Amid such sweeping challenges to their faith, there were two obvious paths that the Christian churches could take: accommodation or resistance. The first approach would seek to forge a new Christianity more consonant with the spirit of the age, one better adapted to the trends that were undercutting orthodoxy. The latter would follow William F. Buckley’s maxim and stand athwart religious history yelling “Stop!” The first approach would attempt to sustain Christianity’s midcentury reconciliation with Western liberalism by adapting itself to the changing cultural circumstances. The second would break decisively with the revolutionary mood in American society and identify Christianity with cultural conservatism.
Both approaches were invoked as solutions to Christianity’s struggles, and both were blamed for Christianity’s eclipse. With every drop in church attendance, vocations, or donations, accommodationists would blame the forces of reaction for preventing necessary adaptations, alienating the changing population of a changing country by refusing to change themselves. Resisters would retort that the collapse of Christian culture was a direct consequence of accommodationists’ surrender to contemporary fashions.
In the end, neither approach reaped the fruits that its adherents promised. But the forces of accommodation gained the upper hand first. They had the cultural wind at their back in ways the resisters never did. In terms of intellectual clout and institutional power, the 1960s and ’70s were their decades. Yet these were precisely the years of Christianity’s most dramatic decline. And while that decline may not have been the fault of the accommodationists, in the most immediate sense it was their problem.
* * *
The age of accommodation was heralded by Time magazine’s famous cover story “Is God Dead?,” which ran in April 1966, just six months after the Second Vatican Council closed its final session in Rome. Half-remembered as a brief for atheism, the story was actually an example of a kind of long-form journalism that was soon to vanish from the American scene: a sustained engagement, in a mass-market periodical, with just-emerging trends in Christian theology. Modern Christianity, Time informed its readers, was in a sense as vibrant as ever: in “a country where public faith in God seems to be as secure as it was in medieval France,” the Christian faith was “now confidently renewing itself in spirit as well as form.” But this renewal pointed away from the neo-orthodoxy of the 1940s and ’50s, and toward what the magazine intimated was a more sophisticated and mature understanding of religion—one that might “formulate a new image and concept of God using contemporary thought categories” while requiring the revision of certain “Christian truths” and other “God-related issues.”1
Nearly all of the “new concepts” of God considered in the article had a big idea in common: the notion that henceforward Christianity could flourish only by transforming itself into a more secular enterprise, dedicated to building the kingdom of God in this life rather than preparing believers for the hereafter. In this secularized faith, Christ would be invoked “as a spiritual hero whom even non-believers can admire,” while God and transcendence would be associated with the modern hope for a better future—a hope that would be achieved through progressive politics and enjoyed by a human race that has “taken responsibility for the world.” Religious institutions would need to “become more secular themselves,” Time suggested, “recognizing that God is not the property of the church, and is acting in history as he wills, in encounters for which man is forever unprepared.” Along the way, those same churches “might well need to take a position of reverent agnosticism regarding some doctrines that it had previously proclaimed with excessive conviction”—doctrines, for instance, like personal immortality and the resurrection of the dead.
This accommodationist Christianity drew on various influences from the 1940s and ’50s, including the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, with his doctrine of the “anonymous Christian” saved by works and good intentions rather than explicit faith in Jesus Christ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Protestant martyr of Hitler’s Germany, whose prison letters, published for the first time in 1960, meditated provocatively on a “religionless Christianity” for a “world come of age.” But at heart the new theology was a revival of the modernism of the prewar era, a gospel of social progress like the one that Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr had rejected as ultimately antithetical to Christianity, updated and reformulated for the age of the United Nations and the moon race.
The realism about original sin fostered by two world wars and an economic depression might have undercut this creed, but now the political aspirations and technological achievements of the 1960s made it possible to unite religious faith and secular ambition again. So did the turn of generations. The men who had fashioned the neo-orthodox epoch were dying: C. S. Lewis died on the same day as John F. Kennedy; Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray passed in 1967; Barth followed in 1968, the same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Jacques Maritain in 1973. (Fulton Sheen would linger till 1979, but as a cultural figure he was an anachronism.) Their successors could see that the times were changing, and that Christianity faced new challenges that were too powerful to easily master or dismiss. Understandably, they wanted something bold and fresh with which to meet them. “Neo-orthodoxy doesn’t work,” the young theologian William Hamilton wrote in 1966, and “pessimism doesn’t persuade anymore.”2 Half tongue-in-cheek, he cited January 4, 1965, as the date when the neo-orthodox era officially ended: the Anglo-Catholic poet T. S. Eliot passed away that day, even as Lyndon Johnson was delivering a triumphant State of the Union address committing his country to the Great Society and “revolutionary change.”
Hamilton was just one of many tribunes for this renewal of the modernist gospel. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. J. Altizer framed it in the Nietzschean language of the “death of God” (which had given Time magazine its cover line), reinterpreting Christ’s incarnation as a sign that God had entered history and been subsumed by it, leaving mankind the master of his own fate. Similar ideas were floated in Gabriel Vahanian’s more bluntly titled The Death of God (1961), and in books like Paul van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1966) and Ronald Gregor Smith’s Secular Christianity (1966). (The era’s titles tend to run together.) All of these authors offered variations on the same basic premise—that it was time for Christianity to turn from the supernatural to the natural, from theology to anthropology, and from the Kingdom of God to the City of Man.
Then there was Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant Jesuit paleontologist-philosopher who died in relative obscurity in 1960, only to become a kind of posthumous court theologian to the New Frontier and the Great Society. His intellectual system was a shotgun marriage of Darwinism and Christianity, floated on a cloud of buzzwords—hominization! excentration! Chris-togenesis! Pleromization!—and perfectly tailored for a moment in which the cautious and disillusioned leaders of the World War II generation were giving way to John F. Kennedy’s whiz kids. (De Chardin was reportedly Robert McNamara’s favorite theologian.) The Jesuit was orthodox in his personal piety, but his arguments were easily turned to more heterodox ends. His admirers interpreted them as divinizing science and technology, capitalism and globalization: These were all signs of humanity’s progress toward the second coming of Christ, which was implicitly redefined to mean the moment when God, mankind, and the cosmos all merged into one universal consciousness. There was no room for a Fall of Man in this narrative, and no original sin—just the steady upward ascent of an ever-improving, ever-evolving species, converging toward the “Omega Point” of unity and harmony with every passing year.
But the defining theologian of the age of accommodation, the Niebuhr (or, more properly, the anti-Niebuhr) of the 1960s, was probably the young Harvard professor Harvey Cox. His treatise The Secular City (1965) was a publishing phenomenon, selling more than a million copies despite containing sentences like this one: “The ruling figures who stand at the fountainhead of existentialist thought still breathe the air of the presecular Bildungsschicht.”3 The abstruse language mattered less to Cox’s eager readership than did his reassuring message, which suggested that all of the trends considered in the previous section, all of the forces then emerging to undercut Christian practice and belief, were actually opportunities for Christianity’s growth and maturity and true fulfillment.
Was the Gospel in danger of being overpoliticized in the wake of the civil rights movement’s successes? Not possible, Cox wrote: “What God is doing in the world is politics, which means making and keeping life human. Politics also describes man’s role in response to God…. Theology today must be that reflection-action by which the church finds out what this politician-God is up to and moves to work along with him.” Indeed, “in the epoch of the secular city, politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology.”
What about the rapidly accelerating sexual revolution, with its apparent threat to Christian sexual ethics? No such threat existed: The new sexual freedoms offered a chance for believers to transcend “dead-end arguments about virginity and chastity,” with their “cheap attempt to oversimplify” complicated questions and “reduce all the intricacies” of sexuality “to one decision.” Indeed, the new freedoms represented the true fulfillment of the New Testament, whose sexual teachings were actually far more open-ended that a cramped and narrow reading would suggest. “Instead of registering an answer [on sexuality], the Gospel poses a question of its own…. It asks how I can best nourish the maturity of those with whom I share the torments and transports of human existence.” The “traditional Christian sexual norms” were all well and good, but “like all human codes they stand in continuous need of revision so that they will help rather than hinder God’s maturation of man.”4
What of the rise of moral and theological relativism, which threatened to recast Christianity as just one of many essentially equivalent religions? It was anticipated in the Old Testament, Cox assured his readers, where God’s revelation from Sinai “relativizes” rival gods and values, revealing them “as human projections” rather than absolute truths. (In this sense, Cox suggested in a characteristic aside, the Bible “is very close to the modern social sciences.”) Contemporary relativism is merely “the nonreligious expression of what Jews have expressed in their consistent opposition to idols, and Christians in their sporadic attacks on icons.” Thus relativism actually fulfills “the work of the God of Creation, Exodus, and Sinai,” by placing “the responsibility for the forging of human values, like the fashioning of political systems, in man’s own hands.”5
When it came to the economic forces undercutting orthodoxy, Cox did manage a few tepid criticisms of consumerism and commercialism. But mostly he followed Teilhard de Chardin’s acolytes in heaping theological praise upon “technopolitan” man’s quest for mastery, and the urbanizing, globalizing world’s capacity for “vastly enlarging the range of human communication and widening the scope of individual choice.”6 What others saw as rootlessness and anomie, Cox ingeniously recast as the fulfillment, once again, of the Old Testament’s warnings against idolatry. “By and large the mobile man is less tempted than the immobile man to demote Yahweh into a Baal,” he wrote, and so “there is no reason that Christians should deplore the accelerating mobility of the modern metropolis.” After all, “the Bible does not call man to renounce mobility, but ‘to go to a place that I will show unto you.’”7
In a remarkable peroration, Cox distilled this accommodationist message to its essence—not just an affirmation of the modern world and modern man exactly as they were (or were becoming), but the bolder claim that all the biblical writers would agree with him:
We have affirmed technopolitan man in his pragmatism and in his profanity. To do so we have not abandoned the Bible; we have found, on the contrary that its views of truth and of creation display important areas of similarity with the style of the secular city…. There is no pathos in this. Theology is a living enterprise. The Gospel does not call man to return to a previous stage of his development. It does not summon man back to dependence, awe and religiousness. Rather it is a call to imaginative urbanity and mature secularity. It is not a call to man to abandon his interest in the problems of this world, but an invitation to accept the full weight of this world’s problems as the gift of its Maker. It is a call to be a man of this technical age, with all that means, seeking to make a human habitation for all who live in it.8
Cox’s only worry was that the established Christian churches wouldn’t be able to keep up. “God’s reconciling work may be going on in them. It may not be. Most likely it is and it isn’t. Most likely it is occurring within them and also at many places outside them.” In such times, “the real job of those in the churches … is to discern where God’s reconciliation is breaking in and identify themselves with this action.” And the great danger facing the established denominations was that their “intrinsic conservatism” would prevent them “from leaving their palaces behind and stepping into God’s permanent revolution in history.”9
Cox needn’t have been so anxious. The churches were eager to embrace the revolution. There was generational change in the pulpit and pews as well as in the academy. For every accommodationist theologian eager to refashion Christian theology for an age of secular ambition, there were countless accommodationist clerics and laypeople eager to put this new Christianity into practice.
None was more famous, for a time at least, than the Episcopal bishop James Pike. Pike was already a minor celebrity in the Eisenhower years, when he served as the dean of Saint John the Divine Cathedral in New York and the host of a Fulton Sheen–esque hour of prime-time apologetics. By the late 1950s, he had been installed as the Bishop of California, in the long-unfinished Grace Episcopal Cathedral on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. Perhaps inspired by the symbolism, he began fund-raising to bring that project to completion, even as he set out to renovate Christianity as well.
In New York, Pike had been politically liberal but otherwise High Church—activist in his politics but relatively traditional on matters of liturgy and doctrine. (In 1956, he edited a collection of essays by notable Episcopalians that included W. H. Auden’s conversion memoir.) But once installed in California, he began easing his way toward a more thoroughgoing Coxian Christianity. His liturgical conservatism melted away: he told his parishioners that too many candles on the altar were a sign of “Zoroastrian light worship,” and dismissed the idea of genuflecting toward the tabernacle with a terse “I don’t think God cares.”10 He dismissed, as well, the ecclesiastical divides between Protestant denominations, ordaining a Methodist minister as an Episcopal priest on All Saints’ Day in 1959—a move that earned him write-ups in Time and Newsweek along with the predictable criticism from conservative believers. Five years later, he ordained a woman as a “transitional deacon,” the first step toward ordination to the Episcopal priesthood. And he effaced, with a bright flourish, the distinction between secular heroes and sacred ones: as the cathedral neared completion, he added Albert Einstein, Thurgood Marshall, and John Glenn to the church’s stained-glass windows.
Pike soon became a theological revisionist as well. In December 1960, the Christmas issue of Christian Century invited contributors to discuss an issue on which their minds had recently changed. Pike picked the virgin birth, which he had once accepted but now regarded as a pious myth. That was just the warm-up act; over the next five years, operating on the conviction that Christians needed “more belief, fewer beliefs,” Pike proceeded to jettison a slew of major Christian teachings, from the divinity of Christ to the doctrine of the Trinity to most of the moral traditions of the faith. (The revision of Christianity’s sexual code was somewhat convenient, since Pike was a serial adulterer then in the process of moving on to wife number three.)
In the early 1960s, all of this was still controversial enough in Episcopalian circles to generate abortive attempts at a heresy trial for Bishop Pike. Over the next two decades, though, the San Franciscan prelate’s vision would become essentially mainstream, in his own church and in the Protestant Mainline generally. By the late 1970s, women’s ordination was universal among Mainline denominations. By the 1990s, the Episcopal Church, the American Methodist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America all recognized one another’s rites and holy orders. When Pike was elevated to the California bishopric, he claimed (falsely, it appears) that his first marriage had been annulled; otherwise his divorce and remarriage would have barred him from the office. Within two decades, that kind of difficulty was no longer an issue for Episcopalians, or indeed for the members of any Mainline Protestant denomination, nearly all of whom had passed from accepting divorce but forbidding remarriage (at least so long as the original spouse lived) to permitting remarriage in any case where the would-be remarryer displayed (in a passage from a 1982 Lutheran document) “a willingness to acknowledge one’s own failures in a spirit of forgiveness toward all involved, and to work at correcting whatever personal characteristics may be detrimental to a marital relationship.”11
Over the same period, the prohibition on premarital sex lapsed into irrelevance in some denominations; in others it was actually abandoned, replaced by a more palatable-seeming opposition to “promiscuity,” hazily defined. By the early 1970s, too, nearly every Mainline denomination had endorsed some kind of legal abortion—a striking concession to contemporary trends, given how far back the traditional Christian opposition to the practice ran. (The Didache, arguably the earliest surviving Christian catechism, explicitly analogizes abortion to infanticide, admonishing readers, “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”12)
Indeed, by the time the controversies over gay ordination and gay marriage began in earnest in the 1980s, Mainline churches had moved so far from traditional Christian sexual ethics that their approval of homosexuality often felt more inevitable than wrenching.
Where traditional theology was concerned, the Mainline churches as churches rarely offered anything quite so explicit as Pike’s deliberate denial of the Trinity and the Nicene Creed. They merely tolerated such denials, as well as others that went further still—John Shelby Spong, Episcopal Bishop of Newark in the 1980s, moved from denying the virgin birth to denying the very existence of a personal God without facing any sanction—while gradually purging the specifics of Christian theology from their public language. In seminaries and ecclesiastical bureaucracies, where pastors were trained and policy was set, politics rather than theology was increasingly regarded as the central mission of the church. Orthodox belief wasn’t officially abandoned; it was merely downgraded, declared optional, and generally ignored. “Creeds divide, deeds unite,” ran the refrain, and so the distinctive theological traditions that had once distinguished Presbyterians from Methodists and Lutherans from Congregationalists were steadily effaced, and the Protestant Mainline rebuilt itself along exactly the lines that Cox and Pike had envisioned.
The idea behind all of these moves was inclusion. Inclusion of women, through the ordination of female ministers and priests and then through the gradual recasting of liturgies along more gender-neutral lines. Inclusion of racial minorities and immigrants, who would be drawn (or so the theory went) by the churches’ emphasis on social justice. Inclusion of the young cohabiting couple and the older divorcée, the gay man and the lesbian. Inclusion of the counterculture, through folk music services and rock-and-roll liturgies. Inclusion of the seeker, the doubter, the lukewarm believer and the agnostic. Inclusion even of the explicitly non-Christian: the Manhattan headquarters of the National Council of Churches, originally conceived as a meeting place for the “scattered sheep” of Christianity, eventually became an interfaith center instead—“a richly diverse community of many faiths,” the head of the NCC boasted at its semicentennial, “Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and more … a perfect microcosm of God’s world.”13
Christianity’s problem, the leaders of the Mainline decided somewhere in the tumult of the 1960s, was that it turned too many people off; it was too rigid in its moral teachings, too exclusive in its truth claims, too remote from the problems of this world, this life, this moment on the earth. Only a more inclusive faith, they assumed, could succeed where orthodoxy was failing and sustain a version of Christianity amid the various forces undercutting the older dogmas and traditions.
For many people in the Mainline churches, these shifts generated a tremendous amount of excitement. Some of this was the enthusiasm that always accompanies novelty and revolution, joined to the natural human desire to sprinkle this or that appealing innovation with the baptismal water of one’s childhood faith. Some of it was inspired by the latest trends in scriptural scholarship: just as early-twentieth-century modernism drew on the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, the accommodationists of the 1960s and ’70s often claimed to find the Christianity they were looking for in the lost scriptures and secret gospels that archaeologists and textual critics had recently uncovered.
More importantly, though, there was a widespread and understandable belief that a more inclusive Christianity would ultimately achieve a deeper fidelity to the message of Christ. By tearing down the walls of dogma and tradition that separated the various Protestant communions, accommodationists saw themselves as acting in obedience to Jesus’ precrucifixion prayer that his followers would “all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you.” By destigmatizing homosexuality and cohabitation and divorce, they understood themselves to be following the example of the Jesus who had dined with prostitutes and publicans and ignored the purity codes of Temple Judaism. By opening their hearts and minds to the wisdom of non-Christian traditions, they meant to imitate the Jesus who had conversed freely with Samaritans and Romans. Through all these efforts and more, they hoped to correct institutional Christianity’s persistent tendency toward many of the very faults that Jesus had so furiously condemned—a dead ritualism, an unforgiving legalism, and a Pharisaical focus on forms over realities.
This last theme recurred throughout the era of accommodation. In December 1973, a group of would-be female priests presented themselves to the progressive Episcopal Bishop of New York, Paul Moore, during an ordination ceremony. They knew that his sympathies were with their cause, but also that his position would be at risk if he followed Bishop Pike’s example and laid his hands upon them. When he refused to do so, they read the following statement aloud in the cathedral, explicitly linking their opponents to the Jewish establishment of Jesus’ day:
We are … aware of the uncomfortable position in which our pastor and friend, Bishop Paul Moore, finds himself. There are precedents in church history for this uncomfortable position. James himself was no stranger to the snarls of Pharisaic law. Paul, we cannot spare you the discomfort of your position.14
Three years later, this discomfort was removed when the Episcopal House of Bishops voted to admit women to holy orders. One of the newly ordained, Peggy Boysmer, received a heroine’s welcome when she returned from the convention to her hometown of Little Rock: “A huge crowd of people were there with iced champagne,” she recalled later, “and a huge sign, ALLELUIA, that went all across the front of the terminal…. Everybody in the airplane was going, ‘Wow, look at that! What’s happening?’ And we said: ‘The Episcopal Church just voted to ordain women.’”15
Not everyone was quite so enthusiastic about accommodation’s progress. The gradual disappearance of denominational differences had dispiriting consequences for those believers who were invested in being distinctively Methodist or Presbyterian or Lutheran. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, after the accommodationist project had been in motion for decades, the aging Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten penned a letter to Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, bemoaning where this trend had left his own tradition:
The kind of Lutheranism that I learned—from Nygren, Aulen, Bring, Pinomaa, Schlink, P. Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Pannenberg, Piepkorn, Quanbeck, Preus, and Lindbeck, not to mention the pious missionary teachers from whom I learned the Bible, the Catechism, and the Christian faith—and taught in a Lutheran parish and seminary for many years is now marginalized to the point of near extinction. In looking for evidence that could convincingly contradict the charge that the ELCA has become just another liberal Protestant denomination, it would seem reasonable to examine what is produced by its publishing house, theological schools, magazines, publications, church council resolutions, commission statements, task force recommendations, statements and actions by its bishops. The end result is an embarrassment…. I must tell you that I read all your episcopal letters that come across my desk. But I must also tell you that your stated convictions, punctuated by many pious sentiments, are not significantly distinguishable from those that come from the liberal Protestant leaders of other American denominations.16
But of course for the accommodationists this was exactly the point. Everyone had to subsume their theological particularities in an ecumenical and tolerant Protestantism, because an ecumenical and tolerant faith was what the times demanded. Only such a faith could hope to hold the allegiance of modern man, who was too sophisticated and cosmopolitan to accept archaic dogma, too invested in the affairs of this world to look expectantly to the life to come. Only such a faith could hope to satisfy the God who presided over Harvey Cox’s secular city, and who had no time for either abstruse theology or “fasting and cultic adoration,” because He “wants man to be interested not in Him but in his fellow man.”17
* * *
This logic wasn’t confined to the Protestant Mainline. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, it swiftly prevailed in much of American Catholicism as well. In the previous chapter, we considered Vatican II as the marriage of orthodoxy and American liberalism, and as the fulfillment of the work of Sheen, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray. But there were also other forces at work in the council’s sessions. Vatican II looked back to the achievements of the midcentury Christian renaissance, but it also partook of the accommodationist spirit of the 1960s, and its documents hinted at sympathy for the theological currents that would inspire Pike and Cox and their peers.
One peer in particular seemed to enjoy a distinctive influence over the Council’s work. “Few wanted to be associated with him publicly,” Richard John Neuhaus would note in a late-1980s assessment, but “the work of Teilhard de Chardin was a powerful presence in background conversation surrounding Council deliberations.” From De Chardin’s oeuvre, Neuhaus pointed out, some of the Council’s documents seemed to take the idea of a “unified, developmental, and evolutionary cosmos; new things are happening with ever-accelerating speed, and it is all going somewhere, though it is impossible to say quite where.” In contrast to traditional Christian teaching, the Council sometimes appeared to locate God and the transcendent “not above us but ahead of us, the future toward which we are rapidly rushing … only rarely in the Council’s hundred thousand words is the distinction between natural and supernatural even implied.” Again and again, Neuhaus pointed out, the documents of Vatican II—and especially Gaudium et Spes, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—described “the Christian hope … in remarkably this-worldly terms,” as though John F. Kennedy rather than John XXIII had been the inspiration for the Council.18
Alongside this secular, political turn, the Council also seemed to ease Catholicism toward a somewhat more democratic understanding of religious authority—one that insisted on the authority of bishops as well as the power of the Pope, the vocations of laymen as well as those of priests, and the Church as the “people of God” as well as the Church as a hierarchy of ecclesiastics. This “decentralization of decision-making” on certain matters (as the young Joseph Ratzinger would put it—favorably—in his notes on the Council)19 represented an ambitious attempt to correct Catholicism’s tendency to clericalism and papolatry, and it opened possibilities for ecumenical dialogue with Protestants that hadn’t existed since the Reformation. At the same time, though, it blurred distinctions that had historically been crucial to Catholicism—between the Roman Church and other Christian churches, between priestly and lay vocations, between what constituted disagreement and what constituted dissent.
None of this amounted to a formal shift away from Catholic orthodoxy. However, a generation of Catholic leaders wasn’t entirely mistaken in claiming that there was a “spirit of Vatican II” easing the Church toward ever greater accommodation with the modern world. Nor were they mistaken in seeing an opportunity, as the Council’s decrees passed from theory into practice, to push the Church much further in this direction than the Council had been willing to go.
This push didn’t come from the hierarchy, and it didn’t instantly bubble upward from the pews. (Indeed, the reformers of the 1960s and ’70s devoted a great deal of time to griping about the backwardness not only of Catholic bishops but of Catholic parishioners as well.) The accommodationist spirit was strongest, instead, in the intermediate institutions of Catholicism: the religious orders and the universities, the seminaries and diocesan bureaucracies and liturgical committees. It was there that the greatest efforts were expended to keep Catholic Christianity relevant in a changing world. It was there that the transformation of the American Church was attempted—and, often, successfully achieved.
For the religious orders, nuns and monks and priestly fraternities, accommodation meant straightforward secularization. The Jesuits, for instance, moved their training centers from rural and suburban facilities (many of them designed for the larger seminary classes of an earlier era) to urban settings—in one case, spread across apartment buildings—in which Jesuits-to-be could experience Harvey Cox’s secular city more directly. (“Experimentation wth different life-styles is indispensible for our Jesuit studies, if we are to prepare … for a contemporary ministry,” wrote the editor of Jesuit Theological Review.20) Other orders adopted similar approaches, shedding habits and priestly collars for pantsuits and turtlenecks, and the rhythms of communal life for the hurly-burly of the world. The theory behind these innovations was captured by Brother Gabriel Moran, author of The New Community (1970). In the modern age, he suggested, “a distinction between people who live in community and those who do not is no longer meaningful. Everyone needs to live in a community, but no one should live in one community.” (The distinction between religious and secular communities, he added, was particularly “obsolete.”)21
Some orders had to fight for the right to put these ideas into practice. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary engaged in a long public battle with Los Angeles’s aging Cardinal McIntyre, which earned them a Newsweek cover and finally ended with their transformation into a religious community only tangentially connected to the institutional Church. There were similar high-profile conflicts in New York, Milwaukee, and other cities. But mostly the changes met with only limited opposition from the hierarchy and received the enthusiastic endorsement of immediate authorities. (When the Vatican tried to reinforce the older rule that every order needed some distinctive habit, the president of America’s Leadership Conference of Women Religious responded that if “a woman is not to be trusted with a decision as to how, when, and where she is to wear a particular form of dress, she can hardly be entrusted with the really serious matters of conscience which absorption in today’s apostolate requires.”22)
For the universities, accommodation meant a swift march away from their former deference to the Vatican’s authority. In 1967, a group of twenty-six educators, led by Notre Dame president Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, signed the “Land O’Lakes” statement, which declared that “the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” While Catholicism must be “perceptibly present and effectively operative” within a Catholic university, the authors allowed, such schools’ primary obligation must be to carry out “a continual examination of all aspects and all activities of the Church and … objectively evaluate them,” rather than simply seeking to transmit the Catholic tradition intact to their students.23 Not surprisingly, given the temper of the times, this “objective evaluation” tended to favor the accommodationist position in nearly every controversy.
In the seminaries, accommodation meant that this “reinterpretation of the transcendent” was taught as the coming thing and assumed to be the only dogma that a priest needed to carry with him into the ministry. And it meant extreme laxness, as well, on sexual discipline—particularly on issues related to homosexuality. The priesthood had always enjoyed an obvious attraction for gay Catholics, but the atmosphere of the sexual revolution encouraged a wink-and-a-nod approach to homosexual relationships—a tendency reinforced by the collapse in clerical vocations in the 1970s. With more and more straight men leaving the priesthood to marry, seminaries became known for their gay subcultures (Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans was dubbed “Notre Flame,” Baltimore’s Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary was known as the “Pink Palace,” and so on), which in turn tended to turn off heterosexual candidates for holy orders. The idea that the priesthood was dominated by a kind of “lavender mafia” became a staple of traditionalist critiques of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. But the issue was also raised by accommodationist Catholics, who cited it as another reason to allow priests to marry. Notre Dame’s Richard P. McBrien, a leading liberal theologian, told PBS that men who may “have a genuine vocation for priesthood go into a seminary and feel very alienated by the gay culture. I don’t say this in any homophobic sense. It’s just the reality.”24
In Catholic liturgy, accommodation meant experimentation and upheaval. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, many liturgical reformers insisted that their cause was less about “modernization” than about reengaging with the wisdom of the Christian past. The shift from Latin to the vernacular, in particular, was framed as a means of more effectively immersing the congregation in ancient prayers and Scripture readings. Once the baroque excesses of the Tridentine Mass were stripped away, the theory went, there would be a revival of medieval and patristic piety, and with it would come a deeper encounter with the core of Christian faith. But by the mid-1960s, with the battle over the vernacular won and Latin banished to the fringes of Catholic life, reformers soured on the idea of looking backward for inspiration. That way lay ossification; only by leaning forward, into secularization and modernity, could the Catholic liturgy hope to engage the rising generation.
So liturgical experts like Rembert Weakland, then Abbot Primate of the Benedictines and later Archbishop of Milwaukee, dismissed the quest for “a feeling of infinity or eternity or the world beyond” as “a new archaism,” insisting that modern worship needed instead to promote “the communal sensitivity that I am one with my brother next to me and that our song is our common twentieth-century situation.”25 In the conferences and journals where liturgists debated the future of the Mass, there were similar attacks on the “magic superstitious character” of the older Christian way of worship and demands for rituals that spoke more directly to Harvey Cox’s technopolitan man. The liturgy needed to be relevant: there were calls to model services on presidential inaugurations, on antiwar protests, on bullfights and skating parties and film festivals. It needed to be hip: a successful mass would generate “the fun of a successful cocktail party,” an enthusiastic Benedictine declared in 1966.26 And it needed, of course, to be political: By 1968, the Liturgical Conference’s annual Liturgical Week was being held on the theme of “Revolution,” and the following year, Garry Wills noted drily, “the best-known speakers were some Black Panthers, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Wayne Morse (former Senator from Oregon), and the SCLC’s Andrew Young.”27
The wilder experiments—a “Christmas mass” that opened with a Yuletide-themed reading from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn; a “divorce mass” that reversed the wedding service, with a soloist playing “It’s Too Late, Baby”—rarely penetrated all the way to the parish level. There, renewal mainly meant a kind of unpredictable Protestantization, in which the rhythms of Latin gave way to a theoretically more accessible vernacular, and local leaders often took it upon themselves to strip away the material culture of preconciliar Catholicism—incense and icons, prayer cards and rosaries—in the name of renewal and modernization. But since nobody could quite agree on exactly what form this renewal ought to take, every pastor became a liturgical reformer unto himself, and the mass came to vary markedly from church to church and service to service. As Philip Lawler put it, in The Faithful Departed, his history of Catholicism’s Bostonian decline:
Up until the 1960s, when a new pastor was appointed to a Catholic parish, he might introduce a different style of preaching and a different method of conducting parish meetings, but the essentials of parish life—the Sunday mass, the teaching in the parochial school, the advice given in confessions, the requirements for Baptism, and the programs for marriage preparation—would be unchanged. By the 1970s, the introduction of a new pastor could bring a complete transformation in all these areas…. Different parishes developed their own distinctive personalities, emphasizing more “high” or “low” liturgy … traditional hymns or rock music. “Parish shopping” became commonplace, with devoted families driving past several Catholic churches every Sunday to reach the one where they felt most comfortable.28
If there was confusion in the pews, some of it probably flowed from the fact that while everything was changing, the reality of the change wasn’t always publicly acknowledged. As in Mainline Protestantism, the Catholic accommodationists didn’t always engage in a frontal assault on orthodox Christian belief. Catholicism had its outspoken radicals, including dissident priests James Kavanagh and Matthew Fox, feminist theologians Rosemary Ruether and Mary Daly, and others who seemed to want to burn the Church to the ground and then stage a successful cocktail party amid the ashes. But the turn away from traditional theology happened just as often through gradual transformations rather than revolutionary shifts, and manifested itself in subtle substitutions rather than open critiques. From seminaries to parishes, theology departments to church bureaucracies, accommodationism became ubiquitous without always being made explicit.
Still, it was ubiquitous. By 1984, Thomas Sheehan could survey the state of Catholic intellectual life and announce, in a New York Review of Books essay entitled “The Revolution in the Church,” that “the dismantling of traditional Roman Catholic theology, by Catholics themselves, is by now a fait accompli …. In Roman Catholic seminaries, for example, it is now common teaching that Jesus of Nazareth did not assert any of the divine or messianic claims the Gospels attribute to him and that he died without believing he was Christ or the Son of God, not to mention the founder of a new religion.”29 Of all the dogmas of Catholic faith, Sheehan’s essay suggested, only a “purified” (that is, largely symbolic) belief in the resurrection endured among the present generation of scholars and theologians; the rest had been quietly dismissed, through what was rather credulously described as a “scientific” process of biblical criticism, as encrustrations created by popular piety and Vatican self-aggrandizement.
As went the university, so went catechism class. A typical religious education textbook from the post–Vatican II period wouldn’t deny basic Christian teachings like the Resurrection and the Atonement, or specifically Catholic concepts like purgatory and the intercession of the saints—but it would often ignore or minimize them, substituting the language of self-actualization and personal growth, until it became hard to distinguish a religious education manual from a typical handbook for building self-esteem. (An eighth-grade Catholic religion text from the late 1970s, entitled Seek, began as follows: I sit at my desk, head cupped in my hands, staring into space. What do I see? I see me. I see myself as doing my own thing, the master of my destiny….30)
Another case study: In 1970, the Catholic Theological Society released a text called Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, which aimed to provide a guide for Catholics (and seminarians, in particular) interested in the most au courant Catholic thinking on matters of sexuality. Its findings were very au courant indeed. “At this time the behavioral sciences have not identified any sexual expression that can be empirically demonstrated to be of itself, in a culture-free way, detrimental to the full human existence,” the authors assured their readers. The best theological thinking, they suggested, indicated that Catholic teachings on sexuality were best understood as rough guidelines, to be applied creatively and charitably to the necessarily complicated realities of human sexual desire. Eventually, the institutional Church would grow up and recognize this reality. “Until that day arrives, enlightened and well-integrated individuals might well free themselves of conflicts by simply reflecting on the relativity of their society’s sexual ethic and proceed discreetly with their sexual project.”31 (These recommendations were issued at the height of the priestly sexual abuse epidemic, though it would be decades before anyone realized that fact.)
Sometimes the accommodationists proceeded less “discreetly” and admitted publicly to the scope of their reforming efforts. Thus Robert Hoyt, editor of the liberal National Catholic Reporter, would write in 1970:
It is simply true that the religion texts of today are vastly different from those of yesteryear, that progressive views dominate most Catholic religious and theological training, that in consequence the Catholicism of tomorrow will be something new on earth—and that all of this has been accomplished in something less than democratic fashion, by ways and means that eluded standard ecclesiastical safeguards…. Liberal theologians dominate the public prints, the catechetical training seminars, the publishing houses, the professional associations, much of Catholic bureaucracy; they praise each other’s books, award each other contracts, jobs, awards and perquisites. There wasn’t anything sinister in all this; it wasn’t planned, it just happened.32
Hoyt’s reference to “standard ecclesiastical safeguards” was a reminder that this progressive dominance remained de facto rather than de jure. Whereas in Mainline Protestantism the bishops and the bureaucracies were more or less on the same accommodationist page (at least in those denominations that had bishops at all), in Catholicism the hierarchy often strove to restrain and revise the work of its subordinates when they seemed to take accommodationism too far. In Rome, certainly, there were no moves to revise Catholic teaching on any of the suddenly contested subjects, from sexual ethics to biblical interpretation, where accommodationists were convinced that only further, swifter change could keep Catholicism relevant. Indeed, Pope Paul VI’s only explicit response to the accommodationist moment was the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which shocked the world by reaffirming what most people considered the most extreme Catholic teaching on human sexuality, the ban on artificial birth control.
But even a de facto triumph was enough to transform the life of the American Catholic Church. Catholicism might not officially approve of divorce, but the diocesan bureaucracies granted annulments in the hundreds of thousands. (By 1980, 90 percent of the world’s annulments took place in the United States.) The Pope might not have blessed contraception, but you would be hard-pressed to find a theologian interested in defending that position, or a pastor willing to expound upon it. Priestly celibacy was still mandatory, but you wouldn’t know that from observing social life in many seminaries. In a swift march, the accommodationists had come to dominate faculties, bureaucracies, and liturgical committees. They picked the hymns, wrote the religious-education textbooks, issued the press releases, and most important, perhaps, educated the next generation of Catholics. “In ten years people will believe only what they experience; anything else they will not believe,” a Jesuit told readers of U.S. Catholic in 1968.33 He was describing the new philosophy of religious education, but his words expressed the assumptions of the entire accommodationist project.
As the 1970s rolled onward, the changes that had transformed seminaries and Catholic universities seemed poised to transform the hierarchy as well. Indeed, this transformation was already happening, under the supervision of the Belgian Archbishop Jean Jadot, Apostolic Delegate to the United States from 1973 to 1980 and a progressive’s progressive. His advice on episcopal appointments created a generation of like-minded bishops, nicknamed the “Jadot boys” by admirers and critics alike, who began to steer the U.S. bishops’ conference away from theological line-drawing and toward the political activism that accommodationists saw as the proper mission of the modern church.
The same sense of inevitability was captured by Sheehan’s New York Review essay, which suggested that the Church had engaged in “a quiet but momentous shift of emphasis” from dogma to politics, abstract belief to worldly action. Aware that its doctrines were fundamentally untenable, Catholicism would henceforward become an institution geared toward personal improvement and social reform:
The Church’s gradual shift of concern away from theoretical questions and toward social, political, and moral issues… is, I believe, one of the major consequences of the undoing of traditional theology. Perhaps the current regime in Rome will slap a few more wrists in a futile effort to stop the liberal movements launched by the Second Vatican Council. But it is more likely that, as the Church approaches the beginning of its third millennium, things will continue to follow the trajectory of the last two decades: an entrenchment of conservative forces in their shrinking pockets of power; the vigorous advancement of liberal exegesis and theology in scholarly circles; and the equally vigorous pursuit of the social gospel where issues of politics and morality are concerned.34
There was only one difficulty. By the time Sheehan was writing these words, it was increasingly clear that the brave new world of the accommodationists had fewer and fewer people in it.
* * *
In fact, this had been clear almost from the beginning; it just took some time for the anecdotal evidence to harden into data. Before the collapse in churchgoing began, accommodation was represented as the only way to forestall Christianity’s decline. Once that decline began in earnest, accommodation was hailed as the obvious way to stanch the bleeding and revive the patient’s health. But the collapse was often swiftest in the churches and orders and dioceses where accommodationism had triumphed most completely. The more a Protestant body pressed forward down the path blazed by Harvey Cox and James Pike, the more its seminaries emptied and its congregations shrank. The more a given Catholic order reframed its way of life along more secular lines, the fewer new members it attracted.
This pattern wasn’t universal. Sometimes the initial burst of excitement created something lasting and significant. Sometimes accommodationist congregations flourished; sometimes their leaders won converts from less-adaptable churches. Nor were all forms of accommodation identical, since a church or pastor or theologian might go only a certain distance with the reformers and then stop. It was possible to ordain women without rewriting the Nicene Creed, to embrace left-wing political activism while remaining doctrinally conservative, to reread Scripture through a feminist lens without demanding that the Bible be rewritten in gender-neutral language, to dissent from the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality without abandoning its position on abortion, and so forth.
But in a great many cases, one form of accommodation tended to lead inexorably to another (and another, and another), and after many waves of accommodationist enthusiasm the tide of faith went rushing out. No sooner had a liberalizing faction won a great victory over what it perceived as the forces of reaction, it often seemed, than the next phase in its life was decay and dissolution. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary barely survived doffing their habits and breaking with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The Liturgical Conference didn’t survive its renovation of the liturgy. (The chaotic, politicized “Liturgy Week” of 1969 was the last one ever held.) In Mainline Protestantism, churches merged triumphantly—another victory for ecumenism!—and then went on shrinking. The National Council of Churches headquarters on Riverside Drive, erected as a monument to Mainline power, soon became a half-empty monument to the Mainline’s swift decline.
The Catholic accommodationists, at least, had someone to blame for their failures to keep people in the pews: their Church’s hidebound hierarchy, with its blinkered refusal to let Catholicism’s reformation go as far as they believed it needed to go. As the crisis in religious vocations mounted, they suggested that all the good priests were being driven out—by the slow pace of reform, by the resistance of bishops, by the intransigence of the Pope. As attendance at mass plummeted, they blamed Paul VI’s birth control encyclical for alienating believers. The Pope “did to his reign what Lyndon Johnson did [to his presidency] with the Vietnam war,” Garry Wills wrote,35 and the Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley argued that 70 percent of the drop in Catholic churchgoing was explained by lay revulsion against Humanae Vitae. And they wrapped the two arguments together, arguing that priests as well as laymen were leaving because they could not abide the sexual repression preached from Rome: “Even a priest who feels called to celibacy,” Wills argued, “must be reluctant to identify his own way of life with church authorities’ views on sex; must feel his own witness cheapened and distorted by the imbalance and ignorance displayed at the very top rungs of the hierarchy; and must fear that he will end up resembling the obsessive old men who have risked all credibility, order and good will within the church to uphold their animus against human intercourse.”36
But there were two problems with this theory. The first was that Rome was distant, whereas the accommodationists were increasingly the ones running American Catholicism in the day-to-day. The more power they obtained within the American Church, the harder it became to claim that their ideas weren’t being put into practice, or that they were being held back by the Vatican’s medieval instincts. Yes, the formal strictures remained in place, but by the late 1970s you could pass from a Catholic grade school to a Catholic university to a Catholic seminary and finally a Catholic diocesan bureaucracy—all while faithfully attending Sunday mass—without hearing much of anything that deviated from the accommodationist line. The accommodationists had built their own church-within-a-church in many cases. Yet they had reaped none of the victories (floods of new members, a generation of activist priests and nuns) that their theories predicted.
Instead, the opposite was happening. What growth there was in American Catholicism was appearing in precisely those orders and dioceses that had refused to yield to the spirit of the age. By the 1990s, ordination rates in prominent “traditional” dioceses were more than four times higher than ordination rates in “progressive” dioceses, and the same held true in religious orders. A 1993 survey found that nuns who rated traditional modes of living (either communal life or close proximity to a motherhouse) as “extremely important” had five times as many novices as those who had more thoroughly secularized. Similarly, orders that had officially “changed their spirituality” since Vatican II had only half as many novices as those that hadn’t.37
All of this could be explained away, perhaps, as the last spasms of a dead tradition, just before rigor mortis finally set in. The deeper problem for Catholic accommodationists was the struggling Protestant Mainline, which was providing a perfect test case for their theories of how religion ought to be renewed. There were no Vaticans bestriding the Mainline, no reactionary popes, no onerous celibacy requirements or bans on contraception. Women were being ordained, politics was given pride of place, sexual strictures were being downplayed, and traditional theology was being dismissed. The Episcopal Church, in particular, was fast becoming the Catholicism that reformers so earnestly desired—democratic, egalitarian, politicized, and sexually liberated, but with the outward forms of liturgy and hierarchy still intact, and the Eucharist still offered every Sunday. Yet Episcopalianism’s slide, like that of its sister churches in the Mainline, was more precipitous than anything the Catholic Church experienced. Liberal Protestants were selling exactly what the accommodationists claimed the public desperately wanted from religion, and nobody was buying it.
So what was going wrong? In part, the reformers had overestimated the potential for sustaining religious practices by marrying them to secular causes. “He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower,” the Anglican Ralph Inge remarked, and so it was with the accommodationists. Their theories about what the God of the secular city desired had been forged in the brief and optimistic window that gave America the New Frontier, the Great Society, and the triumph of the Civil Rights Act—and when the optimism of the early 1960s collapsed into polarization and pessimism, this faith in progressive politics suddenly looked less prophetic and more partisan. There were still causes to embrace and crusades to champion—environmentalism and the Equal Rights Amendment, the campaign for nuclear disarmament and the movement for gay rights. But fewer and fewer people believed that these causes added up to some kind of Chardin-esque “Omega Point” rather than representing the usual political give-and-take. The more firmly accommodationist Christianity defined itself by taking sides in this give-and-take, the more it came to be seen as just another faction, just another interest group, with nothing particularly transcendent to offer anyone.
And transcendence, it turned out, was still what people wanted from religion. Here, too, the early accommodationists went astray. They mistakenly associated sexual liberation, theological relativism, and growing prosperity with straightforward secularization, and assumed that what post-1960s America wanted from religion was something rational, nonmystical, antisupernatural. But it turned out that while a single twentysomething might have no time for Christianity’s sexual taboos, and a prosperous suburbanite might not want to ponder its critique of wealth and acquisition, they were both still interested—more interested than ever, perhaps—in a religion that promised encounters with the mysterious and numinous, one that promised to make the universe responsive to their prayers and rituals and spiritual gestures. Thus the irony that James Hitchcock noted in the early 1970s:
Progressive clergy shed their vestments on the sacristy floor, threw their incense in the trash, and sold their golden vessels to antique dealers, only to discover that somehow the puritanical young men and women who had marched with them on the picket line had got hold of all these discards and more besides—tarot cards, Ouija boards, Tibetan prayer wheels, and temple gongs. The Latin had been eliminated from the Mass so that the young could comprehend it, but they preferred instead to chant in Sanskrit. Campus chaplains had ceased trying to sell prayer and were selling social action instead, but their former constituents were hunting up Hindu gurus and undertaking systematic regimens of meditation and fasting.38
The accommodationists could try to adapt, and often did. Just five years after the publication of The Secular City, the flexible Harvey Cox produced Feast of Fools, a “theological essay on festivity and fantasy” that celebrated “neomysticism” and urged readers to move beyond the austerity of death-of-God theology to something more playful, ritualistic, and spiritually rich.39 (Cox’s tract was timed to coincide with Woodstock, and it was cited as an inspiration for Broadway’s Godspell.) Other accommodationists followed his example, looking for ways to reunite the sacred and the secular that would fulfill, rather than betray, the broader liberal Christian project.
Ways weren’t hard to find, as it turned out. Churches committed to interfaith dialogue could integrate Buddhist meditation techniques or Hindu oblations into traditional Christian prayer and liturgy. Churches committed to feminist theology could invite their members to dabble in goddess worship, borrowing rituals from Wicca and other modern pseudo-paganisms. (The Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, once James Pike’s home parish, became a center of such efforts, displaying a female “Christa” in lieu of crucifixes and hosting “Solstice services” at Christmastime, complete with ritual howling from the audience.) Churches devoted to the politics of environmentalism could embrace the kind of eco-spirituality that inspired Matthew Fox, the Catholic dissident turned Episcopal priest, to create what he called the Techno-Cosmic Mass, a mix of Christian liturgy, paeans to Gaia, and rave-style music that briefly excited liberal Protestant enthusiasm in the 1990s.
But genuine mysticism ultimately depends on genuine belief, and it often seemed that all of these efforts were just so much “play”—in Cox’s telling phrase—with little connection to actual conviction. It was this conviction deficit, above all, that explains the failure of accommodationist churches to keep believers in the pews. Their pastors and theologians had recognized, correctly, that the old foundations of Christianity were being undercut by the social revolutions of their era. Yet they had failed to identify any new foundation that could inspire real piety, real allegiance, real belief.
Here their emulation of Jesus proved fatally incomplete. In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgments. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnations of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they deemphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them—ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the woman taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.
Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true. In the process, they burned their candle at both ends, losing their more dogmatic parishioners to more fervent congregations and their doubters to the lure of sleeping in on Sundays.
Any institution that calls human beings to devotion and self-sacrifice needs to justify that call. The accommodationist churches had no such institutional justification—or at least, they had no justification that explained why Americans should be involved with their church in particular. Political activism wasn’t enough: Why would you need to wash down your left-wing convictions with a draft of Communion wine, when you could take the activism straight and do something else with your weekends? Nor was their belated rediscovery of the numinous element in religion enough to stem the tide of defections: Why would you get your mysticism from somebody who was just play-acting, when you could get it instead from someone who really believed it—whether that someone was a swami or a Pentecostalist?
Even a triumphalist like Sheehan, hailing the accommodationist influence within Catholicism, could see the inherent contradiction in the project. The accommodationist theologians, he suggested, have “pushed Catholic theology to the limits of its own language,” and raised the question of what makes liberal Catholicism “essentially different from non-Catholic religions and non-religious humanism.”40 And if the answer is “nothing,” then why should anyone be Catholic at all?
The ecumenical efforts that increasingly consumed progressive leaders only added to these difficulties by contributing to the impression that liberal Christianity had no distinctive theological convictions, no principles that couldn’t be compromised in the name of conciliation and unity. Already in 1973, the author of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing saw this problem taking shape. Whatever the advantages of ecumenism, Dean Kelley wrote, the ecumenical personality is ill suited to institutional leadership and incapable of creating the sense of shared purpose that successful religious institutions require:
The balanced, mature person with an awareness of the wide range of values and interests open to modern man is not going to sacrifice all (or much) for any single set of values or any sole area of fulfillment. Rather he will try to find an equilibrium among them…. He will recognize the validity of conflicting views, the complexity of countervailing forces…. He will be a balancer, a temporizer, an equivocator, and organizations composed of his ilk will be correspondingly ambivalent and immobilized.41
It wasn’t just that such leaders failed to attract parishioners to their churches or inspire would-be clergymen to join their seminaries. It was that they themselves often drifted away from the organizations that they headed, looking for something less constraining and restrictive, less dogmatic and demanding. In Catholicism and Protestantism alike, many of the most vocal and active reformers of the 1960s had left organized Christianity entirely by the 1970s and ’80s. The explanation (especially among departing Catholic priests) was almost always that change wasn’t coming as fast as they had hoped, and sometimes this seemed plausible. But more often these defectors seemed to be in the position of a general who has fought and won a series of battles, only to decide that the territory wasn’t worth ruling after all.
This pattern was captured by the liberal Wills, in a sympathetic Esquire profile of the Jesuits’ fateful leap from rural seminaries to the secular city of New York: “Standing under the El,” he wrote, “talking in the rain … I asked about the two priests who, more than any others, performed the herculean labor of lifting the whole dead weight out of its slumber and flinging it into this sewery living city—but Sponga and Cardena are, neither of them, Jesuits any more.”42 And the pattern was analyzed, perceptively, by the more conservative Hitchcock:
The chief dishonesty of the reformers was their studious concealment, even from themselves, of the problem of belief, until almost the end of [the 1960s]. Theological language, liturgical forms, vigorous social action, the uses of authority … all were seen and discussed as problems. But never faith…. In retrospect it is possible to see the preoccupation of the progressives with changes of various kinds as a way of avoiding the ultimate question of their own faith.
When “the problem of faith finally comes to the surface,” Hitchcock concluded, in what could serve as an epitaph for the era of accommodation, “many progressives found little fundamental belief on which they could rest.”43
* * *
Many, but not all. The accommodationist churches lost members faster than any other Christian bodies, but they didn’t simply disappear. Eventually the declines leveled off, and in their much-reduced state they gained something like stability. There was a market niche for accommodationism, it turned out, even if it was vastly smaller than Harvey Cox had imagined, and there was a swath of America who found its appeals comforting and even inspiring. To the extent that religion endured among the nation’s intelligentsia, it was usually in the form that Cox and James Pike had championed, which meant that accommodationist Christians retained a cultural clout disproportionate to their numbers. To the extent that more orthodox Christian attempts to resist cultural change ended in defeat or disillusionment, too, accommodationism was always there as an appealing fallback option. It was forever failing—but forever being rediscovered. And it remains potent enough today to justify returning to the heirs of Cox and Pike later in this book, and considering their most enduring contemporary project—the quest for a “real Jesus” who would supposedly vindicate their theological premises.
For now, though, it’s fitting to conclude with Pike’s own bizarre exit from the American scene. Always ahead of the curve, he was one of the first accommodationists to abandon secularism for a kind of postmodern mysticism, which in his case took the form of a sudden interest, following his son’s suicide, in parapsychology and spiritualism. He reported poltergeist activities and psychokinetic episodes, befriended various mediums who promised to put him in touch with his departed child, and eventually participated in a filmed séance, broadcast on Canadian television, with a professional psychic named Arthur Ford. These experiences inspired a 1968 book, The Other Side, coauthored with his soon-to-be third wife, in which Pike reported on his otherworldly encounters with not only his son’s spirit but with other shades as well—including the recently deceased Paul Tillich, whose spirit supposedly thanked Pike for dedicating a book to him.
That same year—and again anticipating many of his fellow accommodationists—the Californian bishop gave up on institutional Christianity entirely. Amid the round of controversy that followed his second divorce and third marriage, he turned in his bishop’s miter and left the Episcopal Church. (There would have been even more controversy, no doubt, had there been greater publicity surrounding the 1967 suicide of his mistress and Pike’s apparent role in erasing evidence of their affair before the police arrived.) Pike justified his departure with typical bravado, taking to the pages of Look to dismiss the organized Church as a “sick—even dying—institution.”44 And he swiftly proceeded to found a Center for Religious Transition to minister to other souls who might follow him out of organized religion into what he insisted would be a deeper spiritual quest.
It was this spirit of pilgrimage that carried the ex-bishop and his new wife, Diane, to Israel in August 1969. Pike had become fascinated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, first-century texts uncovered near the ancient settlement of Qumran in the late 1940s and early 1950s, because they seemed to open a window into alternative Christianities—Gnostic Christianities, in particular—that dated back to the earliest decades after Christ’s death. (Once again, he was blazing the trail that others would follow.) Hoping to experience the atmosphere around Qumran directly, as a first-century mystic might have—“to drink it all in, as Jim said so many times,” his wife would later put it45—the couple rented a Ford Cortina, stopped to buy two Cokes near the Church of the Nativity, and drove out into the desert.
The third Mrs. Pike reappeared a day later, dazed and bloody and on foot. They had taken several wrong turns, their car had stalled in the wilderness, and her husband had sent her back to find help. A frantic search ensued, complete with various interventions from the psychics Pike had cultivated. By the time the searchers found him, in a dry riverbed seventy miles from Jerusalem, the era’s most celebrated heretic had perished of exposure.