Hope in the Secular

The years 1963–68 were, by one reading of events, a dark period in the nation’s history. They were bracketed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the start of this half decade and, at the end, by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and of Robert Kennedy just weeks later. In between, we witnessed the murders of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and scores of lesser-known victims, both black and white, killed in the Negroes’ quest for civil rights. The nation, it seemed, was always in mourning.

And yet, these were also years of exceptional energy and optimism. In January 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson introduced the “Great Society,” his Texas-sized bundle of federal programs to rebuild cities, improve education, and expand civil rights for Negro citizens. That summer, Congress passed the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. By 1965, Johnson’s ambitious “War on Poverty” was up and running. And three years later the first human beings—Americans—were orbiting the moon. It was this second series of events that conditioned the mood of American religion.

In The Sixties Spiritual Awakening, historian Robert Ellwood has characterized American religion in the middle of the decade as “the Years of Secular Hope.” But in my memory they also register as years of religious “hope in the secular,” which is something quite different. Secular hope is what every new president tries to inspire when he takes office—what, in fact, Kennedy did inspire with his appeal to American idealism (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”) and Johnson with his programmatic War on Poverty. “Hope in the secular” isn’t just a play on semantics. Rather, it allows room for those aspirations that arise from within religious communities and that seek to be realized in a secular fashion. In the mid-Sixties, that hope was embodied in the civil rights movement under the leadership of King.

The struggle to overcome the American system of apartheid was the central drama of the mid-Sixties, though not the only one. Here I want to focus on the impact of this struggle on the white, mainline Protestant churches—the liberal denominations that collectively once embodied “the Protestant Establishment.” It was largely because of the civil rights movement, and the political response to it, that the nation’s 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. This was the paradoxical message of the “secular theology” that excited many liberal Protestants in the middle of the decade, and found its most exaggerated expression in the phrase “God Is Dead.”

We Shall Overcome

The story of mid-Sixties American religion begins where history dictates it should: with the contagious hope generated by the civil rights movement during its most idealistic years under the leadership of Dr. King. A major question, much debated at the time, was whether the Negroes’ quest for civil rights was a secular or religious movement. More precisely, was the hope that animated the civil rights movement secular or religious? How we interpret American religion in the mid-Sixties depends on the answer.

At Newsweek, as elsewhere in the national media, the civil rights movement was seen as essentially secular, with black churches serving as its institutional staging ground of convenience. The very word civil suggested the movement’s secular intent, and King himself, who exhibited grave moral lapses in his personal life, relied more on political strategy than he did on prayer. On this view, King was a civil rights leader who happened to be a minister, and the redress of wrongs he sought was essentially legal. In his speeches, King regularly appealed to the nation’s founding documents. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he reminded us, “that all men are created equal…,” thereby grounding his vision of a fully integrated society in secular texts that all Americans recognized as civilly sacred. Moreover, his appeal to conscience was urged on a nation, not just fellow Christians. When, in 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, it conferred on the man and his movement a secular, not a religious, canonization.

To be sure, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was directed by clerical lieutenants like Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson. But the SCLC was not the only civil rights organization, and within secular groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) there were those who resented the clericalism of the SCLC, dissing King himself as “De Lawd.” Moreover, King’s quest for a racially integrated society was directed against the churches as well as secular institutions. White churches were not the only ones that were segregated. Within the black church establishment—notably the National Baptist Convention, by far the largest black denomination—there were numerous pastors who resisted King’s dream for fear they would lose their own power, which depended on a segregated Christianity. And on King’s left there were numerous proponents of black power who advanced both racial separatism and violence as the only answer to white oppression. In sum, there were ample reasons to regard the civil rights movement, even under King, as a secular quest.

That said, King always insisted that whatever else he was to others—the list included agitator, troublemaker, and, to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, communist—in his heart he remained “fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage for I am the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.”1 King’s public oratory was laced with biblical language and allusions from the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels. His civil rights rallies were saturated in gospel music and the call-and-response structure of Negro sermons. Even the elements he borrowed from Gandhi, the praxis of nonviolent direct action and a belief in satyagraha (the personal force of love and truth), were orchestrated in a Christian key. Above all, King cast the entire black experience in America as a reenactment of the Hebrews’ exodus from oppression to deliverance, with himself as a vulnerable Moses (“I’ve been to the mountain. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there myself….”).

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. African Americans read themselves into the Bible as fully as the Puritan settlers had. Both pinned their hopes on scriptural promise. But where the Puritans found deliverance in their escape to the New World, Negro slaves found only oppression in their transport to the American colonies: their deliverance was yet to come. King appealed directly to this religious hope embedded in black Christianity, a hope that looked mainly to the world to come until King redirected its energy toward goals achievable in the here and now—literally, a hope in the secular. This transformation of hope is well expressed by the movement’s signature anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” There is no mention of God in the lyrics but it hardly mattered. The anthem grew out of Negro spirituals that resonated with ingrained yearnings of an entire people and helped galvanize their potential for collective action. Black religion, in short, was the religion of the civil rights movement for as long as King was its prime spokesman.

A Kairos Moment

By the mid-Sixties, it was clear to many in white northern churches that the civil rights movement was a gift as well as a challenge. Jewish as well as Christian leaders recognized in King a prophetic figure in the biblical sense of one who speaks truth to power. “In a real sense, the American Negro, in his travail, is causing the rebirth of the white church,” said Episcopal bishop C. Kilmer Myers of Michigan, though most of that travail was then seen mainly as a consequence of segregation in the South. For more than a decade, the National Council of Churches and agencies of the mainline Protestant denominations had been involved in the movement in southern states. But the high tide of northern white clergy involvement was yet to come.

King’s last great national success began in March 1965, in Selma, Alabama. King planned a march for black voting rights from there to the state capitol steps, fifty miles away in Montgomery. Like other civil rights marches, sit-ins, and public protests, this march was designed to provoke a violent reaction, in this case from Selma’s volatile Sheriff James Clark. King was counting on media coverage to arouse the nation, as it had two years earlier in Birmingham—and to prod the Johnson administration into action. As Rev. Andrew Young explained, “Sheriff Clark has been beating black heads in the back of the jail for years, and we’re only saying to him that if he still wants to break heads, he’ll have to do it on Main Street, at noon, in front of CBS, NBC, and ABC television cameras.”

Sheriff Clark obliged. On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, Negro marchers were met by two hundred state troopers who beat them back with bullwhips, clubs, and tear gas. Mounted troopers pursued them back into the ghetto, flaying them with rubber tubing wrapped with barbed wire—all of which was captured on the evening news. King watched from Atlanta and decided to wait for a federal judge to overturn a state injunction against further marches. Besides, he had amassed a war chest of $1 million to spend on the battle, if necessary, though only he and his most trusted aides knew that.

The march to Montgomery resumed two weeks later. King had spent the interval on the phone, summoning white churchmen who had been waiting for his signal to join the march. For the first time, legions of Catholic nuns from the North showed up and in full dress: like the Protestant bishops in their robes, they understood the symbolic power of religious uniforms. One of the Episcopal bishops who answered King’s call was Paul Moore, a close friend of Newsweek editor Oz Elliott. Because of the white clerical involvement, Oz Elliott sent word that the story was mine to write—and ordered up a sidebar on Moore as part of the package. It was the first opportunity I had since coming to Newsweek to write about the subject that had consumed me in Omaha.

Veteran civil rights reporters from Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau, like Joe Cumming and Andrew Jaffee, plus Marshall Frady, a new recruit who would later write fine biographies of Jackson and King himself, managed to be everywhere in Selma that week. From their copious interviews and vivid descriptions it was clear that the more than two thousand white northerners in Selma had, for the duration, only one pastor and they all were members of his congregation. King’s lieutenants warned them not to venture outside Selma’s black ghetto—earlier, a Unitarian minister from Boston, James Reeb, had been bludgeoned to death by white men after he wandered outside the Negro area. Selma’s Jewish and white Christian clergy dared not offer sympathy or support to the northerners; in fact, most local clergy regarded them as invaders. In daily orientation classes, black clergy drilled the white volunteers like Army sergeants: “No matter how big a chief you were in your own tepee, when you got to the border of Alabama, you became an Indian.” By day, black churches served as the marchers’ meetinghouses and dining halls; at night, the northerners bedded down on pews in Negro churches, or in the maternity ward at Good Samaritan Hospital run by the Edmundite Fathers, an all-black Catholic religious order serving Negro patients. “There were many times before that I thought I’d slept with the Lord,” one rabbi quipped, “but this is the first time I’ve ever slept with a bishop.”

As my deadline approached, I put the files aside and brooded on what Selma meant. An image came to mind and then a lead sentence that summed it up:

Like the lame to Lourdes they came—bishops, rabbis, ministers, priests and nuns—several thousand in all, sensing somehow that God was stirring the waters in Selma, Ala.

Then, as now, it seemed to me that the white clergy needed their immersion in the civil rights movement as much as the movement needed the witness of white clergy. The way King framed it, segregation challenged the very core of religious conscience and commitment. Protestant theologians recognized the Negro challenge to American apartheid as a kairos—one of those urgent, God-appointed opportunities in the here and now to recognize and do God’s will. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who strode arm in arm with King and other religious luminaries at the head of the march, articulated what many of the white clergy experienced in Selma. He was, he said, “praying with my legs.”

—

It took five days for the marchers to reach Montgomery. By then their numbers had swollen to twenty-five thousand, most of them Negroes. Alabama governor George Wallace watched through binoculars from his office but refused to meet his visitors. It hardly mattered. The audience King wanted was watching on television, especially in the nation’s capital. Five months later, President Johnson pushed through Congress a Voting Rights Act that abolished literacy tests, poll taxes, and similar Jim Crow devices that Alabama and other southern states had used to limit the registration of Negro voters. King’s “hope in the secular” had been vindicated, at least for the moment. The day after the Voting Rights Act was passed, a wild week of Negro rioting broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Houses and businesses went up in flames. The era of nonviolent protest—the kind that northern churchmen could support as “prophetic”—had peaked. But the effects of the civil rights movement on mainline Protestantism turned out to be far-reaching.

After Selma, veterans of the march would talk of their experience as life changing. It wasn’t just a memorable moment: it was also a moral credential. There, Protestants and Catholics and Jews and people of no religion at all had stood with their black brothers in common witness. 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.

God’s Avant-garde

In the fall of 1965, with Vatican Council II about to adjourn for good, I proposed that Newsweek devote its Christmas cover story to a meanwhile-back-on-the-ranch examination of American Protestantism. My premise going in was simple: now that Catholicism had changed, how would American Protestantism respond?

At the time, two-thirds of adult Americans identified as Protestants. But beyond that self-identification they did not have a lot in common. A 1965 sociological study of Protestant laymen from all major denominations found that on bedrock beliefs like the nature of God, the divinity of Jesus, and what one must do to be saved, there was more disagreement than agreement. “Protestants can no longer sing ‘Christ crucified, risen and coming again,’ with one voice,” the study concluded, because less than half “really believes it’s true.” The half that did was mostly Fundamentalist and Evangelical. But from where I sat in my office on Madison Avenue, they were still a distant and disorganized fringe.

By “Protestant,” then, I meant the denominations associated with the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the editorial outlook of The Christian Century magazine. These were the ecumenical, mostly northern Protestants who officially supported the civil rights movement, who produced the publicly prominent theologians, who sent official observers to the Council in Rome, and who had long been recognized as the nation’s Protestant Establishment. Episcopalians, (northern) Presbyterians, Methodists, American (northern) Baptists, Congregationalists (United Church of Christ), most Lutheran denominations, and the Disciples of Christ—these were the Protestant denominations whose members got elected to Congress and theirs were the churches, usually with “First” or “Second” in their names, clustered along the Main Streets of America. Such was the fellow feeling among the mainliners that in 1962 there was a formal effort to unite several of the largest Protestant denominations. “Think of it this way,” explained an ecumenical Presbyterian in a sermon I happened to catch on my car radio: “Protestant Christianity is like organ music and we Presbyterians must recognize that we are just one pull on God’s organ.” (I think “stop” was the word he was looking for.) In this analogy, the studious Presbyterians were Protestants who did the thinking for the Methodists, and the emotional Methodists were Protestants who did the feeling for the Presbyterians. The only differences were matters of history and temperament.

By the fall of 1965, however, events more urgent than ecclesiastical mergers and acquisitions had captured the attention of mainline church leaders. First was the realization that Catholics, now properly reformed, were to be embraced rather than feared. As one Methodist observer in Rome neatly put it: “You fight your father for years, and then one day he says, ‘I agree with you.’ Protestantism has got to say in a fresh way what it is.” Second was the challenge of Dr. King, who had demonstrated the power of black religion to effect social change—something the liberal mainline churches, with their background in the nineteenth-century Social Gospel movement, had hoped to do themselves. The third was a felt imperative to rethink the relationship between the church and the secular order. If the primary purpose of the church was no longer to convert the unbelieving, as many liberal clergy now believed, what was it?

My first problem was choosing a representative Protestant figure to put on the cover of Newsweek. The age of the great theologians was over: Reinhold Niebuhr was an old man, Paul Tillich was dead and Karl Barth soon would be, and none of their younger disciples commanded similar national recognition. What we needed, I thought, was someone who embodied mainline Protestantism on the move.

Eventually I settled on Robert McAfee Brown, an ecumenist, a veteran of civil rights marches, a professor of religion at Stanford, and a prolific writer. His just-published book, The Spirit of Protestantism, was one attempt to say afresh what “Protestant” means. At age forty-five, Brown belonged to the last generation of well-bred, well-educated American Protestant clergy who, if they hadn’t chosen the ministry, would have become doctors or lawyers or business leaders. Besides, he looked good: with wavy silver hair and a square Dick Tracy jaw, Bob was a rare sort among Presbyterian ministers I’d met—a Calvinist with a lively sense of humor.

Bob had to come to me because there was no way I could get to him. The only time he had to sit down for an interview was during an overnight stop on his way from Rome, where he was an official observer at Vatican Council II, to Delano, California, where he was leading an interfaith group of clergy trying to mediate a strike by migrant Mexican grape pickers against fruit growers in the San Joaquin Valley. Our sit-down was at the kitchen table in the new house we had just built in Westchester County. The stove and refrigerator had yet to be delivered and there were our three children, aged five, four, and six months, to attend to. Pizza and beer would have to do.

Bob sketched his religious trajectory in quick strokes. He had been a Navy chaplain, a pastor, a colleague and disciple of Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. His introduction to Catholic America was through Senator Eugene McCarthy and the Benedictines at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, where he had spent his ninth wedding anniversary in a monk’s cell. His migration to Stanford was for him the final leg of a journey out of the cloistered world of Protestant “clericalism” and into the secular classroom, where, he believed, the Christian faith can engage “the modern mind.” He no longer wore a clerical collar except in Rome, where it was expected, and on protest marches, where it was symbolically useful.

“If you’re going to be on the cover of Newsweek, you’re going to have to show the collar,” I insisted over Bob’s objections. “We’ve got to signal the reader visually that the cover story is about religion.” And, I added, “It’d be nice if you could find something that also symbolized Presbyterianism.” “Presbyterians don’t go in for symbols,” he reminded me, and besides, denominational differences were passé. Reluctantly, he came up with a three-inch stone Celtic cross that he always carried with him. Magnified by our art department, it loomed over him on the cover of Newsweek like a cemetery monument.

Brown wanted me to know that the age of the Protestant Establishment was over and that he for one was relieved. Making room for Catholics meant Protestants no longer had to “assume responsibility for everything in our culture.” Thus unburdened, Protestants would be free to regroup as a “prophetic” minority, much like the black clergy under Dr. King. To make this happen, he said, mission boards, Sunday schools—the entire structure of Protestant denominations—would have to be ruthlessly reformed. A new Reformation was at hand.

Brown was hardly a voice crying in the wilderness. Every mainliner we interviewed seemed to be imbued with contempt for American Protestantism in its current suburban flourishing. Colin Williams, the NCC’s secretary for evangelism, derided the mainline Protestant churches as “sick with self-concern.” By that he meant concern for recruiting new members and building ever bigger churches to accommodate them. For Paul Stagg, evangelism executive for the American (northern) Baptist Churches USA, the question facing Protestants was not “whether the church can convert the world, but whether God can convert his church.”

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. Albert Outler, a wise and gentle Methodist scholar who was also just back from witnessing the reformist spirit at work in Rome, tried to help this Catholic journalist out. “There’s something you don’t yet understand, Ken,” he explained. “Deep down, we Protestants distrust the church structures we’ve created. But for Catholics, even the most liberal among them, ‘Holy Mother the Church’ is always ‘Holy-Mother-the-Church.’ ”

I knew what he meant about Catholics. He meant what Lenny Bruce meant when he famously asked: “Why is the Catholic Church the only the church?” We Catholics did not think of our church as just another Christian “denomination.” But I was just beginning to realize that for Protestants, “church” primarily means the local congregation that individuals voluntarily join, the place where families worship on Sundays, study the Bible on weeknights, and find “fellowship” with other believers. On this view, Protestant denominations, while often family-like in feeling, were perceived as essentially provisional bodies whose directives and decisions could be and frequently were ignored by local congregations. “Seats at church conventions are considered a reward for twenty years of being a nice guy,” explained Yale theologian George Lindbeck, a Lutheran. “And so the conventions try to avoid dealing with any fundamental questions for fear that a great scandal might issue out of a public debate on unresolved problems.” Lindbeck was another Protestant observer at Vatican Council II and had been hugely impressed by the role theologians had played in its deliberations. I thought he was being hard on his Protestant brethren. “Protestants are always holding church conventions,” I pointed out. “Vatican II was the Catholics’ first council in a hundred years.”

Among the structures targeted by mainline Protestant reformers, first on the list were their own suburban churches. The problem with suburban congregations, in the reformers’ collective view, was their insulation from the plight of the urban poor—that part of America that President Johnson focused on in his Great Society programs and that King had spoken for when he launched the Poor People’s Campaign just months before his assassination.

The reformers’ strategy was to expose Protestant youth groups from suburban parishes to the effects of segregation, unemployment, and urban poverty by busing them into the nation’s inner cities on weekends. Teenager Hillary Rodham was one such student who, as she later wrote, found these weekend exercises in urban exposure to be life transforming. Gibson Winter, one of the leaders of this back-to-the-city strategy, was very candid about its intent: “We take laymen from their [suburban] parishes and soon they find that they are no longer interested in normal church organizations; we destroy them for [conventional] parish work.” The assumption was that suburban Christians, being white and usually well-off, had no real problems of their own.

In place of the old model of the residential church, where members bracketed secular concerns to worship God on the Sabbath, the reformers proposed a new model of the “servant church,” one geared to assist God in whatever they believed God was up to in the secular world. And “secular” usually meant “inner-city,” where most Protestants who lived there were black. Thus the mid-Sixties saw the creation of urban missions by mainline churches and funded by foundations created by the Ford and Rockefeller families, whose boards were controlled by liberal mainline Protestants. Among them was Chicago’s Urban Training Center for Christian Mission, which used black ministers to orient white Protestant seminarians and newly minted clergy in service to black communities. The point was to convert clergy of the Protestant Establishment into “prophetic” ministers of the Gospel. “The church is God’s avant-garde,” Rev. Archie Hargraves often told his clerical wards at the center. “And its function is to be where the action is, out in the world.”

Unlike Hargraves, a black Congregationalist who went on to become president of Shaw University, most white mainline Protestant leaders felt more like God’s rear guard. The mantra most often heard from their ranks was “Let the world set the church’s agenda.” This was the servant church asking for directions, and none was more blinded by white guilt than the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Because of its image as the church of the carriage class, the Episcopal Church was especially self-conscious and self-critical. In the mid-Sixties, about 6 percent of Episcopalians were black, most of them of Caribbean descent; there were 253 black priests, now with their own black caucus, but as yet no black bishops within the United States. In 1967, Episcopal leaders called for a special General Convention, only the second in its history, to confront its social sins and reform its structures. Optimists hoped to accomplish in six days the kind of changes that had occupied the Church of Rome for six years. The convention is worth recalling for what it tells us about the posture of the mainline at the close of the 1960s.

By the time the convention opened in summer of 1969, on the University of Notre Dame campus, the original agenda had been essentially scrapped. In addition to elected delegates, each diocese was directed to send three outsiders—preferably black, preferably poor, preferably female—to tell the church what its mission ought to be. In the view of the bishop in charge of the program, this new agenda was designed to jolt complacent white delegates “who have the money and the time to spend on the church” through a process that he described as “planned mayhem.”

By 1969, however, the civil rights movement had changed as well. King was dead and black power, with its attendant racial anger and threats of violence, was ascendant. In May, former SNCC executive director James Forman issued his Black Manifesto, demanding $500 million (eventually upped to $3 billion) in repatriation to blacks from the nation’s white churches, synagogues, “and all other racist institutions.” Already Forman had shown up at various denominational meetings, even crashing the sedate annual conference of Christian Scientists in Boston, demanding cash up front for his new organization, the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC). (The faith-healing disciples of Mary Baker Eddy politely received him, and just as politely ignored his demands.)

The only fear among planners of the Episcopal convention was that Forman might not show up. He didn’t, but surrogates did. Just a few minutes into his opening talk, Presiding Bishop John Hines had the microphone wrested from his hands by a group of his own black clergy who demanded $200,000 for Foreman’s organization. Since the church had already committed $9 million to combat the nation’s urban crisis, the extra tribute was not the issue. The question that bothered conservative delegates was whether the church should fund an organization that threatened violence to achieve its goals. In a compromise, the money was handed over to the church’s black caucus—a move that placated conservatives—which then delivered the check to Forman, pleasing the liberals. In this way, the BEDC wrested its first “donation” from a mainline Protestant denomination. If Forman got what he wanted, the convention’s planners also got what they hoped for: six days of searing group therapy. But for all the “planned mayhem,” the delegates left Notre Dame as confused and divided as when they arrived. Those who wanted a theological vision of what the church is and where it was headed would have to look elsewhere for guidance.

Secular Theology

They didn’t have far to look. 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, they were wildly optimistic about “the world,” considerably less so about the church. Never more than a half-dozen in number, they nonetheless set the terms of conversation through which liberal American Protestants struggled to locate God in both.

Secular theology presupposed what social scientists call “secularization theory”—the notion that Western societies had already undergone a process in which the authority of religious faith and institutions declined as these societies became more rational, more compartmentalized, more focused on this world (the saeculum) than on the next. Max Weber saw secularization as the progressive “disenchantment of the world” that occurs when science finds answers to questions that were previously considered religious mysteries. As the space allotted to the sacred—that is, to God and His Providence—waned, the secular waxed, pushing religion to the margins of human concerns. Most secular theologians were Americans who looked upon this process and pronounced it not only good but also the long-delayed fruit of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.

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Ironically, the most influential secular theologian in the mid-Sixties had been dead for twenty years. Nor was he American. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young Lutheran pastor and precocious German theologian who left the safety of a teaching post at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1939 to join the anti-Nazi Resistance. Shortly after, the Nazis imprisoned him for his complicity in a failed plot on Hitler’s life. He was executed at the age of thirty-nine, just months before the German surrender in 1945. While in prison Bonhoeffer wrote a number of letters that, together with some of his papers, were posthumously published. By 1965, an English translation of his Letters and Papers from Prison was selling by the thousands on seminary and college campuses. Many Protestants regarded Bonhoeffer as a martyr. Indeed, shortly after Vatican Council II a group of Lutherans went to Rome to inquire whether the Catholic Church might consider canonizing him.

American theologians were drawn to certain enigmatic phrases and tentative theological probes in Bonhoeffer’s prison meditations. Toward the end of his life, Bonhoeffer spoke of a “world come of age” in which men would solve their problems and go on with life without need for or reference to religion, as was already happening in Europe. He imagined a “nonreligious Christianity” that dispensed with the traditional myths and metaphysical ideas about God’s transcendence. Under such conditions, if God were to be found at all, it would have to be in the midst of secular concerns—again, where the action is. And Christ? If he were to be acknowledged at all, it would be anonymously as “the man for others.”2

Read in the context of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer’s prison musings (they were no more than that) made a certain sense. He saw that the German churches that failed to confront Hitler had proffered “cheap grace” to believers, while men of no faith recognized and resisted evil and died for what they did. Many Americans who studied Bonhoeffer saw a direct parallel with the civil rights movement and read their own experiences into his. Bonhoeffer’s more enthusiastic followers, however, used his prison writings as starting points for creating a full-blown “secular theology.”

I said at the outset of this chapter that the mid-Sixties was a period of enormous optimism for mainline Protestantism; we are now at a point to consider the textual evidence. Between 1963 and 1966, a blizzard of books inspired by Bonhoeffer appeared and, however different from each other, bespoke his peculiar form of “hope in the secular.” Among them: The New Creation as Metropolis (Gibson Winter, 1963); Honest to God (John A. T. Robinson, 1963); The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (Paul Van Buren, 1963); The New Reformation (Robinson, 1965); The Secular City (Harvey Cox, 1965); Secular Christianity (Ronald Gregor Smith, 1966); The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Thomas J. J. Altizer, 1966); Radical Theology and the Death of God (edited by Altizer and William Hamilton, 1966). This list does not include the books about these books—titles like The Honest to God Debate and The Secular City Debate.

Cox’s The Secular City was the most ambitious of the bunch and by far the most successful—an international bestseller in fourteen languages, something altogether new for a serious young theologian. The Secular City brimmed with optimism, beginning with its jaunty subtitle: A Celebration of Its Liberties and an Invitation to Its Discipline. 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.”3 Like Gibson Winter, Cox saw a “new creation” in the making, which he called “technopolis,” with a new urban style, at once secular and profane, which he identified with the can-do idealism of the late John F. Kennedy. Secular or technopolitan man does not waste time pondering the meaning of life: he is a problem solver.

In this new cultural surround, Cox argued, the church was called out from its old and “crippling structures” on the margins of the secular city. It was to become “God’s avant-garde,” discerning within the secular city the signs of God’s coming kingdom and working for its realization. Like the Israelites in the desert, Cox believed, properly secular Christians were a people on the move with no time or temptation to worship static religion’s false idols. They would follow Jesus into the world, working anonymously at his side in a secular fashion while history moved ever onward and upward under the hidden hand of God.

Although Cox’s celebration of the secular seemed revolutionary, his ideas actually reconfigured a thoroughly American, wholly Protestant, and specifically mainline vision. Cox himself had been an Evangelical Baptist from Pennsylvania newly recruited by Harvard Divinity School. Like the Puritan John Winthrop’s imagined “city upon a hill,” Cox’s secular city was the latest iteration of a persistent Protestant dream—albeit one that in its details looked a lot like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Behind it lay the nineteenth-century Protestant ambition to transform the United States into a righteous empire and the early-twentieth-century Protestant Social Gospel movement’s emphasis on taking the church into the world, building there a new Jerusalem fit for Jesus’ promised return. Where the mainline Protestant establishment once saw itself as the conscience and institutional custodian of American culture, it would now perform the same role (albeit in concert with like-minded Catholics and Jews) as the disestablished but discreetly embedded conscience of the emerging secular city. Liberal mainline Protestants had nothing to fear from the secular city: as its prophetic avant-garde, they would still be custodians of its conscience.

One measure of the thoroughly Protestant character of Cox’s vision was the distance between his secular city and the urban experience of American Catholics. Inner-city Catholic parishes defined neighborhoods where community rather than autonomy or anonymity—Cox’s prized virtues—was cultivated. The anonymous city folk that Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers served—and, for that matter, the Salvation Army and other Evangelical storefront missions—were the utterly poor and uprooted: Manhattan’s underside, not the affluent Upper East Side, where Cox’s secular city was more clearly visible. Moreover, Catholics still inhabited an “enchanted” world shaped by the very myths and metaphysics that secular theology rejected. God may indeed be active in the secular world, but Catholics were not about to ignore the Christ whose sacramental presence they encountered and liturgically celebrated in churches.

For a handful of Protestant theologians (never more than three or four) Cox’s celebration of secularity was not radical enough. Taking as their own Nietzsche’s adage that “God Is Dead,” they insisted that the transcendent Deity really had died in our time—and that the world was now an immensely happier place for it. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Thomas J. J. Altizer, a professor of religion at Emory University, called on Nietzsche, Hegel, and especially William Blake’s prophetic poems as witnesses to the death of the traditional God—a God who had inspired alienation, sin, and guilt. That God, he announced, had so emptied himself of divinity when Christ died on the cross that he was now wholly immanent in history. For Altizer that was Good News indeed. Abstract, apocalyptic, and wholly idiosyncratic, Altizer’s work owed more to the emergent counterculture than it did to Christian theology, and it might have gone unnoticed had it not appeared as part of a wider effort to announce the death of God while affirming the continuing relevance of Jesus.

If Altizer was the prophet-seer of the death of God, William Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Theological Seminary was its pleased and plainer-speaking funeral director. Although he labeled his work theology, his essays were really sweeping readings of American cultural trends, engagingly but superficially put. Everywhere he looked, Hamilton saw release from postwar angst and the introspective conscience of classic Protestantism. The old God associated with that conscience had died, he concluded, giving Americans a new birth of freedom from tragedy and restraint. Significantly, Hamilton pointed to the civil rights movement and its “We Shall Overcome” anthem as his “most decisive piece of evidence” that a new age of secular optimism had arrived. “That there is a gaiety, an absence of alienation, a vigor and contagious hope at the center of this movement is the main source of its hold on the conscience of America, especially among the young.”4 Ripped from its roots in black religion, the civil rights movement had become in Hamilton’s version of secular theology the prime example of an ecstatic “hope in the secular” once God no longer exists.

Except for Altizer, secular theology was easy to read, provocative, and flush with taunting paradox—low-hanging fruit ripe for picking by newsmagazine journalists keen on discerning trends. Time seized the moment with the magazine’s most memorable cover image: “Is God Dead?” printed in red letters against a funereal black background and published as the Easter issue in 1965. The story inside ran to nearly six thousand words and featured a potted history of God from ancient Babylonia forward. Writer John T. Elson read forty books in preparation for his piece and thirty-two Time correspondents around the world contributed some three hundred interviews with experts as well as believers off the street. It was a splendid example of magazine journalism’s version of the full-court press, bringing to the general reader’s attention news of an important obituary they might otherwise have missed.

Countless clergymen entered the pulpit that Easter Sunday brandishing copies of Time and preaching in God’s defense. Universities sponsored teach-ins on the Death of God and defiant bumper stickers proclaimed “My God’s Not Dead—Sorry About Yours.” Like a sudden summer storm, the Death of God came and swiftly went, more media event than movement. But for one brief moment it almost cost me my job. At Newsweek, senior editor Ed Diamond, the man who edited my articles, read the Time story and concluded that religion, while occasionally interesting, was no longer a subject deserving of its own weekly niche in the magazine. Not enough Americans really believed in God, he argued in a confidential memo to the top editors. In place of religion, Diamond proposed running a regular section devoted to philosophy, a subject he knew even less about. It was a proposal I could challenge only with burlesque: “You’re right, Ed,” I told him. “There’s a huge congregation of neo-Kantians out there and devotees of Wittgenstein just waiting for Newsweek to weigh in every week.” Eventually, Newsweek did institute a new section of the magazine, “Cities,” in part because by the end of the Sixties so many of them had been trashed in inner-city riots.

Secular theology, it should be noted, was not addressed to secular Americans—who in any case paid little heed. Nearly all the writers I’ve mentioned were ordained ministers writing for a Christian audience of mostly mainline Protestant readers. Cox’s The Secular City, for example, was commissioned for a conference of the National Student Christian Federation. But it wasn’t 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.

What we have yet to examine is how secular theology affected those who represented mainline Protestant churches. Here, by way of example, I turn to the life and career of Episcopal bishop James A. Pike, easily the best-known mainline Protestant churchman of the Sixties. Following his career was like watching a weathervane register every new breeze blowing from the zeitgeist.

Pike’s Pique

On the second Sunday of September in 1966, Episcopal bishop James Albert Pike strode down the center aisle of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, doffed his miter, lowered his scepter, and climbed one last time into the pulpit, his brown leather penny loafers barely visible under his buff-colored robes. His parting sermon before resigning as bishop of California was titled “What a Man Can Believe.” It wasn’t much. Having jettisoned the Incarnation, the Trinity, and other doctrines of the Christian faith, Pike affirmed his belief in an afterlife based on his séances with mediums, endorsed love—“I-thou relationships are tops,” he offered—and urged his 2,500 well-wishers to continue to praise God as “that which is in, and under, and beyond all this and maybe continuous with it—I don’t know.”

Had he not been a bishop, no one would have cared what James Albert Pike did or did not believe. But as a bishop he was the most visible mainline Protestant churchman of his era, a man who insisted that the media pay him heed and then returned the favor by proceeding to come apart before our very eyes. In life, as in his religious views, Pike was tumbling tumbleweed, always moving on, always reinventing himself according to what’s happening. In this sense, he provides us with a parable of liberal Protestantism in the middle of the Sixties—“the years,” as essayist Joan Didion, a fellow Episcopalian (and fellow Californian), later wrote, “for which James Albert Pike was born.”5

Pike was born in 1913 in Oklahoma. Two years later his father died and his mother moved to California. She was Catholic and as a boy Jim imagined becoming a priest. But during his sophomore year at the Jesuits’ Santa Clara College young Jim lost faith in the Catholic Church. Papal infallibility and birth control, he later claimed, were the issues that drove him into religious indifference, though like many of his assertions this seems like retrospective editing: at that time, most Protestants no less than Catholics opposed birth control. Pike’s intellectual formation was in the law, first at the University of Southern California and then at Yale, where he earned a doctorate in jurisprudence, a secular credential. In 1938, he married for the first time and went to work at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. In 1940, his wife divorced him. While serving in naval intelligence during the war, Pike occasionally attended liturgies in the National Cathedral. “It looked like a church ought to look,”6 he thought, and he liked the enlightened elasticity of Anglican theology. Besides, as he wrote to his mother at the time, “practically every churchgoer you meet in our level of society is Episcopalian, and an RC or straight Protestant is as rare as hen’s teeth.”7

Pike married a second time and in 1946 was ordained an Episcopal priest. In taking holy orders, he liked to say, he remained a lawyer who merely changed clients. Pike’s approach to matters theological, first as an apologist for traditional Anglicanism and then as orthodox Christianity’s prosecuting attorney, was always essentially forensic. He liked to sift the evidence for this or that belief.

It took Pike just nine years to move from small-town church rector to chaplain at Columbia University (where he also upgraded its meager Department of Religion) to Episcopal bishop of California. His key career boost occurred in 1952, when he was appointed dean of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an edifice larger, if not more grand, than the National Cathedral.

As dean, Pike quickly assumed the role of the unofficial voice of the Episcopal Church. He wrote a half-dozen small books explaining and defending the Anglican middle way between the Anglo-Catholicism of the liturgy he celebrated and the Protestantism he preached from the pulpit. It was easier to chant doctrines you didn’t believe in, he would later say, than to recite them in a creed. Pike hired theologians for his staff, hoping to make his cathedral a center of Anglican scholarship. Although Catholics had the larger numbers in New York, Pike believed the Episcopalians attracted the more sophisticated crowd. One of his first acts was to register the corporate title of “The New York Cathedral” with the state, thereby denying legal use of that title by the Catholics’ St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He especially enjoyed jousting with New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman over issues like birth control, the cardinal’s penchant for condemning “dirty” movies, and Spellman’s ardent anticommunism. Pike was no left-winger but he believed the Church of Rome was soft on fascism. When John F. Kennedy geared up his run for president of the United States, Pike wrote a book arguing that the senator’s allegiance to the Catholic faith made him unfit for the nation’s highest office.

Pike drew attention to his views by writing for secular publications like Look, Vogue, and the Sunday newspaper supplement This Week. In 1955, the ABC television network gave him his own weekly program, The Dean Pike Show, which put him in direct competition with another media favorite, Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Pike liked to display his wife and four children on his program to show that a bishop can be a family man as well—though in fact these on-camera sessions were often the most time Pike spent with his family each week.

By the late Fifties, then, Pike had become mainline Protestantism’s ablest—certainly its most recognized—public apologist. But in this role, his most enduring credential would turn out to be his refusal in 1953 to accept an honorary degree from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The university was supported by seven southern Episcopal dioceses and included a seminary that would not accept black students. When several teachers at the seminary challenged this segregationist policy, Pike supported them by refusing the university’s offer to honor him, saying he didn’t want “a degree in white divinity.” This was two years before the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. and burnished Pike’s later image as a “prophetic” churchman.

The California Pike returned to as Episcopal bishop was not the distant cultural outpost he had left a quarter century before. Whatever California is now, it was said, the rest of the country would soon be. The hippie counterculture, the Free Speech Movement, the gay rights movement—all of which Pike progressively embraced—made him feel at the cutting edge of social change. Grace Cathedral, his Episcopal seat, hovered like a vaulted spaceship above the genteel neighborhoods on Nob Hill, rivaling in magnificence those in Washington and New York. From there he traveled widely, giving lectures and sermons and turning up wherever there was a rally or protest march. As a churchman, Pike had reached his peak.

If Pike feasted on public attention, he also watched the market. In the first phase of his church career he had addressed those Americans who were personally not religious but lived vicariously off those who were, and who expected churchmen like himself to maintain institutions and traditions: after all, everyone needs a fit place to marry and to bury. Now he was tired of that role. In 1960, Pike began to air his private doubts. The Trinity, the divinity of Jesus—the whole carapace of Christian doctrine, he had come to believe, was now so much “excess baggage” that had to be jettisoned in the name of “Christian candor.” By going public, he hoped to rally those within the church who, like himself, enjoyed the liturgies, the music, the belonging, but personally could not accept the doctrines that these rituals presumed and expressed. Who better to shoulder the burden of vicarious disbelief than a bishop?

Pike himself was not a theologian, though this was now what he wanted to be. His gift was playing middleman, adept at retailing the thoughts of others. Although he owned a bachelor’s degree in divinity (magna cum laude) from New York’s Union Theological Seminary, his exposure to systemic theology was limited to a pair of seminars with Paul Tillich. Tillich became his close friend and chief inspiration: from him, Pike borrowed the idea of addressing God as “the Ground of Being,” a title about as compelling as Aristotle’s “unmoved mover.” Tillich also inspired his former student to live “on the boundary” of Christian faith—including the boundary of Christian marriage. Both were notorious philanderers, and neither went to church unless he was the preacher. From Bonhoeffer, Pike appropriated the servant image of Jesus as the humble “man for others.” And from Honest to God he swallowed whole author John A. T. Robinson’s program (itself a distillation of others’ thoughts) for demythologizing the Christian faith. In this way, Pike became the ecclesiastical spear-carrier for the gathering secular theology. Time noticed and put him on its cover.

I first met Pike in the summer of 1964 when he frequently came by Newsweek for lunch. He had just joined Alcoholics Anonymous—“Make it a Virgin Mary,” he would tell the waiter—and chain-smoked nervously through the meals. His face was lined like a tobacco leaf, making him look a dozen years older than he was. The bishop was by then well into a series of sermons at Trinity Church, Wall Street, culminating in one that famously dismissed the Trinity itself: “Sounds like a committee God,” he said.

Pike was spoiling for a fight with his own church. He wanted to test its vaunted reputation for tolerance in matters theological. A group of twenty-seven Anglo-Catholic bishops from southern dioceses eventually took him on, demanding that he be tried for heresy. Pike was not on trial, the church was: if a bishop need not accept the basic doctrines of the Christian faith, then all members of the church were free to believe what they wished. The outcome, I felt, held important implications for the future of all the mainline Protestant churches. What exactly were the truths to which they were bearing witness?

“The Bishop Pike Affair,” as it came to be called, crested at a meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops in 1966. Most of the bishops wanted to avoid a heresy trial, which they felt was anachronistic—even medieval—for so modern a church. A committee created to resolve the issue voted to censure Pike for his flippant ways with historic Christian doctrines, but judged that his “often obscure and contrary utterances” did not warrant the time and effort and wounds of a trial. The church, the report concluded, “had more important things to get on with.”

And what were these more important things? A minority report from the church’s more liberal bishops was quite clear: “We believe that it is more important to be a sympathetic and self-conscious part of God’s action in the secular world than it is to defend the positions of the past, which is a past that is altered with each new discovery of the truth.” Chief among God’s actions was, of course, the civil rights movement. “Why is it,” asked Bishop Paul Moore, “that the House has not censured any of the rest of us who have not spoken out and allowed to occur within our own dioceses greater blasphemies….I speak of church doors closed against members of another race, clergy denied backing by their bishops because of their Christian social views, and the public impugning of the motives of fellow bishops.” This was a less-than-veiled reference to Pike’s southern accusers, whose timidity in supporting the civil rights movement was, in the mind of Pike’s defenders, more heinous than the flippancy of their resident Doubting Thomas.

Pike’s 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 Christ’s teachings was to be judged. There would be others, notably the war in Vietnam and women’s liberation, and woe to those who did not properly discern what God was doing in His secular manifestations. For Bishop Pike, though, there would be other trials and other personal transformations.

When Pike retired as bishop of California, his private life was a mess. His second wife was preparing to divorce him for his repeated infidelities over the course of their marriage. He also had a mistress, Maren Bergrud, who would soon commit suicide in their shared apartment—an act in which the bishop was partially complicit and, as it turned out, one that he illegally tried to cover up. Also, the very week Time’s cover appeared, Pike commenced a sexual relationship with a third woman, Diane Kennedy, a student twenty-four years his junior in a class he was teaching on “The New Morality.” Although Pike remained on the wagon, Bergrud was into drugs. So was his semi-estranged son, Jimmy. A week after his twentieth birthday, Jimmy sat alone on the bed in a London apartment and blew his head off. His grieving father turned for help to spiritualist mediums, and in a series of séances claimed consoling contact with his son’s wandering spirit. One of these sessions was aired live on Canadian television and became part of yet another book from Pike’s hand, The Other Side, which used his experiences with psychic channelers as evidence of a hereafter. After his divorce and the suicide of his mistress, Pike married Diane in December 1968. When the local Episcopal bishop refused him a liturgical marriage, he resigned from the church. Typically, his leaving and the reasons for it were announced in an article he wrote for Look magazine.

Throughout his tumultuous final years, Pike wrote short letters updating me on his doings, just in case I hadn’t noticed. So I wasn’t surprised when he called me early in September 1969 to say that he and Diane were going to Israel to visit the desert ruins at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered. The journey, he said, was part of his new interest: investigation of the historical Jesus, a subject about which he planned to write several books. It was a field trip of sorts. He wanted to get a firsthand feeling of the barren Judean desert, unchanged since days when Jesus went there to fast and pray before taking up his ministry. There, Pike believed, he might somehow make contact with the earthly Jesus the way that psychics claim they can pick up spiritual vibrations from past events just by visiting the places where they occurred. His hoped-for experiences would be one more set of empirical facts to bolster his belief in an afterlife.

“Do you fear death?” I asked him on the phone. “I guess all men fear death,” he replied. “But to me death now is like going to a new country to live. Frightening, maybe—but exciting, too.” It would be yet another transformation. I think that was the last conversation he had with an American journalist.

Pike died in the desert wilderness. He had taken a wrong turn driving out of Bethlehem and soon got lost. Diane set out on foot alone seeking help, leaving her exhausted husband resting in a cave. She was found by Bedouin workers and carried back to Bethlehem. The next day the Israeli army launched the largest manhunt in the young nation’s history, deploying planes and helicopters and more than two hundred troops to scour the desert’s rough wadis and cloven hills, but to no effect. On a hunch, I cabled Newsweek’s London bureau to call on Ena Twigg, a famous psychic and pious Anglican whom Pike had often consulted. Maybe she had a clue. Twigg said she had been trying to reach him for days. Her visions placed him in a cave but that was all she could see. Besides, she complained, Newsweek reporter Kevin Buckley had brought with him an interposing shade from the other world, whose features she described in detail. His presence, she complained, was blocking her channel to the beleaguered Pike. “What she described resembled my dead grandfather,” Buckley cabled back, “so please don’t send me out to her again.”

Eventually, a volunteer search party found Pike’s body: he had tried to follow after his wife and fallen seventy feet onto a subterranean ledge. The news of his death was broadcast while the Episcopal bishops were convened at Notre Dame for their previously noted special General Convention. It was the first such meeting in years that had not been dominated by Pike. The bishops promptly hailed him as a “prophet,” but it wasn’t clear of what. Ironically, although Pike had left the church, technically he was still a bishop.

Bishop Pike reflected all the crosswinds coursing through mainline Protestantism in the middle Sixties, albeit in a convex mirror. Like other churchmen, he really thought he was witnessing a new Reformation, and as a bishop he tried to urge it into existence. Like the secular theologians, he supposed the church could be reformed by accepting the outlook of a putative secular man. Indeed, though the church provided Pike with a career and institutional platform, it was not a community of faith he loved or trusted as a source of wisdom, much less truth. “I never became disenchanted with the church,” he said toward the end of his life, “because I never was ‘enchanted’ in the first place.” He might have said the same about the Bible, which he approached with lawyerly suspicion. In short, he was a church careerist without religious convictions or commitments. Still, Pike remained absurdly enchanted by the figure of Jesus. He thought he could encounter Jesus, one-on-one, somewhere beyond the community of faith, beyond the Bible, beyond time itself. In this quixotic gnostic quest he prefigured a whole generation of younger spiritual drifters, church “alumni” like himself, who would follow in his wake.

Endgame for the Mainline

History doesn’t turn on a dime nor does an era end with an exclamation point. Still, anyone who was around when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on Sunday, April 4, 1968, realized, if it was not already apparent, that the hope placed in the secular had been naive. Hours after the news of King’s assassination flashed across television screens, the National Guard was called out to stanch rampaging black Americans in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. In Philadelphia and Boston, too, Guardsmen were put on alert—and that was just in the North. Newsweek reported that Washington, D.C., looked like “the besieged capital of a banana republic”: mobs of black youths smashed windows, torched buildings, and looted stores—the havoc went on for days. Helmeted combat troops with fixed bayonets guarded the White House. Stokely Carmichael, who loathed King’s nonviolent ethic, stood near the Capitol steps preaching mayhem: “Go home and get your guns!” he shouted. “When the white man comes he going to kill you!” More than four thousand rioters were arrested in Washington, D.C., alone.

With the death of Dr. King, the civil rights movement lost the compelling moral vision that had energized white as well as black churches. The murder of Robert Kennedy two months later seemed to snuff out what optimism remained in American politics. I used my press credentials to attend his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I lingered for an hour after the service had concluded, the smell of incense still heavy in the air over the center aisle where his coffin had been. I was hardly alone in feeling that something was over, finished. The rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer seemed a final confirmation. Nineteen sixty-eight was a year like no other, a rupture in time that Americans would not again experience until the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Here, though, I want to use 1968 as a kind of close-parenthesis on mainline Protestantism’s long reign as the nation’s religious establishment. By then there were already signs of decline in both the membership and influence of the mainline churches. In 1967, the Southern Baptists overtook the Methodists as the nation’s largest Protestant body. Year by year, the mainline statistics showed erosion. By 1984, the Methodists had decreased by 16 percent, the United Church of Christ by 17 percent, the Episcopal Church by 19 percent, the Presbyterian Church (USA) by 27 percent, and the Disciples of Christ by a whopping 40 percent. By the end of the century, no more than one in five Americans belonged to a mainline Protestant denomination.

What went wrong? That was the question The Christian Century posed at the end of the Sixties in a series of articles, and that sociologists probed in books. There was more than one answer. Some analysts saw the decline in membership as a proper winnowing from church rolls of those who had joined in the 1950s, when going to church was socially expected. In this view, that decade’s surge in religious belonging was a brief and aberrant demographic bulge in a longer history of drift from organized religion. What the churches gained in the Fifties, according to one sociological study published in 1968, was a larger “audience,” but few committed believers. In economic terms, American religion was experiencing a cyclical “market correction.”

Some activist clergy on the left interpreted the decline in a more positive light—good riddance to those members who refused to embrace the churches’ prophetic role, especially on civil rights, but also the mainline leaders’ opposition to the Vietnam War, which will be addressed in the next chapter. There was some evidence for this view. As in 1960, so again in 1964 and 1968, white Protestants were more likely to vote Republican than Democrat, and did so overwhelmingly in 1972 when Senator George McGovern ran on an anti–Vietnam War platform. During this period, the leadership of the mainline churches moved to the left, embracing or at least tolerating racially separatist “black power” movements represented variously by James Forman, Malcolm X, and theologian James Cone. In a series of books beginning in 1965, Cone articulated a Black Liberation Theology that identified God with the goals of the black community: “If God is not for us and against white people,” he wrote in one typical passage, “then he is a murderer and we had better kill him.”8 This was death-of-God theology in the key of racial contempt, but it was a measure of mainline Protestant guilt that Cone was given a faculty position at Union Theological Seminary, where his critique of white religion was celebrated as—of course—prophetic.

Even so, later studies showed that mainline Protestants did not abandon their congregations because of their denominational leadership’s support for radical movements. That only increased the inherent Protestant distrust of denominational structures that Albert Outler had alerted me to, and further isolated the National Council of Churches and its agencies from grassroots constituencies. Protestants could and did remain mainline in membership on the congregational level while withholding funds and support for denominational programs with which they disagreed. One such program was the defense fund to which mainline leaders contributed on behalf of imprisoned black militant Angela Davis, an avowed communist who had been on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list on charges of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy. She was found not guilty in 1972, but by then it was clear that the mainline leadership had lost much of its followership.

That same year, Dean Kelley published a widely influential book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which was chiefly about why the liberal mainline churches were not. Citing the Mormons, the Southern Baptists, Orthodox Jews, and similar groups with recognizable boundaries against secular influences, Kelley argued that “strong” religions such as these thrive because they provide firm beliefs about the meaning of life, make high demands of their members, and in return elicit strong commitments from them in the form of time, enthusiasm, and financial support. In contrast, Kelley found that the liberal mainline denominations were declining because they had lost all the “traits of strictness” necessary to strong religion. Unless a religion “makes life meaningful for its members,” he insisted, no amount of social action, welfare services, or patriotic preaching could take its place—nor would these substitutes benefit the larger society as much as providing meaning for its own membership.

Kelley’s sharp critique of liberal Protestantism was all the more arresting because he himself had spent most of his professional life in the service of the National Council of Churches as its church-state expert, and was an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, which owned the council’s deepest pockets.

Kelley’s book, though contested, provoked further denominational self-scrutiny. If the institutional test of any religion is its ability to pass on the faith to subsequent generations, then liberal Protestantism was indeed in trouble. The Presbyterian Church in the USA, for example, found that 45 percent of children reared as Presbyterians do not grow up to become adult Presbyterians: rather, they become something else or, just as often, nothing at all. Why? One telling answer was this: those who remained Presbyterians did not differ significantly in beliefs or behavior from those who dropped out. They had no compelling or coherent answer to the question, “What do Presbyterians do that make them different?” 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.

Where Kelley pointed to internal institutional factors to explain the mainline’s decline, other investigators found equally compelling external reasons. Chief among these was demographics. Mainline Protestants had fewer children than conservative Protestants, and were more apt to use birth control and to marry at a later age. Moreover, mainline Protestants tended to live outside the Sun Belt states, where the population was growing and where Sunday churchgoing was expected in ways that it was not in the more urban North. Nor were they as aggressive as conservative southern churches in trying to “grow” their congregations. Hanging out a sign that says “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” is not nearly as effective as knocking on doors and inviting strangers to join your fellowship. As chaplains to the nation’s established leadership, mainline clergy expected others to come to them.

For all these reasons, then, the close of the Sixties signaled the long withdrawing roar of liberal American Protestantism. For decades, liberal Protestants assumed that history’s gravitational pull worked in their direction. A professor at Union Theological Seminary described it this way: evangelists like Billy Graham would convert sinners, whose children would eventually migrate upward from strict conservative to more relaxed mainline churches, and whose gifted grandchildren would then enroll at Union, where they learned that religion was mainly applied ethics and that God was best thought of as an expression of Ultimate Concern. At the close of the Sixties, this trajectory was no longer operative, if it ever was. Instead, as conservative Christians moved up the social and economic ladder, they took their churches and schools with them, sprinkling the suburbs with Pentecostal and Adventist, Southern Baptist and Mormon congregations.

As it turned out, my story on “The Protesting Protestants” was the last time Newsweek, Time, or any other general-interest magazine featured the mainline churches on its cover. Moreover, by the end of the decade, I had come to the conclusion that whatever residual group identity mainline Protestant denominations retained, denominational labels had ceased to be reliable indicators of what their members believed or predictors of how they would behave. Some combination of ecumenism, indifference, and loss of historical memory had made such labels moot. If I were to continue writing about American religion, I would have to find more descriptive categories to distinguish one form of belief, behavior, and belonging from another.