There is in the United States and the Western World some sort of religious revival occurring. Gen Z men—males born between ca 1997 and 2012—are flooding back in to churches. USA Today noted that Gen Z men—and to a lesser degree women—attending churches more than their millennial predecessors and they also seem more curious about the Bible, church history, and the nature of the church itself. Irreligiosity, Eastern Illinois professor Ryan Burge notes, has hit its ceiling. To some degree, America is turning back to the church, and Gallop notes that trust in the church remains relatively high compared to the federal government, the courts, telemedia, and corporations. Evangelical Protestant churches in particular, it seems, are no longer merely a spiritual societies, but dynamic and essential places of social and moral catechesis: and, I would propose, this transition is recurrent.
North American Protestant intellectuals should understand ecclesiocentrism and the spirituality of the church less as universal imperatives and start treating them as different stages in the developmental cycle of Protestant civilization. I concede in the affirmative Peter Leithart’s definition of ecclesiocentrism, but believe that there is a way of squaring the circle, as it were, between ecclesiocentrists and those who reject the label in favor of a more strictly spiritual church. This essay proposes that Ecclesiocentrism is, for pre/post Christian societies, a necessity for the creation of Christianized non-churchly institutions to maintain societal order so that the Christian church can go about its primarily spiritual mission. The spirutality of the church, I argue, could not exist with an preexisting ecclesiocentric order.
The history of North American Protestantism outside of New England was necessarily ecclesiocentric. The English colonists who built the stockade at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 made the primitive wooden parish church there the heart of social life in the fledging colony. New England centered its theocratic government around Congregationalist churches. What matters for this essay, however, is not the well-worn historiography of colonial Protestantism, but the nexus of religious and civil life in the new American republic. The Great Awakening of the 1740s, the Great Revival of 1800, and the Second Great Awakening, all influenced culture, society, and even politics. But they did so via institutions. The Christian institutions that kept the United States a relatively healthy Protestant society were not created out of nothing, particularly in what became the American South and Midwest. With the exception of New England and the South Carolina Lowcountry, there were no geographies in the United States that had institutional strength to maintain any sort of political or social control in their hinterlands to create and sustain regularized and stable ecclesiastical communities, much less sustainable representative political institutions.
As late as 1800, major parts of what became the United States were essentially ungoverned. Henry Adams in his famous history of the United States complained that Roman roads in the time of the Antonines were far better than those of the Jeffersonian United States. Violence regularly occurred amongst whites and from white settlers towards Native Americans. The mythology of the unchurched frontier tells the story of heroes like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo or something like a mythologized version of Daniel Boone, but Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence shows that the frontier was fundamentally violent.
Not even Enlightenment or Natural Law influence could morally redeem the American frontier or bring order. Pennsylvania-born Presbyterian missionary William Speer, who championed the rights of Chinese-Americans in California in the Gilded Age, said of Early Republic western New York State ca 1800 had been “colonized westward by a bold and enterprising class of people, some of whom, like the same class in the new States of the West to-day, were speculators in land, or those whose misfortunes, or vices, or roving character, disposed to regard with distaste the staid associations and habits of older communities, and to cast off the obligations of religion.” Speer repeated “a common saying, ‘religion has not got west of the Genesee River.’ Some of the towns were hotbeds of infidelity; and the books of Tom Paine, Voltaire, and their tribe, were largely circulated through the country.” In the South this unchurched American society took the form of what Bertram Wyatt-Brown believed was a “primeval” form of honor culture more like that of ancient Rome than Protestant Christianity. This honor culture, ungoverned by churchly structures, has its most visible narration in works like William Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom, wherein the character Thomas Sutpen hews a magnificent 60,000 acre plantation out of Mississippi forest, but in undone by sexual profligacy and a host of other sins.
The South and West, however, did not stay uncivilized. The heart and genesis of Protestant civilization and durable cultural and political institutions on the Early Frontier was Protestant churches. Baylor historian Robert Elder’s The Sacred Mirror convincingly makes the case that Evangelical churches in the South successfully subordinated honor culture and corporate social life to churches and their ministers. Those same churches were hardly places where parishioners pursued individualized and merely spiritual salvation. Elder, Anne Loveland, Richard Carwardine show how Southern and Midwestern Evangelical Protestants—Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and some Episcopalians—committed themselves to growing institutions like colleges, benevolence societies, fraternal groups, and other local intermediary institutions.
Initially, the church was the central cultural, ecclesiastical, social, and in some places political institution on the Early National frontier. The arrival of Christian ministers and the creation of particularized churches, served as the match to light the fire of Protestant civilization in the American West and South in the Early National United States. Revivals created churches, who needed educated and regularly ordained ministers, who in turn needed colleges to train them in the liberal arts because Christian ministers tended between 1800 and 1830 to be the only liberally educated persons in a given locale.
By 1872 there were non-churchly institutions throughout the United States. The Rise of the Benevolent Empire in the 1830s, nonetheless, was understood by clerics like Speer to have arisen out of an ecclesiocentric framework. Speer wrote that “the Great Revival of 1800 created an immense demand for ministers. The Synod of Virginia in 1798 enlarged Liberty Hall into Washington Academy.” In the western states of Kentucky and Tennessee “the rising interest gave existence to Washington College in the year 1796, and when a few years later scores of new congregations demanded pastors, which could not be at once supplied, it led, in the end, to the introduction of uneducated and incapable men into the pulpit, and to the painful schism of the “Cumberland Presbyterian Church” from the parent body.” The need for ministers for new churches in Western Pennsylvania “begat Jefferson and Washington Colleges, only a few miles apart, and somewhat later, Allegheny College; and in New York, in 1796, Union College, which has always been essentially Presbyterian, and in 1812, Hamilton College.”
This was Early Republic ecclesiocentrism, plain and simple. Even if clerics had wanted to perform a merely spiritual mission, that would have been impossible, not because the church was becoming a political institution instead of a spiritual one, but because in most areas of the backcountry United States the new churches were often the only institution to speak of. This did not lead Protestant divines to support a populist ecclesiocentrism of self-declared self-ordained pastors of independent churches. Presbyterian in particular, and later Episcopalians after the 1835 commissioning of Jackson Kemper as a missionary bishop, insisted on a regularly ordained ministry confirmed by national synodical structures. It was the lack of elite education and institutional credibility, warned Speer, that led to schism.
By the 1850s, Protestant ministers—Presbyterians like Charles Hodge and James Henley Thornwell, and Episcopalians like James Hervey Otey, spoke increasingly of the spirituality of the church. Undoubtedly, by the 1850s an Christian institutional framework had grown up in the American republic that made politized churches or even the church as the center of societal rhythm redundant at best, and clericalist imposition on other aspects of Christian civil society at worst. Likewise churches could do their spiritual mission in a stable social environment that sustained Christian moral and social commitments. The symbiosis of church and the civil order represented the apotheosis of a Protestant anacyclosis that began in the beginning of the 17th Century. That the spiritually oriented church might be the best ecclesiological telos, however, did not mean it was the only or even most durable telos for ecclesiological life. Nor did the spirituality of the church represent a meaningful doctrine that could or should be replicated by the church in all times or in all places.
History is not static, and the United States did not stay as Christian as it once was. Tim Keller wrote regularly that the 21st Century United States was a post-Christian society. Christians, he wrote in his How To Reach the West Again, had long been accustomed to a cultural and social framework that upheld Christian catechesis, but in the 21st Century, discipleship making was being done in a post-Christian society. Christian discipleship for Keller was not a merely spiritual one, but instead one that encompassed civil society as well. He proposed in Generous Justice that the church was the beating heart that rightly ordered society to be truly just. In this way Keller proposed a sort of ecclesiocentrism for urban society in the post-Christian West.
Given the collapse in trust in major institutions in American and in broader Western socio-political life, Protestant churches find themselves once again back at the start of a cycle wherein the church takes up much more than a merely spiritual mission. On some level the laity intuit this change. Popular Christian writers like Eric Metaxas, divines like Wayne Grudem, and scholars like Daniel K. Williams address an essentially political Christianity, with varying levels of sophistication. What seems clear is that, whether churchmen or the church wants to be political, ecclesiocentric life in the U.S. is back. How long it remains necessary depends, it seems, on the success of ecclesiocentrism.
Dr. Miles Smith is an historian of the South and the Atlantic world at Hillsdale College.