The Books of My Life: A Christian America

 

When I was an undergraduate student in religious studies one of the deans of American Christian history and more specifically American Protestant history was Robert Handy. Handy, who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, along with Winthrop Hudson, William Hutchison, William McLoughlin, Edwin Gaustad, and H. Richard Niebuhr, were all scholars of the history of American Christianity and American Protestantism who I learned a great deal from about American Christianity and American Protestantism, who I admired, and who I wanted to emulate in my historical and sociological scholarship on American Protestantism and new religious movements as I progressed through my intellectual and academic career.

One of the most noted and well-known of Handy's books is his A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, revised and enlarged, 1984). Handy's classic history, written in a period of great demographic, cultural, economic, and political change in the United States, explores the impact of constitutional disestablishment, White Christian nationalism, urbanisation, industrialisation, wars, revolutions, economic booms and busts, and the increasing demographic, political, economic, and cultural diversity of the United States had on White evangelicalism from the American Revolution to the Reagan Revolution. Along the way Handy explores how mainstream White Protestantism linked Protestantism (translation White evangelical Protestantism), the Christianisation of America through voluntarism (translation evangelical Protestantisation), global missions (translation the evangelical Protestantisation of the world through voluntarism), and Americanism (Gilded Age and after notions of the economic, political, cultural, and, demographic superiority of the "civilisation" of the US), in both its Gilded Age and post-Gilded Age Victorian or traditionalist individual oriented or pietistic form and its more liberal Progressive or social gospel forms. Taking a dynamic approach Handy also explores how historical economic, political, cultural, and demographic changes in the US impacted these two dominant strains of White Protestantism over time leading eventually to an acceptance of diversity and pluralism, cities, and industrialisation. 

Handy argues that this White Protestant (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist) dominance lasted until what he calls the second disestablishment after WWI. After WWI, Handy argues, thanks to the currents of cultural disillusion and the rise of such secular social theories as Pragmatism, a disestablishment that continued into the 1980s and which led to increasing divisions in a Protestantism that had once been somewhat united around broad conceptions of mission and the superiority of American civilisation, declined. Handy ends his book by noting the increasing importance of right-wing thought, the increasing success of right wingers in American politics, and the increasing prominence and influence of right-wing religion in American life. Handy implies that, thanks to disestablishment and increasing demographic, cultural, political, and cultural diversity, a disestablishment and pluralism that most right wing Christians continue to believe in, the revived White evangelical Americanism of the post-LBJ era was unlikely to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century when White evangelical Protestantism did dominate American economic, political, cultural, and demographic life and did when White evangelicals did believe that America was god's chosen nation and Americans were god's chosen peoples. 

Retrospective history is, of course, always twenty-twenty. From the vantage point of 2021 the history and sociology of White evangelical Protestantism looks somewhat different than it did from 1981. With the revival of evangelical and political theocratism with their our way or the highway mentalities when it comes to politics, economics, and culture, its White supremacism (even when it is denied by its proponents), and its connections to the Cult of Trump, activist evangelical Christianity and its Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, and Judaism right wing allies may be able to at turn the clock back at least to the civil war, a cold and hot civil war that is once again being fought out over who is a "real American", over what a "real American culture, politics, and economics should look like, and what a America should be. Beyond the revival of the theocratic right in its religious and secular forms in late twentieth century and twenty first century America, some might wonder whether Handy's heavy emphasis on elite evangelical theologians and the official records of the mainstream denominations may be problematic in terms of getting at what individual evangelicals thought about the Protestant dominance of the US and its ideologies of Christianisation and Americanism. One also wonders whether there were geographic variations in White evangelical culture given that historical studies of the American (and Canadian) West have shown that that region is more open to White sects and cults than the South, for instance.

Regardless of what one thinks about Handy's interpretation of post-second disestablishment America and its religious culture and his use of sources, A Christian America is an important book that should and must be read by anyone who seeks to understand the role of White Protestant evangelicalism in American economics, politics, and culture. This is a must read for anyone interested in American religious history and a must read for anyone who wants to know how we got to now.