lost their authority, the old aspirations spent their force, and the old hopes dissolved in a mist of sadness.”10 That the religious commitments of the American people could survive intact in such a culture might have been too much to hope. And, indeed, they did not.

Into this breach stepped Robert Green Ingersoll, who became the primary spokesperson for the sharpening critique of Christianity and of theistic religion more broadly. Ingersoll had served in the Civil War and witnessed its horrors firsthand, and as a lawyer with a large network of correspondents, he received many accounts of the suffering that Americans endured during the economic hardship of the decades that followed. Shortly after the economy crashed in the Panic of 1893, Ingersoll received a desperate letter from his own niece, who reported that her family had lost its business to creditors just as they had taken in a twenty-four-year-old relative who was near death from consumption. She reported being “utterly without a resource,” lacking any hope of finding any, and unable to muster the means to relocate. “I am not well my self, so tired in mind and body,” she confessed to her “Uncle Robert,” and she admitted to feeling that “death would seem sweet relief.”11

Ingersoll channeled his anger at the ubiquity of suffering in the world into an attack on the benevolent deity of Christianity. “How do you account for the fact that the world has been filled with pain, and grief, and tears?” he asked. “Is it easy to account for famine, for pestilence and plague if there be above us all a Ruler infinitely good, powerful and wise?” The Civil War colonel pulled no punches in his campaign to discredit Christian belief, declaring, “It is a religion that I am going to do what little I can while I live to destroy.”12

Yet Ingersoll did not articulate a nihilistic view of nature or o...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. Twilight Faith
• 2. Correcting Elijah’s Mistake
• 3. An Expansive Kingdom of God
• 4. Drawing Together
• 5. A Larger Vision
• 6. Proclaiming Common Ground
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index