The tenuous, ebbing strength of the American Protestant mainline

"America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian," Joseph Bottom writes in First Things. "A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets."

There was a time when American mainline Protestantism, with its simple, white wooden churches dotting the hillsides and its pleasant, optimistic theology, had a sense of givenness in American life. It provided the texture that grounded American life. Even if you didn't believe in it—if, say, you were a Catholic who always felt the need to prove oneself as "American enough," or if you were a Jew forced to celebrate Christmas through the magic of Technicolor—you couldn't help but be influenced in the civic traditions that it created.

In the preface of my copy of the Federalist Papers, Garry Wills notes that the Constitution reflects in many ways the Presbyterian—or, more properly, Calvinist—presuppositions of its writers. The system of checks and balances and the emphasis on procedure emerges from the acknowledgement that people's perpetual tendency toward corruption (the political equivalent of original sin) means that they can't be trusted to do the right thing by themselves. The Constitution is a minimalist endeavor that recognizes the latent self-interest in even the most well-meaning of political ideologies. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, the irony of American history lies in the ability of Americans to do the wrong thing even as they seek to do the right one: Wars to make us "safer" end up making us less so, for instance, and political visions that would "end poverty" sometimes end up increasing the economic marginalization they aim to fight.

Mainline Protestantism promises a quiet, steady approach to public life, in which an awareness of the possibility of human evil is always realistically matched with an awareness of the redemptive possibility of human action. In the twentieth century, Bottom notes, this quiet, steady approach became increasingly confused, and he uses the current presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as an example:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.

Bottom decries the insouciant, and often elitist, leftward tilt of the mainline Protestant axis, but Ross Douthat, blogging on the website of The Atlantic Monthly, reminds us that the Christian left has no monopoly on Peale's thin theology of positive thinking. "Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well," he says. "The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush."

American religion has always been thus: amorphous, tenuously grounded in spirituality over religion, always interested in the next big thing. While this has been its strength, it is also its weakness.